[WILL NOT BE PRESENT] Commander Upgrades

Well, if we play the History Card, and look at WWII Germany. There was this artillery piece that fired 88mm shells up into the sky. It was pretty effective at doing so.

It also used flak rounds which exploded in mid air which are different to artillery rounds. Again, add a missile launcher to the tank so at least it makes sense.

I think that artillery should be able to target aircraft just like tanks!

Can we ignore realism? There is enough to argue about without invoking realism and when you do the argue will not yield anything useful.

I only want a unit to attempt to shoot if doing so is worthwhile. If the artillery has projectile physics such that it will almost never hit aircraft then it shouldn't bother shooting. If it only has a 10% chance to hit aircraft then it should pick other targets if they are available.

@gunshin
Arbitrary Rules! Yay!

/sarcasm

Just make the tanks have some variance in their projectile trajectory (which they should have by default anyway) when shooting and reduce the pitch speed of their turrets so they can't effectively target air. They can pick off stragglers but can't decimate an entire Bomber wave.
Done. Problem fixed.

This is a balance concern, not a mechanical problem.

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Back on topic.
Commander upgrades are unneeded. There are Commander abilities to consider first.

Mimimimimi, but I want my tanks to target air...

Oh come on, you guys can't be serious about the question whether tanks should be allowed to target air or not? Of course they can. Because if you tried to forbid it, you would enforce the abuse of bugs to get them into a suitable situations.

So disallowing them to shoot at air is a total no go.

Neither does limiting the firing arc work, for the very same reason. Just park your tank on a slope and the ark suddenly exceeds the allowed parameters.

You know what the difference between a flak canon and a tank canon is? First one shoots dozens to hundreds of projectiles, but only a single one needs to hit in order to take the aircraft down. Tanks shoot only a single projectile on a single target, and if they miss, it's a significant loss of resources.

Heck, there is only one proper solution: Move the air layer higher and give tanks more spread. Spread does not only mean a spread in the target area, but also a slight spread in the launch timing which is the correct variable to play with when creating a miss chance when intercepting moving targets. (Also something you can NOT counter by micro!)

Shooting at gunships? Great! Shooting at interceptors? Forget about it, you would need a lucky shot to time the shot right.

@exterminans, it's not exactly a directed and specific 'want' that people are expressing when they talk about tanks shooting at air. It's a distillation of a much more broad desire: The lack of arbitrary restrictive mechanics.

Same as why people don't want restrictive unit caps, restrictive armour type mechanics, restrictive tech-upgrades and so on. Arbitrary mechanics just don't gel with Planetary Annihilation's heritage.

It's not about restricting the mechanics, that's bad game design. It's about introducing new tweaking parameters in the correct place, thinking outside the box.

A spread in the launch timing is such a parameter, it would even work as desired if all projectiles would be instant hit (or instant miss) and it is the only proper way to differentiate between moving and stationary targets without introducing artificial limitations to the arcing or enforcing a dumbed down targeting algorithm.

But all I get from these discussions is "I want tanks to hit planes", "No I don't want that", "But I do" all the time, and all the do is demanding hard limits or fixed mechanics which are always exploitable, no exceptions. Thinking in extremas is a usual problem when spending to much time using an unfinished product, you completely loose the ability to think of solutions which are outside the current feature set.

This.

If a player is smart enough to park his tanks on a slope so they become effective at shooting air... then excellent! It means someone was smart, and used positioning to their advantage.

Bullshit, thats a terrible thing to happen. It's an exploit which give the small set of players who have knowledge of this exploit a distinct advantage with little to no effort required for replicating the behavior. Thats like saying, abusing the overshoot bug would be a excellent thing because it requires players to aim manually.

Abusing a bug, and discovering the best way to use an intentional game mechanic are completely different things.
Did you never play Total Annihilation?

Modern tanks can shoot a car sized target, miles away, while rolling forward at full speed. Add 10 thousand years of tech, and shooting down an aircraft at 30000 feet is child's play.

Anyway, this is a feature that made TA so cool. Crippling the whole point of a physics based attack system is as effective as punching yourself in the ****. It's stupid, and if you aren't going to use it to its fullest, then just use damage types like everyone else.

Shooting a target while you self are going off road is not an issue. Shooting a moving target, which is going off road, is.

And know why? Because of precision timing, that's the only real difference between aiming at an moving and aiming at an stationary target. And the precision of timing is the one parameter which can be tweaked in this case which no creates possible exploits nor artificial limitation.

I did. And while there were a lot of intentional mechanics which where intuitive to use, there were also exploitable mechanics like bots dodging indefinitely due to artificial, exploitable hard limits in other places.

So are you saying that tanks refusing to even try to defend themselves from an aerial attack is intuitive, exterminans?

Very much agreed.

You are thinking in extrema again. I'm neither Con, nor Pro, nor undecided. I offered a solution which is more than just a compromise.

I said they should try to shoot at ANY aircraft unless there is a reason not to do so. But I also said that they are currently lacking a not yet implemented tweaking factor which allows to control the effectiveness against fast moving units while not affecting the use against stationary units without introducing exploitable behaviors.

And that factor could be (there might be other options) the precision of the launch timing since this allows to express the hit ratio against fast moving targets as a function of the movement speed and the precision, even if the projectile was (close to) instant hit. While at the same time avoiding unwanted spread against stationary targets and being compatible with a perfect movement prediction.

Then it's just a balance objection, not a mechanical one. No one thinks that tanks should be as effective as they currently are against aerial targets. (well, no one that you should pay any attention to at least)

Can we get back on topic now?


We've had fifty posts of Gunshin's derailment already. No need for more.

Generalizations all over the place...
Neither does an aircraft need to be fast (think of a gunship as a flying tank), nor does a unit have to be an aircraft only to dodge tanks, nor does a tank need to be unable to hit units in the air layer at all (again, think of gunships as tanks, except for movement).

It's a generic issue with tanks that they are capable of hitting fast moving targets (unless screwing up the algorithm behind movement prediction, or hitting the hard turret turn speed limit), and the set of air units we have right now only happens to be ONE group of units affected by this issue.

Yes, and we both know that, as do many other people. It is however, completely unrelated to the topic of this thread.

Tanks firing at aircrafts is perfectly fine IMHO as long as the hit ratio is reasonably small and doesnt make air units completely worthless. Just a matter of balancing that.
In thousands of years there could for sure be guided shells that hit aircraft when shot about in the right direction.


And the mighty "Acht Acht", primary developed as anti air weapon, had a multiple uses, it could fire everything from flak shells to anti-tank. It was mounted on tanks and other vehicles too.

Because it's not as though a robotic death machine can measure time in microseconds or anything...