Artillery Defense

What about a counter battery system for tactical missiles?

When artillery fire near them, or at them they are able to lock on to the firing enemy even without radar confirmation, and then launch a missile to destroy it?

Thus making mobile artillery much better at sieges, as they can avoid the counter battery?

Anything with a faster fire rate or hardened shells can overwhelm a counter battery. That's not too difficult to manage.

A more important question is how will the defense system work? This is important to determine if it can adopt any other roles as well.

Traditionally shell based artillery is inaccurate vs a missile based artillery.

It could just be specialized for the role of counter battery fire, but I suppose you could use it as a launch pad for a bunch of missile attacks, possibly even to launch torpedoes at nearby ships and subs.

Another possibility is to go the physics gun route and deflect/repel the projectiles away from target. There's a ton of ways to play around with that, more fun than simply making another gun.

Are you saying we should Bounce the Bomb's back at the enemy with some kind shield?

What about ToT artillery firing though - I think it would expand the role of artillery considerably if you could reliably blanket an area with simultaneous impacts, making it more effective, and making artillery defenses even more useful.

ToT?

ToT - Time on Target, basically an artillery piece can adjust its firing arc between shots to launch several shells into the air that will all impact at the same time. Also a term used to describe multiple artillery pieces coordinating their shots to land at the same time.

Sounds like you're just doing it wrong or doing it against players (or bots) far less skilled at the game than you are. You should never have income you can't spend, and if you spend a lot of money building defenses you should not have the same income as your opponent who is spending his money building more money.

That eithers points to players doing something weird and highly inefficient, or a poorly balanced game.

would be an interesting feature, in particular since you could easily integrate it as alternative firing mode for a grouped set of units.

on artillery defense in general, I think any offensive weapon should have at least some way of counter, how (cost-) effective the defense mechanism should be is a issue to be discussed/balanced.

It's a shame no weapon did such a thing.

Oh wait. No.... it just soaked up fire and turned it into a nuclear explosion that did zero friendly damage.

The Loyalist came closest. Its missile defense redirected missiles back to target, magically refilling the missile's fuel at the same time. It didn't make any sense, and was kind of bogus, but it kind of worked.

I have artillery everywhere, if the AI sends a huge wave of units, it'll be shelled to hell enough that it'll arrive at half strength and the remaining units in no condition to fight. The t1 mobile arty was overpowered, though. You could win in a ridiculously short amount of time with them.

I either have a massive overhead mass waste, or I'm going down 150 mass/sec.

Not a realistic game scenario in the slightest. In TA, a single Bertha can decide the game. Artillery in Supcom was defeated by shields, which defeated EVERYTHING to be honest. That mistake won't happen again in PA.

Please try again.

What I'm looking for is something between no artillery defense and the impact of shields. I feel like a point defense laser could be done right to provide a balanced counter to artillery without breaking the game or making people not want to use artillery barrage as a strategy.

It did that, but more as a cosmetic effect. Kind of sad. Anyway, the principle has been done, just needs to be done right.

How about a big tennis racket for our commander, neatly tying into the "commander late game viability" discussion.
May also be used for smaller asteroids, PA =Pong Asteroids.

Yeah, sorry to say seeker, but your comments aren't valid in a seriously competetive setting. It's great against the AI (I love occasionally doing a game like that myself), but if those things were true in high level competetive play.. there wouldn't be any of it.

But I don't play competetivly.... So there is a lot of it...

I've had so much shields that no amount of artillery could crack, but a dozen monkeylords rolled over it...
I usually plop down some heavy artillery at each one of my bases, try and attack it, and you're gone. Usually have 1 or 2 mavors pounding at his forward bases and mexes.
A single Bertha in TA was almost useless, unless the gravity was low or something... It's range is horrible compared to the SupCom artillery. But the TA:ESC arty was amazing, if you let it build for a couple hours.