Well with mobile tactical missile launchers filling the role of anti-building units, naturally its up to mobile artillery to fulfil the role of fire support. And if they cant due to natural inaccuracy or because a little bit of micro effectively cancels the unit out then there really isn't much of a point in the unit altogether.
Natural inaccuracy isn't so much of an problem. Thats something you can balance since effective DPS = weapon damage * hit ratio. Issue is when you are able to break it using micro, that is no longer balanceable since hit ratio is no longer a constant, it becomes a variable depending whether the defending player nows how to abuse the patrol feature or not. This also messes up the targeting AI since dodging by micro is an unexpected behavior and might cause the targeting AI to choose targets which would have been optimal under normal circumstances, but not against human players. This renders this specific type of artillery useless in high level competitive games since it is no longer capable of delivering the performance which was the base for the initial cost calculation.
Micro is why I build 15 t2 artillery per side of my base. There is no micro that can defend against the firepower of up to 30 artillery firing on them. The mobile artillery fills its roll. But the t2 lobber fills another with its splash damage. There are still more units to be released and who knows one might fill what your looking for.
In SupCom (and in the current version of PA), micro DOES defend very well against 30 artilleries at the same time. They all share the very same broken target selection and the very same movement pattern breaks all at once. Besides: No feedback from the devs again? Homing missiles still show the broken behavior (due to the lack of the third state) and it isn't a secret that the range system for all other weapons is utterly broken too, all of them have an actual weapon range which exceeds the targeting range by far, you only need to exploit it by clever target selection.
It's not even that as much as... what would you want them to say? They're not happy with balance, that's a given. Artillery should be countered by mobility, a longer range combat unit seems like a different role. I don't think anyone disagrees that artillery is a little derp right now.
Added launch timing spread as an additional tweaking parameter for direct and indirect fire projectiles. To my understanding, this (currently non-existent but easy to implement) parameter is capable of providing a simulated dodge chance for fast moving targets while not affecting the hit chance against stationary targets, and all that independent from the time of flight / projectile speed. The resulting dodge chance is calculable and not exploitable.
And it's also an unintuitive hidden variable that benefits the few high-level players that will be willing to memorise the numbers for each and every unit.
On the contrary, it does affect a few high-level players, but in the opposite way since it removes the distinct need to hit the hard caps for turret turn speed in order to dodge. The effect is rather intuitive and very easy to express in words: Aiming at moving targets is unreliable with projectile weapons. Not exploitable, embeds perfectly into the simulation and removes the need for the hard turret turn speed limit we currently have. It's simply the counterpart to the movement speed variable, in terms of the calculation.
According to you of course. I still disagree that moving forces away from the landing zone of in-route shells to be a exploit beyond making artillery useless for pros and overpowered for new players. Simulation based projectiles are always going to have that effect.
It's not about moving out of the way, that's a totally different feature/issue (however you would like to see it, I perfectly agree with you for long range arty). Take a look at the current approach of laser towers vs bots, where the turret speed of the laser tower was reduced in order to allow dodging (given the short range which would have made dodging impossible otherwise due to almost instant-hit!), but the actual effect was that you could suddenly outrun the turn speed. That's because the dodge mechanic we have right now, only works on long distances or long time of flight in comparison to the units reaction speed and the balancing flips uncontrollable upside down every time the movement prediction algorithm is improved.
After years of RedAlert light tanks dancing rings around mammoth tanks, I am used to that kinda stuff. However hopefully once wreckage/trees work to block shots, and even be destroyed in the process I predict that 'dodging' will be effectively reined in as units will then have cover to work with for flanking attacks and closing the distance with high powered turrets. (Still hoping for the laser turrets to draw power to fire, making their defence capability economy dependant.)
Different scale, and same goes for TA, I fear. You couldn't really multitask in any of these games while dodging, and neither would you need to since you usually had only a single strikeforce and frontline to manage. The dodge mechanic (or to be precise the idea behind it, using speed to gain a chance to evade) is great, but the implementation (dodging by hand by abusing knowledge about the inner workings) isn't so much, not in a game which has sworn to do away with repetive micro despite the full simulation in order to allow for real multitasking. (Thats something I hope for EVERY weapon, scaling with the damage output, stearoller running out of steam...)
You'd be amazed at the resistance to that idea exterminans. I brought it up in the Realm Teamspeak a few nights ago and everyone in the room with me, hated the idea... like, actively rejected it in the extreme. And I even limited it to just weapons that used Lasers (or were huge constructs like Artillery). Some people don't like the idea of their steamroller ever running out of steam.
Unfortunately you weren't WrongCat. There was no debate however. It was just some people demanding that their steamroller not actually require steam to function.
Still waiting for someone to do the math to prove me wrong about the thesis that launch timing spread would the adequate way to do implement a dodge chance based on unit speed in a simulated environment. Until someone finds a legit flaw in my calculations, I will consider them to be accurate. Btw.: Do we still have circling rockets? There is a good reason why I included the inner workings of homing missiles in the original post, that misbehavior is actually quite easy to avoid. PS: Probably should add bombs to the OP too, can't remember why I left them out.
This is just sad. It adds depth to the gameplay and makes sense - why would anyone not want to have this?
The 'reason' that was given to me during the Teamspeak conversation is that it would be 'too difficult' for them to regulate their economy, and that the steamroller running out of steam isn't 'fun'.
