Pelican accel/brake and unload

Feel like either brake speed needs to be increased or pelicans are allowed to unload without needing to completely still.

Right now it takes over 3 seconds for the pelican to come to a stop from 70 speed with only 20 brake, severely limiting it's use

Use empty Pelicans as meat shields. Aa priorities empty ones first. I disagree though. As much as I would love them to be faster it will make them too strong.

That seems backwards. Shouldn't AA prioritize full Pelicans first?

you can't drop if theres even just one spinner. It will kill like 6 pelicans before anything is unloaded. It's pretty silly to use unloaded pelicans to meatshield too when that metal should be used for hummingbirds, regardless of any aa priority issues in the game

I dont want to be faster - only more responsive. If they had 50% move speed i wouldn't care.

A good counter argument to this is not to drop on top of a spinner . Scout ya big noob. Transporting should be risky as hell as it has high reward potential and extremely hard to forsee.

i think you playing too many noobs recently

anyone who builds just 1 air factory or few spinner is basically immune to drops. Why bother with pelican when bomber is better than it.

I am not talking about fabber dropping btw. I would like to see pelican be more than just glorified air fabber

*To expand, basically what i mean is this. I would like 1 spinner to only be able to prevent for example 3 pelicans from dropping, instead of 6 (random numbers for illustration). You will still lose all 6 pelicans, but atleast 3 will drop making it more proportional comparing metal used to defend vs the metal used to attack. I'm not talking about making it easy mode, you can decrease pelican move speed as necessary so that you cannot hot drop right ontop of spinners but atleast closer in range than currently.

Infact, i wouldn't care if decreased move speed and increased responsiveness from brake and accel cancelled out so that effectiveness of dropping was the same. Responsiveness to control is a much better trait to have.

I think it's hard to compare metal to defend against attack with Pelicans. Basically you need lets say 20 aa veh around your base to protect expansions. If they have one aa and a double lazer turret defending an expansion. Bomb the veh AA with 2 bombers, you lose one. Drop 2 infernos beside turret,lose neither. Or you can drop an ant out of aa range snipe the aa veh and then freely drop. If pelican drops are too strong then people will porch up more. I mentioned before that I would love this type of play but I think this will bridge the apm skill gap too much.

That doesn't make sense to me.

If you have an aa and a laser turret, and you bomb the aa vehicle, then you will also bomb the turret. Why would you go to the effort of trying to inferno drop ontop of it. If you are trying to compare 2 bombers (480 and only 1 factory) vs 2 pelicans (640 + 2 factory types), you will need alot more than 2 pelicans to drop 2 infernos.

The metal to attack vs the metal to defend is not hard to understand - it is already vastly in favour of bombers. If you assert that increasing pelican brake speed is going to make it too strong, then that is basically saying that bombers are already too strong.

I don't think you need aa vehicles everywhere to protect either. Just one air factory right now already means invulnerability to pelican dropping not only because hummingbirds directly counter pelicans, but because it creates a cost wall (much greater than bombers) such that if you go for pelicans, then your opponent will have air control over you

As for the dropping ant out of aa snipe range, the change i am proposing changes nothing in this situation so i don't think it's relevant.

Think we are looking at this from different angles. There are too many ifs to this argument for either of us to be completely right or wrong.

The risk you take is will flying these units to this location pay off or not. I would rather have 5 units in the middle of an enemy expansion and putting pressure rather than 10 units making the slow walk hoping, you don't notice and react with defenders advantage. You most likely already have units in reactionary locations around your base. But most likely not at the expansions at the back of your base that I can drop in 10 seconds.

I agree with clopse, the utility of the transportplanes is incredible. Ofcourse fighterplanes kill them, and ofcourse spinners kill them, that because otherwise they would be completely out of control. I would like to see a realistic targetting system (priority on the loaded pelicans). I think its not too difficult to lure away enemy aircontrol, or to find a place without spinners to make your drops.

Priority on loaded pelicans sounds like a no-brainer, i can't imagine how frustrating it would be for the enemy to fly in some units and your AA takes out everything but the major threat!

I always assume pelican drops to go hand in hand a with a hell of a lot of scouting to make it viable, and probably distraction as well. The 3+ second drop does sound a bit too much though. Just a tricky one to balance, I guess.

It's a moving drop, as in the slow and then drop, not stop, stay still and drop. So the just decelerate last 3 seconds.

I will look more closely next time I do one

I still think Pelicans need to be modeled after SupCom's - tanky and slow. But that's just me.

I feel like their utility would be increased this way, but making pelicans quicker to drop? hell no. You should use pelicans for flanking, not for frontal assaults.

er what. Nice generalisation. This change does nothing for 'frontal assault' effectiveness whatever that means. There is this thing called a scale of cost effectiveness. Try to actually read the thread and understand the concepts of and interactions between accel/brake and move speed.

Faster dropping is meant for more responsive movement specifically to allow better harassing.

Obviously no one has played anyone good if you think pelicans are good. No units guarding and zoning areas of the map? Why use pelicans when something else like a bomber is just as effective if not vastly more so.

I would be thoroughly surprised if anyone can actually produce evidence that they consistently use pelicans to great effect, let alone use them with combat units and harrassment drops atleast once every 10 games. No-one uses them like this, other than as glorified air fabbers, so untill that time maybe we should recognise the problem for what it is.

Pelicans are powerful? When was the last time you used them to harass? Let's try to be objective please

If you are going to insult my knowledge of game mechanics before attempting to have a logical discussion with me, you can just not even start to begin with.

Dox are already fast enough to allow better harassing than has ever been possible in PA before.
No one uses pelicans consistently because the update has officially been on stable for a week. We haven't given people time to try an effective meta. Problem is, this requires so much micro that it's close to impossible to pull off in PA past a certain stage of the game.

I never said pelicans are powerful. Stop reading trying to read between the lines here. I'm not some predictable think tank. The last time I used them to harass was a game against burntcustard on the PTE about two days after they went to T1, and before that against Xankar I used them to swiftly relocate my comm for expansion and flexibility.

And I'm telling you they'd be more useful to everyone, not just those with high APM, if they were slower and more forgiving to mistakes in micro.

Elodea, careful not to dance on top of the ad hominem line please.

Mered, if you could stop taking everything so personally, that'd be great.

How about when a pelican gets shot down it drops whatever unit's inside with something like 1/3 or half health remaining? It makes them less "all or nothing", although this would be exploitable with boom bots so they should be made to blow up normally

It allows a few spinners to heavily cripple a large force of pelicans like they do now, but if all you have is spinners or fighters then you still have to deal with the damaged units left over

I always give my Pelicans a change of direction queued just outside where I think enemy AA coverage is likely to start so they're slowed down and I can drop almost immediately if they come under fire.

Managed to get 3 infernos out of 5 on the ground when I accidentally flew over a spinner during a drop
yesterday cos I'd queued multiple move orders to keep them from reaching max speed.

too abuseable with infernos and vanguards .. so no