Catapult Repurposing

I have seen many threads that focus either on trying to come up with an idea for a fair T2 anti-air turret, and I have also seen many threads complaining about catapults, and how it is too hard to deal with them as is. It seems to me that instead of adding a mobile anti-catapult defense unit, and adding some kind of flak tower or some other kind of T2 anti-air turret, we should re-purpose the catapult to be an anti-air launcher.

The catapult has a range that is close to being reasonable for a T2 anti-air turret, especially considering its current fire rate, which I believe (please correct me if i'm wrong) is only one missile in the air at a time. Its damage and homing capacity, along with its movement speed would make it a fairly good target against T2 air units, while not providing much of a solution to mass T1 bombers, and absolutely no defense against an all-out ground assault. With a slight reduction in cost (due to it's very long current build time) this would make for an excellent resolution to both problems (in my opinion). This turret would force the enemy to micro more with their T2 air assault, as the closer they get to one of the turrets, the faster it will be able to shoot (the sooner a missile lands a hit, the sooner it can shoot again), and the faster it will be able to take out enemy air units.

This idea isn't perfect of course, we would still need to tweak the stats a fair amount, but it would be a good way to hit two planets with one asteroid. Leave the missile artillery to some unit, it would provide a more interesting tactical environment than a unit with missile defense capabilities.

I thought the complaints with the catapult was how it overlaps with a holkins and is actually inferior to it.

Didn't seem like it to me on most of the forum posts, but it might be the case, either way, this still deals with the issue, by removing it as an artillery defence.

Well, like i have stated in these other threads, i was under the impression that the catapult was meant to be more of a TML, or if you have not played supcom, a 'mini' nuke so to say. You build the missiles, then order the missile to be fired at something. The missile has a long range, high damage, and small splash. This way, it could also be used as a potential anti-orbital weapon, although that may be a bit unbalanced.

That could be another way to do it, though it would probably take more code changes than re-purposing it to be an anti-air turret.

Why should code change have anything to do with what a unit should do?

I'm just saying it might be easier, and take less effort for uber, who i'm sure is already swamped with work. You could probably do both, it might be easier for them to just make a whole new structure for both by re-designing the existing catapult code.

A long range missile is a long range missile
A flak is a flak ... they have their clear purposes

By flak I was simply picking another person's suggesion for an anti-air turret at random, not as a specific example, sorry I should have clarified!

I really don't like the thinking here, it's very counter intuitive. Yes, the current Catapult implementation has some issues(that aren't wholly based on itself) and yes many feel that some form of Advanced AA is missing, but they aren't related at all.

The Catapult's issues, in my eyes, stem from how the current implementation has a lot of Role Overlap with Pelters. Additional complications come from the way that Catapult missiles have very little 'overkill overhead' due to how they re-target mid-flight and are 'perfectly' accurate due to tracking. When dealing with Role Overlapping, especially when all the contributing units are far from finalized, it's important to look at both units to see the whole picture. For example one of the biggest areas of overlap is actually accuracy, many(myself included) feel that artillery need some inaccuracy(to not overlap so much with Laser turrets) and if that does happen then there isn't a reason that the Catapult can't keep it's accuracy but the problem then becomes that you're still using Pelters and Catapults for essentially the same thing, so now you need to decide which you keep really and for me it would be better to find some new purpose for the catapult, my favorite I've seen so far is to make the catapult anti-structure, remove the tracking capability and maybe tweak some other settings for the missile in terms of damage, rate of fire and more.

As far as turning the Catapult into a SupCom style TML, it's come up before and the problem for me is that PA will have a lot more things drawing your attention due to the Spherical maps and Multi-planet gameplay and being required to micro catapults just isn't really that great in the context of PA.

Mike

The catapult should be a T1 nuke. But we need missile defense to stop it. Maybe t1 anti air should hit it.

Is this addressing the tracking capability for no overkill, re-acquisition of target mid-flight?

Because removing catapult tracking capability would make it overlap even more with the Holkins.

Basically it would remove all tracking, making it only really useful against stationary targets. I had forgetting that the Catapult and the Holkins were that close together in terms of range. In that case the best case I can think of off hand is to bring down the Damage on the Catapult, so that while the Holkins can do some damage to a base with it's high point damage and splash the Catapult is doing chipping damage, it never misses but it'll take a lot more hits to take out a building compared to the Holkins which might pop buildings in one hit, but even with splash it might still miss completely. Range could prolly come down a bit as well in the 300-400 area on the catapult make make it more for securing your perimeter rather that striking deep within an enemy base type deal perhaps.

That's just my gut thought, it's really hard to judge it too much given how nothing is really 'certain' when it comes to balance and I think we can start to see just how inter-connected everything can actually be.

Mike

I guess you're probably right in saying that, but I still do think that simply switching the catapult to an anti-air turret would actually be a reasonably balanced air-defense. Don't get me wrong, I still think that some form of missile artillery should exist, we could even just copy the catapult, and make one version hit air units as well. I just think that the current code for the catapult might work very nicely as an anti-air defense, all you would have to do is change the unit type it can target, along with a few balance tweaks to range, damage, AOE and cost. It wouldn't take any major functionality change in my opinion.

It wouldn't take much functionality change to make any new turret really, it's even better if it isn't quite as easy because at least you have the freedom to design something that fully fits with your needs. A good idea that betters the game is worth putting in the extra effort to make it right.

Mike

Of course, you'll have no disagreement from me there. I just see something very similar to the catapult functioning as an effective yet balanced anti-air weapon that would be easy to implement due to the pre-existing code for the catapult.


I don't know, it makes sense in my head!

How is this different from a SupCom TML?
How are you gonna prevent it from firing at moving targets when there are better suited stationary targets around?
I'm quite sure that people can still use it against blobs of units, close targets or try to predict the movement of mobile units so it still sounds like you can gain a lot from manually targeting with it.

Erm...

To paraphrase the essential argument in the other thread - having long range weapons with both indirect fire AND direct fire is necessary for the game. I think the current overlap is therefore ok. I think more terrain features will make this more of an obvious mechanic/interaction.

^+1000

I don't think this would be 'enough' of a distinction to be honest, and it doesn't need a missile weapon to do this, a "proper" high Arc Artillery piece would work much better in that regard if your ask me.

Mike