Orbital Strike: What should it Cost?

No, not by popularity contest. By choosing which players are good leaders and respectful players. 5000 certs is an attainable goal for anyone.

This screams "Hologrind Part 2: Electric Bugaloo".

SOE, yes even SOE, is not likely to make that mistake again, of giving out an "alpha" class/weapon in any of its games that comes only at the price of a long stupid grind that will pre-occupy everyone trying to counter or match it.

Everything comes down to Grind in the end, MMOs simply cannot live without it, no matter what anyone claims.

And huge area of effect blasts aren't bad themselves, they reset stagnant battles challenging each factions ability to quickly redeploy and resecure a facility.

Grinds can be minimized. Saying "nothing can be done, so do lots of it and encourage more of it" is fundamentally silly.

Again, the idea of "if we make it take a huge number of resources so it will be fine" just commands everyone to grind even harder than before, and to depend on these stupid things until they become commonplace. And when they do, game starts to depend upon them and everything bends until it breaks to accomodate the new paradigm.

Again, an echo of the SOE Jedi disaster. "Make jedi really hard to get with permadeath and pvp flagging" "Oops the Jedi are whining that they have permadeath" "We removed it, now they're dominating pvp and fightclubbing a lot to finish grinds" "lets lower the really hard part" "now there's even more of those guys!" "lets make them a starting class" *GAME DIES*

See the problem? If you don't, well, I'm glad you're not in charge of SOE's game direction.

Grinds for such powerful things shouldn't be minimised.
Grinding incentivises long term play and discourages uses of powerful tools without a good reason.

The problem you describe lies not in the concept itself, but in developers giving in to whiners.

I see some people here saying that it should only be used by platoon leaders. I don't think it will make it any less abusable though.

All you have to do is make a "platoon" of you and 12 randoms and voila, you can now call orbital strikes. And making outfit membership for platoon leaders a requirement still won't solve anything since zergfits will let anyone in, no questions asked.
Infact, we might even start seeing orbitalstrikefits.

In short: I think it is a powerful and easily abusable mechanic that shouldn't be in the game.

I will say it again an outfit cert line will be the best way to implement this, as we don't have CR5 the only real organization are outfits.

As someone else suggested before it should be only given access to the faction that is under population on that continent.

£49.99 per use, christmas is around the corner and Higby has promised some ott presents this year

And he still owes the gardener for the haircut.

I reckon it should only be useable by a Platoon leader when they have a full Platoon and that nobody in that Platoon has been in a platoon that has used it in the past two hours.

You should also have to cert into it, but that doesnt have to be a large amount, it can be like many of the other squad leader costs.

By doing this only organised outfits are likely to be able to use it. Which should make it rare and if its rare it can be quite powerful.

Well, I'll post the same thing I always post when this comes up:

The orbital strike should only be available a full (or nearly full) platoon
The orbital strike needs to lock on to an area. Someone has to mark an area using some kind of marking tool and has to mark the area for some amount of time. The marking tool should be available to everyone (or maybe only reckons) but the platoon leader has to authorize the use of the orbital strike.
After an orbital strike has been executed noone can use another orbital strike in an radius around the spot where the first orbital strike has been for a certain amount of time.

When we will get meta game, faction leaders and a complex ressources system:
One possibilty to spend ressources is for a space ships which have to be over the area where someone wants the orbital strike to be used. Countermeasures would be buildable shield generators, ground to space weapons or deploying an own spaceship over that area.


But actually... What would you want to use the orbital strike for? Kill every enemy in a certain area? Who cares, they'll respawn a few seconds later and at least a few of them will bring vehicles again. An orbital strike would only be useful if we had strong defenses that need to be destroyed somehow (what would hopefully be the case if he had meta game and a compley ressource system). But just to destroy a few tanks it would just be stupid to use an orbital strike.

But to answer the question of the thread: Since there would be so many restrictions to the use of the orbital strike I don't see any sense for high costs for the Orbital strike. It could even be free and it woudn't be used very often, and since only big platoons can use it you can be sure that the platoon leader isn't the biggest idiot in the game.
And if we had a complex ressources system and stuff, it should cost a lot of ressources of the whole faction, but still not too much for the individual player (still: a platoon leader).

PS: I'm sorry for the double post, but the "Edit" button doesn't really work.

Try hanging out in command chat for a while, you won't hold this opinion for long

Ideally an orbital strike would wipe a base clear and disable spawning there for some time, so it comes to which faction can redeploy there fastest. Obviously the person who called down the orbital strike is prepared for this and will have some full galaxys waiting, but the other faction can probably react before the zerg arrives.
If you imagine that on a lattice chokepoint you'll have intersting gameplay.
Still, there should be a mechanic preventing the frequent use of such a potent weapon.

That is what I'm trying to solve:

How to we introduce a End-All weapon, in such a way as to make it require skill to use?

It should cost 1m certs. So no one can say it's not in the game but no one can use it either (as it should be).

Just my two bits so how about this:
1: An alpha strike weapon that kills everything in an a certain radius/hex unless they are inside spawn room shields. That way you give people a chance to escape.
2: Can only be used by a full platoon and requires X amount of certs to activate, say 10 certs per platoon member. Platoon only restriction limits it to being used only in huge fights and making it cost certs instead of resource makes players less inclined to waste it for poopoo and giggles.
3: After it fires, a massive EM field scrambles ALL nanite respawners in the area for a time, making getting into a spawn room critical for defenders as well as giving them a fighting chance against attackers who can't just ram an AMS sundy in and start spawning troops.

Mind you I'm not looking at game balance; just throwing out potential ideas. You might even name it the "Nanite Disruptor Beam" because it destroys the nanites used in healing/rezzing/constructing in its initial blast.

If orbital strikes were to be implemented, they should posess a cooldown measured in days.

Anything less and you run the risk of running into the same problem PS1 did - namely that the CD becomes irrelevant. In PS1 it was short enough that you always had one for every play session.

In PS1, it was pretty normal to use an OS only to "not waste the cooldown". I lost count of the number of times single player or even lone base turrets got OS'd just because of this.

We need to avoid that.

Give it a 5 day timer, and people won't be so eager to use it 'just because'. It also becomes a much greater tactical commitment.

Oh right. Because the devs play the game a lot obviously, as evidenced by the game updates/patches/hotfixes which don't fix the bugs, make more bugs, bring back old bugs, and leave in bugs that the PTS testers have already identified.

250 certs per use per member sounds fair.

That's along the lines of what I was thinking except more than 1k certs to unlock it. It should cost 10k of certs to unlock. Something ONLY top players should be allowed to use.


Above all else, any kills gained from an Orbital Strike, should not give the originator ANY XP.