Artillery projectile speed discussion

In TA the Big Bertha and the Dominator had a extremely fast projectile speed, which was imo spectacular to watch. The artillery in SupCom one and two had a much lower projectile speed.

Which one of the two do you prefer? And are a fast and low speed both balance-able?

A brutally fast speed ofc with a nice boom at the end.

Slow. It's nice watching them lob across the map and grin as you anticipate the destruction they're about to meet out...

Fast looks more epic. Slow allows a micromanaging player to dodge. Difficult, because I want things to look epic, but I don't want to prevent micromanagement.

Slow also allows to power up defenses in time if you see the shot early enough.

Plenty of AoE splash and healthy warm-up/cool-down delays would mitigate those.

slow, It's awesome to see a lot of arty stations launch projectiles and make them crash into something.

You could go for fast projectile speed with things like the vulcan or buzzsaw or something. But they should be relatively hard to construct.

How slow is slow?

SupCom speed worked fine for me.

Actually, SC T3 Artillery has a muzzle velocity of 1.17km/s, while I believe the Big Bertha only had a muzzle velocity of 960m/s. TA's maps were considerably smaller than SC's maps.

Also TA's LRPCs primarily chose the low-angle firing solution, while SC's T3 Artillery chose the high angle (which was the optimal solution for shield-busting).

I always felt the TA artillery to be more epic. It sounded more epic, the bullet flew faster towards the enemy's doom and the explosion was more satisfying to watch.

I think that SupCom speed on the planet with atmosphere and TA fast on moons or Air-less planets would be satysfying for everybody, and it would make Artillery usage a bit different depending on the planet it used on.

Perhaps time is a better measure. Even a 'fast' projectile speed would feel slow if you're shooting long distances.

At the high end of the spectrum, artillery starts to feel like a pewpew, which already exists in laser weapons. Too slow and it feels like a rocket, which already exists as rockets and ballistic missiles. About the in-between speeds, why not have them all like TA did. The emg's were 'fast', the artillery units were 'medium', the plasma cannon batteries/naval cannons were 'slow', the berthas were 'slow'.

Variability within a unit could even add additional fun. For example, a tank that fires fast and medium range, but can deploy and become slow and long range. Or Multiple Rounds Simultaneous Impact, which I personally think has humongous awesome factor.

The guiding principle for any implementation of artillery should be the following:

"Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be an ugly brawl." - Frederick the Great

The "ugly brawl" part is the direct combat units going at one another head to head, which is basically a numbers game. Artillery adds finesse to this equation, since a solid volley of artillery on enemy troops massed together is devastating. The same volley spent on empty ground is wasted resources.

Speed should depend on what it is for, is it suppose to hit mobile targets. While it is impractical, I think the Big Bertha style firing at a low angle is more epic and interesting. You can get terrain blocking and an elongated hit area.

I think this is a good point. Being more of a SupCom player, I am used to those speeds but I personally think it depends on the physics engine. I personally thought that the arty fired fast and it was just the range that affected how "slow" it appeared to be going. LRA is designed for immobile bases, not armies. T2 Arty could be used against armies and you could say the projectile speed was very fast... it just took forever to get the second shot off.

In my book artillery should be pretty ineffective against move targets, guided missiles are for that, although a generous helping of splash-damage should ensure they're not entirely useless in that regard.

Your definition of artillery seems narrow compared to mine. I include missiles, giant lasers etc... If we're just talking about the plasma cannon artillery such as Bertha then it would be confusing to make it particularly accurate because that weapon type is usually a bit inaccurate and less accurate over range.

Fair point.

Then my point about their being slow (compared to reality) stands doubly.
You simply rely on guided munitions to hit moving targets.

No reason why their can't be a Tactical Missile Launcher building without the micro of SC's.
It worked for land (MML) and sea (Cruisers etc.) units.

I always felt slow was more epic because it made the maps feel physically larger.

Also it was nice to be able to dodge the things, artillery was a little OP.