Indirect fire support

So it's been about 3 months since I've played the game. The new construction tools are epic but one thing I've seen a distinct lack of is indirect fire support. We have AC-130 style air support but there's no bombers and no artillery. Not even mortars! No self respecting military (let alone planetary assault force) would dare assault such rough terrain or fortified installations without some form of artillery. It's always bothered me that we have flippin tanks, lasers and nano constructing technology but the concept of an angled tube that farts out a grenade over long distance (mortar) is completely lost on them.

Indirect fire support provides a completely new way of fighting. Zerging is still a nightmare but if we had the ability to soften them up with artillery then it would make zerging less of a viable option due to the tightly packed masses being vulnerable to explosive damage. And I know some people are going to scream OP but there's plenty of ways to balance this. Much like the tanks you could use the HEAT HE and AP shells just like they use with increases to radius and reduction to damages. There's various ways this could be implemented. Mortars are the first thing that comes to mind. It could take the place of a heavy's rocket and primary due to the size of the equipment and shells or could be mounted on a SB that's locked down replacing one or both turrets. A self propelled gun that fields only an artillery piece with a minimum firing angle would work as well. This prevents people from using giant oversized artillery guns as direct fire tank hunters. A static emplacement much like the giant WW1 batteries would be a nice addition to the constructed fortresses.

Yes, the game needs more ways for me to die to things I can neither see nor react to.

You know those side-scrolling game levels where the screen moves automatically and forces you to beat the level quickly or be killed?

Artillery acts like that.

You really only die to artillery if you stayed in a fixed position too long or if your movements were too predictable. This is because artillery, being indirect fire, can't see you directly and only can shoot at targets that they've been told to shoot at.

So does artillery punish bad players who think that Medieval tactics of holing up in a castle are somehow still relevant? Sure.
But artillery does little against good players who adopt modern dynamic warfare tactics.

That's kinda my issue. 90% of every siege I've been part of has been trying to flush the enemy out of their hiding spot. Also it forces attackers to be more aggressive as well as artillery shells them from a distance. The goal isn't to make artillery a massive one hit wonder that makes every single vehicle obsolete when you can just use artillery. I'd much rather see it as a pressure tool designed to force players to adapt. Every time I've sieged a place like the crown or Hab units it's always been a case of "Wait for the turtle to make a mistake". Artillery forces adaptation and alteration of plans and provides another level to the combat.

So if you have 2 equally sized forces fighting at a base, they're forced to push all their allies forward into kill zones just to avoid being farmed by artillery? While you might enjoy farming with artillery with zero chance of being countered, the infantry that are stuck between certain death by explosive shells and getting gunned down in kill zones after being prevented from seeking cover would not have such a good time.

Also, the moment artillery targets a sunderer, that sunderer is dead with zero way to fight back, as anyone spawning at it or trying to repair it will quickly die.


And before you say "Oh, but the artillery is only firing at an area they can't see" let me rebutt with the fact that you have access to a continent map that shows the entire layout of bases that you have likely fought at for years, which means you generally know where attackers and defenders will clump up. I could bombard certain bases with a liberator with my eyes closed simply because the base layout naturally condenses the infantry in easily-defended spots where they can get nailed by explosives, and if I could do that without exposing myself to return fire, and from a perfectly stable firing position, The gameplay would return to the way it was in Beta, where almost all fights took place indoors because if they stepped outside they would be obliterated by indirect explosive fire..
The game shines at it's best when you have to advance or defend against a massive zerg, since it forces you to work together as a group to deal with the threats.

The last thing this game needs is to force infantry to not group up, constantly move and expose themselves, and never defend a position because any enemy you see can instantly relay your location to an artillery installation kilometers away from the actual fight.

Ok so we basically need the Flail from Planetside 1

Btw we have bombers: that's Liberators.

Yes, the force that decides to remain in place should be obliterated while the force that maintains the initiative and pushes should be victorious.

Additionally, if your only idea to counter an enemy offensive is to rush into their "kill zones", then that's probably not good tactical sense. Flank, ambush, close with and destroy. Kill zones are meant to be avoided, not sought after.

That's just because bad players are notoriously predictable. And quite common. They should be parking their Sunderers in unexpected places and using unexpected avenues of approach. Predictable Sunderers and the infantry who spawn at them should be punished until they develop a modicum of tactical sense.

Sure you defend... but you defend aggressively. That means constantly counter-attacking and attempting to drive them out of the hex altogether. Staying inside a building with a shotgun ceases to be a viable tactic when with enough firepower that entire building can be brought down on your head. Overall this makes for better, more dynamic gameplay than just baby-sitting a point.

The other problem is that your thinking is quite infantry-centric. Sure a heavy infantry force would lose to artillery... since WWI that's been pretty obvious. Infantry are slow and unprotected, and artillery is designed to precisely counter that type of unit. On the other hand if your force was organized more along the lines of a combined arms battalion, then infantry would not be so vulnerable. They could hitch rides on forward-moving Sunderers, Valks, or Harassers. Counter-battery artillery could be held in reserve and target enemy artillery. Air strikes could be ordered to follow in the artillery shells and destroy the enemy cannon. Tanks could make a break through enemy lines and pound artillery to pieces.

Having infantry die in droves to artillery only means that the infantry force was uncoordinated and unbalanced to begin with... and should justifiably be blown to bits without being able to fight back.

I'd love to see indirect fire and artillery in this game. Seeing Flails firing halfway across the continent, or Liberators (Our "Liberators" are more like PS1 Vultures) cruising high over the battlefield, unleashing lines of bombs that march explosions across the battlefield back in Planetside 1 was always really cool.

However, the devs have stated that they don't want people to die to stuff they have almost no control over. I think players should just man up and deal with a bad situation, but the devs want to keep people from feeling too pinned down.

Good grief, don't we have enough explosive spam horse **** between rocket primaries, grenade spam, tanks, sunderers, harassers, flashes, liberators, ESFs...

No. We clearly need something that can shoot from even farther away in total safety to farm infantry. That's exactly what the game needs. Yup.

EDIT:

They're doing a hilariously awful job of this, then.

I posted a thread about this yesterday. I came up with the solution of creating a construct-able base cannon that could only be used on locations with a beacon marking the target position.

Good Vanu the entitlement in this thread is absurd.

Personally I think there are already plenty of ways to cause explosive death without the need to be too accurate. I would be sad to see even more.

The Lightening has the Viper, guess its SORT OF like artillery?

Medium to long range bombardment is certainly possible? Stack it up and you can obtain some quite nice area denial?

Yes, because any indirect fire weapon is completely invisible and leaves no signs of it's presence until it has exploded on your head.
Unless of course we think for more than 1 second and maybe add the damn signs?
You can give any artillery/mortar shell lots of signs and lots of ways for people to react to them:

• Warning sound. Just a simple whistling sound or even just an alarm when a shell is detected by your suit (they can detect what type of vehicle is firing nearby you if the enemy is using a stealth frame, no real reason it can't detect if an artillery is fired and alert the wearer)
• Lights. The shell can have lights, smoke trails and other big visual cue's that notify players of the shell presence. The player's HUD can also have some flashy indicators (along with the alarm) to warn of the incoming shell, which you could do similarly to how we do it for grenades. It instantly telegraphs the shell and a direction from which it was fired.
• Slow shell velocity. All these warnings are great and all, but if you can't react in time after firing it doesn't work. The shell needs to be slow enough for players to either run away or do something else to protect themselves. With a tank shell at the very least you can see the tank aiming for you (even though there might be 0 indication of that in the hectic battlefield and you'll get OHK'd anyway).
• Phoenix-like shell/destroyable shell. Every mortar/artillery shell could have a hitbox similar to a phoenix. This could do any number of things. From changing the shells flight-path to reducing the shells damage and/or AOE to destroying the shell outright when enough damage is done.
• Don't let it OHK, have a DPS that allows players to react and try to get to safety between shots.

These solutions incidentally also solve every single problem you come up with in your second post. Also in your second post you completely gloss over the part where artillery could easily be countered by things like "scouting ahead" and "blowing them up while the artillery is a sitting duck".
Not to mention the idea's for making artillery support-weapons that infantry/tanks/aircraft can call in... Which requires them to physically be there which means that the retaliation would consist of "shoot the guy who's targeting us in the face before the artillery is fired", instantly destroying 90% of the moaning in this thread about it not being counterable (aside from allowing the players plenty of time to react, giving half a dozen different warning signals a shell is approaching and allowing players to destroy said shell if necessary).

Just as a bonus, why does almost no one ever think that artillery could have a small AOE? Or that depending on how you execute it is combined with it's AOE, you can easily make artillery either completely useless or OP as helll... Or anything in between. You can easily shoot for that area in-between UP and OP and create weapons that not only are balanced, but add so much more depth to the game.

It's... already in the game.

Get two ammo sunderers with furies. Staff them with 13Bravos, get a stalker infiltrator who isn't an idiot to be the 13Foxtrot, have the fox sight (not spot) the targets, then the bravos walk their fire in until they are hitting. Then have them unload. The fury is the one this works with because it does not move its point of aim from recoil.

I used this on indar when we had line of sight to a sunderer some 350-400 meters away, two furies had a big spread on the enemy position, and you had to aim so high you could not see them. But once they were walked in the kills rolled in and even though the enemies could see us they didn't think it was us firing. They were clustered pretty close together. Two sundies killed, a few assists on tanks, and various infantry killed, in less than a minute. More recently it was used to pound the skyshield out of commission from behind a rock. Took longer and ran out of ammo (thus two ammo sundies), but it's there, and it works. But like real artillery, you need a spotter and discipline.

I think, that as there is an anti-artillery shield now, that more indirect fire weapons can be added. Honestly if there was some variant of the fury or that other launcher that just aimed higher, and had a sight that would put a dot on your last firing angle, it would be good. Incorporate the destructible hitboxes and light trails and not only does it look cool, but it's literally the most complicated way to play missile command ever made. And missile command was a fun game. It's a mechanic that could literally be fun to defend against. (maybe add smaller skyshield module as an addon for a sunderer)

Let's assume for a moment that these are in fact proper substitutes for artillery...
Why would that mean that no new, dedicated artillery can be created for the game?

With your logic, we wouldn't have had a single sniper, a single shotgun, one carbine and nothing more. Because AR's, SMG's and LMG's (and all alternate versions of the Sniper, shotgun and carbine) wouldn't need to be in the game 'cos of one version already being there.

Furies are barely artillery. Sure you can do a teeny tiny bit of hitting people out of your LOS, but theoretically you could do the same with any weapon because of the bullet drop, that does not make it artillery, or play like artillery.

So... You aren't against the idea of new artillery? Why bash on the idea in the first place then?

I will be talking about indirect fire weapons. Because "artillery" is a broad term, and everyone here is probably actually wanting indirect fire weapons. As artillery already permeates the game

It doesn't. It just means all the mechanics are there and they are awesome

My logic of "It's here already, here is how you use it right now, so awesome." is, not that. None of that is mutually exclusive with variants.

Um, what? Furies, are 100% artillery, and essentially indirect fire weapons. You just need a spotter to walk you in. You don't do a lot of damage, yeah, but you still DO damage. If you did more faster it would be annoying, ESPECIALLY if you didn't need to walk the fire in. Having the fire walked in on you is your time to react. You see a volley fall, another one a little closer, another a little closer, one on the fringes of your position, then that **** just unloads on you.

Pointing out that it already exists and how cool it is isn't really "bashing." And yeah. I ******* love artillery. I went to basic at Ft. Sill, I have seen Atomic Annie in all her beauty, Radiant be her name.

Clientside hit detection doesn't allow true artillery because nothing is rendered outside small arms range. (that is what artillery is supposed to do - shoot stuff where infantry can't retaliate)

But if you want indirect fire weapons, go TR. They get Pounders and Marauders. Pounders are especially good for hitting sundies behind hills. Lockdown adds good synergy as it allows you to adjust your firing arc by changing projectile speed.

I think adding fire modes might actually be a nice addition to many of the indirect fire weapons. Give them fire modes to change the speed of the projectiles (the Swarm launcher already has that option).

*BLAM* Heresy. Liberators are super heretical battle gunships that are really flying artillery platforms with no effective counter.

Get it right.

Also, perhaps now would be a good time to mention the persistent idea of Valkyrie Bombers!