Artillery Accuracy

Hmmm, not sure if I should look through the post in detail to see whether I believe it is really accurate or not, or just avoid getting into a random argument

Wonder if I even remember everything from my collage physics. I think I should have slept less in college. Well, now that I'm going back for a higher degree, it should be easier with my classes being at 6PM, instead of 6AM.

It's not my fault you lack the basic English skills to read the implications of the very next sentence. Also: You're a massive hypocrite, since if you swap firing angle and velocity, I can create nitpicking cases where it's not technically true either. Firing straight up, or straight down, for instance. If you're going to jump down someone's throat on a minor technicality that's explained in the next sentence, you'd better not make a similar error yourself, and not even bother to include a clarification.

Well, you can vary the shell velocity, but there is only a limited range where the velocity seems "real". If the velocity is to high for some type of planet, then the projectile will leave the gravity well for sure, leaving your artillery with nothing but the direct fire option. If the velocity is to low, then the shells will be unable to travel around the planet. The statement that you could reach every point on the planet by choosing the right angle only becomes true if the velocity of the shells has been adapted perfectly to the size of the planet.

I don't like the idea of highly accurate long range artillery. Perhaps mobile mid-range artillery with high accuracy but a long projectile flight time would work.

There is an interaction in ZK between the big bertha cannon and advanced radar towers, which are expensive but improve the accuracy of artillery. Several advanced radar towers covering the same target spot can lead to quite good accuracy, but for that price you could have another big bertha, so it's rarely done.

Actualy you never use adv radar to increase the accuracy of your bertha. It has almost zero effect on a big bertha. By the time you got enough bertha's that making multiple adv radar will be more cost efficient in terms of increasing dps you got so much bertha's that you can decimate a entire area in a single salvo.

You only use adv radars so that anihilators and other weapons with pretty much zero aoe can hit the radar blobs without missing.

HA!

An incorrect statement is an incorrect statement, no matter the implications of surrounding statements. That goes part and parcel with basic English skills.

You are correct to point out the edge case where shooting up/down doesn't work. But I never said that made the slightest claim that it was at all valid, I said swapping those parameters around would make your argument better.

But you jumping to insults about comprehension skills is doing wonders for the validity of your argument. If you made an earnest error in what your wrote, then be a man and admit it.

Or don't, and if someone challenges your claims, simply attempt to discredit them and side-step the issue entirely.

You know what also goes with basic English skills? Recognising that a 'statement' is not limited to a single sentence. The previous statement, for example, was two sentences.

It would also make it irrelevant to the post I was replying to, which was about projectiles of constant initial speed. An irrelevant argument is not a better argument, so technically, your statement was incorrect. I can play this overly-technical grammar criticism game too, you know.

I wasn't going to point it out the first time, but since you only seem to be posting in this thread to make cheap shots, I may as well follow up with more cheap shots of my own:

"It's" always means "it is". The word you are looking for is "its". You should keep making posts on the subject of grammar, as they seem to be an effective supply of grammatical errors for me to insult.

Oh wait, you did:

You want a semicolon after "valid", because they're separate clauses.

guys please. shake your hands and forget the fighting.

Why is this even a point of discussion? We're talking about battling it out on an extremely exaggerated scale, so they should feel more than free to scale down anything to 'fit' that needs to be scaled down. Realistic? Yeah, because it's so realistic that the sun is four miles away from the surface of the planet and hasn't torn it to pieces or cooked it to a crisp.

BulletMagnet, I see you chose to ignore my first point in favour of more hypocrisy by complaining about the very thing you jumped into the thread to do. I am taking this as an admission that you don't know the difference between the words "statement" and "sentence" and as such your 'argument', if it could even be called that, doesn't actually exist. Concession accepted.

+1 to as least accurate artillery as possible. No Sniping with super-long-range weapons (only exception here might be nukes)

Last thing we need is a world where all of the battles are won by a guy who builds arti turret first.

STOP ARGUING LIKE A KIDS, all of you.
Thank you.

If you don't want to address the issue of incorrect mathematics and contradictory sentences, fine by me.

Moving on...

I think it's important that the player can expect a fairly consistent and even pattern of damage from artillery. I say this knowing that there's always going to be variations, given firing randomness. 'Least accurate as possible' is just a little haphazard. Instead, it might be better to say (this is a tokenary example, and I'm pulling numbers out of my arse, so balance it yourself); over a two minute period of shelling, we should be 95% confident that the artillery will do at least 80% of its theoretical* damage.

*theoretical being damage per shot, times number of shots.

Doing it this way brings in some serious, but not very difficult, statistical maths into the balancing process. I think this is useful because when we're talking about dozens of artillery, per planet. Firing for hours at a time. Everything bleeds out into averages, but you can't rely on averages in the short-term. Short-term is where people get upset; either getting wtfpwned by a newly constructed artillery, or by watching your newly constructed artillery's shells bouncing haplessly off enemy armour.

I would go for something like that:
Over a two minute period of shelling, we should be 95% confident that the artillery will cover every point in an area of 500m from designed point with at least one shell.

If you get what I mean. Use artillery as a support area-deny weapon instead of a gun that's made to destroy enemy units just like a shells from regular tank. IMHO there's no point in having Artillery as you describe in the game - it doesn't introduce anything original to the gameplay. It's just a tank with enormous range. I don't think we need that.

(that said - most of the games threat Artillery as a tanks with enormous range - but it's so... counter-productive. I'd pick more varied gameplay any time, night and day, over what you propose)

Artillery as area denial doesn't work terribly well in a SupCom-like paradigm. Due to bases being very compact and battlefields very small, the area you most want to deny to your enemy is the one where all their stuff is contained. And there's no way to deny this area to the enemy than to blow up all the stuff that's in it. Area denial works IRL because people don't tend to fight battles a stone's throw from their entire military-industrial complex.

If I'd actually posted any mathematics, or you'd actually demonstrated any contradictions, this would be relevant, but unfortunately for you, this isn't the case.

This game, however, will be a few orders of magnitude bigger.

I loved the artillery buildings from Supreme Commander 2; to see an army moving from one point to another, and being shelled by inaccurate but deadly artillery fire.

Sure, some pin-point precision artillery could exist too, but the majority should be inaccurate I think (with the exception of light, tier 1 artillery that isn't really artillery but more like a tank with slow moving projectiles and a slight range increase I guess).

This also makes missile launchers and artillery different; the first is for precision, the latter not.

Yep, but in PA we'll have maps in acceptable size, right? Instead of SupCom? And we'll have actual terrain with choke points, etc?
There we go! Area Denial weapons are suddenly useful again!

It would also work in SupCom or PA if the maps had chokepoints in them, but usually the maps are very wide and open, aphimbian units make it even worse. Chokepoints do only exist in maps which were designed to have such.

Artillery (sniper form) is still the most efficient way to take down enemys defenses and it should stay that way. That only didn't work in SupCom because of the way shields were used and the damage of artillery was far to high to be just limited on taking down the defenses and ciritcal buildings like power plants, instead artillery caused havoc to the whole base including the commander.

This also works, I don't have a problem with using this instead.

I posted it because I think, later on, it will allow artillery to be balanced more precisely (ala. it's a better tool than just assigning numbers, experimenting, and tuning those numbers up or down a notch).

Kinda' agree on the artillery being area denial weapons too. Leave cruise missiles for the precise I want that thing there turned to slag work.

Then spread bases out some!

What I think you're describing is a symptom of an unrelated problem: stacking of shields. There was massive incentive to make small bases because you didn't want anything outside your 482 shield bubbles, and stacking shield bubbles meant that when one collapsed under heavy fire, it would be replaced by one of the 481 others while it very quickly recharged (they recharged faster after you collapsed them from fire than while they were still up).

If we had real cruise missiles, things would be fine. But since there are none, artillery should take their role. A precise, yet not to strong mechanism which allows you to pick off supportive units and buildings. Not strong enough to cause real havoc to elementary building like factories or the commander, but suited to snipe the enemy defense grid or power plants.