So for anyone who hasn't seen it yet: This beauty is the Galaxy Gunship, 2 wing-mounted cannons, 2 top-mounted cannons, one rear-mounted Shredder, 2 side-mounted heavy canons like Daltons, Schredders or even a version of the Vulcan. It was just an artist who made it, but it would have been a wonderful vehicle to have access to in the game, just like the Colossus: One massive dual-canon, 4 possible mounts for secondary canons. Now there's two questions to ask yourself: 1: Do you want to drive these types of mastodons across the battlefield and cause mayhem? 2: How on Auraxis are you going to balance these things? Well you can decide number 1 for yourself (hint: The answer should be yes). For number 2 however I have a solution: Make them only buildable by ANT's. ANT's are going to be collecting different resources. The resource costs of these vehicles would be immense, and you would need to collect a different mix of resources, preferably some rare one's if they are in the game as well. The best way to do this would be to have at least 1 resource that is only ever available in contested area's, so that there is a risk in collecting the resources and achieving the awesomeness that could be these vehicles. By limiting them through the time consuming and (hopefully) dangerous collection, you can make them incredibly powerful as a reward. Considering the already farmable nature of the game, having these super vehicles would not mess up any part of the game but the important for the greater picture tactics.
You could also do like they seem to be going to do with certain ANT abilities and make them require Resources not only on a pull but also to keep working .. The ANT would have to keep them fueled for want of a better expression.
Why would it need any reworking at all? Why would any vehicle need buffing? Are you expecting that Colossus to OHK tanks or something? Achieving these vehicles would, if done right, take an immense amount of time and teamwork. Then you would need a good team to actually use the things without being destroyed, for instance by accidentally running into a group of MBT's that will focus fire and annihilate you. Edit: And as Hades proposes, there are multiple ways to keep these vehicles in check and not require the rest of the game to be overhauled.
Colossus with four turret slots just think about the dps that thing could put out even with just basilisks. how would you balance something like that currently without making it near unplayable. Also nothe much teamwork just aim forward everything would die from sheer firepower
Let's see about a scenario then: Broken Arch road, this illustrates the "pop up" scenario the best. Even on Esamir, most battles begin with one faction popping up from behind cover, a hill or a mountain. The Colossus drives up through Broken Arch towards Crossroads. This thing is big, this thing is slow. So by the time his main canons can fire he's about to receive the second volley of the Vanguards that can already see one tread and can only be fired at by one secondary turret. The vehicle is a team vehicle. It requires a team to acquire the resources, it requires a team to drive and fire, it requires a team to destroy it. Just imagine what one Valkyrie could do by dropping mines on it, or C4. Imagine what some Magriders can do by simply outmaneuvering it and shooting it from behind. Imagine what Prowlers can do from a deployed position. Imagine what a Liberator or two could do to this vehicle. No, the colossus would not work as a single vehicle fighting groups, it would actually become a support vehicle to push through stalemates or to make sure smaller attacks work fine. Scenario 1: 8 people man the Galaxy Gunship (7 gunners 1 pilot). There's 3 weapons on there designed to do A2G. Scenario 2: 8 people take 8 ESF, depending on the loadouts, they have 8 to 16 different weapons for A2G, and with the right loadouts they can out-DPS the Galaxy Gunship with ease. Scenario 3: 8 people take 4 Liberators. With their TB's and belly canons they have 8 high-powered A2G weapons available. To conclude, people taking a squad vehicle reduce A2G spam. (the same thing actually counts for the Colossus, take separate AP lightnings and you would be able to deal more DPS than this tank) Super vehicles would be good because of their tankyness, great DPS, the impossibility to get split up and the ease at which you can work as a team. Super vehicles would and could be balanced through half a dozen idea's: The resource acquisition takes time and is dangerous, meaning a high chance you will get destroyed before you even get to spawn your vehicle. It requires a squad to be truly effective. You can make it show up on the radar to everyone within 300 to 1000m distance so they can react to it appropriately. The total DPS would, in the current shape, be lower than that of people taking separate vehicles. They could have a fuel gauge, meaning they would need to return to a nearby ANT to refuel through the resources they collect Alternatively they would need to stay within a certain range of a specific ANT, this ANT needs to keep collecting resources to keep them active.
Scenario 1: 1 Galaxy @ 450 nanites = 450 nanites Scenario 2: 8 ESFs @ 350 nanites = 2,800 nanites Scenario 3: 4 Liberators @ 450 nanites = 1,800 nanites I'm not sure what a Galaxy gunship would do against Skyguards either... At least if you pit an AC-130 against any modern SAM, that AC-130 is going down in flames.
Personally I think the resource used with ANTs should be for construction. Nanites should be used for vehicles. But why should 750 be the limit? How many of you have gone on with 750 nanites and not use more than a single grenade's worth? Sometimes you don't have enough, sometimes you're swimming in them. But it sucks to get 75 or 100 per minute and it goes to waste. Wouldn't it be great to send the excess to a pool? Imagine if Platoons had a pool you could stick nanite into. Maybe you put them in manually, in chunks. Maybe you offer a percentage of what you earn, or even what would be in excess of 750 when you earn more than you can use? What would the Platoon do with those extra nanites? Galaxies, Sunderers, everything you spend nanites on. You basically can give them to others who would use them here and now. Nanite pool of the platoon would be larger than the one of a player. Allowing for purchases of vehicles and assets that cost more than 750n. Colossus Tanks Dropships UAVs with Scout Radar Orbital Strikes Are all possible. Ooh the dreaded zerg breaking orbital strike sounds scary and a tool to farm with. Well when it costs 9000 nanites.. a platoon could spam 4 of them. But then have 48 players at 0 resources for the next 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes of vehicles, grenades, medic kits, mines, and c4. Not really worth it to spam something like that. That's balance. 4 Basilisks is 2 stock sunderers and if it has a dual cannon like the pick suggests, add a MBT(prowler) to that. Thats only 850 worth of nanites... and requires 5 people to get that DPS.. 6 if the driver is separate. That doesn't sound too OP at all. Because last I saw.. 1 Prowler and 2 Sunderers isn't that OP. And if using my suggestion above.. it'd likely cost 900, 1200, or 1500 (or more) nanites depending on how much armor and hp the thing has.
Did... Did you read how the Galaxy Gunship would be build? It won't be 450 nanites, and it would be easier for 8 people to collect 2800 nanite resources (just wait a bit) than the right mix of ANT resources to build one of these. Seriously, you have gone downhill Chingles. This kind of deliberate misinterpretation should be beneath you. We aren't playing the modern world or a milsim, we are playing PS2. A future milsim with any elements of PS2 would play like a button masher: Who can fire the most missiles at the right targets from their warpgate. Also a good way to handle it! You could even allow the Platoon leaders and Squad leaders to give out parts of this platoon pool in resource rewards for completing objectives to encourage using nanites and completing them, or paying part of the cost of a certain vehicle, MAX or utility to encourage people using them. Just to show how strange it is to call it OP. Can anyone tell me why I attract such reactions? Thanks, well worded.
That is of course quite an assumption isn't it? That any ANT-dependant vehicle is going to be easier? To get resources for an ESF will take a normal person 3.5 minutes. How many resources could 8x ANTs mine in 3.5 minutes? That's the problem. A nanite-resource conversion rate won't be constant. It would be incredibly difficult to balance properly, leading to cases where super-vehicles might be spammed non-stop or other cases where they would be quickly countered by conventional units. As others have mentioned, when this unit clashes with other conventional units, this will lead to balancing nightmares. Again, Skyguards are a good example of this. As it is, a Skyguard taking down a Galaxy is incredibly rare and difficult... only 2.77% of all Galaxy deaths come from Skyguards (for comparison, Liberator Daltons rake in 3.25% of Galaxy deaths). It's bad enough that the dedicated AA unit in the game is terrible against a transport craft... but now this same airframe is not only going to be able to tank Skyguard hits but return fire and destroy the unit that is meant to counter it. If you cannot see how this sort of unit would further destroy the role of many existing units like the Liberator or Skyguard, then you don't really understand how the vehicle ecosystem of PS2 works.
Idea is not bad. Maybe a team can build a generator (like VP generator) to build one of those epic vehicules. It should take time to be generated and have a unique loadout, dependig on empires. Once the vehicule is created, a general message says to other empires: <empire> have built a Colossus/Supernova ! Those epic vehicule should have a huge amount of HP and are really big. They should be like mother ships. Weak point is that they are big, so easy target, slower. I think that Colossus should be so big that he can't go everywhere. And he is so big that he can roll over ennemy tanks to destroy them.
i don't actually think there is too huge of a balance issue for the colossus, yes its a bunch of turrets, yes its really powerful, but lets say its crewed by 4-5 people, those 4/5 people could instead spawn 4/5 AP lightnings and deal far more damage at far greater range. the only advantage the colossus would have is a health pool equivalent to 4/5 lightnings, but we could balance that by making it really really slow (you could hit this thing with decimators without leading!) onto the galaxy gunship, as much as i love the idea, i don think it would be hilariously OP a good battle gal is already death from above
how would you cert the colossus? would each turret attachment or upgrade cost 10000 certs? each individual type of turret 100,000 certs? so you need a TDFN TTRO sized outfit to even have a hope of making it even remotely worth it. but it would make them the Empress of the battlefield.
Well, first it costs resources to buy the ANT's, then you need to find the right resource deposits. Then you need to make sure you have the right mix, and get a team to help gun/fly your vehicle. So just the driving around would need more than 3,5 minutes, assuming you run into the right resource types in the meantime and hope that the resource doesn't run out before you have enough. This already means that having 8 ANT's is counterproductive, first because you would need to find the same type of resource type multiple times to get enough and secondly since your team of 8 ANT's would then need to collect 56 people to man their Super vehicles. Since I made it clear that at least one of the resources should spawn inside contested area's it would also carry a risk that you die before you can buy your vehicle, and ANT's don't seem to be very strong in the defense department. It would take a long time to acquire the vehicle in the first place and have a limit due to resource spawns. So it will never be spammed. Just like the Leviathan in UT3, you can acquire it but it does not guarantee a victory by any stretch. Just like the MAX does not guarantee a fight unless you have support, these super vehicles would work best when supported by your team. The G2A game needs balancing anyway, but that does not mean that a Galaxy Gunship would instantly be unbalanced. Did you read the list of balancing properties you can throw at it? Also, these Galaxy Gunships could have altered hitpoints and resistances to make them more or less vulnerable to certain threats to balance it out. There's absolutely no reason to keep current Galaxy hitpoints and resistances just because it's based off a Galaxy. We already have the Liberator for that. Besides that, since you can root out the problem before it starts by destroying the ANT you have plenty of opportunity to take it out beforehand, and since the cost of replacing a Galaxy Gunship is a huge amount of time and resources that do not regenerate while flying it (or in the case of the squad-based vehicles it does, but takes an awful lot of players to generate the required amount) it would be a much higher reward for taking these out. Add the option for massive XP rewards or maybe other rewards to compensate and these things will be loved and hated when they are spotted. Says the guy that tries to put current realism aspects into a game set into a future where no single current combat technique will be used. It's even doubtful that we'll use tanks and aircraft anyway by the time this comes around. As for ecosystem, having one of these mastodons to support your troops does not mess with the ecosystem, it enhances the amount of playstyles and strategies. The chance that there's more than 1 supporting an attack is highly unlikely due to the costs that I had in mind, and considering Teamiens words you should realize that having a bunch of Liberators or MBT's instead of these super vehicles would be better overall, and you would really need to work together and survive for long/destroy a lot to actually benefit from all the time and effort it took to gather the resources and build them in the first place. Hence: Squad vehicles. Under no circumstances should these things be farm weapons or simple powerups. The combined strength of their capabilities should make them more powerful. Hence the DPS should theoretically be lower than a group of current vehicles of the same/lower cost, but the capabilities of staying alive and getting a ton of concentrated DPS on the battlefield with the right teamwork would make these vehicles worth it. Why the incredible high numbers? Why not just normal certs, only you have to cert into 5 turret slots? Also keep in mind that the Colossus would need a careful consideration of what kind of loadout you give it. Imagine you give it an AP loadout with Halberds, then any ESF could basically maul it to death with Hornets. Any Lib could TB it to death or just hover over it and bomb it to kingdom come. What about a group of Heavies firing rockets, or Engineers just running up to this slow vehicle and toss mines? Sure it won't be quite as easy as that, but you would be incredibly vulnerable. You would need a mixture of weapons or a good squad to back you up against targets you aren't equipped to deal with. The Galaxy Gunship would have it easier probably, since it's automatically have several mounts for AA and several mounts for G2A. Still, depending on your loadout you would be better or worse against things.
because its a squad vehicle, and so should require the work of the entire squad to make it work properly. I play alone so its not really something id be looking to bother with, but these things should have: HP 10x the HP of a MBT blockade armour sunderer resistance by default Armament (Main cannon) Projectiles do C4 level damage, (2 hits and you are gone, fortunately it has 2 barrels) Vanguard AP projectile speed. 8-10 second reload on each barrel Turret traverse speed of 20-30 degrees per second. Movement (what movement xD ) it should be slow as **** but have decent torque so that it doesnt just flop backwards when going up hills like on the way to scarred mesa from Tarwich recycling, or up the hill to point C at Saero outpost on esamir. id say 30KPH tops.
