Not if your enemy decided to use artillery as a defense too. Issue is: His artillery is stationary and has slightly higher range than your mobile artillery, so you can only abuse bugs in the targeting system (kiting) or try a large scale suicide mission. Same issue with bombers, antiair shoots them down before they can deliver their payload. And antiair is both cheaper and more efficient than aircraft... Well, yeah, artillery is designed to take down laser towers. But that only works right now because people prefer laser towers over stationary T1 artillery due to the insane firepower of laser towers. Same as T2 stationary artillery is also better used in offensive than in defensive scenarios due to the fact that it can kill an enemy commander single shot, but is incapable of stopping an enemy army due to overkill and too small AoE radius.
I didn't mean kiting in the sense of retreating, but kiting in the sense of dodging by micro. When you abuse a certain abnormality in the targeting algorithm to completely break it, rendering yourself invulnerable on purpose.
You are wording that in a way that purposefully make it sound bad. When you kite you force predictive fire to miss, and I see nothing wrong in that. The problem is what it's always been, that artillery shells move far too slowly, and is what makes kiting so effective. Kiting is micro, and if you want to spend the time to do it then you should be able too, but you don't have to and there are certainly times when macro is a better thing to do at the time.
Don't forget about client side mods in PA. Issue with micro is, micro can be automated. On the client. Especially such "simple" types of micro. You allow that, you allow cheating. And there is nothing which could be done about this type of client side mod or cheat, except for fixing the anomaly in the targeting system. And it really doesn't matter whether you exploit using a script or if you do it by hand, exploit is exploit and is no sign of true skill, but only shows that you are investing more time in abusing bugs than in actually playing the game in the designated way. These type of bugs can render the game completely unusable for esports as the knowledge of a certain bug can undo the whole balancing.
It's not a bug! And how does micro have anything to do with a client side mod? And why the hell would you create a mod for that? What the hell is this discussion? REALLY?
It is a bug and is can be exploited. And I will even give you an example how the client side mode could be implemented: All you need is to write yourself a macro which adds patrolling between two waypoints with no-roam option and fire-at-will at the end of each order chain and which also removes the patrolling when you issue a new command. Add 2-3 lines of code to scan for artillery, match the distance between the two waypoints to turnspeed, movement speed and distance to artillery and you are done. All your units are automatically invulnerable to artillery now.
Avoiding predictive fire is NOT a bug, its basic thinking! If you fire a weapon that takes time to get to a target, then against a moving target you have to fire ahead of it in order to hit it. So you see the shot be fired, and change direction so you don't meet up with the weapon. You are honestly saying that is a bug? And client side mods are a different matter entirely, you are just tuning this discussion into how you feel like players shouldn't have to control their units. Sure you can make a set of instructions for a computer to follow, BUT THEN WHAT IS THE POINT IN PLAYING? You might as well watch a movie at that point if you are going to automate your units like that.
Fantastic. Then go! and get yourself banned for creating client side programs to play your games for you.
Micro isn't cheating. If you want to micro, go ahead. I believe the intent is to make those kinds of micro less effective, or perhaps build it into the unit AI (there is already a "meander" or roam move type in the UI, those controls just don't do anything yet). Not sure what the specific plans are, I just know that we want to reduce micro's effectiveness.
The border between micro and cheating is pretty thin when talking about such bugs... I agree that micro is perfectly legit if you improve pathfinding to avoid collisions, or if you retreat to stay just outside of the enemies firing range (although units should do THAT on their own), or in common: To avoid suboptimal default behaviors. But using micro to disable prediction algorithms, especially when this creates an asymmetric advantage? Dodging is simple to achieve and to automate for the person doing the micro. But it is close to impossible to counter by hand for the person affected by the use of micro. Not without manually targeting every single shot to overcome the shortcomings of the prediction while the cheater can just make use of the patrol feature. Either dodging becomes default-behavior for all units when under artillery fire or the issue has to be resolved in a different way, e.g. by increasing AoE splash / projectile speed far enough to make dodging impossible.
In regards of artillery toward this, if their shells didn't move so bloody slowly, and at such a high angle then it would be harder to actually achieve a large advantage to microing. But when a shell takes 3 or 4 times the time to get to a target that a direct fire weapon would, then really why would you not simply dodge?
Maybe a shotgun-like behavior for artillery could provide a much more constant result... Add a spread and clustering to artillery which is independent from the used firing mode (indirect / direct). This spread shouldn't have much of an effect when the direct fire mode is used, it still would hit pretty well (and barely dodgeable due to the short time of flight). And it would also render dodging a useless strategy when indirect firing mode is used, due to increased AoE radius and an unpredictable spread. There is a good reason why I always liked the T3 Aeon quickfire artillery more than the pinpoint precision Mavor and alike... Damage to individual targets was lower, but it was actually useful at dealing reliable damage to ALL units, not just the ones which stood still.
Yeah that could be good. It just seems silly for artillery to fire at any angle higher then 45 degrees when trying to hit a moving target to me. Leave the higher angles and slower flights to the missiles!
I will start a new topic on the various projectile types and on their behaviors, advantages and drawbacks, as well as implementation details which need to be considered to avoid certain bugs / possible exploits.
Yup, I'll defer to Uber for their ideas on micro but it's hard not to like the Spring approach. When many advantages of micro are intrinsic to unit AI and the game is balanced around unit characteristics it's a lot harder for micro to affect balance. That is a good idea. This might be useful: http://zero-k.info/Wiki/WeaponClasses
The current wall concept just seems like it's a collection of pillars. I would like to be able to build walls in a couple of clicks instead of having to click for every little pillar.
