[Suggestion] Indirect artillery vehicles

I know that this has been here a few times, but as a person who has been dreaming about this since the beta stages of this game I'd like to make a new thread to sum up my thoughts. I also know that this changes the gameplay dramatically and requires quite a bit of development time, which means that it may never actually see the light of day. But that doesn't stop me from dreaming

This whole artillery idea can be replaced with orbital strikes in the style of PS1. This has many pros and cons compared to the normal artillery.

Suggestion:
- Add an artillery marker for the infiltrator. It acts as a laser pointer and adds an artillery mark on the map. An artillery vehicle could then use this mark to fire to the location either manually or automatically. Marking the location should make the Infiltrator vulnerable for some period of time.
- Add an artillery vehicle to the game with low ROF, low maneuverability, high projectile range and high damage.
- The artillery vehicle would cost a lot, but would be quite vulnerable. It would provide a weak but risky target for the enemy.

Optional:
- Make the artillery marker available only to squad leaders to reduce marker spam (available to all classes instead of just the infiltrator)
- Hide other artillery marks than those created by your platoon to encourage teamplay
- If the artillery vehicle is faction specific, NC could have a bulky big gun, TR could have a smaller gun with a better ROF and easier relocation while the VS could possibly have an added EMP effect in the shot.
- Artillery vehicles could be able to fire smoke rounds in addition to normal rounds to better support an infantry assault.
- Make the operator of the vehicle exposed so that the gun can be disabled by an infiltrator or other troops

Pros:
- Could make Galaxy drops to places other than base complexes profitable
- Gives a target for guerilla troops
- Gives a risky target for ESFs
- May give something to do for all those vehicles that normally stay parked outside a base while it's being captured
- Gives a new strategic option for organised groups
- The epic moment when artillery fire rains down
- Creates jobs for snipers and AA protecting the big guns

Cons:
- The job of an artilleryman is not generally fun if you don't have a voice chat or anything to entertain you
- The profitability of being an artilleryman is not dependant on you. Again a good or bad thing depending on if you are in a good squad or not.
- Bringing big guns too close to the frontile and using them to shoot directly. Can be avoided with good designing.
- Removes players from the frontline, making the actual fight less crowded and thus less enjoyable for the others
- If not in a squad, an infiltrator will not know if his marker is accounted by an artillery player or not
- Marker spam

The Dev's are on record as saying they don't want to add more ways to die without ever knowing how it happened - and artillery is exactly that, unseen death.

The idea isn't a bad one, and what you described is functionally how artillery worked in Planetside 1. You marked a target with the marker, it made a waypoint for your squad, and the people in the artillery vehicle could look at the marker and get the elevation they had to fire at for the shell to land there.

The artillery vehicle had low health and low speed, and had to go through a lengthy deploy-and-undeploy process in order to fire and/or move.

That all said, they were generally just used to shell vehicle pads and other areas infantry congregated to farm kills and served no real tactical purpose besides being annoying.

I am personally not opposed to them being in the game, however. They do pose technical challenges though. In Planetside 2, a player can only be damaged by your projectiles if they have rendered for you. For the artillery to be effective as artillery, and not just be a locked down Prowler with arc, its range needs to be greater than infantry render distance. It will also likely be firing non-line of sight, which also means targets will be unrendered. The game doesn't render things you can't see.

This could theoretically be overcome by making the fired projectile "owned" by the person who did the marking - and this is self balancing in a way, as this means if you find and kill the person who made the mark the artillery is now useless. It also means the person who made the mark has to stay in line of sight and render range of the marked target. It is relatively easy to then make the projectile kills count as mark assists to the owner, and the assists (the artillery) actually count as kills on the back end.

Perhaps finally a use for Stalker Infiltrators and Darklight?

Additionally the devs have been working on Planetside 1 orbital strikes, but have yet found a satisfactory way to introduce them to the pacing of Planetside 2. Either they didn't like their plans, or the community didn't, so it keeps going back to the drawing board.

In Plantside 1 we had this, it was called the Flail.

My experience was that it wasn't used often (but I think this was due to it being related to the Caverns expansion)

But it was a long range slow firing weapon that required a spotter.

Thank you for pointing that out. I was not aware that the devs have made a direct statement about this. However, artillery is not that "unseen" if you think of it. In real life there would be the tearing sound of the incoming rounds. In addition, artillery can't do anything without spotters so for every artillery barrage that hits the ground you can go searching for the person who marked the target and eliminate them. Also, artillery can target only open areas and barrage a single location. A player should know that they are risking themselves

I was also not aware that PS1 had actual artillery other than orbital strikes. Thank you for the information!

That's why I said that this will most likely never be made. Not because the idea isn't good but because the projectiles would have to be handled in a completely different way on the servers and therefore would pose a lot of unneccessary challenge for the dev team with little gain.

Artillery sounds fun in theory, but frequently turns out not. PS2 has so many players that lethal angles exist everywhere around you from players you often don't even see coming. Adding more "random death from above" would not improve the game...

That said... I can envision one way that artillery might be a tolerable addition, and that is if they essentially function like large-scale grenades. Let me explain. Grenades are not primarily a killing weapon. They are most useful for displacing entrenced enemies. Because they have a timer and an indicator, it creates a "move away or die" situation. If artillery acted similarly (ie. you got an indicator on the map a handful of seconds in advance of an incoming strike) then it would similarly force a "move or die" situation, except you'd use this to dislodge a line of tanks on a hill rather than a cluster of infantry camping a doorway. With this - it could work, although I suspect that the average player would still find it frustrating because average players tend to not have enough situational awareness to process everything and would miss indicators only to "die randomly" in their eyes... but at least at that point you could improve and learn to handle it better - which is essential to any added gameplay mechanic.

Other risk factors:

-This would be the ultimate spawncamping tool. Random rain-of-death from a safe distance directly onto the spawnroom would make spawncamping an even worse experience. I think you would need an exclusion-zone about the size of a sunderer's deploy zone around the spawnroom and simply not let you fire into that area (maybe the lore says the spawnroom is too valuable an assetto destroy or whatever), or it would just become horrendous. There are enough players who would sit and do nothing else just because its safe and wouldn't require any particular skill while giving kills randomly now and then.

-From experience, any type of indirect fire like this, while having the potential to be used strategicly TENDS to just devolve into mindless spam for random kills. Does that really add to the game if that turns out to be the acual usage-case? If it just ends up adding a handful of artillery units lagging behind the usual tankzerg and shooting more or less randomly at every target that presents itself then I don't think it does. A lot of things have to be well thought out in advance is all I'm saying.

I really like the idea of having the capability to do large-scale smoke cover though - if it can be done in a way that doesn't crap out everyones framerate on lower-specced machines. Anything that makes oldschool open-ground infantry rushes slightly more viable is probably a good thing for the game, because as-is infantry outside is vehicle fodder unless its extremely cluttered terrain.

-Stigma

I agree that death from an unknown place being constantly spammed should be avoided. The Flail in PS1 was kinda like this.

However, a shorter artilary barrage via mortor would be ok. Something that could be deployed by only Engineers perhaps. Something that if you wanted to kill the engie with the mortor you could still run over to him but it would be a loooong run, subject to being picked off by snipers, tanks, and literally everything.

But anyway, I like limited artillery or mortor'ing because it encourages teamplay.

Remember in Tribes? You had a spotter "paint" the turrets and the slow moving heavy class could lob their shells over. But it was always possible to kill the Heavy with a little effort. Thus, it was balanced.

True, true. A good point. I could argue that sitting in the middle of nowhere is "safe" as I also suggested to make the vehicle and also the operator a lot more vulnerable than what it apparently was in PS1. If your base is getting bombarded, just spawn an ESF and do a suicide run to the place where you think the gun was.

And yes, I admit that even though ideas like this sound like fun and strategic, they always tend to be everything else.

I personally don't like small mortars and those kinds of things in a game like this as they are very much just small explosions added to the other small explosions on the battlefield and you can't really tell you are being bombarded unless the gun generates a visible trail to indicate the firing position. I however agree that smaller arms would be more controllable and thus more balanced.

This was functionally the counter to Flails too; the Flail was slow, the projectiles left a trail in the air you could follow, and the vehicle was weak. Particularly to aircraft shells.

This was countered by the flail usually travelling with its own support group. A Lodestar to supply it ammunition (a resupply sundy in PS2), a Skyguard to shoot down pesky air, and some planes to boot. Here is a good pair of youtube videos that sort of showcases it;

sorry, hope artillery will newer happen in this game.

I have been victim of your c4.

I will find you, i will spam you.

Artillery would be a helpful part of the game because it would eliminate stale, drawn-out fights. In most RTS games where artillery appears, artillery serves the purpose of discouraging people of just having a massive amount of units in one spot. Artillery forces players to engage in more mobile and rapid warfare, which in my opinion would be an improvement for PS2. Instead of holing up in one building inside a base, the point would be to hold the area around a base. And of course making the area around a base important to hold gives vehicles solid offensive/defensive tasks.

Anyhow, some pictures from an old thread of mine on Sunderer-based artillery:

God no!

I remember being hammered by flails, think it was AZK or JollyTraveler used to do it for laughs... for a whole day.

Yes they could be found and attacked, but pretty sure you know if a squad of good players defend said artillery, that in it self becomes tough fight.
Then all they have to do is relocate, rinse and repeat, and meanwhile it leaves the zerg unable to zerg so your empire gets steamrolled.

We've already got it: NC 15 Phoenix + Engineer. Best indirect artillery there is.

Those are brilliant.

Maybe if the artillery was shorter range to be sat a bit behind the defence lines/zerg?. I'd much rather some new empire specific artillery or at least ns artillery units though than sunderers.

In fact i demand empire specific artillery units (dont let soe think we'd find it even remotely ok to have ns over empire specific!). It could work where there is a driver and gunner. The gunner would get a screen akin to the bf4 mortar sceen but to balance, have it so spotted units do not show up on it or anything, it would be nothing but a small minimap to place shots. Have it so the only way it can fire at targets directly (kind of) is to have an infiltrator to place markers/laser markers that show up on the gunners minimap.

Just chucking ideas out but i think if it would be implemented then the range would probably have to be a lot shorter than people might be thinking.

These didn't add to the PS1 gameplay. Personally, I could wedge one on a hill at the right angle (next to AZK...) and shell within visual range solo farming kills. There was range based drop-off, but with the render distance you didn't really need a spotter.

There are of course contrived ways to stop this, e.g. require a target to be spotted before you can actually fire, but then there's the issue of the PS2 bases not being designed with this in mind.

Imagine, for example, a biolab pad being marked. Or any of the many exterior spawnroom doors on the map. It would be a killfarm 1-2 people enjoyed to the detriment of the fun of 50+. And even then that enjoyment comes from holding the trigger and watching the killspam, rather than actively doing something.

For games like PS2 this is always an idea that sounds fun in theory but doesn't work in practice. Much like BFRs.

The threat of artillery spam certainly is real. But I love the idea because it is a crew served weapon. It necessitates teamwork. In fact, it could be made that it can ONLY be used if there is a spotter + artillery/mortor person.

PS1 if I remember correctly allowed players to part on the top of a hill pointed down at a base and spam. That should not be allowed to happen again.

Maybe in this second version, PS2, an "artillery beacon" could be placed by squad leaders to be targeted. Much like spawn beacons. Also, just like spawn beacons, they should be very obvious to the enemy team, thus, easily destroyed. Careful placement and timing would ensure longer survival, much like how spawn beacons work now.

It would take alot more coding and interface work, but one option to make it even MORE teamwork oriented, and to reduce spam, is to make it cost more than a single player can afford in resources.

Add an interface in the squad/platoon menu for members to pay resources into, and then only allow the squad leader to PULL the vehicle and make it so the vehicle is only ever on Squad Access. Not locked, not open, only squad. Make it only pullable at warpgates.

Our normal vehicle requires atleast two people (due to the engine limitations mentioned before with shell ownership), a spotter and a gunner. These vehicles will be incredibly powerful from a firepower standpoint, but squishy and weak, so lets incentive the entire squad to defend it. Make it cost 4 peoples worth of Nanites. In a twelve person squad, this now means four people are bankrupt and 8 can pull support (skyguards, maxes, and what not).

The problem is, I would say if implemented as a squad access thing, if it is a farming machine, people will make multiple (free) accounts and multibox, because it still effectively only needs one human to operate jumping between accounts (a bad sign of the limited skill that would be required). If it's not a farming machine, then it's pointless as an actual squad could use the resources better elsewhere.

Quite honestly the best implementation of indirect fire I could see would be an HA mortar in the launcher slot that worked the same as BF3. And I think most people know how rage-inducing that was.

Mortars in BF3 and 4 were pretty harmless as far as I can recall. They had next to no explosive radius and even then could not OHK from splash alone. In order to actually kill someone you had to drop the mortar directly on their head, which of course is quite silly.

There were really only two types of players who were ever really threatened by mortar fire: 1) snipers who didn't realize that taking a shot and then moving is part of their job description and 2) other mortar users. In both these cases mortar fire did good things, because it helps to deal with long-range threats that normal infantry can't do much against.

I mean if you're thinking of the number of rage-inducing things in BF... there's got to be much, much more stuff on that list before you get to mortars. Infantry grenade spam on Metro would at least be 50x worse than mortars ever might have been.