Remove the Catapult

100% imo post
The building is ugly, not even impressive.
It launches cheap missile without any style.
It s not what i expect from a T2 artillery defense structure.

The lobber (big bertha), this is a T2 big f.... gun ! Why should i need a missile launcher when i have 30 meters long canon with balls of steel.

This is a silly post. Actually... i don't have any arguments. I just don't like the catapult. and you ?

The Lobber is a pale imitation of the Big Bertha at the moment. It's not even an Intimidator.

It's just the T1 Cannon scaled up... nothing special about it.

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As for the Catapult, eh... take it or leave it at the moment. It's not that special... but it's Alpha so I don't mind it being there for now.

Come Beta I'll have a many, stronger words that I will have to say about it.

It needs tweaks, not to be removed, jesus way to overreact. Dude this is alpha, where you discuss alternatives. Submit ideas for changes. Or don't post here.

:roll:

This is probably the only part of your post I agree with.

We have a fraction of the tools available to us than will be available in the full game, non of which have been fully balanced yet.

Be patient.

woooh guys, don t take it too seriously
This time i will not "overreact", if you prefer.

what i like in the lobber is the ballistic style of the weapon. On the contrary the cold accuracy of the catapult missile which pick up a single unit... i just don t feel it. It is not something related to the gameplay (that is why there is no argument), it's just a feeling. (and as english is not my language i have quiet difficulties to express these kind of things)

There is something fun using a big balistic gun, that you cannot find using the catapult.

The catapult seemed quite OP in my IMO. I had one game where i set loads of T2 tanks at this guys base and he was smaping catapults. They seemed to auto shoot my army and take out lots of t2 tanks very quickly.
Maybe this is what they are intended for i dont know but they sure are effective at base defence.

Is there a discussion going on about the auto-fire behavior of PA silos vs. the build-and-manual-target behavior from TA? I liked that mechanic - the player had to devote resource flow to the launcher for a long time per missile then manually fire missiles from their stockpile until they ran out. This both gated the launchers further in to the end-game and made the player make a conscious choice of "launcher or another factory" in the mid-game.

I like the idea that the missile launchers (inc nukes) require mass an energy in order to build their weapons.

What I didn't like about the supcom system was the enforced manual firing system. It felt like an attempt to artificially limit the usefulness of a unit via means of requiring player babysitting, rather than emergent balancing from unit qualities.

My hope is that the catapult still uses mass and energy to stockpile missiles, but is controlled via the existing unit command sidebar. Want it to stop making missiles? Just hit the power-off button at the bottom, and it will no longer use resources. Want to not have to babysit launching it? Hit the "fire at will" button and it will see to attacking enemies whenever it has a missile in the clip. Bonus points for it using a little bit of intelligence in selecting targets, so it will go after high value targets that it has a chance of hitting. Want to wait until that perfect moment, then release a full, player targeted missile barrage at the perfect moment? Put it on hold fire, and it will sit there and stockpile until you manually give it a target (or shift-queue list of targets). There's even no reason why the same control scheme couldn't apply to nukes. They just have a much more expensive cost per weapon. Players would probably keep them on manual fire, but in a particularly large game, I would love to see a game escalate to the point where players were casually hurling nukes back an forth as though they were pop-gun bullets.

The devs have already put these tools in the game (well, at least the UI elements for them), so I see no reason why they can't be applied to this unit in a sensible manner.

I think right now it's just a little bit too overpowered in the sense that it has a ridiculous range, paired with a huge range of the radar makes for a pretty rough ground attack if someone has 5-10 of these things early in the game.

This will of course change when the mex spots go active and people can't spin up 100x of them at the start. But I'm thinking the catapult will definitely need some tweaks in power, cost, etc ... sooner than later

Mex spots are active now. Try the latest build.

i want more intimidating defense, like the guardian, bertha, annihilator, not some ***** defense...

People keep talking about range.. ON THE SMALLEST PLANET. Wait until we play on some larger ones before deciding ranges are to larger or small. Mainly because if the range were decreased now on larger planets people will just complain about how all the ranges are not enough (radar, arty, etc).

With enforced metal spots Catapults should be less of an issue. They take a huge amount of resources to build and fire. If someone has enough economy to build and run 10 of them they probably had enough economy going to have built enough of pretty much anything else and still be effective.

A tactic for dealing with someone who just builds catapults, send in a large swarm of cheap units ahead of advanced units to soak up the missiles. A handful of cheap scouts flying ahead of even a small number of advanced bombers make short work if them.

Are there any plans for mobile missile defense ala TA's walking small-radius antinuke? What about radar jamming/mobile radar jamming?

I would love some missile defence for my base.

here my teamate kills two coms with the catapult :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIOvXdK6Dr4

it stays

I like this idea of balancing the catapult.

Though, it is yet to be seen how ballistic missile defense will effect the catapult.

this was also exactly the same in SupCom one time you'd loose for having chosen tml over more land spam, sometimes you'd win for it.

I don't have the alpha, is the catapult supposed to be a nuclear missile silo, or more like supcoms tactical missile launchers?