Mobile Artillery useless?

This is absolutely one thing that artillery does. However it seems to me that certain subtypes of artillery are best suited to taking out a specific tower/turret at a time, especially precision artillery. Bombardment artillery can also do this just by shelling the target area for an extended period, but it will take longer to clear the towers out than precision artillery would, unless there are a whole lot of them together. Because of its range, it still works for defeating towers, but it is also suited for shelling large groups of units in the field.

A good example of a precision artillery unit would be the TA-style Starburst missiles, such as those on the Merl and Diplomat. These are exceptionally long range units that can reach targets that are completely unable to fight back, and can fire over an entire battlefield with impunity. However due to the lengthy time period between launch and impact, they are best suited to accurate strikes against stationary targets.

Compare this with long-range bombardment artillery like the Big Bertha, which has tremendous range, is inaccurate, and has significant splash damage. This kind of artillery isn't really that useful for killing a single specific enemy unit, but a sustained bombardment of a target area can do a tremendous amount of damage over an extended period, making these types of artillery extremely powerful and dangerous, and a very high-priority target as well.

Smaller artillery pieces would work on the same principle, but with less range and/or power than a very expensive stationary gun like a Big Bertha. The fact that they are inaccurate also justifies more range and power for the same price point, and range is hugely important for artillery, so getting as much range as possible on the cheapest unit possible is a good thing. Trading away accuracy for range instead of forcing a more expensive unit makes bombardment artillery more interesting, and creates an interesting difference between precision artillery and just bombardment by shelling.

Dividing artillery into inaccurate bombardment artillery using shells, and precision artillery using missiles makes sense to me, but of course there are a lot of good ways to design artillery. Both outrange turrets, but for targets that don't move a Merl is a better choice than an inaccurate artillery gun.

My point is that a Big Bertha acts like true artillery; it isn't standing right behind the combat units with a bit more range than the enemy's combat units. It is WAY behind the lines, providing fire support. Smaller artillery should have such long range that it functions similarly, even if it has much less range than a Bertha, which the Bertha gains due to its high cost.

Other unit roles can have merely long-er range than combat units/turrets, and can counter turrets by marginally outranging them. They don't necessarily have to be artillery to have good/superior range; other roles stand nearby behind the front lines, like skirmishers and defensive units.

Right now mobile artillery has been largely replaced by pelter creeping - if I want to take out towers I bring some engineers forward and build a pelter. It has superior range to artillery units and is generally undetected unless radar is installed along that front line.

Towers are the least of my concerns.... looking at you pelters/catapults!

The most casualties from world war 2 was the result of random artillery shelling, but the reason they're so big and covered in pipes and whistles is because those things were designed to hit things on the dot. I think that it's accuracy should be determined by intel, with the option to shell available

That's true.


But it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is because you build it too late, and pelters are just better.

By the time you have artillery on the field, it's highly likely your opponent has pelters if not catapults and holkins.

Pelters should be used to fight against blobs and stationary targets. They should thin down a big blob so that the defence towers can deal with it.

Basically a defensive line should buy you time so you can launch a sally with your units.

The fact that you have to move to T2 to counter the basic units isn't good

Then the catapult renders the T2 artillery unit totally useless. Especially as it acquires a new target after its current target is destroyed. So you can't even rely on Overkill to save you.

Personally I feel current mobile artillery should be T1 with a much longer rate of fire, with a mobile artillery unit much more comparable to the Catapult in T2. And also that there should be some defensive units (aluminium chaff, ecm, even AEGIS style units).

The problem with that dangoofed is that while the gun was actually very accurate, the targeting information most definitely was not. The vast majority of artillery shells do nothing. In fact, the majority of artillery shells are fired intending not to inflict casualties, such as suppressive, covering, and defensive fires. Aiming at an area with the purpose of making it impossible to attack into it, or aiming at the general vicinity of a group of enemies (exact positions unknown) knowing you won't actually hit anything, but that it will make an immediate follow-up assault into that area much more effective.

Even among shots that are fired "for effect" (meaning to try to kill something) the vast majority of them miss. Estimating the location wrong, incorrect targeting information, wind, weather, terrain height variation, small, hard-to-hit targets in bad visibility. Reality has a lot of factors that make accurately aiming artillery utterly impossible, even if your howitzer is perfectly accurate. How do you know where the enemy is so precisely? How do you know where the enemy will be so precisely? How can you communicate that information both quickly and with ultra-high fidelity from the forward observer to the gun itself?

At the end of the day, even though it is possible for an m110 to deliver a round onto a patch of dirt very precisely, you have to point out the exact right piece of dirt sufficiently far in advance for the gun to put a shell there. People and vehicles have a tendency to move about, making them extremely difficult to hit without an active guidance system (aka a missile). Furthermore, even if you are trying to hit a building, it is going to take multiple shots of tweaking your angle and windage before you actually get a solid hit. In-game, it makes more sense to just have random variation within a circle, with hits closer to the center being more likely, instead of bothering to simulate correction.

Despite how accurate gun artillery is, it misses the vast majority of the time. Commanders know it is inaccurate, but it is still extremely useful, to the point of being the primary real damage dealer in modern combat doctrine.

Finding real hard numbers for realistic range and accuracy artillery is very hard because there are a tremendous number of factors involved that will vary their effectiveness immensely. But regardless, any type of gun howitzer artillery is extremely long-range, and very accurate. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that the range and accuracy of most gun howitzers is somewhere in the ballpark of about 30km of range, and accurate enough to drop a shell within between a 50m radius circle to about a 300m circle, depending on distance and weather conditions. Thirty kilometers is a long distance, and 50 meters is a very small circle by comparison. The total surface area that might be targeted is 2827 square kilometers, and the minimum deflection is only 0.01 square kilometers. Even at the worst end, at a 300m circle, the maximum deflection is only 0.28 square kilometers. But hitting a single tank? Impossible, even with the absolute most advanced guns in the world. Still, a tank cannot possibly hope to counterattack since its main gun maxes out at about 2 kilometers of range. Very advanced modern tank guns might go to 2.5km or a bit more. Thirty kilometers lets you put rounds anywhere on a battlefield from a huge distance away from the battlefield.


Still, realism is not my point at all. My point is that making artillery extremely long range and very significantly inaccurate is a very different combat role from standing a short distance behind the lines and accurately attacking an enemy from marginally beyond their attack range.

True artillery acting in a fire support role outranges the enemy by a factor of TEN, not by plus three. But you can't really use it to kill a single specific enemy target, unless you throw a really prodigious hail of shells in order to be absolutely certain to blanket the entire deflection radius. For gameplay reasons, it makes sense to make such long-range artillery assets highly inaccurate instead of highly expensive. If you want high accuracy, you are going to have to get closer, or pay for very expensive precision options at range.

I think supressing artillery would definitely be a nice addition to the game.

I think the various kinds of ways to use artillery emerge naturally from the extreme range and intrinsic inaccuracy of using artillery, not as a formal mechanic that needs to be overtly implemented.

Suppressive fire is simply firing inaccurate artillery at a group of units to make them more vulnerable to a follow-up charge, which would happen in-game by reducing the HP of some of their units, and killing some of them. Defensive fires are performed by firing your artillery in front of your forces to stop the enemy from assaulting into you, because they don't want to be hit by your artillery.

No formal mechanics are necessary, just massively increased range and introducing significant inaccuracy.

I.e. relying on unreliable splash damage on a larger blob, not perfect accuracy against every single snipable unit.

the Dutch and German howitzer is a long range vehicle, have a range of +/- 40Km, but its weaker compared to a tank in a tankbattle, however it would not see such Battle if everything goes acording plan.

but, that would make the artilary units in PA have a range of 20times a ant, and that would make it to strong and not fun to play against it.

and don't say radar coverige, with 4 radar types and 2 of them mobile and orbital..

they would ruïne the game!

I use the artilary bot, doxes and stingers, and it works, could be better but for a Beta game it works.

and it is not the Year 2013 in PA.

Artillery with 20 times the range of an Ant which is perfectly accurate would need to be extravagantly expensive in order to justify the ridiculous advantage it provides, of being able to snipe any target within such a tremendous area. Especially with radar which cheaply allows it to fire at any target within such long distances, it would need to be so prohibitively expensive to stop it from dominating the game that it would be useless. If it were affordable anyway, even if it was a high cost, I totally agree that such an artillery unit would ruin the game.

But artillery with 20 times the range of an Ant which has an inaccuracy of 0.5 times the range of an Ant? Your probability of a hit increases with the size of the group of Ants, until the Ants are packed solidly into a circle with a radius of half an Ant's weapon range. Then you have a 100% chance to hit something. The bigger the group, the more likely you are to hit something.

Against small groups of Ants you are practically wasting your time to even shoot at them. Such inaccuracy drastically reduces the effectiveness of the weapon, at least until the armies or bases start getting really large.

A deflection of half an Ant's range is quite large. Such an artillery piece could be very inexpensive, despite having so much range. Allowing you to potentially build a large number of them. Or perhaps it could have even more range to justify being so inaccurate.

Simply making powerful things very expensive doesn't make them less dominant, it just slows down when they can be acquired, and makes getting a large number of them more difficult. Built-in downsides are much better than simply making something extremely strong and very expensive.

Inaccuracy isn't going to function very well if splash damage doesn't drop off. A splash attack that glances frequently is dealing very little average damage with dropoff(in addition to having standard misses), while it remains an all or nothing deal with a flat template.

Giving splash a flat damage drop makes it 1/3 as powerful as a flat damage disc. It's kind of a vital difference.

I think you're selling an inaccurate mortar gun too enthusiastically, the mobile artillery is supposed to be used for cracking stationary bases and that's not going to work if it misses 3 times out of 4, and if it doesn't work for what it was designed for no one is going to use it. You seem to only be addressing it's use vs mobile units or groups of enemies, and though mortars are used in that manner, THIS one was designed to fill a vital and missing roll with the assumption that you're trying to hit something that you sent somebody out to comfirm that it's there and not going anywhere. Our thoughts and ideas only factor into the game tangentally, but If there's such an argument about this, we could suggest to have the differnce be in tier, with the t1 artillery being a mortar and the t2 being accurate super cannons, or have the artillery bots be mortar slingers

The good news is that we have mobile artillery in both the bot and the vehicle factory. I am very much in favor of differentiating bots and tanks more, and one way to do that would be to have tank artillery be the base cracker, and bot artillery be used for taking out armies.

Err.... but bots and Vehicles are basically equivalent.

Against stationary targets artillery should not miss. Stormtroopers much?

Against units however it shouldn't be god mode.

Why can't one of them be more accurate and move more quickly while the other is more powerful and moves slower but has less accuracy? What is the point of having both bots and tanks if the factories produce the same units?

Maybe they are currently, but I don't see that as being indicative of anything.

Mike

You know neutrinos post on the matters? What's the point in having anything at all?

Because the vehicle artillery unit has more range, more damage, a higher fire rate at the cost of health:metal investment, speed and maneuverability

There is already a substantial difference in them.

the issue with making tanks be base crackers, and bots be army crackers, is why would you then ever build slammers or Levelers? The bot artillery unit would be superior to both of those units in every way.

Current implementation, bots are more maneuverable than vehicles, and give you more hp per metal invested, at the expense of range. There is already a substantial differentiation between the two. Making the T2 bot a unit destroyer would just make it into a better investment than a Leveler. And that's bad.

People are looking at the differences between bots and vehicles in terms of the literal properties of the units. While there will be different characteristics, the really significant difference is how they should play, and the units' characteristics should be designed to achieve that goal.

For example, suppose tanks play like an armored division where each fist of tanks is a focused attacking group. Bots, on the other hand, might be spread far and wide across a large area, covering a large area with numbers instead of movement speed.

To achieve this, tanks might be big, individually tough units with good range and movement speed. An armored corps of tanks is few in number, but each individual is both mobile and powerful. Bots might have more maneuverability and lower speed, and be smaller and squishier, but with considerably more HP per cost, despite each individual being fragile.

The way they are intended to play comes first, and then the unit's characteristics are assigned to achieve that. Making them different just for the sake of being different will lead to the kind of superficial differentiation like between Doxes and Ants now. They may be different units in terms of their actual characteristics, but they play in virtually the same way with some minor differences.

Regarding artillery, it is certainly possible to assign characteristics to the different factories, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. A basic artillery unit with poor accuracy should probably be available in both land factories. There can easily be more than one artillery unit while still making each interestingly different. An advanced artillery unit with much better accuracy, and an advanced heavy artillery unit with much larger splash damage might also be added. Then there's small mortars, rocket bombardment artillery, long-range missile launchers, and many other possible designs. These and potentially other more specialized artillery units make a lot more sense to assign to specific factories.

Suppose the basic bot artillery is a cheap, small mortar which does little splash at short range (for artillery- still 5x anything's combat range), but has a tighter spread than bigger guns. The basic vehicle artillery could be a howitzer, which is really just a bigger, longer-range mortar with less accuracy. Advanced bot artillery could be highly precise with better range than its basic artillery. And advanced vehicles might also have heavy artillery with massive splash damage, as well as a rocket artillery unit that fires a massive salvo of rockets over a large target area, while advanced bots also get an accurate missile launcher unit for sniping structures. The basic units might be similar, but still interestingly different, while the advanced units are more specialized, and more highly diversified. Just one possible arrangement of many.

And regarding bobucles' comment about splash damage, yes damage dropoff is very important. A flat damage template would be dreadful. Damage dropoff with distance from the center of the explosion is critical. Not even necessarily linear dropoff- a more serious quadratic dropoff with distance from the explosion's center might work even better.

Not going to wade into the main discussion here as I don't feel I have much to add, but I was just wondering whether we think we're going to have rocket bots/sniper bots (or vehicles) in the game at some point. With the current implementation of artillery I can't see then having all that much of a role.
Just food for thought, I always liked the rocket bots and how they functioned in supcom.