Gameplay: Fire/Airstrike missions

[NapalmEnima]

Originally Posted by Me

Yeah... speaking of arty... make bases choose between the Heavy AA and a nice artillery piece. Not the end-all-be-all, but something capable of bringing a serious hurtin'. One shotting infantry (over a fairly wide area) that were out in the open sounds quite reasonable for a dedicated AP round. Ditto for dedicated AV. If you sit in one spot long enough for the round to actually get to you, and its a round designed to take out whatever you happen to be... it should bloody well take you out.

Now there's a cool command ability: Fire Mission.

"Please blow the tar out of coordinates X,Y. That round was a little short. Okay, dead on. Fire For Effect"

And watch stuff go kaboom.

The down side of arty is that its not all that much fun to Actually Do. You just point at some spot in the sky and pull the trigger. Not very satisfying.

Two possible solutions:
1) Make it more interesting. A: Wire guided missiles. B: Shell cams
2) Phat Lewt (or BEP in this case). Blowing up lots of stuff should pretty much rake in the BEP, but then that's kind of a given. Just don't reduce their BEP because they're slaughtering folks "the easy way".

So make it more fun, or make it "pay" well.

That got me thinking about how fire/airstrike missions would work:

An air or arty group would have to make themselves available for missions.
Grunts On The Ground would then have to request missions from them.

And there'd have to be some kind of limit on it so the first arty squad that showed up didn't get spammed by 50 different fire missions in some heated battle.

One way to control this sort of thing would be to only allow such requests within an outfit or platoon. There'd be no "pub" artillery/air mission list that squad leaders/infiltrators/etc could add to.

Another option would be to make it an Arty/Air squad leader unlock: Available mission slots. Once those slots are full, you have to wait until they're completed/rejected in order to accept new ones.

Come to think of it, publicly requestable mission slots sounds like a handy general ability for higher-ups to use to manage squads. Squad-of-Type-X ready for mission types A & B. Squad-of-type-Y ready for missions types B, C, and D.


(and do you allow "subcontracting"? My squad is supposed to blow up Target X. Is it kosher for me to ask infiltrator group Y to do it for me?)

[Lartnev]

Roll it up into a Forward Air Command cert that simply paints targets to any nearby attack aircraft and I'm sold.

The danger of having mission slot types is that they could be filled by spammers. Perhaps players let commanders know they are FACs and then get the nod to co-ordinate the air strikes if there are too many... I dunno.

[EASyEightyEight]

Make a player sacrifice something to bring a tool with them that lazes targets. that should keep the spam in check. The pilots would have to set the request thresholds, like outfit, squad, platoon, public, where with public they see every one, and instead of it being missions, it's just way points they can follow if they choose.

[Talek Krell]

How about smoke grenades, or beacon grenades? Low level command tree item, set them to different firing modes for different requests (red for airstrike, green for resupply, etc...) and they either put out differently colored smoke, or maybe show up as waypoints on the huds of appropriate units (reavers and libs for airstrikes).

[EASyEightyEight]

Originally Posted by Talek Krell

How about smoke grenades, or beacon grenades? Low level command tree item, set them to different firing modes for different requests (red for airstrike, green for resupply, etc...) and they either put out differently colored smoke, or maybe show up as waypoints on the huds of appropriate units (reavers and libs for airstrikes).

Cooler than my idea. And let's be honest, probably fair too. The enemy will know the green smoke in their area means bad things might be coming their way, but they don't want to just hand over the location either.

[Atuday]

I love the idea of fire mission and even more so the idea of rewarding those that fulfill the missions. One thing I did not like in PS1 was that if you wanted to use the one artillery unit in the game you had to work with someone who would then laze a target for you to fire at. I would rather have a command power that lets you mark a target area or tank for fire support. Being able to say to the guys in the air that there is a tank we need blasted to a smoking crater would make my day. The same with artillery.

The other thing I would like to see is the ability to target locations by viewing the map rather than by aiming at the sky. Also the power to see artillery shells in flight on the map would make it better both for eye candy and also so if some one is shelling a spot already then you can target somewhere else. That would need to be restricted to artillery only though since normal players would not really need that kind of info.

If you can target using the map then if a bunch of people start marking that there is a tank or a lot of infantry in an area then you can shell the area and hope you get the kill. The upside to having a commander targeting a location is you can then hit the target exactly. Sticky beacons that you could toss onto a tank or a laser that you could keep aiming and make an artillery shot or missile turn with (ie laser guided) would allow artillery to be very effective.

[Kouza]

Keep it un-fun Flails are already not fun on the receiving, or throwing end of the stick. Yet they are used all over.