Gameplay: Squad Remote Artillery Vehicles

[Saieno]

This was a quick concept (literally about 15mins) I did for the idea so it could maybe be implemented as a mod to the Lightning.

[Toppopia]

That is a nice design, or if people don't like the idea of a vehicle, how bout something like this....



(You have to open it in a new tab to see it for some reason.)

[Sirisian]

I already talked to Saieno on IRC. The lack of a rotating turret would need to be fixed, but making it a sidegrade isn't out of the question.

Personally I'd make it a sidegrade like I mentioned earlier with this vehicle which I based my collapsing turret design on earlier. Having it embedded under the back part and then have the top open up to reveal the artillery system would be awesome. (Huge fan of animations for deploying).
http://www.planetside-universe.com/m...3072b82973.jpg

Originally Posted by Toppopia

That is a nice design, or if people don't like the idea of a vehicle, how bout something like this....

This was brought up in other artillery threads. Personally I find "towing" concepts for vehicles to be overly complex. It requires someone to pull a redundant vehicle they might not need or get another person to pull the towed artillery they just bought with their own resources.

[Toppopia]

I was thinking of the artillery in Endwar and how the european artillery sort of has that same design with a back that folds up, i also saw the American vehicle but its barrel folds in half which in reality would make a structural weak point which no military would allow. Then the Russian vehicle just has the barrel lie flat on the back.

European


American

I can't find a picture of it with the gun folded so you will have to imagine it folds backwards and sits on top of itself.

Russian


But these designs would be kind of outdated for a sci fi game, but could help get a picture of a sort of futuristic artillery vehicle.

[Sirisian]

I started out with a similar design as in the first picture you posted, but I realized the artillery piece would need to rotate so I changed it. The idea being that the system would be deployed then left at the current place and the artillery piece would need to rotate 360 degrees and fire rounds. With that in mind I came up with the design I showed on the previous page. That and it's compact when the vehicle is undeployed. The placing of the wheels also allowed for stabilizers.

Honestly if someone could take what I drew with the basic placements and modernize it into the NS theme it would probably look rather sci-fi. Artillery of the howitzer kind tends to look modern though. The NS look seems to be modern though and not science fiction.

[Toppopia]

That is one thing i didn't like about the European design, it could still turn (because endwar is RTS) so it looked like the supports wern't even doing anything, thats one good thing about the tracked design is that it actually is possible to turn while firing where as the other 2 would realistically have to do a 3 point turn style manoeuvre to target the enemy.

[Raka Maru]

This is our new Lightning.


I don't think it is too far of a stretch that this looong body can be upgraded to handle an artillery attachment.

Wonder what the Devs were thinking with this design?

[Xyntech]

I'm not the biggest fan of artillery, but as long as it supports team play and not killwhoring spam from a safe distance, I'm all for it. It sounds like a lot of the ideas in this thread share some common interest and I think they are on the right track for the most part.

Details, such as whether it's a vehicle that's deployed, are some sort of advanced engineering construction like I've mentioned in a past thread, are pretty irrelevant to the core concept.

I think the main key is that artillery be most useful when being assisted by someone who the targeted enemy can potentially see. The Flail wasn't this way at all, and there are a lot of good ideas here on how to redesign it.

I can't say I am agreeing with the thought that someone must be in the artillery piece for it to fire. By its very nature, it would seem best used if it were held in reserve, not firing, until just the right moment. That would mean someone sitting in a deployed artillery piece with nothing to do. I'd like to see it more like a deployed AMS, where you can set it up and then focus on other stuff, like setting up CE defences.

On the flip side, I'd still enjoy seeing it being able to be directly controlled and fired by a gunner, so long as it was less accurate when there was no target painted.

In the past I have thought of an entirely remote operated artillery that could either automatically fire at a painted target, or inaccurately spam fire at a designated are of the nearby continent map. Perhaps the idea could be amended, that only a gunner could make it fire at unpainted targets, while keeping that accurate fire required lazing.

Regardless of how artillery is implemented, it should still be easy to follow the trail of the shots back to where the artillery originated from, so I don't think it would be that bad to allow the option of deploying some artillery out in the field and then leaving it unattended. If nobody is there to defend it, it won't be long before some enemy aircraft or infiltrator comes over and makes short work of it. I'd rather see a lone defender set up some CE or be in a MAX suit, instead of just sitting around doing nothing inside the artillery, waiting for someone to paint some targets.

[Raka Maru]

Once this remote artillery vehicle starts shooting, it's position is compromised. This will create balance as it will now have to be either guarded or moved. The laze person will be either de-cloaked or spotted.

Having this behind a mountain somewhere will make this a standby vehicle until it shoots. Probably only a few barrages until its destroyed by aircraft or whatever if unguarded.

All this seems like a plus for a good game and more fighting.

I would like to add that I think this vehicle should be allowed extremely long range. Allow a CE version (mortars) to handle short to medium ranges.

Some say it will hide in a base and shoot from safety, but they will be open to any air attacks and lib bait when deployed. Sitting ducks from an open sky with just one attack from the sky. Perhaps put a very long cool down like 30 min or 1 hour.

I'm for the extreme precision when lazed. Dumb fire should be allowed because without a laze it will take a while to zero in, thus giving away its position prematurely.

I don't think it should have its own cloak, but allowed to sit under an angis shield generator (teamwork). I can see dedicated arty teams doing this. I know I would. Spot/shoot/move. The loner would still be able to deploy/spot/run back/move but would be at a big disadvantage.

[Xyntech]

Dumb fire should never be as accurate, just because people will learn tricks for driving to a spot, aiming at a specific direction and angle, and hitting exactly where they want to hit. Dumbfire is fine, as long as it is at least somewhat less accurate and useful for pinpoint hitting a spot. Otherwise it WILL be abused.

Artillery can add a lot to the game, I think that case has been well made. It should just never be:

Able to be used as a direct fire weapon.

Able to accurately hit a target without assistance.

Able to fire without threat of retaliation.

Those are all more than addressed here. Now that last one is a bit interesting, because it's a bit more of a complex variable. How can you define if an artillery piece can be retaliated against or not? I think the simplest answer is whether it's easy to find an (active) artillery piece, and whether it is possible to then destroy it once you have found it. Considering that you can have trails behind shots give away the location of artillery, and that infiltrators with C4 can potentially sneak in and destroy the artillery, or an aicraft can fly in and barrage it, this shouldn't be a problem. As long as the artillery can never fire from behind an impenetrable location, it should be fine. If the artillery goes through the trouble of having AA defense and someone watching out for infiltrators, they deserve to have higher survivability and warrant that much more effort being required on the part of the attackers to destroy the artillery.

Hell, I know that it's never a good idea to have one unit be the ONLY viable counter to itself, but it should always be an option. Too many defenders guarding an artillery piece? Set up your own artillery and then have an infiltrator go laz the enemy artillery. If it requires time to set up and deploy, odds are it's not going to move before you destroy it, and odds are they won't be able to find your own artillery and return fire before theirs is destroyed either.

I think this form of artillery would be a lot of fun. I certainly wouldn't feel as bad about getting killed by an artillery blast of I knew it was either inaccurate (with a small blast radius) and I just got unlucky, or if I knew that I had been painted by a spotter. Setting up your own artillery is such a better idea for Planetside than just randomly calling in tactical/orbital strikes too. Much more immersive for a game like Planetside.

[Talek Krell]

Originally Posted by Sirisian

A number of points in response to my concerns.

I think we may anticipate it operating somewhat differently but I'm becoming more comfortable with the idea of highly accurate artillery, especially at the levels of damage that you describe. I'm going to put together a hypothetical design for people to comment on. I'll try to have that up later.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by Sobekeus

In my opinion, the Flail would have been perfectly balanced if the driver had to laze the targets themselves each time to fire a shot.

So if artillery works like that, it won't be silliness.

Actually, artillery would be great if it was aimed by traverse and elevation. To move a round 50 yards further down range, then you have to mess with the elevation.

And stand outside the pieces, like a field gun. Not sit ensconced in a highly armored vehicle clicking on a waypoint.

And, no laze pointers. As I said, gunner is blind if not LOS, and has to just click up the elevation and traverse to move the points of impact.

[Saifoda]

Originally Posted by Traak

Actually, artillery would be great if it was aimed by traverse and elevation. To move a round 50 yards further down range, then you have to mess with the elevation.

And stand outside the pieces, like a field gun. Not sit ensconced in a highly armored vehicle clicking on a waypoint.

And, no laze pointers. As I said, gunner is blind if not LOS, and has to just click up the elevation and traverse to move the points of impact.

Definitely agree with your assessments and suggestions. I think the system could be modeled similarly to farcry 2 (I'm unfamiliar with it past this little vid I'll post) or Operation: Typhoon Rising (the next closest thing to planetside to a true mmofps -- little plug here for them -- their maps supported up to 160 some odd players, and it was quite fun). http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=Ijde8w3verI

On that note too, Operation Typhoon Rising had man-portable mortars, and they were balanced enough that they still had their role on the battlefield but u didn't have 30 guys with mortars just spamming the battlefield either.

I think there are plenty of things that can be done in terms of balancing to make this, well, fair and balanced (dammit fox news! lol). Some examples would be having range limits. For a man-portable mortar, for example, no lazing, ammunition limits (maybe could carry a max of 25ish rounds and that would be ALL available equipment slots), can't carry a good primary weapon (maybe only a carbine or pistol -- no mortar guys in max suits or with chainguns), can't fire within 200 meters and max range of 1.5-2 klicks or so. For the bigger guns (howitzers, etc...) maybe a deployment time of 8 seconds, a 30 degree firing arc and if you want to fire outside of that you have to redeploy (5 seconds for pack-up, 8 seconds for setup) for a different angle to prevent "area mastery" in a sense (if you could fire at all angles without restriction it might give an unfair advantage), no armor rating (easily destroyed if engaged even just with a couple rockets, and have the crew completely exposed as well) and a range limit of 500 meters in, 4 klicks out or something.


The thing in general that makes artillery in a lot of FPS games unfair is that you can just be like "oh, this place is too hard to defeat, I'll just call in my arty and take it over 20 seconds later." This needs to be something that takes manpower, time, and resources so it needs more significant consideration than would be required for something like "oh I'll just setup my arty piece here, and then run over to the battle area and if it gets too hot or if I see a good target I'll just laz it and 5 seconds later it'll be destroyed." Also needs to be more inaccurate than direct fire -- a LOT more inaccurate, honestly. One of the things, for those of you who haven't played Operation typhoon rising, is that the further out you wanted to fire your mortars, the larger the "cone of fire" became (essentially the same cone of fire concept popular in most FPS's today but from a top-down view).

[Cuross]

I personally love artillery. And I have played PS1 extensively, and I have been vaporized by flails numerously, but that only made me respect them more. Sure it sucked that whenever I would leave the door I'd get blasted by a tactical nuke but that's the whole point, isn't it? I didn't complain, I just said "Ah crap, guess I'll have to go out another door" or, more often, I would time the shots and run out. Artillery creates a kind of battlefield chaos that I actually found to be most enriching, it made me have to check my corners even more closely and anticipate the next shots that I know were on their way.

That said! Some of my ideas (and acknowledgments of others)

Artillery sidegrades for MBT and lightnings: Love the idea and have wondered about this myself. Replace the main guns with an artillery piece that could reach out and touch a target from a few hundred meters away but it is slow.

Deployable artillery pieces: Alright, not flail grade artillery, but something along the lines of a siege tank. The pilot is required, but here's the trick! Once it's deployed, it can't actually fire, and while I like the idea of lazing a target, I think that even that is a little too impersonal for a game of PS2's caliber. Give a platoon leader or higher a smoke canister and they just pop smoke where they want artillery strikes (this makes it so that the enemy can see where the artillery will be coming and can try to get out of the way before the first barrage). Once they do this, then artillery pilots then have a reticule that has calculated distance and all the pilot needs to do is point and shoot. This lasts until the smoke has cleared, then the artillery pieces are "safe" again. Platoon leaders can only pop smoke that artillery in their own platoon can see, but outfit leaders can pop smoke for their whole outfit and I don't know about having high CR players able to, perhaps just keep it to a 'local' level.

Now! I know what you're thinking, "boring boring sitting in a tank waiting for the smoke", well, the artillery shells would move rather quickly as I'm opposed to long travel times for the rounds (perhaps covering five hundred meters in 2 or 3 seconds, maybe 4 or 5 depending on just how destructive they can be), but relatively small blast radius (3-5 meters), and moderate to heavy damage (perhaps with some certs and stuff), can reload once or twice during a fire mission, and relative accuracy of up to perhaps a five or ten meter area of target for each shot (less accurate, but no less effective). So, while many of you are thinking that this sounds boring and stuff, well, no one is asking you to, really. I mean, most outfits I know of you can choose what role you want to play in a fight whether that be air support, armor, infantry, etc. Not to mention that you'll probably get plenty of opportunities to fire if you've got a platoon leader and/or outfit leader that knows a thing or two about how the fight is going.

My last idea is that (and this depends on if bases still have a sphere of influence), but artillery pieces can not be deployed within a sphere of influence at all. That means that obviously you have to drive out a short distance from the base and accompanying defensive structures. Now your only defense are AA vehicles and support personnel.

And okay! Popping smoke is definitely twentieth century, but come on. How many people have issues with an infiltrator lazing a target from nearly as far away as the artillery pieces are? Even fifty meters to me seems a bit much and making the laser a glowy line to me just seems tacky. Invisible except with certain optic implants? That sounds much more better to me. Popping smoke means that the leader in question has to be personally involved in the fight, which means that if you see smoke, you just aren't killing the enemy fast enough :P

[mirwalk]

One thing it needs is a infil hacker cert that puts a virus. Next time laze shot goes off, it comes for YOU!

As for the whole safety farming thing.. in PS1 I kinda felt that that with Libs and reavers. Someone who knew what they were doing, were near impossible to kill from the ground. You had to have an AA plane to have a chance.

I have the same issue in BF3. Makes me want to play AA roles, but I can't fly worth a damn. I hope all MAXes can use flak since guided missiles seem to easy to dodge with flares and a little afterburner.