I tried the Alpha this evening and I was trying out the artillery buildings. Turns out they become essentially useless when you take into account the amount of time and resources they take to build. When it gets operational, they can only fire so far. Can't even reach my enemy's base. Now I don't know if it's the right time to start balancing, but w/e, here's my input.
Resources are arbitrary because Mass Extractors produce excessive mass and can be built exponentially and Power Generators produce excessive energy and... Can be built exponentially. Wait until later in the alpha for balance suggestions.
I am actually a bit confused with the current Artillery personally. Twice now I have played games in which I started very close to an enemy base. I would build artillery and have it pound as much as it could "reach" on my radar. I would then proceed to send in my army to mop up what was left. I felt that this limited range made artillery weak and not tremendously useful. However this morning I ran into an interesting situation where I had build a single piece of heavy artillery in my main base and sent out scouts to explore the rest of the map. While one of my scout planes was flying over an enemy base, far from mine, my artillery sprang to life and started lobbing shells well over the horizon. I was able to destroy several structures by having my aircraft reveal targets for my big gun which was able to fling rounds about half way around the world. I don't know if this was a glitch or not, but it made me think, if this is the TRUE range of artillery, it may be fairly good.
Isn't that the point? Really Id like to see the T1 artillery have 1.5 to 2 times the range of standard defences. And have the T2 artillery have 3 to 4 times the standard laser tower range. I just had great fun using proxy artillery guns on the AI stockades, and that catapult tac missile launcher was hella fun to watch.
Not sure if it is. I just stated something. I wouldn't mind having a defensive arty. I actually don't like base demolishing arty that much.
Defensive? I loved building lines of lobbers ever closer and closer to the enemy base. Forcing him to build away and abandon the base that was eventually steam rolled over. Making sure your economy is ready to start building these so that they go up fast is important. Its best to get them up fast so they get to actually hit something. Its only a matter of time before they are taken out or run out of targets.
I built a moonbase and used the bugged engineers from the moonbase to invade with an army of Advanced Artillery at close range. It was like a PeeWee rush, but with Big Berthas replicating via binary fission. I had a lot of eco on that moon.
The T2 battleships have a range of approximately 20-30% of the default planet surface (less than a hemisphere, but not by much), and I suspect the T2 arty has a similar range i.e. you will need more than one advanced radar to allow them to achieve maximum range. However they are massively, massively power hungry, and having several fire at once will easily energy stall you even if you are running 20k excess production. I think you're looking at a couple of thousand energy per shot or something similar. I don't care at this juncture because alpha's are about engine tech rather than balance, but this definitely requires you to go all out building T2 power gens just to feed them, and T2 radar to get the intel to allow them to be effective. Plus a stack of 10 T1 bombers can currently wipe them out with minimal losses unless you go overboard on the AA turrets too :cry:
I wiped out half an enemy base with artillery 18 hours ago. It's really really good. You just need to build it with Advanced Radar near it. The range though not unlimited is very high and so is the damage output.
Say what?. Moon base ? how on earth did you get to another planet am i missing something or what ?. :shock:
Currently, range doesn't bother me much, (though an overlay or range indicator would be a premium) What I miss more is the feel of the huge bertha, aka long reaction time and scattering and AoE. So far, every unit - as far as I could tell - has a sniper-like precision. This means essentially that artillery unit are effective long range interdiction units, and T2 arti bots can kill over moving units once in direct fire range maybe too easily. The distinction beween precise but slower missile shots and quicker but very not precise artillery fire was interesting in TA. I know most of these feelins may stem from features currently missing*, but if it's a gameplay design thing, well, that was my opinion on the topic. *I hope lasers turret will fire.. lasers at some point hehe
Once they add an overlay to show the range of the artillery, artillery will become more useful that its current state.
