The 'Orbital Strike' needs to be removed, now!

It's simply just a game ruiner, which sometimes causes more damage to allies than the enemy.

Recently I was in a one zone battle. There was under a minute remaining to capture the point, we where pushing the enemy back and would take it over in time, because we had more numbers and MAX units near the end.

But what happened instead was some Orbital Strike owner just rushed to the battle, he had no idea what was the state of the fight and thought we were losing. So he decided to shoot the Orbital Strike right at the capture zone, which was inside the building...
What happened was not a single enemy inside the zone was hurt but instead the OS nuke threw away every single allied player from the building and killed everyone, including all the MAX units.
Poor guy, he had no idea that would happen, he killed his whole allied force, multiple MAX units, and won the battle for the enemy.

The OS is a structure that should have never been able to shoot into bases.
I believe the update for the Orbital Strike's ability to shoot anywhere was not because the developers wanted to support construction after the removal of HIVES, but instead because they were lazy to fix the no deploy zone problem, where you could simply fly above it and shoot your aircraft for the OS to target the area.
If that's true, then the story of devs selling hacks is proved to be true, which I hope is not.

You can even grief someones PMB with the OS. I had a case where someones OS base got destroyed and what did he do? He ran over to my base to place his OS there....he pretty much just took over my base.

Or working on an OS objective and didn't care.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. That's very possible.
You don't even get punished for doing this. You can kill 40 allied players, lose the battle for them and get only a warning lol.
But you cannot even punish the OS owner because the weapon is a nuke.

signed, signed a million times signed,

all OS does is ruin base fights for EVERYONE, enemies and allies,
if i would know an ally was about to nuke the base i was in i'd kill them without hesitation,
before they kill me, my allies and everyone else...

get rid of it.

tbh i like orbital strike... are cool...and if you play with infantry you only need to find a corner to deal with it.

nope, i have enough clips like this to make a damn compilation,
full health maxes, getting in a corner in a direction pointing away from the ground zero, DEAD.


because some idiot (usually ON MY TEAM) left clicked on his mouse, everyone in a base fight dies, allies and enemies...

why the hell is this in the game?!

if you play max you die...

The 450 Nanite Max, that is the slowest in the game.
That's quite the expensive asset to be dead casually.
Since you know, That's an entire Liberator or MBT, dead with no prayer, and no speed to escape, dead to Friendly or hostile fire, through cover, with no way to survive reliably; And they're usually pulled in the lattice, in combat, or near it, as they're slow.

So, yeah that's kinda akin to a "Whelp, You spawned a Lib or MBT, so Dice roll says You lost 450 nanites to friendly-fire"
And that's easily consistent, with OSC's.
IE not exactly fun - and incredibly expensive on allied forces even.

actually i've put my ASP points into cheaper armour, so i can pull that stuff for 360 nanites,
so max is far-and-away the most expensive unit in the game for me by a whopping 90.

so yup it really does suck when someone decides to left click and kill everyone in a base,
when i'm a full HP max, indoors, and get oneshotted with ZERO available counterplay.

to be honest you have a counterplay, attack the base before the os reach your position...

I just don't understand why sometimes you will die from the velocity of hitting the roof/wall and then falling down and other times you take nearly zero damage, crouched in a corner farther away from the centre or not.

Attack the OSC base, which can be constructed & is fully automated..
So don't be at the Lattice, unless you can teleport & not be at that Lattice, to destroy an PMB in the middle of no-where, controlled by a Stalker infil with a cloaking Ant.

That's akin to "Be an Anti-Air Skyguard, when Air pops up" as if that's not a constant problem.
Or "Be the Heavy Assault, when a Vehicle attacks", Unless you happen to be capable of hauling Your MAX to said Enemy PMB, able to pull out of the fight, and not be there at all, and consistently --- and have that PMB be the Enemy
That ain't happening.
An ALLIED OSC, will wipe out your MAX.
And ENEMY OSC, is one you can attack, but it's a throw-away base, and will wipe out your MAX.

Or are expecting every Max to be able to Travel across a hex or more, to an OSC, destroy it, before an ANT builds another, assuming it's not an Allied One, which is an equal threat...

I take the opposite position, In that I think more artillery should be usable on bases. Bases are hard to capture, and artillery breaks stalemates.

What I think is that most bases should have an ecm generator that makes accuracy with these weapons difficult, until it is destroyed.

Let us use the Flail and Glaive in base fights, where it is needed, without these huge no shelling zones. Having to deal with this threat gives something for the vehicles to do when infantry are claiming bases.

The Spawn room is exposed to the air, and has no cover from any arcing fire, same with most open area's.
Your flail has an absurd cycle time, and would near permanently seal off the spawn room casually - as it ain't even expensive to make.

an ECM Generator, as if any of those artillery units care about accuracy.
Likely exposed to the sky as well, making it easy to destroy, hard to protect.

Fighting against those PMBs, is usually a one-sided affair; Where the non-builders get shafted on EXP, and have to deal with Automated defenses, self-repairing walls & buildings, pain-fields, sky-shields, and if they're lucky, actual Players.
Mean while, The one using the Artillery is a Stalker Infil with infinite-cloaking pointing a laser-dot or Dart-gun.

Not a single base fight needs artillery fire every few seconds, let alone enough that near every spawn-room being easily Camped by an PMB 3 miles away behind a mountain.
As it ain't worth it, IE the cost of Near constant Artillery-fire shelling the Lattice, usually the spawn-room, To Get more Friendly-fire shelling on the Cap points, the ones at least exposed to the sky.

Also; What Lattice base is hard to capture?
You can likely name the few able to hold their line in one-hand.
You can name half of each map, for Where Artillery-fire being in the lattice, means No ability to spawn without Artillery raining down, Hidden from return-fire: IE worse than the OSC', as that takes at least a half-hour per little sodding PMB.
Flails do not, and their cycle rate is absurd.

So just to be clear. The defenders were inside the building and holding the point. You tried to attack but all were outside.
This doesn't look like a winning situation at all.

Aside from that OS is one of the few things that can actually break a stalemate with bunkered in MAXes and Routers.

OS also isn't a huge surprise when it's used - If there is a stalemate and an OS is in range, what do you think is going to happen? It's not that difficult to keep an eye on the map. Position yourself and hope you can be revived.

B

Positioning? What's that? I don't want to think, let me just run around and shoot.

Lots of people calling for the removal of like MAX suits and OS', they were key aspects of this game that made it unique in the first one and if you remove them I feel you wouldn't be true to the original. As annoying as they may be

But to be honest I am very tired of the constant OS' from a dude who built a base 100yards away, it's like every 10 minutes one goes off. They need to be like in the first game, very deadly with a 12 hour cooldown. I would gladly take a deadlier version if It ment I rarely saw one, and make it like an ASP point in order to get it. Make it mean something to have the ability to OS in this game, not this rapid fire ********

in PS2 OS was added as a way to deal with enemy construction bases, back when wall were invincible and hives were a thing,
and then they got rid of hives and made bases squishier with vulnerable walls,
so suddenly OS (and the whole construction system)had no place, so some genius decided to allow it to ruin base fights!

true! but imho even if OS can only ruin one base fight every 12 hours, it is still one base fight too many!
they should scrap OS entirely.

A base with an OS is visible on the map from the moment the OS is placed, so it's not like it's difficult to find and take it out.
The OS takes a long time to charge giving you plenty of time to take it out before it becomes a problem.
My preferred method of dealing with that problem is using stealth.
An Infiltrator with stalker cloak, crossbow with explosive bolts and ammo printer implant can do a lot of damage.

No we were the defenders, but what does this have to do with the OS topic? It was just a story to give an idea of the issue.
The OS problem is not simple because it knocks everyone back, you can't get revived.