It's unfair of the developers to take away physical Artillery

[Envenom]

I for one don't want to step out of a base and have 2000+ nubs 16km away barraging the shit out of me = not fun.

[Turdicus]

Originally Posted by Forsaken One

or be auto pwned by a magic beam/group of shells that come from a magic invisible rainbow that farted in the sky?

...I'd pay for that option actually...

[PhoenixDog]

Originally Posted by Forsaken One

Honestly think about it. Would you rather be hit by a flail where you can then respawn and kick the flail and its user in the nuts or be auto pwned by a magic beam/group of shells that come from a magic invisible rainbow that farted in the sky?

Sniper = One man, as the weakest "class" defensively in the game killing me. Gives his position away to my empire once he kills me. Needs to see me to kill me, thus be close to my empire to counter.

Orbital Strike = Large one-time bombardment on an area. Used likely by a high ranking player. Also likely acquired in the cert trees thus making them limited in other aspects of the game in order to use it. May cost a large amount of resources or a long re-use timer to use again. Has to make it count or is wasted.

Artillery = Heavily armoured unit that didn't even need line of sight to kill me. Thus could be kilometres away. Likely protected by other armoured units, or behind a defensive line. Potentially hidden in a base making it difficult to engage. Will take many empire deaths to locate the path in which the shell took to determine the location of the artillery. Requires large manpower to take down due to high potential of defence.

[Forsaken One]

Originally Posted by Trafalgar

I find your insane troll logic oddly compelling.

I jest.

Perhaps you could explain why you would be able to locate a flail (I am unfamiliar with that, and am quite sure you don't mean the medieval weapon) any better than a howitzer or the like. E.G. Why wouldn't it be just as far away and non-visible?

I'm guessing you mean me? Flail is PS1 artillery truck thing. its a vehicle you get in, place and fire artillery shell from like a howitzer.

http://wiki.planetsidesyndicate.com/...hp?title=Flail Its shells also have a pretty long "bullet trail" so if you see a shell in the air you can pretty easily guess very close to where it is.

[PhoenixDog]

Originally Posted by Forsaken One

I'm guessing you mean me? Flail is PS1 artillery truck thing. its a vehicle you get in, place and fire artillery shell from like a howitzer.

http://wiki.planetsidesyndicate.com/...hp?title=Flail Its shells also have a pretty long "bullet trail" so if you see a shell in the air you can pretty easily guess very close to where it is.

And never be able to get to it and destroy it as it's almost always inside an enemy base surrounded by the entire zerg. Only way to kill it is normallt with an Orbital Strike.

Oh yeah, you don't want those in the game....

[Goldeh]

In one game that I forget what the name of it was, it was an RTS though. It had it so that the shells themselves appeared on the minimap allowing players to zero in on the artillery location rather quickly.

If they had like something like that in for Artillery, would that make artillery better? And perhaps weak-1-shot from-anything armor?

[PhoenixDog]

Originally Posted by Goldeh

If they had like something like that in for Artillery, would that make artillery better? And perhaps weak-1-shot from-anything armor?

Once again...It's not about knowing where the artillery is that is the issue. It's the fact that it is entrenched. Surrounded by friendly armour and population. Yeah, it'll take teamwork to kill it, sure...But while you and 50 friends formulate a plot to invade the enemy base surrounded by tanks and aircraft...20 artillery are ruining 20 differently locations, and pissing off hundreds of people with insta-kill lobbing.

[jpmc]

I personally like the idea of indirect fire-support because it brings a whole new aspect of game play (groups working together in Arty, AA, inf) but I do see downsides, Why not have a custom module for armor to be able to shoot the shells down in flight? Have modules for gunships to have a long range missile like ability that only locks onto arty? The pros outweigh the cons imo.

[Goldeh]

Originally Posted by PhoenixDog

Once again...It's not about knowing where the artillery is that is the issue. It's the fact that it is entrenched. Surrounded by friendly armour and population. Yeah, it'll take teamwork to kill it, sure...But while you and 50 friends formulate a plot to invade the enemy base surrounded by tanks and aircraft...20 artillery are ruining 20 differently locations, and pissing off hundreds of people with insta-kill lobbing.

But your side could do that as well and counter artillery, among other things.

[Buggsy]

Originally Posted by Sifer2

If they didn't have stats I don't imagine people would have a problem with it. But now that they felt the need to include stats for everything, and K/D ratio it would just become a huge kill whoring weapon.

Personally I think mobile artillery might be out. But I could see them having static Artillery emplacements you could capture, and activate for your faction.

Static anything placed by the developers is junk.

Let players build them where the players want to build them. Stop controlling players.

[Superbus]

Artillery could be done in this game, if it was coded in a somewhat realistic manner to how it works on a real battlefield.

For one any artillery piece would have to be multi crewed, that way it isn't just used to get a easy massive kill count solo. So for a mobile platform you would need driver, gunner and loader to be effective, for a mortar you would need someone to deploy and aim, and a loader. This makes it a team effort and not easily spammed. You would also need some sort of observer/spotter relaying that information to guns.

Artillery should also have a fairly long setup time, and a fairly quick tear down time. Reason being the muzzle flashes would be visible at long distance, especially at night, which would make them extremely visible to aircraft, so ideally you would get maybe one two rounds off tops before you are spotted. The other reason for a fairly quick take down would be engineers would have a utility item such as a radar which would tack incoming rounds and pinpoint the artillery location, so your team could easily counter-fire that artillery battery with your own. This would make it extremely difficult to sit in one location and lob artillery into an enemy base, you would always have to be shooting and moving.

Resource cost should also be expensive. The vehicle should be expensive and hold a small number of rounds that have to be purchased with resources as well. The rounds would very in price I.E. smoke being the cheapest, H.E. being expensive.

I would much rather have a system like this rather than one person nuke a base every few hours. A system like this involves intensive team-play, gives a commander something to command, I.E. where to setup where to shoot etc. Last but not least it is high risk play, you spend a lot of resources as well as time setting something like this up, with the chance to lose it all in seconds, but can potentially get a big pay off as well.

Oh and if SOE does decide on artillery please no crappy looking flail that thing looked awful!!! Never liked the alien stuff in PS1.

[OutlawDr]

Originally Posted by Runlikethewind

If they implement artillery then they should also implement counter battery radar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-battery_radar

No that would be unfair to physical Artillery.

[SKYeXile]

Originally Posted by Goldeh

Ya but couldn't you say that for the OS then? I mean if you don't see it coming and you're in the middle of it..?

the only time you die to an OS is because A: you're a retard or B you just spawned and had no possible chance of moving out of the way. with the charge up time its pretty easy to dodge and compared to artillery that can be spammed, orbital strikes cant be by an individual.

What would be the purpose of artillery though? or would its only purpose be to attempt to simulate a real battle?

[kadrin]

There are many many ways to balance out artillery: rate of fire, health, resource cost, range, damage, damage radius, etc.

It would seem people who are against artillery lack the capacity to think of how to counter it, and greatly exaggerate it's "invincibility", while underestimating the amount of teamwork required to be effective at anything other than close range door camping.

"Oh it's near a warpgate and will just go inside if we come after it". Sure, if you go at it guns blazing like a moron. Take that extra 10 seconds and come up on its flank. All MBTs, the Reaver, Liberator, BFRs, and Galaxy Gunship can kill a Flail well before it undeploys, and I'm sure a few other vehicles can too.

"But it's surrounded by enemies who are protecting it". Great! For every person they have defending it, that's one less who's actively out there fighting your empire. And it still doesn't protect them from OS's or even Flails of your own! Yes, that's correct, USE A FLAIL TO KILL A FLAIL. In reality it's called counter-battery fire, and it's made REAL easy in PS1 because of nice long clearly visible and audible trail of shots streaming out from the Flail, no math or radars required. Instead it requires one person (preferably a cloaker) to burn in on a Mossie, find it and laze it for any friendly Flails.

Now, as much as I like artillery, I think I'd rather see shorter ranged mortars in PS2, maybe limited to around 600 meters max and somewhere between 50-100 meters minimum. Excuse the very poor quality of this video.


WWII Online does mortars very well, on the bottom he's adjusting the range he wants (it's blurry unfortunately) and literally pointing in the direction he wants it to go. Much better than say, Battlefield 3s point and click on mini-map, pinpoint accurate crap. Add in a little random deviation (representing wind and such), give it smoke rounds too, and you have a great indirect fire support weapon which will mostly require line of sight unless you have someone giving you ranges and directions.

[Buggsy]

So they're keeping the OS, which is lame, and they're removing the indirect artillery which actually requires planning and cooperation.