Galaxies should be able to transport armor. They should also function as floating gun ships with impressive firepower and can be upgraded with far reaching radar to scan large swaths of territory for reminiscence purposes. This will greatly help the infantry on the ground and give the Galaxy a multifaceted role. As it stands right now, the Galaxy is a slow tanky school bus that makes whale noises. Nothing more.
They are already ... Could it do with more roles ? Maybe , but they wold have to come with downsides .. Such as a transport module : Extra armour , Transports vehicles , but zero Weapons .. Or AWAC module : Radar A2A weapons but zero AG2 capabilities We could do with starting to move away from Jack of all Trade loadouts and in doing so force more combined arms withing a set unit structure.. Ie: Vehicles Transport Gal SHOULD require ESF escorts because the ability to defend themselves is next to zero .etc etc
2 Galaxy variants should have been put in this game, an assault class and a support class. The Assault Class galaxy would only support gunners, lose its ability to act as a spawn and would be outfitted with a crap ton of guns. The Support class should just be the normal galaxy with an addition to the ability of carrying 1 armored vehicle, 2 buggies, or 4-5 flashes in its belly at the cost of infantry transport slots. Now that we've picked our hopes up with creative imagination and dreams of a better planetside, lets drop our heads and weep about the reality of these never coming to fruition.
Frankly speaking Who _really_ cares about galaxies being able to transport vehicles? You can spawn a vehicle or redeploy to the next base to spawn one if you want. The only time this becomes relevent if when you are almost being WG'd and have no tech plant (driving distance from WG) or it's Esamir and your faction doens't have Eisa and you want to move MBT's around. Outside of Esamir, not enough incentive for them to be transported instead of just spawned near by. All it does is let tanks get in better elevated positions quickly. Till logistics get fine tuned it seems kinda moot. Once transports become real transports though, give 'er
I totally agree with this. C-130 vs. AC-130. Agreed. It seems that Support-focused builds of anything, doesn't fair to well when players get ahold of them. Mainly because most FPS players don't understand that war is not just about shooting and killing. So anything that is intended to fill a pure-support role, gets whined about, and the players demand the item become an Assault platform. To the point where as you said, everything takes on a Jack of All Trades position. Now i'm not saying that all aspects of war must be simulated, as that would be VERY boring in certain instances (The MW3 joke trailer hits the nail on the head quite well. However, the direct support aspects can be.
as much as i would love a Galaxy that can transport ground vehicles, lets be honest here: it will just be abused with MBTs ending up on towers, bases or Biolab landing pads, farming nearby infantry or turning bases into untakable fortresses. this is one of the features that sounds great on paper but needs to be severely limited to prevent abuse and spam, and in that case it is not worth implementing anymore.
lets be honest, PS1 is superior to PS2 in every way. Galaxies CAN transport harassers and lightnings being "light" vehicles. LodeStars could carry BFRs, MBTs, and sunderers. the ability to hack vehicles and loot dead enemy soldiers created more balance than anything cuz you could use their guns against anyone. PS2 was just a quick model game thrown togeather with some of the key features we all know and love but without the key abilities that went along with them. - in my opinion PS2 is still in "beta" stages and not in the condition it should be.
A big potential use would be sticking battle buses on the biolab airpads, maybe on the middle level of tech plants. People would find any number of uses for the ability to fly vehicles around, and it would wreak havoc on base balance.
Galaxy vehicle transport doesn't co-incide with carrying sunderers though. That doesn't really tie into the discussion though. For every other vehicle in the game there is little point because there is no transportation role in the first place.
Lockdown prowler in a hossin tree? Sundy on one of those freaky glitched buildings that float about? Biolab sundy, like itg said. How about the very top of a techplant? I must admit that it would be pretty close to useless for light vehicles, but you could do some really powerful things with sundies and MBTs.
No one explicitly said otherwise. In any case, a Lockdown HE Prowler on a biolab airpad could be every bit as bad as a sunderer.
Strange, but I am coming across more Galaxies recently than ever before. This is quite reassuring as they are the easiest aircraft to hit with an ES rocket launcher. As the result is not usually enough damage to get a kill everyone is happy!! lol PS they may be slow lumbering giants but they can still outrun a Phoenix missile.
How about people who drop from galaxies get some sort of minor combat buff for 3 minutes, and the pilot gains a % of the xp the dropped troops gain for those 3 minutes. (Doesent have to be 3 minutes) To make both piloting and dropping troops more rewarding. This also encourages the pilot to make drops where people actually survive instead of suicide 1-way trips.
PlanetSide Classic got around the issue of vehicles getting access to strange places in bases by issuing deconstruction notices everywhere except on the normal ground, and when blocking access to Vehicle spawns and doors. Air vehicles could only land on air pads. I think Amp Stations had parts of the main roof that weren't covered by this policy but those were merely oversights. Another thing to consider is that PlanetSide Classic terrain very rarely had isolated mesas (Ishundar notwithstanding). Terrain was highly navigable from many more directions compared to PlanetSide 2, and frontlines much further away, and water separating landmasses connected by very claustrophic bridges common. Being able to transport vehicles quickly via the air was liberating.
One way i can think of to reduce the chance of abusing vehicle lift mechanics on a galaxy would be to use something similar to no deployment zones for sunderers. Make it so that certain areas have a no drop zone on vehicles, so that the ability to detach can't be activated while above bases or towers for instance, and make it so that vehicles drop directly downwards so that you don't wind up with a tank using its forward momentum to overcome the no drop zone. Edit: In addition perhaps adding a bonus reward of exp to a galaxy pilot who flies within a hot combat zone within one minute of dropping a squad mate, similar to the guarding bonus infantry gets for guarding a point, to incentive's further use? I mean i'm a dedicated gal pilot in outfit platoons, i do it for the fun, but the xp would be a nice small bonus in my eyes that would help me feel like i'm not falling behind in terms of certs as much.
I quite like these ideas, although no deployment zones / any status granted by map location have a tendency to persist past when they should (This is where the invulnerable player / vehicle bug came from, and why warpgates lost their invul-for-friendly attributes) Another idea would be to limit vehicle transport to lighter vehicles (Flashes, Harassers, potentially lightnings, but no sundies / MBTs) I'm rather fond of the idea of allowing Galaxies to serve as vehicle spawns for exclusively light vehicles. Slap some detachable glide wings onto a flash / harasser (Or allow them to cert into glide wings as a deployable, for longer distance boost jumps) - The wings would remove the potential for fall damage, force forward thrust, and force the vehicle to remain level until it lands +3 seconds. Add in a limit of one spawn per 30 seconds to prevent harasser raining spam, and this could potentially add quite a bit to the game.
Please let MBT's get on biolab air pads so they can bunch up for my C4 when I inevitably drifter off a jump pad on the opposite side of the biolab and strafe it. More tanks, smaller area, more debris. (literally, the debris will kill)
