Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discussion)

So In the spirit of continuing the discussion in a thread specific on topic for it: Area denial.

I would like to formally suggest using dragons teeth as an alternative area denial method over the use of mine fields.

Dragons teeth are impassible walls that are very difficult to shoot to kill, they are incapable of doing damage to an enemy, and cost a large amount of mass for a (Building?) of its size and ability, but are eaisly reclaimed by enemy engineers and commander.

Without the ability to attack, and being highly resistant to damage, but weak to reclaiming, dragons teeth are a cheap and reliable method at slowing down an enemy force.

Place able in clusters like mines, or drag-able as a wall these cheap and incredibly simple little blocks could be used in a number of strategy, defensibly and offensively.


Comments? Criticisms? Other ideas?

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

I think walls are already confirmed. Edit: yup.
Also, this concept doesn't exclude mines.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

No of course.

But I think we can agree that the ability to paint down clusters of wall and possibly mines is a must if these are to be used in a 'field' type pattern.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Death walls are the most awesome walls.

In most games, area denial is done with turrets. They provide lethal damage and protection against many basic types of units. Their advantage is usually in the form of efficiency, and their weakness is the inability to move.

Simple walls, made completely out of metal, with no guns or energy sources or mobility whatsoever? It seems like a complete waste of money. Even today, it's pretty apparent that walls are only useful if your opponent's goal is NOT to "obliterate everything" (Protip: The goal in PA is to obliterate everything). The only modern borders that mean anything worth a damn are the ones made with lethal ordinance.

TotalA walls were okay, I guess. Pathing wasn't that good, but the real obstruction came from wreckage rather than explicit walling. Supcom walls were nearly useless, mostly depending on weak pathing to be effective. They could protect a turret line every now and then. Supcom2 used factories and generators to create walls. Every game could do this effectively, but Supcom2 practically made it the norm for base design. It does everything a wall needs to do, and no extra unit was needed.

Walls suffer from being passive. Like all passive units, they are only effective if your opponent is completely brain dead. The only potential base design combos are easily merged into proper stats for the appropriate structures. Thus, walls are only interesting if they can add something actively useful to the game.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Sticky walls?

So if an enemy hit them while driving, they get suck to the wall?

And besides, if you could cluster enough walls around a choke point, you could eaisly make a downright killing zone for your turrets!

Because no one goes out of their way to shoot a wall.

In supcom it would be like painting down 50 wall blocks at a choke point, not to stop your enemy, but to thin out his advance into a manageable line of units that were easy to kill (Not that anyone did, but thats the premise)

So if you could paint down a field of walls to screw the enemy's formation, and easy move ability, would you?

I would at choke points, especially if i could build them quickly like in supcom.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Area denial weapons can be a lot more creative and display their effects up-front so your opponent can judge whether to face them.

Lasting damage over time (fire, radiation, magic etc..) that sits in a large area dealing damage to all units within.

Unit degradation/disabling. 'Mudfields' which slow unit movement, 'magical weapon jamming' which disables or decreases effectiveness of weapons. Or a combination.

These could be one shot things which are placed and persist for a time such as tacnukes or crawling bombs. They could be shot for free by artillery such that an artillery unit can keep an area hostile to units. The effect could originate from a unit or structure which would make the area clearable.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

I’d much rather area control use systems like Company of Heroes artillery overwatch, which would help defend and control an area but when disabled the arty could also help you take areas.
– For those who never played CoH the artillery overwatch was ability where you placed a target area, every time a unit entered it the artillery would fire a scatter shot. It was a lot more elegant and nicer on the ears then attack ground-

In games where you’re going to take whole planets been able to turn aggressive units into defences to hold the planet from attacks (while you find enemy bases so you can crush them) or vice versa would be a really usefully ability.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Area denial should be visible to your foe. Artillery cover, minefields, anything else "sudden" is not area denial - it's a trap.

Walls as done in SupCom are perfect area denial tool. They are rarely used, yes, but this is not because they are bad area denial, that's because area denial is rarely needed.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

The tricky part is figuring out what "Area denial" means. If you can secure an area, then you build up turrets and defenses. The land is effectively taken and in your ownership. If you can't secure an area, at least you can poison the land with some kind of area denial. Rather than allow land to enter an opponent's control, it belongs to no one.
Not many games have these types of weapons. Very often if something is lethal, then it is lethal everywhere, and thus isn't much of a denial service anymore.

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A few features seem to be common with area denial:
1) It can be deployed virtually anywhere. It is most effective on places you can not otherwise secure, but are not necessarily under enemy control.
2) The damage can be more abstract and limited. The purpose is not so much about killing the enemy, as it is rendering an area a bad place to live. Tricky to do without direct damage.
3) It is indiscriminate. At least, it does not matter if it backfires, because it is used on an area you have no interest in holding.
4) Easy to deploy, annoying to defeat. This can become a real problem if it combos too well with defenses.

I think the best example is the Sentry's Force Field from Starcraft 2. It can be used nearly anywhere(around the caster, at least), is non lethal, and renders an area inaccessible. It can also backfire by screwing up the pathing of Zealots. It was super effective at choke points, effectively controlling the movement of enemy forces. Perhaps something similar (like a unit repulsor?) could do the same in PA, pushing units apart and generally being a PITA.

Widow Mines from HotS are another decent example. They create a wall of death that you simply don't want to cross. Detection doesn't completely ruin them either. A widow mine's weapon remains effective against most short range units, and when compromised they can simply walk away to redeploy.

In TotalA, area denial depended a lot on unit wreckage to be effective. Turrets were the primary defense, but dead units created wreckage that made further attacks even more hazardous. That feature is likely not coming back, although it could be a nifty perk for certain combat units.

In Supcom, Artillery and Nukes had the most features of area denial. Artillery could poison the land with an endless barrage of shells, shredding both allied and hostile armies in an area. Defending a nuke was fairly easy, as a simple nuke defense counted them very well. However, units on the field were virtually powerless against nukes. A simple launch warning was enough to send armies scattering as the enemy struggles to spread his army out to minimize damage. Unfortunately, both of these tools were incredibly lethal. They were most effective when used directly against the enemy, and thus were not great for strict denial.

Both TotalA and Supcom had mods for land mines. Unfortunately, these tools depended mostly on dealing extreme damage, became very expensive very fast, were difficult to deploy, and were quite trivial to counter. Not that great for denial, by any measure.

In PA, we already know of one denial method: Blow it all up. It kills an enemy, of course. But more importantly, it renders an area completely inhospitable for the rest of the game. This method affects everyone on the field in some way, and is a clear solution for land denial. For other methods, you just gotta get creative.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Again I'm going to turn to my old standby, TA: Twilight. In Twilight, the Dragon's Teeth deployed very rapidly and had a very low cost. They were still quite sturdy to attacks, and still very vulnerable to reclamation. Turrets were even more varied and lethal in comparison to OTA, but they had some important weaknesses. Not only were they more expensive than equivalent units, but those units could take them down fairly quickly. However, when used with walls of DTs, turrets were a lot less likely to be overrun, once again making them quite effective defenses, without needing to spend more resources on static defenses.

That said, how effective this system would be in PA, where the scale of the maps is so much larger, is something that should be taken into consideration.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

If scale is a problem, the all the more reason to have a way of deploying many of them across an area right?

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

That might solve the issue, but I doubt it myself. Placing ________ down in bunches only saves the player time in terms of giving those orders, they'd still take just as long to build, long term the time difference is minimal in terms of the effectiveness of _______.

Also consider the spherical nature of planets, suddenly there are possibly many more avenues for attack, meaning you may need to build even more for them to be an actual obstacle instead of just going around at no consequence.

Mike

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

That's "wall". It could be dropped using some special artillery/aircraft, though. Or built by special engineer with very long range, but very limited amount of structures. It will have same effect, I suppose.

Walking short-range turrets?

P.S. Orbital EMP strike. It's visible - satellite sits over some position. It's non-lethal - only unit suspend, It's passable (but slowly) - you units have some time to move before satellite recharge. It could be done cheap, but expensive to kill - you need a costly surface-orbital missile to take it down.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

This is generally not an issue, since most TA games are played with the Demo Recorder patch, which includes a feature for drawing out building formations. Supcom did the same.
One challenge is ensuring that a very large wall of DTs is constructed in a timely manner, but with orders being first-class entities, getting multiple engineers to work on different portions of a wall should be fairly easy.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Double evolution chamber is a "wall". Pylon/forge/gateway is a "wall". Barracks/Supply depot is a "wall". Force field is something different entirely. Unlike a wall, it can be used anywhere at any time, and is gone just as quickly. It controls the terrain itself, which is something you rarely see in any game.

There is a major difference between permanent holdings and something that is used to direct the field of battle. Standard walls only serve to reinforce a permanent holding. They have little use anywhere else. As long as that's true, the wall isn't adding anything new to the game. There are already dozens of structural bricks that can serve as a defensive wall such as factories and turrets and even generators. There's little need for more of the same.

Area denial is not something that's needed at home. Area denial is needed in the field, rapidly and effectively and sometimes under fire. That is definitely a role that a new unit can capitalize on. A fragile, slow, vulnerable engineer is in no way suited for the task.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

@bobucles: You are confusing idea of "wall" (to prevent any movement though) with implementation of "wall" (permanent destructible structure vs. temporary indestructible magic-cast effect).

Temporary walls that should be renewed by hands from time-to-time are micro-hell. We don't need them (as we don't actually want to care about area we want to deny).

Non-temporary means destructible/interruptible.

We also don't want to deploy area denial by moving some units in (engineer).

So, I suggested three possible wall implementations. Wall engeneer - can build walls on great range with great speed, but only walls (maybe turrets too). Wall arty - deploy ordinary wall bricks (for a little cost) from the distance. You just mark the area to deny and it starts shooting walls there until area is unpassable. EMP satellite - movable, persistent, air/land/sea area denial. Destructible by surface/orbit missile.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Upgrade that to a flying engineer that drops wall bits.
Then upgrade the wall bits so they lunge at units and explode/melt/disable/seize control. It is now impassable, at least as much as it needs to be.

Crowd control and electronic warfare devices are best listed under "support". It seems you'd more likely drop this directly on an enemy army or base before wiping it out, like some kind of superweapon.

It's not easy to stall an army without killing it. But here, have one on the house:

That's some good denial. It even splits an army up, making you feel real bad about that deathball push.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Flying engineer will do the trick, right.

That's mines. Not needed. Walls already making area unpassable. Build one single turret and no engineer will ever dismiss your area denial.

Same with mines. And it could be very slow/not-movable, so it's not easy task to drop it directly on moving army/enemy base (unless your opponent is dumb and has no anti-orbital defense on his base).

Anything that may hinder an army for a while at some spot will force your foe to choose another path. That's "area denial" in effect.

So I may just surround my high-base with that thing. Units are coming out, but enemy can't get in. Also, it's not obviously interruptible - you need some kind of "super unslick-50" to undone this effect. While it would be fun to watch tanks sliding around land like cows-on-ice, you need some clear and simple way to undone the effect to make it "area denial", not "area destruction".

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

I still think that aerial area denial would be a good addition to prevent aircraft just flying straight through everything and bombing the crap out of your commander.

Something like a storm generator that generates a stormy area that planes cannot move through.

Re: Area denial devices and weapons (Suggestions and discuss

Yep. Then change its name to "mine layer" and have it only deploy mines.

And therein lies your flaw. Wall dropping is trivially countered by the engineer. It relies on supporting turrets to do anything useful, and turrets are not something you build anywhere and everywhere.

Mines can function entirely as a standalone unit. No other supporting infrastructure is needed, and deployment can be stupid fast, making it suitable for contested territory.

Well that's easy. You just shoot the terrain to roughen it back up. Isn't it amazing how much a portable plasma emitter can fix?