[Suggestion] Artillery, it could work

I'd love to see this implemented. However, don't give the ability to light the target to he HA. They can fulfill nearly any role in the game already. Let the infiltrator fulfill that role.

Yes anything but the HA or MAX pls

For my idea of artillery, they'd have to do something about the render range and being able to engage targets beyond 500m. It would basically be a new vehicle. And it would have the following restrictions:

It would turn slowly.
Very very slow acceleration.
Top speed around 35-40kph
Require deployment to fire.
Turret could not aim below a certain level. (Couldn't defend itself against really close targets)
Turret has limited left and right movement (no 360 turret)

It would work sort of like the Longtom did in MechWarrior Living Legends (Video at the bottom).

Basically you would pull this artillery piece. Drive it to an area and deploy it. You now have a weapon that deals devastating damage to a large area (say about a 4 or 5m spread). It also has a parabolic curve in its delivery so you can fire over hills and such.

How you aim is you have an onboard range calculator that tells you how far your shell will go depending on how far up or down you tilt the barrel. What you have to do is determine where your target is and then place a waypoint over it to see how far you need to tilt. You can also have a squadleader or platoon leader place a waypoint as well to see the distance. Maybe a PL can say, "Arty, fire on Delta's Waypoint."

The artillery piece will have a range of up to about 1000m. More if firing at an area below them in elevation, less if the target area is higher.

Max Damage: 1500
Min Damage: 1500
Max Indirect: 1000 before 1m
Min Indirect: 1 after 5m
Muzzle Velocity: 175m/s
Reload: 8s
Magazine Size: 1
Ammo Pool: 20

This would be a challenging weapon to use. As it would literally take 4-8 seconds for the round to reach its target. Stationary or stuck vehicles would get wrecked. Areas being bombarded by more than one would be denied entry. Smart opponents however would rush the location as hitting moving targets with this thing would be nearly impossible.

As for the vehicle stats:

2500 Health
Armor 45% Front, 40% sides, 30% rear
Nanite Cost: 450
Damage Resistance (similar to Sunderer)

Basically you have something that can't take as much punishment as a Sundy, but slightly more than the Harasser. Aircraft would be the bane of this vehicle, as would harassers and flashes. Imagine that, a potent vehicle, who would easily be taken out by a Infil on a wraith cloak flash with a fury.

Overall the main role of this new vehicle would be to break tank zergs. The powerful cannon is capable of even 3 shotting a shielded Vanguard. Defenders getting overwhelmed at a base can bring this from their back line and punish the zerg from a distance. Attackers can also use this to bombard a base. However it would not be OP as you would need LOS to be able to see where your shells are landing. LOS to the base means base has LOS to you. Lancers and Strikers would likely set the thing to burning or nearly in a clip, while a pheonix could easily wreck it before it got out of range (setting up the resistances properly so that is the case for all three weapons)

In many cases to really get the most out of the weapon would require teamwork. LOS would be a death sentence. You would require teammates to set waypoints to give you a range, and you would further need them to tell you where your shells are landing and help bracket (direct) them in.

Here is a video as stated before, showing how the similar Longtom in MWLL is operated:

So here's your reasoning:
"I say no because they will raise the walls and make it near-impossible for vehicles to get in".
Then you post your second post:
"Vehicles can perform the same roles as the artillery but at a more efficient level".

So... you don't want artillery because it isn't as powerful as tanks? We can always increase their firepower you know...

You also say "you can get in a Galaxy and bulldog the base, but that would require some risk".
You mean that using a bigass laser showing where you are isn't risky? People couldn't defend against it by, you know, blowing your face off? Unlike the Galaxy Bulldog you can actually prevent the artillery from firing. Which I call a way for people to defend against it.

As for your whole point of "they would make bases near impossible for vehicles to get in". Why? Why would they do that? There's no reason for them to do that. I think you mean that if shells can land inside a base suddenly they block every tanks path inside? It still makes no sense whatsoever.

I don't understand, the topic of artillery has been brought up so many times but everyone says the same thing, "Big trucks with huge gunz". Honestly I don't think it should start there, I think that if something like that was introduced its best to start off small. Infantry mortar systems are artillery in its smallest form which would be the best way to introduce a mechanic that has allot of varied opinions about. Give that a shot and if people don't like it then don't go further with making vehicles for it.

One reason to start with vehicles is that by creating a nanite cost associated with artillery, hopefully you could limit the amount of artillery.

Free, infantry-based artillery has a greater risk of being spammed. Moreover infantry can more easily hide and avoid aircraft, which are meant to be a counter to artillery.

The game is bad enough with constant Mosquito banshee farmers flying overhead at all times during gameplay.

I don't want devs to waste time on even more spamable/farmable gear with which to farm infantry when they could be implimenting things that are actually useful.

While in concept artillery seems nice, given the base design, and the huge amount of bases on every continent, artillery would just be another thing people would use to spawncamp...

And it's not like we don't already have enough grenade spam in large fights to the point nobody even gets to shoot their gun.

I do like the idea of artillery, however if I was going to do it it would be like this:

Only targetable by Platoon/Squad leaders carrying a Forward Observer Implant. Effectiveness would be based on the number of people in the squad/platoon to prevent min/maxing, a 2 man squad would call in a frag grenade type shell while a full platoon would bring the real big guns.

Only targetable within xxx meters of a friendly spawn room for defensive fire or xxx meters of a Forward Observation vehicle (New vehicle or new Sundy upgrade) for offensive work.

Would require a link back to the Warp Gate along a lattice line with active “Artillery Targeting Nodes”. Nodes could be disrupted behind the front lines to break the link, this could add a new meta and promote some behind the front lines action.

On activation the guns based back at the Empires warp gate would start to cycle, a couple of seconds to align to target, a couple more to load the ammo hoppers… Then bang…

Flight time to target based on a preset muzzle velocity and distance to target from the warp gate. This would make all artillery units equal at the centre of a map while becoming more effective the closer you were to your own warp gate. An Empire that had been pushed back would benefit while one that had pushed almost to another gate would suffer.

Cone of fire based on distance to warp gate. Basically as above.

An Empire specific voice over alert just before impact: “INCOMING!” A very short warning that may give the target enough time to make a break for cover.

Flight times, damage, aoe size, TTK and refire rates could all be tweaked but basically you’d be looking at a medium-to-high damage attack that would only hit a moving target by luck but that could pound a camping force back to their last spawn point.

Finally no xp/kill count for any damage done. Your reward will come from the base capture/defence.


So new ground vehicle, new implant, new meta, not spamable and no farming kills… Anything I miss?

give engineer this and I'll start playing PS2 everyday again

Those would be 100% pure farming vehicle. Just stay 1000m from target and count kills. I wonder if people could even stay in warp gate and snipe targets

Wolfenstein ET? OMG I thought Im the only person on the world who played this ;d

Arty is cool, but this game doesnt need more farmy 1 shot mechanics....arty is just far worse cuz it usually is so powerful it vacates and entire area....

I just can't understand how people think this is a spammable system. I also can't understand how people only think it useful for farming spawnbunkers and the like.
No one hangs around outside a spawnbunker. They either run into the next best cover (usually a building) or fight somewhere in between the spawnbunker and an objective.

Again, did you even read the list of things I used to balance this thing out? You cannot spam this thing.
Also, grenade spam is used inside buildings mostly. Not a lot artillery can do inside a building is there?
And one more thing, when will artillery be really useful? With the time it takes to paint a target, the time it takes for the shells to fly there. The only thing you can reliably hit would be someone who you attacked from behind or large tankgroups... during spawncamping. Hey! You place some artillery in the next base, you head to the spawnbunker and paint some targets or have someone else do it. They are stupid if they stick around and get annihilated by artillery, so they will drive back away from the spawnbunker. No one thought of that? Really? The fact that you could use this to break spanwcamping? And it's a tactical weapon, only people who stick around after the big bad laser targeted them will die. Artillery would be an incredible support weapon to use to dictate enemy movement, create room for your own people and move on.
And for those already getting up in arms against "another weapon for spawnwarriors!". There's a reason that we have spawnwarriors, and that's because going outside the spawn is suicide because there's a dozen tanks/infantry waiting.

Eh, definitely no. Mortars are nice and all, but if you can hit somewhere with 100% accuracy that fast it would be a spammable farm-weapon. If you can come up with a mortar system that can be used as a tactical weapon or something,sure!

You can hit with 100% accuracy yes, but you forget that it's a trial and error to get the right coordinates.
Besides the only ppl who are against this are the ones that camp in front of spawn points. The guy in the video knew exactly where to position himself and what angles to use.

Now try to work out and remember points and angles on a 8x8km map. You will spend weeks if not months of fighting to get a feel for it. So I don'y really see why ppl think it's going to be OP. Besides it has a lock down. Like turrets. Once you kneel down to start firing you can't move around. You need to undeploy and deploy again to get into firing position. It's like TR max lock down with a difference that you can't just fire it from a hip.

Not really my problem if you try to spawnkill and refuse to move while mortar is in-comming

Spammed maybe but tricky given that you don't want to hit your allies, but hiding somewhere from aircraft; doubtful. Given that you can't really have something over you to fire an arching projectile, placement of such a weapon would be on flat open terrain, firing it would probably make the user oblivious to anything else around him as well.

However even if your trying to avoid spamming, when it comes to vehicles think about how powerful the unit will be, a vehicle version would probably be territories away, spamming shells over large distances. It would be like fighting a liberator but without the liberator being overhead. My thoughts were on to test its effectiveness first on a down scale then up scale it if it works out.

Has anybody here played Command&Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight? Well, the artillery there worked a bit different and was more of a territorial bonus. It couldn't move, couldn't run out of ammo,couldn't be build in any way ,it couldn't be destroyed and using it was completely free.
However, it could be captured. So, when there was artillary somewhere in the field it encouraged players to rush it first, because when you have artillary on your side you have quite a decent advantage against anything in it's range.



Let's add this to PS2. Tech Plants already have those big, useless guns near the control point. Let's make them work when someone captures the tech plant.They could be guided by lasers and have a limited RoF/Ammo/range. This could actually add some strategy to the game.Like
"oh crap, the enemy is destroying our tanks with this arty, we have to take the techplant first"

Artillery would be totally necessary, after developer placed fixed spawn poitns are removed from the game and it's no longer a game of Capture The Flag.

King of the Hill, m8. King of the Hill

-Hold point until the timer is complete-

CTF is:

-Acquire an objective and escort it back to a randevu point-




On that note,


I want artillery badly but the game needs a lot of work to handle it. You'd have to make it worth while so yes, needs to shoot beyond the 300m mark. Fortunately your painting the target idea could be of use for that no problem (this was something used in PS1).

The issue is the game itself with the 90+ bases per map crowding every road making Amerish look more like a regular every day sub-urban town sprawl than bases scattered about isolated and in charge of their territory.
As a result, most artillery will just fire from within bases probably 85% of the time which is fine an dandy' but it only allows Air to get inside to take them out. And bases provided a little extra AA sometimes too.


The other problem of Spamming is easily fixed by not having the weapon fire until your mouse un-clicks.
I tried reading through most of the posts but all I saw was people basically complaining about the already prominent spawn camping which is an ENTIRELY SEPARATE ISSUE THAT ALL VEHICLES CAN CURRENTLY ABUSE so having that as an excuse to not use Artillery is baffling.
What IS A LEGITIMATE issue though was that in PS1, people would tape their mouse buttons down and walk a way while their artillery spammed a base for hours.
That's a problem easily remedied by only having the cannon fire once the mouse un-clicks (button release). And it only fires once. No full-auto.
Should help thwart the AFK Bombshells from PS1.


Now if they would just reduce the amount of bases and give base spawning a similar model to PS1s, we'd be set! Bring on the artillery!