Artillery Defense

This is why I don't play competitively... I can predict what an AI will do, every single time. Plan out what I will do, what he will do... I cannot do this for a sorian AI on an 81k map, however. Humans, however, are not predictable, and my one working strategy isn't dynamic enough to defeat them. I could probably get used to planets easier than any hardcore TA/SupCom player.

You guys are forgetting orbital units. What if the thing that can shoot down artillery shells/nukes is an orbital unit? This puts it outside the protection of your ground based base defenses and forces you to fight for orbital superiority in addition to land, air, and sea.

This also opens up a place for base shields. Not as a way to affect ground or air combat but as a way to defend against orbital bombardment (except asteroids). That way base shields could be countered with ground forces and conventional air craft as the shields would not affect anything not coming in from orbit. While holding orbital superiority would let you use artillery and bombardment to help soften up a planet for ground invasion to try and take out the base shields by covering your landing forces and helping to defend your new base.

This opens up doors for combat between ground and orbital forces via artillery type units with energy cannons that the orbital artillery defense unit cannot defend against. Since energy weapons cannot fire on a parabolic arc these orbital defense guns would be unless against ground forces. (Imagine a firefight between bases on asteroids who's natural orbits bring them close together once in a while) You could even make the base's orbital bombardment shields stop fire going in both directions so that the guys on the ground couldn't fire up at the invading force in orbit from perfect safety.

Simple physics tells us that the guns firing at the planet will be more powerful than the guns on the planet firing up at the attackers so it would be impractical to try to defend the orbital layer with only ground based defenses.

Then the defender would have to choose between using orbital defense guns and contesting orbital superiority with their own offensive force or turtling up with base shields and trying to hold off the ground invasion with their own ground forces against an attacking force that has orbital bombardment support with little or no Big Bertha style artillery support of their own.

If the defender somehow manages to get the entire planet covered in base shields then just throw a large asteroid at it and be done with it.

Artillery defense on the orbital layer could be cool

Placing artillery defense outside of ground defenses means it also can't be countered on any of those levels. That could make it even stronger than leaving it as a ground based structure.

For every defense, there should be a method of trumping it. The more methods, the merrier. Arty defense allows a clear weakness against spam weapons (cluster bombs, sheer numbers), super heavy weapons(like nukes), and beam weapons. It is also ineffective against normal units. That should be effective enough to keep it in check.

The defense may detonate the projectile regardless. If the shell ends up getting too close, it could still deal damage to taller things or air units.

Well you said it yourself bob, counters should flow from the physics system rather then by some arbitrary counter unit.

And I am still really not sold on the idea we even need this anyway, if you are being artilleryed then kill the artillery, not like there are shields to stop that this time.

Unless there are ground based guns that can shoot at things in orbit or air units that can go high enough to launch missiles at it. I see no reason for "base shields" in orbit. And there is no reason you couldn't still counter it with sheer artillery spam.

The basic idea is to allow an invading force a way to get a beach head on a planet controlled by another player. I don't think it should be possible to build a base that can only be destroyed by an asteroid because someone decided to turtle up.

Agreed

If we get artillery defenses I'd like to see the shield from Metal Fatique make a return.
Basically it was a base station that you could order to produce little flying octagon shields that aligned themselves with the projectile arc.
Basically like the missile defense in supcom / ta, just for artillery.

No.

Has it occurred to any of you that artillery wouldn't, and couldn't, have planetary scale ranges? The horizon says no, and puts a hard range cap on any direct artillery fire. Now it might be possible to get around that several ways.

First, what I call the ICB Shell. Rather than firing missiles you fire shells that reach orbit and slingshot around the planet. However, there would still be limits to what you could hit, and good god the accuracy issues . . .

Second, artillery firing from orbit would be able to bombard massive areas of the planet. However, it still couldn't fire on at least half the planet. Also, those shells are going to need some protection from re-entry, especially if they are jam-packed with explosives.

However, conventional ground artillery simply fire in an arc, and thus can reach around the horizon, but again there is a limit to the reach you can attain. Gravity is a bitch. These are planets we are fighting on, not maps.

You can create a ballistic trajectory between any two points on a planet. They only question is how much velocity you need for it. You could replace ICBM's with a giant artillery gun if it can get a muzzle velocity of the max speed of the rockets (ish). You are using ballistic paths that are called sub-orbital trajectories. Conceptually it's the same as conventional artillery, just bigger.

Also, a artillery gun in orbit could hit any location on a planet, IF it has enough muzzle velocity. The hardest place to hit is straight down. The math is tedious, but not terribly difficult.

Yeah...I trust the devs to implement artillery in the game in a way that will be the most fun. Just wondered if anyone else thought some kind of artillery defense would be good/fun/useful in the game as well.

As noted above, it's not that hard for arty to shoot over the horizon. Also note that the ICB shell you propose is identical to arty firing over the horizon using regular good old aiming.

Also accuracy is not a problem: GPS-guided shells could easily hit anything with a deviation of a few meters.

Just search for the American Navy's railgun tests. ranges of 350-600 Km, impact of a Tomahawk missile, accuracy up to a few meters. And yes, at those ranges curvature of the earth becomes a thing. At a few thousand dollars per shell, railgun arty would beat cruise missiles in terms of cost while loosing no accuracy or range.

Too bad that the railgun itself is scrap metal after a few shots though. :mrgreen:


As for artillery defense, its not needed imo. Just make it so that the firing artillery's approximate position shows up whenever it fires, so it can be counterfired, taken out by a task force or just nuked from orbit.

It helps fighting enemy artillery by revealing their (approximate) position and doesn't help turtlers too much. (Mobile artillery can move when it gets counterfired too badly.)

I like the idea of heavy artillery giving away its position when it fires. Counter battery fire is a very real thing and it works quite well. This give people a reason to use mobile artillery instead of just the larger fixed guns that were so popular in TA and SupCom.

Warzone 2100 had the Counter Battery sensor tower, which would automatically send out signals to attack the position of enemy artillery fire. You could hook your own long range weapons up to it, and they would automatically return fire on enemy artillery as soon as it started shooting.

It was a pretty cool concept.

CBs were hilariously fun. I thought they made artillery a little too useful though, so rushing the longest range artillery was the first order of call. Once you could suppress enemy artillery, you could just spam your own out without remorse.

Yeah I'm not sure about their balance (never having played Warzone multiplayer, just the campaign) but conceptually it was pretty sweet.

If you've played TA you'll know that the only real way to counter arty is to go blow it up before it wrecks you ><

They also had counter radar.

Using well positioned mortars you could easily take out enemy radars with attracting too-much attention.

It could be fun to play with that concept as well.