Projectile Defense System (PDS) Idea

Since we dont get shields to defend ourselfs against rockets, bombs and artillery (oh i love artillery), I thought we could use some sort of Gattling/Laser to just shoot them down.

My Idea: (which is subject to change)

• Maybe a expensive static version and a smaller less effective mobile version

• Can only target artillery fire and bombs

• Fixed firing rate so it can only shoot down a fixed amount of enemy fire

• If energy is low the firing rate goes down

• Possibly overheating which affects the firing rate

• Needs more hits for bigger Targets

• faster target, less hits

• Focuses on the biggest Projectiles, so eventually other shots go trough

• not very effective against super weapons (nuclear, anti astroid rockets, trainguns, scathis, etc..)

So instead of shields which prevent all enemy fire till they go down it would shoot down only a certain amount of projectiles.

Even if you build a lot of them you aren't immune to enemy fire because it only blocks projectiles with an high trajectory.

Tell me what you think or just vote!
greetz

My Thesaurus lists 'missile', as a synonym for 'projectile', and these devices would be deployed on a 'tactical' level to 'defend' against these 'missiles', so perhaps they might be called Tactical Missile Defence. Original unit idea, do not steal.

Sure I'm inspired by the Tactical Missile defense of supcom or whatever anti missile system you can name, but it's not stealing or is there another post with the same idea?
Anyway I'm also thinking about shooting down larger bombs, artillery rounds and not just one type of missile.

Reminds me of the PDLs (Point defence lasers) in C&C generals(+ Zero hour) Those could only target small missiles, giving a certain type of tank an slight edge over rocket infantry, compared to other tanks.

One faction had pdls on aircraft which were actually bugged(due to a not working ammo clip reload timer system on the special code module that were pdls) making them invulnerable against whatever amount of rockets you shot at them, requiring you to use non-missile AA, limiting the US factions' AA to one expensive, late game unit.

There was also one special unit in Zero hour that had no actual ground weapons, but an above average pdl as a support unit.

If this can be included in a way that it forces your enemy to change his/her unit composition to effectively battle with your units, that is maybe more expensive it could work. But if this system would merely be a shield replacement, it won't work. Basically you always want artillery to beat base defenses.

One of my proudest achievements with modding, was creating a shield system in ZH(which was already done multiple times), but in such a way that your entire base would run out of power if the enemy concentrated fire on the shield. But in the end it still was very hard to get the balance right, if we succeeded at all. And it had problems with high fire rate units (flame weapons and such) and very fast projectiles.

The PDLs where a huge problem for the GLA which used rockets with most of its units.

I dont think of an impenetrable shield, it should be expensive enough so you can't spam.

If you use enough artillery, shots will get trough, also if you mix light and heavy artillery the PDS should focus on the more deadly heavy artillery and the lighter shots get trough.
Also there could be artillery shooting very fast projectiles the PDS cant shoot down at all.

I want a system that protects units and structures to a certain degree from enemy artillery fire, but doesn't suddenly completely fail to work like shields.

Sounds good to me, I'll be sure to build plenty of these on my asteroid before smashing it into your base/planet. That way your missiles to deflect my asteroid will be worthless. Muhahahaha

Seriously. In the video, we did see missiles (nuclear?) as a countermeasure to asteroids. Not terribly effective perhaps since the planet still went boom, but they were there. Now I know, don't take anything from the video as canon, but that being said, It would feel pretty strange to me to not have missiles as a last ditch defense against asteroids.

So with your point defense lasers (or whatever) that shoot down missiles, what's to stop a guy from building a bunch of those on his asteroid before slamming it into you? Is that going to be balanced?

I don't know.

But it bears thinking about.

those missiles should be pretty fast, and not to easy to shoot down.
also when riding an asteroid the missiles come closer even faster so your pds will have problems hitting anything.
at least I would want it that way.

What about NOT making them able to shoot down nuclear missiles XD. I guess you have anti nukes for that, and I don't know if those would work when mounted on an asteroid.

I think if there is no shields at all, you should be able to build something that shoots down high firing arc projectiles. But needs good balancing.

@kryovow: what do you think would be important to make it balanced?

its not something that I can say now xD how would you balance something that isnt even designed to be there^^

Imagine you build a late game heavy artillery installation for a huge amount of mass. (like t3 artillery in supcom)

Now the enemy builds 10 little defense systems (like TMD in SupCom) and spent only a small fraction of what you spend, and now your artillery is useless.

So either that Arty-defense needs to be expensive too, or it should not counter heavy artillery, but only small early game artillery. But this is lame again, cos now you have differen "shell types" and ****...

maybe artillery projectiles could have "hitpoints". It would need 10 shots from "PDS" for a huge bullet but only 1 for early tech unit projectiles...

To be honest, I would rather see shields be the counter to artillery, but have Artillery have the ability to change ammunition types between an EMP round (Effective vs shields and maybe momentarily disrupts a building's function but otherwise has low-no physical damage) and the standard explosive ammunition.

Especially since this means that we wont have situations where these PDS defenses keep shooting down tank shells or aircraft bombs and rendering a defense unable to be effectively taken down, just because of some walls, a DPS, and an engineer are making a Point Defense Turret unable to be assaulted by most forces.

People are constantly saying this, however:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ?context=3
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... ry/c5ws504

@kryovow:

Yeah it probably should take more shots to counter such huge projectiles, and if all pds focus fire on that one projectile everything else can go trough.

If there aren't going to be shields in PA, then I think some kind of projectile defense system would be necessary to intercept long-range artillery and missiles. If not, they'd be too over-powered and the game would be un-balanced in favour of long-range bombardment.

The Kickstarter trailer revealed strategic interceptor missiles that could shoot down a propelled asteroid (or try to), which means that defensive missiles are on the table. So it's reasonable to expect that there will be defense systems for conventional bombardment weapons.

All they say is we might get shields at a later date.
But all the info. thus far points to them not being in game in the first instance.

So the OP's assertion that; some other kind of arty counter deserves consideration, stands.