Artillery Defense

Sorry about that repost, was my internet, I swear.

I'm probably the worst turtle ever... But I have multiple bases, and my little bases provide enough cover to launch my commander, get an asteroid, and blow the enemy up. Granted, I play against the AI, and turtling is the only way to beat an AI, since they're so damn spammy.

Yeah, vs AI isn't much of an argument usually The basic idea behind turtling is that you're sacrificing control of the map for an impenetrable position. You should not be able to leave the confines of your base against a good player, which means no new bases. At best, slowly creeping forward with turrets and the like, but anything that leaves your defense grid should be dead. And your opponent should be expanding like crazy, to secure all the resources he can get his hands on.

I've won games by building 2 t2 tanks and then going to sleep. The AI must have rushed them with it's commander.

Eh. Artillery defense just provides another opportunity to turtle.

A turtle can build up an army behind that impenetrable defense. Unleashing hundreds of t3s and dozens of experimentals, for example. Done it a few times. Economy doesn't matter much. On a good map with map control, you're going to get 50+ mass/sec that you'll never use. So in truth, both players will use the same resources, but one has map control. Unless you're building 6 mavors, you'll stall your economy real fast like that, but if you make it, hell it's rewarding.

Turtles use artillery, don't know how it would be a disadvantage for him.

It does, somewhat. However, you can still create artillery weapons that are immune to ordnance defense. This might include beam weapons from space, flying bombers, gigantic nuke missiles, and asteroid bombardment.

There's plenty opportunity to create good weapons, counters, and counter counters.

And if a turtle manages to fortify an entire planet, complete with asteroid bases, good luck attacking. Asteroid control means you can just chuck units when his engineers try and build massive rocket engines on one.

So? Are you implying that turtling is bad? I personally think arty is awesome, in all games and le turtle is a valid strat.

The arty in FA was just insane eye candy, great to look at and felt like you were really pounding the enemy.

Turtling is bad, because even if I dedicate all my resources into building units, I hold them back too long, and chances are, it's already been nuked. Take it from me, who's never won against a single human opponent in over a decade, and my last win was In a StarCraft risk mod. This was before I realized that StarCraft was an over scripted piece of sh*t.

What about giving artillery the ability to fire in a coordinated manner? Namely, allow them to match their time on target, so that all the shells from a particular artillery battery position land on the target at the same time?

Very long range artillery could also adjust the angle of attack in order to make several successive shots land on the target zone at the same time.

This would help overwhelm any anti-artillery defense

I don't like the idea of an artillery defense, see, long range artillery should require so much energy and build time to fire, like the Mavor, that whoever is being hit by it should already have a few asteroids.

Turtling needs to be revamped anyway.

Id like turtles to multiple bases around map wide metal deposits, so no artillery defence for me because id like turtles to be building forward artillery and defensive positions on the high ground, while I swarm over the low ground.

Map design is key, preventing a turtle from camping in one place with hills, cliffs and swamps to impede mass construction.

like in this pic: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=42802

Massed defences would lose there effectiveness, forcing players to spread out.

Turtling on maps such as the above would be easier. Lots of bottlenecks.

Turtling doesn't work. Failing to grab resources means you lose.

Defending ONE type of damage is not a big deal. It does not protect against every other way to lose the game.

Why not do both?

But it isn't really needed when your enemy cant hit you, see you or reach you from a stupid range away.

Yeah, turtling has a very broad definition. My view of turtling is literally sitting inside your base, spamming up mass fabs/metal makers, and denying your enemy any chance to kill you. You can capture outlying mass/metal extractors, but that means expanding your entire base to consume them. Kinda like an amoeba.

Artillery defense doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It sounds like a really cool substitute to shields. And yeah, while it would help against turtles, it would also help turtles out a lot. Remember that the best way to crack a turtle, if you cannot find any weakness, is to just shell the unholy crap out of him with MArty.

I really hope we have something similar to the Scathis, super-heavy mobile artillery.

Wouldn't the best way to crack a turtle be.. to remove the metal maker?

Poof, all 'huddle in one spot and generate massive amounts of resources' issues gone..

Apart from that, more options to defend yourself against the enemy are always welcome - anti-ballistic weaponry, anti-missile phalanx turrets, anti-KEW nukes etc.. as long as you have gradients of efficiency (building 1 anti-artillery emplacement does not mean you're 100% safe from artillery) then it adds to the interesting dynamic of offense and defense in a game.

Arty is naturally effective against bases (compact targets), and by that same stretch is nearly useless on the field. There is no point in using arty anywhere else if ordnance defense doesn't exist.

The best way to crack a turtle is to have more resources than him, which is easy because a turtle sacrifices the map.

TA artillery was practically a game ender. We already have unblockable game enders in the form of gigantic doom asteroids. There is no reason for anything less to be unblockable.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the ability for weapons to deal permanent planetary damage. Artillery is an ideal weapon to start battering down rocks, mountains, and other obstacles. It could end up very dangerous as a gun style terraformer, which can be a great utility regardless if it can be blocked.