Orbital strike - total disbalance.

wait until we can fire on no deploy zones!
its on PTS now and will likely go live in the near future :O

THAT will be something to get salty about!

No longer on PTS. I tried yesterday there but no-deploy zones cancelled the dart with the message it wasnt allowed there. And yes, I tried and saw all 3 messages: too close to minimum distance, under an airshield, in no deploy zone.

So I think the feature is scrapped.

phew!
it would have been absolutely stupid XD

How is it stupid? You simply die once from a strike in a base that takes 20 minutes to charge?

I wouldn't be mad, I'd simply get even or take advantage of the reset. Biolab camps are completely unfun, I could not care less if the windows were opened on the top so that air could shell infantry inside, I just want more ways to get in besides a little tiny choke.

But hey, if people can't deal with having one death from an orbital strike on top of the thousands they had against infantry, might as well ship codside now.

Because with a semi-well build base you can keep of most attackers for long enough or you keep enough people busy to capture the Biolab anyway (or in reverse, defend it and push the attackers back). And giving someone a supermassive insta-kill that people can hardly protect themselves against, while limiting it to only one or two people who can actually use it because of the range restrictions on how many you can build in the same area, is incredibly unfair to the rest of the playerbase and kind of ruins the fight people were having.

It's not about the "once every 20 minutes you die once extra, big deal". It's the "once every 20 minutes, a single guy (or gal) get's to clean out an entire point-building or enemy advance" that's stretching it. Not to mention the free spawnkills you can get if a large group is bottled up in the spawn and you nuke that.

Like i already said, building a good orbital (meaning you get a lot of kills) is very hard to do. There are only a couple of places where you potentially can hit attackers.
Basically you need a stalemate fight outside of the bases, because the no deploy zones are huge, and it must be an area where they cannot run away or will be potentially blocking each other when trying to flee. (This means vehicles.)

When you want to shoot at infantry, there are even less places where it can happen.

Nobody sane bullds orbitals to wreck a small base.

And trust me, i know what i am talking about as i am currently no. 2 with orbital kills of all servers.

You'll be surprised, but those HIVEs do has enough defenders, that can withstand hard attacks. But now OS - is killing this idea, to make HIVE in deep enemy lands.





Also, constructions was designed fore one of main purpose - make new type of fights - attack and defend player-made bases. Most interesting for base builders is to make very protected base, which enemy cant destroy for a long time with significant power - it gives GREAT fun. When we build bases like that, allies, who has a great fight defending this base thank us for giving such a fight and such a day.

Developers killing their own constructions idea with OS, coz now you can easy kill powerfull HIVE with an OS, without fights.

I'm sure, OS mechanics should be seriously changed.

Yeah but not control the area outside.
You see it takes 1 defender for every 10 ******* people outside.
The OS is in allied land, Your Hive is in enemy land.
You should have a hard ******* time.

IE screw your damn ******* hives.
Great fun! You lock a map, take 3x your number whom have to work 3x as hard, and you can do it till the map locks.

Hives are BS.
OS are BS to hives apparently.
A match made in bloody heaven.

Your defense is only fun for you earning certs to heaven.
It is hell for the majority, and locks out the lattice.
Hell it eclipses the Lattice: You know, the Lattice, the Entire bloody map, the majority of the game... that lattice.

Ok it feels dirty that one guy killed you by building, that's not much of a reason to nerf it to be an anti-playerbase measure when we already have the glaive, speaking of also out ranges the orbital strike.

There has to be something that you can do externally to help your faction fight, biolabs are just giant choke cluster****s, a wave clearing laser every 20 minutes gives your team enough time for a well organized push on that base, it's not impossible to avoid and it's in view to everyone on the map, it's perfectly fair if you do expect it to happen but don't play around it. Like for example, a max inside a building, you know its there, there are countermeasures to maxes in game, but you use an, idk infil instead, then you're not going to do much to the max, simple as that.

Let's not forget that it's not just biolabs either, let's say crown, you delay the enemies that are still within the crown from spreading out of the base an extra 15 seconds, every long period of time. That's not much, hell I could see a squad of heavies simply doing the same for longer with a beacon and simply disrupting the tower instead.

If the only reason for nerfing the 20 minute charge up, plain in sight laser that anyone can target with a glaive, is because it feels bad getting nuked for infantry that do nothing to stop it, by all means, let it shoot mans.

1: It's not about "one guy killed me", it's about "one guy killed practically the entirety of an attack/defense force and there's little you can do about it".
2: The Glaive and the Orbital Strike give completely different results. It's like saying "we don't need Carbines because Sniper Rifles already perform and anti-infantry role and it also outranges Carbines".

And with Orbital Strikes, no one is going to be doing much against it. Yes yes some people have had success dropping through the shield and C4ring it just before the AI turrets murdered them, but that's just it: most people won't do it and the guy was pretty much lucky that he wasn't killed before he could detonate.

Also, in the case of normal open combat you have enough places to run to and get out of the blast, in a Biolab that's not the case. If you are on an airpad you are screwed because you either have to run into the Biolab through the chokepoint or jump off/use gravlifts, which instantly limits you ability to escape, and you can't shoot the dart in time because the easiest placement would be below the airpad.
If you are inside the biolab, well you saw the video, even the air terminals were destroyed by a single blast in the middle. So while inside you would suddenly have to make a dash for the chokepoints, which means you are either running along with enemy troops to the chokepoints or you are running straight into a heavily fortified enemy chokepoint that's going to mince you, giving the attackers a free entrance and good luck getting them out again because biolabs aren't that easy to clear once they are inside.

That's not even close to what the Orbital Strike would be used for.
OS's would be fired at large concentrations of units, meaning the players wait for the force buildup. If you fire to "prevent people from spreading out of the base an extra 15 seconds" you've just wasted an OS, because the people who have already spawned will simply run away and get clear and the people who spawn immediately afterwards are safe anyway, so you only kill a handful of people who spawned while the beam was already charging and they didn't have the time to make minimum safe distance.
No, the OS will be fired at troop concentrations, meaning it would be used to break apart battles rather than support them.

I'll add to this that inability to bypass an enemy strongpoint (the biolab) is another reason to nuke the hours-long door spamming.