Catapults on Small Planets - and artillery in general

I disagree!

I love fighting turtles and I would still love aggressive turtling to be a viable strategy, just having units as a game ender would also mean eliminating/nurfing nukes, remove planet smashing totally and would make the game a spamfest.

Always use holkins and catapults to supplement tank swarms, if a person know how to make a good defence it can be really hard to break even with endless stream of levelers, holkins and catapults are usually the answer for these situations.

Point Defence and anti ballistic missile defence, also having holkins really innaccurate would be a welcome though highly implausible as it is that these robots would not be able to calculate accurate trajectories.

Only having units as the only alternative to win a game would destroy what makes this game unique.

Besides building a pelter takes a lot of resources early game, I have destroyed dozens of opponents who had prioritized a pelter to fire at my base instead tanks on small planets, and if you are allowing your enemies to come to your base and build pelters on big planets then you simply need to find better strategies and watch some PA matches.

Aggressive turtling is kind of an oxymoron. Taking and holding territory isn't turtling, and sitting on a small, heavily defended area isn't aggressive.

I think everyone agrees that playing defensively should be not only viable, but actually very strong. Expanding across the map and then defending that territory with units and structures should be a very critical part of the game. But turtling should just be suicide. Your opponent will just expand, get an overwhelming economic lead, and crush you.

Your definition of turtling is ridiculous as you yourself state that is suicide and if we stick to that definition then of course I agree with you.

I have always seen turtling as the RTS application of the 18th century strategy of paralells



You build "trenches" further and further to enclose with your enemy base and bombard them continually, trenches that parelell your enemy. When they are suffeciently weakened you either send in the army/air force or if you just want to be patient completely cover their base and play the waiting game.

Never attack straight on, always have your army defending the construction of new parallels until you win. Turtling is RTS siege warfare and is both awesome and powerfull when done right.

There is one problem here. Historic parallels are filled with troops, where as PA's parallels are mostly artillery. Sure you can build parallel artillery instillation to attack the enemy position, but building units? No why would any one waste metal on units when the enemy can't even be scratched by them. The only reason to spend metal on units is to distract enemy artillery long enough for you to erect your own in range of the enemy's. There will be no epic charge when the enemy is sufficiently weakened.

fun fact: one Holkins costs the same as 5.7 Levelers and be leave me, one Holkins can kill a lot more then 5.7 Levelers (Holkins get more effective the more you have)

source:http://pamatches.com/wiki/buildings/defensive/holkins/
and: http://pamatches.com/wiki/units/vehicles/leveler/

You usually need to have tanks to stop a tank swarm, thats why you also build units to support your parallels, but of course you are right the analogy is not 100% correct but I find it quite applicable since the overall strategy is the same = enclose your enemy with artillery and defences. Just had a fight against two turtlers yesterday, my 30 tank squadron took down a holkins protected by 3-4 pelters and missile turrets. Had the turtler built walls and tanks to support his defences I would have lost that game, and this happens a lot.

Yes building levelers is unneccesary when turtling, they are expensive and needs T2 factory, normal tanks does the job just fine.

Edit: There were no epic charge at the end of siege (unless ofcourse the attacking general was ruthless egomaniacal) normally the defenders surrendered.

I don't know how you did it but 30 tanks (ants) is not enough.(if the arttilery starts firing at max range)
proof: http://youtu.be/b4-7voikV9g?t=34m25s
sure theirs some thing like 9 Pelters and 1 Holkins but there is a good bit more than 30 ants. He does score some damage but it defiantly wasn't cost efficient.

The Holkins were firing at my base though and without any tanks or walls to slow the tanks down they just strolled through the base destroying pelters/missile turrets as they went by.

The definition of turtling is not expanding. If you control more than half the map, you aren't turtling, even if you are defending forward and far-flung territories. Turtling means sitting on a small amount of space and defending, such as to use nukes or an experimental to try to deal critical damage.

It is, and should be, a terrible strategy because it is extremely boring and totally passive.

Your picture does not really explain what you are talking about. Furthermore, there were no air forces in the 1700's, and neither were there tanks, or any real artillery. Cannons in the 18th century were really not very good at all. They were mainly a siege weapon that would take months to batter down a fortress, or as fire support in battle at quite short ranges such as using grapeshot, or to damage the enemy's morale despite the fact that cannonballs really didn't do much damage at all to an army. Even if you hit a platoon, which was quite rare, it would only kill or disable a few men. 18th century cannons were extremely primitive, even compared to the cannons in the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. And even those are dinosaurs compared to field artillery in WWI.

If you want to talk about being defensive, and about trenches, and about artillery, you really should be looking at World War I. And the fact of the matter is that WWI was made into such a stagnant quagmire not because of trenches or artillery, but because of the machine gun. The machine gun of the day was an extraordinarily powerful weapon for defensive purposes, but was too bulky to be used effectively on the attack. Keep in mind, this is before mechanized warfare. Before WWI everyone expected cavalry would still be relevant in the next war. Turns out machine guns could cut down cavalry charges just as effectively as a huge number of men arranged in formation. A few extremely bloody charges later, military strategists quickly discovered that even overwhelming numbers could not actually take a position defended by even just a few well-defended machine gun emplacements.

So both sides are now sitting outside the ranges of each others' machine guns, and need a way to deal damage. Enter artillery. From high explosive indirect-fire howitzer rounds to nasty mustard gas shells. Trenches were a counter to artillery, because a high explosive shell has to actually land in the trench to kill a dozen men, instead of just anywhere within 50 feet.

Eventually, people started to realize that they had invented this thing called the internal combustion engine that could be used to build a big machine that could carry heavy things. And that such a machine might actually be useful for military purposes, like carrying a machine gun. And perhaps even enough metal armor to make it resistant to machine guns. And thus the tank was born, and mechanized warfare invented.


However none of that is the biggest problem with your analogy. The biggest problem is that having a large number of troops spread across a large amount of territory in a line of battle that moves is not turtling. No army in history has ever actually done the RTS strategy of turtling because actual wars involve geopolitics and large armies spread across large amounts of land. It is not possible to win a war by defending, and no military in the world has ever actually made the mistake that countless RTS newbies make on an hourly basis.

I suppose the closest example in history to the strategy of turtling would be the Maginot Line, which was the strategy of France in WWII of forming an absolute defensive line. And that worked out great for them. Especially when the Germans showed up with their highly advanced tanks, broke right through, and just kept on going, ignoring the defensive line which they had already passed until eventually the line's defenders were cut off from supplies and reinforcements and were forced to surrender.

No the maginot line would be a horrible example to my analogy as it was a static line, the french did not build trenches further and further into Germany. the system of parallel trenching have you build "trenches" parallel to the enemy, once you have completed the first paralell you move in closer and build a second and then a third like the battle of yorktown which is why this picture is a good illustration of my point. The french did the opposite of this.

The type of weapons are just variables, the overall strategy of parallel trencing is timeless and simple when it comes to sieging enemy fortifications, and this is RTS not real life, but thanks for the history lesson This strategy works as good with tanks, airplanes, nukes and satallites in PA as it did for the 18th century revolutionaries.

And our definitions of turtle is wholly different, too many seems to be too close minded when it comes to turtling, I will just call it trenching or something instead if the paradigm of turtling is to just stay in your starting location.

How exactly do you build trenches closer and closer to some one, when they will shoot you dead while your digging it. It just doesn't make any sense. For example artillery one has X range, thus the closest artillery two can be built is X+1 range. There is no way to advance.(if the turtle is well established of course)

The definition of turtling is heavily defending a small area. The opposite of turtling is expanding. You can redefine what it means to "turtle" if you want, but it is just equivocation.

Defending is not the same as turtling. Building turrets near spread-out mexes to stop a scout from destroying them is not turtling. Neither is building a distant forward base and building defenses to stop the enemy from attacking with a small group of units.

Siege warfare is not turtling, even if you are defending the siege. Making a well-defended base that the enemy cannot just attack-move into and must besiege is not turtling unless you only have one such base and nothing else anywhere on the map. If both sides are expanding to the point that it reaches a split-map siege, neither side is turtling, even though both sides are defending their territory.

Regarding artillery, the main weapon for besieging an enemy should be mobile artillery. Static artillery is all well and good, particularly for the defender. But an attacker can bring mobile artillery into range and bombard a base with a known position much more easily than static artillery should be able to destroy the enemy's mobile artillery.

I know I am in the minority on this point, but I really do think that all-seeing radar is terrible for gameplay. Especially since it makes long-range, accurate artillery so brutal at killing everything within its range. If you had to find your target first then artillery becomes much more interesting to use and to counter.

If the enemy is well established so it is impossible to build artillery that cover their base then you need to build the first paralell just outside his range and then either divert his artillery with units while you build the second one or do a airstrike, wish I was a streamer at this moment so I could actually show ingame example.

As I understand from your posts now that this is not turtling at all I withdraw my previous statement about turtling and would just like to use this paralell strategy as a viable option for all the suicidal turtles out there

Turtling into a nuke or turtling into an experimental, and so on, are just bad, passive play that should be actively discouraged. Waiting for minutes, possibly tens of minutes, to decide the game with the outcome of a single action or in-game unit, is just bad.

But expanding across territory, building turrets to stop the enemy from raiding, and then eventually building up into large bases that can be besieged, is aggressive, active, and good gameplay. What begins as lightly defended outposts made to protect mexes against scouts eventually becomes a large number of economic and industrial centers, as well as fortified bases defended by turrets. More space means more resources, and more development both offensively and defensively. Active expansion, active raiding the enemy's expansion, and active countering of the enemy's raiding. Completely different from turtling.

How exactly would you go about creating 'trenches' though? Are you just thinking of a line of turrets?

In TA and subsequent games, early expansion tends towards being close to naked expansion of undefended mexes. The trouble with completely undefended expansion is that it is very easy to destroy, so minimalistic defenses are necessary to protect those mexes from scouts/raiders. The constructors used to expand can then be used to make forward bases, including economy, production, and heavier defenses. Each base can then project power outwards into the enemy's territory, such as using units, artillery, air forces, and so on.

Interesting side-note - Earth 2150 gave its builders the ability to dig trenches to give units with high-mounted turrets an advantage when defending. They were quite fun. Not sure how this would sit with the scale of PA though

Walls put into strategic places could make trenches, or even kill zones if properly done.

Thats what I'm talking about, understand now that I should have clarified a lot more than just posting a 233 year old picture and saying this is a good turtle I don't mean just turrets as that would not work at all, like igncom1 stated, make overlapping outpost of walls+turrets+artillery+tanks+air superiority that constitutes a functioning defensive "trench" paralell to the enemy base and then when you have destroyed their outer defences, build a second line to cover more of the base and then repeat until you have bombarded the enemy base off the map, this works well because the lines of trenches also acts as defence keeping the enemy in place and more important dictating the initiative which gives you the ability to wrestle map control from the enemy.

Maybe if walls ACTUALLY were walls. Right now they are just traffic barriers, or heavily armored orange cones.

Walls should probably be features; more like wrecks than units. What this means is that units will not automatically fire at them, and they will definitely not fire at them instead of an actual enemy unit.

Also, walls don't really mean anything to indirect fire weapons like artillery. The shell is flying high over the wall anyway.

Actually digging a trench does not seem like it would have that big of a gameplay impact, although terrain deformation is possible, I suppose. It seems like to get a similar effect you would need to build a structure and put units inside it to protect them from artillery fire. Normally a tightly clustered group of units would be a good target for artillery, but a single structure is not because the artillery will have a difficult time hitting it, and even if it does hit the structure, it only damages the structure instead of killing several units.

I don't mind walls being an obstruction to movement primarily. In fact we might consider having tank traps that obstruct the movement of bigger units, but which smaller units can path between and around, and then walls can mainly block direct fire weapons. But that's a separate issue entirely.

It may be appropriate to mention the Moh's scale for this one.

Artillery is special because you can have a large number of guns each supporting other guns. Overlapping fire zones adds very quickly to the "hardness" of an area. Just like with quartz vs. calcite, if the coverage is too tough then nothing has any real hope of breaching it.

You can adjust this by changing the unit size. Bigger units are harder to pack together, therefore it is more difficult to provide the same amount of fire coverage. The area becomes easier to assault.

Among other things, Starcraft did this for its base defenses. Photon cannons may be effective and individually powerful, but you can't really have more than a dozen or so supporting each other at any one time. A heavy assault of zerglings/zealots/etc. could pack more firepower into a smaller area, allowing them to punch through the turret line.

I know the unit scale/size isnt changing anytime soon - but maybe they can make the spacing between units more pronounced, like they did with buildings.