[Suggestion] Artillery and Anti Artillery

I concur more ways of farming cheap kills with explosive splash damage is exactly what this game needs...oh wait..where am I?

That's... actually a good point. I'm trying to think of a base that would be vulnerable to shelling and coming up rather dry.

Then again, PS1 bases were even MORE underground, and the fights were entirely different.

PS1 had you clear an enemy base, rush in spawns, clear the courtyard, and then set up and push to tubes, blow them, wait 15 minutes, repeat. In general. Every once in a while, epic bridge fights happened.

PS2 has you clear the base, rush in spawns, take point, then camp the spawn room full of oh-so-brave spawnroom heroes for 3-10 minutes. Now, it's all dropping galaxy-load on the point, or MAX crashes.

I just said it in another thread and I'll say it here.
Although there are plenty of good ways to implement artillery and some ideas come close, I feel this is not it.
The artillery is too strong the way it is imagined imagine it, as well as its strange costs.

Better would be to reduce the damage to about 1,5-2 times a Vanguard shot with barely any splash, always doing top damage. The artillery is deployed somewhere and you (and any other person you unlocked it for) can spend 75 nanites on a painter gun. Within X meters (300? 500?) you can paint a target on the ground where the artillery will fire with great accuracy. It charges for several seconds, if released earlier you can fire, but with a large random COF where the shell will hit. If anyone is near a target painter spot, you could introduce a grenade style warning.

The advantages are clear. You can use the target painter as infantry with its mobility advantage within buildings and be masked as a target painter by the sheer amount of people that might be in the area. The infantry would be carrying vehicle AV power with a modest rate of fire, but possibly very rewarding.
The disadvantages are high too. There is a recource cost for every time you die, making you buy the painter every time at the artillery, also wasting time. As the painter is used by infantry, there is a huge chance on wasted nanites. Secondly, the artillery must be placed somewhere it can fire unobstructed and is relatively safe for enemy AV (Infantry, vehicles, air).
The requirement of high accuracy over long distance, meaning lots of leading, and a line of sight would be enough to balance its power. It would be unsuited for AI or spawn camping, as the line of sight and requirement of needing a direct hit would make it easily outclassed by normal AI weapons.

In addition to the painter gun, you can add a painter grenade. 25-50 nanites and a grenade can be purchased at the artillery, up to 5 at the same time. They stay in the inventory as long as the artillery survives or are thrown. The moment one is thrown and activates, a quick barrage of shots is fored at the location with a generous but tight COF around the grenade. It can rain down hard on several tanks, but again would be less suited for AI as it is most often outclassed by other grenades.

That for me would be a goid implementation of the artillery. A good balance between high firepower and good ROF, mediated by several vulnerabilities (artillery is stationary and in the open, requiring a very good spot to park, firing via vulnerable infantry, resource costs, barely any AOE, requiring mostly direct hits). It can be a great boon for both attackers and defenders, but in a zerg it wouldn't create an obstacle that would be hard to overcome. Generally a zerg would benefit more of another tank than infantry and spamming artillery would generally not be as strong as spamming any other tank, especially against infantry. It is a weapon that has great support uses in tank suppression and taking out armour, but in no way overpowering.

Full squad of lockdown HE prowlers = 24 shots / salvo = artillery is real.
Full squad of viper lightenings = 72 shots / salvo = artillery is real.

Cause of the rendering distance, artillery is not really possible in this game. And you already have libies to shoot from above.
I hear the "OP PLEASE NERF" already.

The point of any artillery is to have indirect fire. Indirect fire means that you do not need a line of sight to the target.

Why is not having to see the target so important? Because if you can see them, then they can see you. And if they can see you, they can shoot you.

So with Prowlers or Liberators, the target can fire back without having to move. If you have 12 HE Prowlers, they can have 12 AP Vanguards that can fire back. Same with Lightnings. Liberators too can be fired upon by the targets they are attacking.

With artillery, the target cannot fire back from the present location. The target is forced to move, to hunt. That's why artillery would greatly improve the game, because it would force people to move instead of camping bases.

Sure some players might cry that artillery is OP... these players simply don't know how to adapt and overcome.

There is my idea, it will be based on bf1942
To order to use artillery, you need recon/spotter/infiltrator with a binoculars/camera/drode to mark the area of target, then to use it,you have to right click to see the area(either by battlefield 1942 way or through drode or camera) and you need to make adjustments to order to hit the target.

Turrets:
Default AP:
Shoot one shell but hight damage to vehicle, no splash damage and no tracers.
Default HE: Shoot one shell but high damage to infantry, mid. splash damage and no effect on vehicle and huge tracers so that esf can easily find you.
5-shot Turret:
Shot 5 shells but very long reload time,one salvo can kill anything, when fire it, the shells makes a very glowing ball, they travel very slow and make a weird sound so that they look up and have enough time to get cover.
EMP:self-explanatory, disable every electronically object.
Smoke:for cover the attack or retreat
Gas: regards where the enemy within the area of attack, whatever it's inside or not, they will die; friendly: on

A random video that I find

Except for making shells act like mines, making artillery a support weapon that's fired through a laser-sight or similar gadget that uses the requesting player's render range or simply designating each shell as a vehicle with some health and a hitbox. Upon destruction of this "vehicle" in the form of a shell it will detonate and deal damage as if it's a mine, server-side. This way the shell could travel the continent and hit anything in it's path even though it might not render to the player doing the firing, because it uses either the server-side hit detection or the victim-side hit detection.

Gee, that's at least 3 ways to game the system, they have only been thrown around each artillery thread a million times...