Laser turrets are too cheap/T1 land armies have vanished

Actually...

It is.

There's a reason tourney games are size 650.

So tourney games make the rules for everyone now?

Heres my suggestion, specific to towers. Give t1 tower the bot weapon, give the t2 tower two ant weapons. Give it more health as it has no engine or wheels since its stationary, but give it same range as an Ant, not greater. For twice the cost of an ant, the double barrelled tower would have twice the fire power, same rate of fire, about 300% of the health. There just rough figures for the health cos I don't know the numbers.

If lasers are this good, why is there no Laser tank? I would seriously want one.

so we have an unit with twice the attack capacity and 3 times the health of an ant. now lats say an ant need 4 shots to destroy an ant. this means to destroy the tower you need at least 3 ants to destroy the tower (50% of an ant destroyed/shot, ants do 3 + 3 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 times the ant dmg 4 shots per ant, 300 ant health -> tower destroyed 3 ants destroyed). tower has twice the cost of an ant meaning for 6 ants you can build 3 towers.....now is 3 towers enough to defend you base? no....the ants can move around the towers and attack from another side....the SAME ants... so you need to build more and more towerd to only defend against the SAME ants.

this tower would be way too weak to make any sence. the tower has to be way more cost effective than the mobile units with the problem of it being stationary.

also you can see that in most cases building the tower and turtling is a bad idea (take 4 ants 4 + 4 + 3 + 3 -> tower destroyed 2 ants left) and balancing this out is not easy

My main rule of thumb is that I should not be able to build a catapult in my base and hit your base.

As long as that's not true, I'm pretty happy with planet size.

Size 900 with 6 people works well in that regard. There tends to be a lot of expansion area for 1-2 players, with another 1-2 players crammed in between others... whatever algorithm picks starting locations is not terribly good at giving people equal starting room.

But I digress.

T1 needs artillery.

If we want to make a weaker sheller that gets totally replaced in T2, fine, as that seems to be the trend, however stupid it may be, but it needs to be decent against 6000 hit point walls.

No, it merely needs to shoot over them. That's the point of artillery.

if u think the tower is too weak, build walls around it. I think its unfair that u want a tower to beat so many tanks, it doesn't make sense. A turret is just an armoured gun. A gun with armour around it. A tank is a armoured gun, with an engine and wheels. Why does a turret have to somehow be super powerful?. In real life if you see turrets, they are behind huge armoured bunkers, but the weapon is the same as what is on a tank. Our towers are not like bunkers, its just a weapon on a tall tower. You have to build your own bunker with walls.

I think considering u can build walls to add more defence to the tower, I feel, my tower is better for gameplay reasons. All your maths is based on a linear assumption, and so is wrong.

Still we probably never find out how it would work, because we never be able to test any changes.

And that's when I stopped reading.

true. but then the problem is not the tower anymore, its the wall
if the tower itself is made out of paper and you put walls with 6k hp around it this means effectively the tower has 6k hp. now make the above example with the tower have 40 times the hp of an ant and you see that even the weak weapon of the tower makes him op again -> doesnt solve the problem.

I'd be cool if we left mobile artillery for T2 and instead looked for a different solution to keep with unit variety. Making a t1 artillery unit just means Shellers would render them them useless come T2.

So how about buffing Booms to be fast enough to evade the majority of turret fire and change their movement so they can climb over walls/terrain? You would send them in to suicide bomb turrets and other defenses before your main force moves through. Booms would be susceptible to splash damage and high rates of fire, using high numbers and speed to negate casualties. So minefields, Ubercannons, and faster firing bots would fare much better against them.

Right now though it is a problem. You can try and catapult creep, which sorta works so long as your field base doesn't get overrun. I've had some limited success with using bombers if they don't put a missile tower up, and hilariously scampers and the scouting boat can out range them, though you need a lot of peck away at turret HP.

Heck another solution is if we dialed back turret HP since everyone and their mother uses them with walls anyway. That way scouts could be an effective counter.

it does solve the problem because of the firing rate. Problem with laser turrets is that they shoot fairly fast and kill units every second. The firing rate of the ant is much slower, this gives more time for walls to be overrun or penetrated by a large force. As it is now, units are wiped out so quick by the tower, u can't get near it unless u have 100's of units.

Think about the firing rate. Fires once, then 2 seconds till next one. 2 seconds advancement before it kills one tank. Your making assumptions again, that the tanks are all lined up in a row. waiting to be shot. In the game it doesn't work that way.

Agreed. Defenses are way too cheap for their strength, but I don't like the idea of t1 artillery or buffing infernos. The former because there already is a T2 artillery and I really hope that one day t2 will be a light upgrade and a huge sidegrade to t1 rather than just being more powerful like it is now. I don't like the idea of buffing infernos, because they are already strong enough, it's just the turrets + wall combo that is op. Hell I would even go nerf vanguards since they are so ridiculously strong now what thel leave no response time if they are dropped or scouted a bit late. Even a single vanguard can melt a commander in less than 7 seconds, but the sad thing is that they need to be so strong because turrets and walls are even stronger (a vanguard costs 675 metal and is build in 15 seconds and it's movement speed is very slow, while a double turret with a layer of 5 walls costs 300+5*25 = 425 and are build in less than 15 seconds with 3 fabbers on the job. If you build a triple defense turrets with 3 t2 fabbers it's even worse). Now if we buff the inferno we really do nothing to make turrets less op, we just end up with another vanguard that is a bet weaker but can be spammed harder.

I really don't get that philosophy Quitch....

@moonsilver - in real life a stationary gun emplacement does not have to move, so you can throw as much mass at it as you like in order to fortify it against return fire from mobile attackers.

The stationary emplacement has to be 'better' than the mobile gun. Because the mobile guns aren't an aquatic bird resting on its posterior.

In the game, that is reflected, but currently it is reflected rather too well.

This is a game, I want arguments based on gameplay. I could not care less about what this looks like in real life. I've invading planets with mechs and creating things out of nanobots.

i did calc in the firing rate. because of the slow rate more tanks come into range of firing. actual 2 things are a problem : tanks get to the tower in mostly a row, not a line, and their own wreckages are a massive problem (you have seen the tanks helplessly trying to drive around those i think). tower shooting slower means more tanks in range that can fire at same time thus weakening the tower even more.

secound thing : needing 100s of units to overcome a tower is the idea behind all. massive armys clashing against each other and so. not small tactical groups of around 10 units raiding small parts.

these small groups can still do harm...but plz not at places that are guarded. you should allways need a reasonable army to overcome guarded areas else you never need a big army. this only gets problematic if the army size doesnt matter anymore at a critical mass of towers that is inpenetrateable like it is now.

Wouldnt adding a very severe constant power drain to turrets solve this.

That is similar to increasing the cost of the defence. Of course when you lose only the turret, you don't need to replace the energy plant that you made to support the turret.

The dominant animal on Earth is a bipedal biological machine which is made by, composed of and maintained by nanobots, whose most advanced technologies in the 15th year of the 21st century are quite primitive compared to the complexity of its own body. I fail to see how the game is more fantastical than realistic.

At the end of the day, war is a game, and every game is a simulation of a real life scenario. This game simulates a war. Stuff that makes sense in a real life war makes sense from a gameplay perspective by default. The argument 'fixed fortifications should be the same as mobile fortifications' does not make sense either from a game play or a real life perspective, and can be counter argued from either perspective.

Really?

Anyway, from my perspective, our predicament is pretty binary and a solution needs to be produced between the community and Uber.
Here is how I see it.
Make turrets too strong, and turtling becomes the dominant play style. Mobile units are only used for raiding outposts without turrets, while everyone turtles and Pelter creeps, nuke rushes, whatever. The best "sim-cityer" wins, because you win almost purely out of economic advantage. That's fine, however, spawns aren't equal and metal distribution is random.
Make turrets too weak, and leaving hold-position tanks in place of turrets becomes the solution to point defense and turrets aren't seen in competitive play. Mobile units are king, just like in FA. (at least in FA you needed T1 mobile arty to deal with PD+wall combo)

I think that we as a community need to come to a conclusion as to what role we want stationary defenses to play, then reconcile that with Uber and have them implement the solution.
What's happening right now is, people are thinking back to their favorite games, games they were good at, and trying to relive that game.
Turrets need to be a unique solution to a specific problem, or be removed. I think they were added to PA due to habit, because every other RTS has static-d, but there isn't much need for it.

I'm willing to bet that static-d was envisioned a long time ago, when unit AI was not very good, and defenders always lost to attackers. With smart unit AI, leaving patrolling forces is the better solution. Not only is it more elegant, but more versatile. Because now, the player can always use those units otherwise.

Maybe I'm overlooking something here, but what problem do turrets solve?

Yes. Cut the sarcasm. Name one concept in Planetary Annihilation which would not make sense in a real life war.