Structure Facing?

I only remember seeing a directional Unit Cannon. not necessarily arty.

I personally would like both. Both forms of artillery make sense and have their own advantages and disadvantages. The main difference is the required chassis: a more static chassis would allow for greater stresses and thus greater firepower.


Structure facing makes sense. For me it's mostly making the factory-exits line up properly for better unit-through-base flow.

However, i would prefer to have rotation off by default. To me it's only sensible for a couple of buildings.

And lastly: the planet is spherical, so i think map-rotating will be much more used than in Supcom and TA (where i never used it). Since spherical maps make flanking possible, structure facing is important.

Remember Populous 3? it had spherical planets. It had structure facing. and it was more or less essential to proper base building (also due to the changeable terrain)

Yes. 1,000 likes.

I'm sick of people arguing against anything that involves even a tiny amount of micro because it's supposed to be about grand strategy.

By definition it's all tactics anyway:
"In military usage, a distinction is made between strategy and tactics. Strategy is the utilization, during both peace and war, of all of a nation's forces, through large-scale, long-range planning and development, to ensure security or victory. Tactics deals with the use and deployment of troops in actual combat."

I like how people compare this to Supreme Commander which while a good game is really secondary to influence [no planned mega units for instance] if you played Total Annihilation you would know that the Core Advanced Kbot Factories for example which have one small narrow exit and one piece of wreckage or if you had a small amount of room then building one next to a cliff would mean nothing could get out. Magically appearing units next to a building is not the Total Annihilation way, its something that starcraft would do and something Planetary Annihition could well do without.

In regards to strategy versus tactics, Sun Tzu said it best.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

Tactics is the fun on making a strategy work. They are not seperate entities.

I really hope that it will be possible to rotate buildings. Not because of the individual buildings, but i imagine if such a feature was implemented, it might also mean that we could rotate entire TEMPLATES.

Me and some of my friends, when playing FA, usually had some templates for a fire-base or a "death bubble". Problem with this was, that you had to make it symmetrical to make sense always, OR having a template for each facing (turrets facing north, south, etc..(edit: not facing, but placement)). It would be so great if the game allowed me to rotate the entire template, that would save me a LOT of time, and a lot of icons when selecting my template, not having 4 icons, one for each direction.

Limited field of fire (term?) would be excellent, but would also require freely rotating structures.

Since I like the idea of directional weapons, I vote yes.

Another solution would be to give some structures a traverse limit for their weapons, to each side of where they are facing. To aim at anything outside this field would require rotating the base platform which is much, much slower. You could direct you units to look a certain direction to avoid the hassle of waiting for them to turn in battle.

Things like anti-air and minor point defenses wouldn't have the limited traverse, but something like artillery would have a very small weapon traverse.

Think of a sniper. They can aim within some arc, but anything outside that arc requires repositioning their body.

I don't think you should ever need to bother with the facing of structures. I'd prefer just having better factories, and weapon + base traverses for some units.