[Suggestion] Meta style artillery gameplay

I wanted to put this artillery suggestion up, because I have been thinking about it for a while, and I think the Idea is sound, but need some work if put into the game. The idea is for a meta style artillery gameplay, where you work with your empire to bring the hurt on you enemy. So here goes:

In every Techplant there is this huge turret inside. It's very impressive and that turret should be mounted outside as an artillery turret or be able to be brought up. Now the artillery should be able to fire a certain range from the tech plant. A couple of hexes or something like that, depending on the station or depending on how many resources an empire wish to spend on a shot. I could also see the idea that the further to shot the more resources is needed.

See, I though it could be great if each shot for the artillery cost resource points no matter the type. One shot maybe have a price 200,000 resource points. One guy can carry 3x750 resource points. That's 2,250 points. So to fire that shot the empire need to have 88 people dump all of their resources into that shot. If they manage to gather those resources, an artillery shot should then devastate an area or base with huge shells and mayhem, but leaving 88 allies resource less for quite some time. Which basicly mean 88 people will not be able to spawn grenades, vehicles, max units, you name it.

It has to be expensive and difficult for a small group to fire, but as an empire you can work together and gather you resources to eradicate a base if needed. But how to operate this thing.

Since we have around 600 potential people on one empire side, of cause not everyone can operate an artillery at the same time. So we need a good intuitive way for some to initiate an artillery shot.

First of the artillery shot should be a cert-able thing from the commander cert tab. The price should be relatively high, but how high I haven't thought of. One should really want to have this ability.

So lets say someone with the ability is online and he wish to execute an artillery shot at a specific location. The way he does this is to select a target on the map, and click some sort of "Initiate artillery shot" button. When this is done, a broadcast is made to all players on the continent, that he wants an artillery shot at that specific target. This now opens up for donations to the shot and a timer until the shot will be cancelled. If a player wants to support the shot, he can choose to donate an amount of resources of his wish. That way an ESF pilot don't need to use his air points, but can use his armor points and infantry points for example. As the donations come in everyone can see how much is still needed.

If the donations reach the target amount, the shot is then fired. If the timer runs out beforehand, the shot is cancelled and resources is returned to the players.

This idea brings teamwork to an empire level but is also expensive to use. That means that it's not always a good idea and artillery is not something the is spammed for the hell of it. But that also means that when it is used, it should have some devastating effect. Bringing this down on a heavily defended base might just do the trick, and before they can rebuild the defenses, you are already on top of them.

What do you guys think?

How do you expect to kill things from a few hexs away when we can't render people 2 ft in front of us?

When it's the system that fires the gun, it can spawn hell upon a target. Remember this is not meant as regular point and shoot gun. But shock and awe. Kinda like a lot of droppods, expect they explode on impact.

huge team kill

Do you play on miller as TR evilfish? If it was you then we've had a few kills on each other

Sounds like a bad idea, sorry

Artillery is always a fun idea when you think of yourself as the gunner. In reality there a number of problems that can occur that I believe planetside 1 had when artillery is introduced.

Techincally the game has some problems with rendering for the sake of not crashing and so trying to hit stuff at the distances your talking about is just throwing bombs at a target and hoping.

If pilots find it frustrating getting killed by a mass of unseen AA maxes then imagine infantries disgust at an artillery barrage from so far away they can't see them.

Artillery fundementally makes battles occur over longer distances, thus you and your opponenent move further and further away as effective kill range is increased. This, though granted just my opinion, is not fun.

Actually, sorry. I thought you meant artillery vehicles. My fault for not reading properly.

I'm not saying this idea is without it's flaws. That's why I posted it, so I could refine it.

I see both your points in that artillery has it's problem with allies in the area and you can never guard against it, if we talk a weapon in this huge scale. 2 points however may prevent this as much as possible.

1: That a lot have to chip in. This makes sure that if a lot of people is on a base, that someone requests to be bombarded, then they can just not chip in. That way the shot will not occur (maybe).
2: Warning system for the allies. When the shot is fired, an alarm will be displayed in the affected area that in 30 seconds a mass impact will ocour here. 2 cool things about this feature. From the allies point of view, lesser "team kills". From the enemies point of view: "Why are they suddenly running away..... GET INTO COV*BANG*". If you see an entire force suddenly just running away you might be worried.

A large area massive bombardment would be good, but I would like to actually be able to control artillery to provide long range artillery support.

I think some in-between buffer bases should have an artillery position as their base benefit. Limit their use by needing spotters, having connection to your territory, having ground transport with heavy ammunition rolling in from your warpgate - those sort of things that would deny the ability to have an OS everywhere on the map with one player hitting one button on the map screen.

Sounds like a bad idea.

Criple your own side to devastate one enemy or own base .... sounds like a bad deal.

I would love if they added cluster munitions of some kind. It would serve as a counter to Zerg Rushes: just make it so that inflicts slow damage on armored vehicles, increasing as they get closer to the base.

Arti could be fun if done right IMO.

I have no idea if this is the "right" way lol but....

One Idea that crossed my mind was for the Arti operator to have a deployed UAV to spot targets that are BVR. So you jump into the Arti system and the screen is now a view from the UAV that deploys automatically upon entering the Artillery piece.

The UAV is directed along with WASD keys and has pretty limited in flight agility. The UAV View is top down and your Mouse is used to move the LDS (Laser designation system) around, the LDS is limited much like the belly cannons of the LIB.

The UAV and Arti or totally reliant on eachother....if the UAV dies your Arti is useless and requires an Engi to repair and obviously if the arti system gets blown then so does the UAV, requiring an Engi.

The UAV can be delt with the same way ESF's are, small arms fire, AA, Missiles and so forth. The LDS is visual so both enemy and friendly can see the red beam moving across the landscape and trace it back to its origin. The UAV has a low 400m flight ceiling (or lower?)

dittos

They'd probably bring back Flails first just to spite us.

sounds like orbital strikes but with added mechanics.

This sounds similar to the orbital strike that they intend to implement into the future. It would be similar to a recon's mortar strike from Bad Company 2 (Higby's words, not mine).

i like artillery but not the way you are saying it. i think that having a cert unlock for say 1000 certs to put artillery on ur lighting. it would be able to go maybe 1 hex away. otherwise on a smaller scale maybe engineer could have mortor but also that wouldn't go to far as u wouldnt want that raining down on some1 from across the map.

One should just be able to spawn SPG's like other vehicles.

I'm surprised that a lot wants to have control over the artillery by them self's, when the flail from ps1 was somewhat disliked by that the fact that everyone could just spam it. I have not tried the flail so I won't be able to discuss it further. It's just the general opinion I have heard.

It's a decision you can take. And it's not like you are cripled. You are still a perfectly good infantry without grenades for like 5-10 minutes. So It's more a decision to blast a whole in a perfect enemy defense.

Yes I guess you can say that. I just like that fact that this idea might bring the entire empire into doing something that can benefit everyone advance. Most teamwork is either based on outfit squads, platoons or cross outfits. There is no real empire teamwork, besides zerg attacks.

Could you elaborate why you think this is a bad idea? I would like all the inputs I can get on this idea.