Warzone 2100 Forums

are the aa cannons weaker than in the original game?? they are a bit too useless....

your post is misplaced, you have to register and then post it in 'development', so more people will read it.
this forum is for general feedback for the team / webpage, not related to ingame things

as for your question, i don't know, but zarel / troman will know

regards elio

mr guest wrote:are the aa cannons weaker than in the original game?? they are a bit too useless....

Before this thread gets moved, ill post here.

AA guns aren't any weaker. What they have become is FAR less accurate. Most planes faster than a HEAP loadout will dodge 99% of AA fire.

elio wrote:as for your question, i don't know, but zarel / troman will know

This part has more to do with projectile code than balancing, I think.

They seem fairly functional playing skirmish (trunk) after a couple upgrades to both ammo and rate of fire. Three batteries seems like a minimum. Placing them off to one side of the incoming path appears to help them track longer.

The missle AA sites are very accurate, boasting what I see to be homing missles. Dunno about the top aa site though.

Deltaflyer wrote:The missle AA sites are very accurate, boasting what I see to be homing missles. Dunno about the top aa site though.

The SAM Sites do in fact fire homing missiles. The Avenger and Vindicator SAMs, and the Scourge Missile(and it's VTOL variant), and the Scourge cyborg's weapon are the only homing weapons in the game. The Angel and Archangel artillery sites are also called "Missiles", but they're actually unguided rockets.

Skrim wrote:

Deltaflyer wrote:The missle AA sites are very accurate, boasting what I see to be homing missles. Dunno about the top aa site though.

The SAM Sites do in fact fire homing missiles. The Avenger and Vindicator SAMs, and the Scourge Missile(and it's VTOL variant), and the Scourge cyborg's weapon are the only homing weapons in the game. The Angel and Archangel artillery sites are also called "Missiles", but they're actually unguided rockets.

You forgot the Missile Fortress.

The rest of your post is accurate. The game code mentions an indirect-homing weapon trajectory, but it was never implemented. Presumably, if it had been, Angel and Archangel would have been indirect-homing.

Zarel wrote:
The rest of your post is accurate. The game code mentions an indirect-homing weapon trajectory, but it was never implemented. Presumably, if it had been, Angel and Archangel would have been indirect-homing.

Thanks, but... I'd prefer not to have such an invincible uber-weapon present ;p

I'd prefer it if the Angel and Archangel were indirect-homing. It would be amazingly cool. As of now, the Angel is just a stronger Ripple Rockets with a cooler-looking launcher, and Archangel is just an even stronger version of the same thing, but with a bigger launcher. Plus, the dead-on accuracy would justify their humiliatingly long reload times. If it were unbalanced, their range, damage or ROF could be nerfed, but homing ability must stay.

It would allow them to enter the league of realistic modern-day weapons, which includes
the Heavy Cannon(equivalent to the 120mm main guns on the M1A2 Abrams or the Leopard 2A6),
the Assault Gun(20mm M61 Vulcan cannon on fighters),
the Machinegun(secondary weapons on modern tanks),
the Ground Shaker(155mm howitzer, like the M109 or PzH 2000),
the Scourge Missile(Hellfire/Brimstone type anti-tank guided missile),
and several others. The Archangel would be equivalent to an M270 Guided MLRS.

On those lines, though, I've yet to see a 3-barreled 105mm rotary howitzer(the HellStorm). It would be rather quite heavy if it were to built in reality, and would probably be a logistics-intensive thing.
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Realism rant aside, it would change the dynamics of a counter-battery exchange quite a bit, especially those Gamma Campaign crossfires that pit NEXUS' Angel Missile Batteries against the Project's HellStorms and Ground Shakers. The player would be guarunteed to lose a few emplacements or a unit or two every time the Angels open fire. If the player had tough, experienced artillery units, they could fight back. But emplacements would be at a loss to do much, since homing weapons can dodge terrain, while non-homing weapons can be blocked by hills and stuff.

Skrim wrote:I'd prefer it if the Angel and Archangel were indirect-homing. It would be amazingly cool.

I second that.

Skrim wrote:On those lines, though, I've yet to see a 3-barreled 105mm rotary howitzer(the HellStorm). It would be rather quite heavy if it were to built in reality, and would probably be a logistics-intensive thing.

The closest I've found is the Russian Coalitsiya-SV(Coalition-SV) a prototype 152 mm twin barrel self propelled gun it's almost as awesome as the German Dora & Schwerer Gustav 800 mm railway guns

Skrim wrote:I'd prefer it if the Angel and Archangel were indirect-homing.

The thing is, if that is the case, it would quickly make ALL ground units useless. Reducing RoF, damage, or anything else won't really make much difference when the angel batteries can be busy pounding targets over 15 screens away (unless you nerf them so far into the ground as to be pointless). The whole game would turn into an artillery-is-the-only-option fest; for an example of what that is like, check out Command&Conquer Tiberium Sun pre-patch; the Nod Artillery (Westwood realized what exactly was happening and very quickly patched the "homing" aspect out of that gun).

Or, in other words, let me detail explicitly how all games would go: All teams will bunker themselves into the main base, using light units to try and take and hold oil derricks, while doing nothing more than teching up to Angelfire Missiles. Any other strat, save for *maybe* an early-rush with flamers before the turtler can finish setting up, will be doomed. Even if an expander-type player manages to take 90% of the map, as soon as those Angel missiles show up (and of course, if you are teching down that tree, you'll have SAMs as well to stop air-raids), he can just start "nickel and diming" everything you have into paste.


As it is *right now*, the angelfire batteries have a role in the game, and are effective in that role (pulverizing slow-moving heavy units and base structures). Changing them from Unguided rockets into guided ones would throw a number of pre-established balance aspects out the window.

I would say that, if you really want a long-range, guided, anti-vehicle artillery piece, make it a new weapon type, multiplayer only (just like plasma cannons or the Satellite Uplink), and balance them from there. And to be SURE, make them have pre-reqs outside the Rocketeering tree, so that someone who's going for the Angel launchers doesn't immediately get access to this weapon as well. Maybe the Kinetic-Energy weapon tree (I.E. a target-computer-assisted Railgun Round)? Or the maligned Machinegun tree (instead of a homing missile, the gun would "function" as a rain of AP-AT mini-projectiles... a Massive MIRV if you will, minus the R-part ), giving MG research use beyond mid-way through T2? In either case, be sure that these weapons are effective vs vehicles, but NOT so much against structures.

Leave the existing weapons as is (if it irritates people that much, change the name of the weapon from Anglefire Missiles to Angelfire Rockets)

The thing is, if that is the case, it would quickly make ALL ground units useless. Reducing RoF, damage, or anything else won't really make much difference when the angel batteries can be busy pounding targets over 15 screens away (unless you nerf them so far into the ground as to be pointless). The whole game would turn into an artillery-is-the-only-option fest; for an example of what that is like, check out Command&Conquer Tiberium Sun pre-patch; the Nod Artillery (Westwood realized what exactly was happening and very quickly patched the "homing" aspect out of that gun).

Or, in other words, let me detail explicitly how all games would go: All teams will bunker themselves into the main base, using light units to try and take and hold oil derricks, while doing nothing more than teching up to Angelfire Missiles. Any other strat, save for *maybe* an early-rush with flamers before the turtler can finish setting up, will be doomed. Even if an expander-type player manages to take 90% of the map, as soon as those Angel missiles show up (and of course, if you are teching down that tree, you'll have SAMs as well to stop air-raids), he can just start "nickel and diming" everything you have into paste.

I never considered what would happen to Multiplayer - I've never played MP, only Skirmishes and Campaigns. How about halving their ranges and tripling the prices of their turrets and emplacements?

As it is *right now*, the angelfire batteries have a role in the game, and are effective in that role (pulverizing slow-moving heavy units and base structures). Changing them from Unguided rockets into guided ones would throw a number of pre-established balance aspects out the window.

Anything that the Angel and Archangel can do can be done by the Ground Shaker, that too with a very big blast radius. And then there's the HellStorm, which has decent range, a blast radius, and fast reload rates. A missed Angel or Archie salvo, as of present, is a lot of time wasted as they spend ages reloading. A hit against a structure is usually an overkill.

Note that I am speaking from a 2.0.10 perspective, where artillery sometimes has a tendency to land a few squares short of the target(mainly an emplacement problem), a flaw that renders all those Collective Howitzer and Ripple Rocket sites in Beta as completely ineffectual. I can't play 2.1 because of the anti-badass insta-freeze inducing combination of Intel graphics and a Vista OS.

Or, you can bury the entire Indirect-Homing problem by simply renaming the Angel 'Missile' to "Super Ripple Rocketz", and Archangel 'Missile' to "Super-Duper Ripple Rocketz". This thread's gone far off track.


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Edit: I didn't notice that you had already offered the renaming solution. BTW, what's an "Angelfire"? There's a Scourge, Angel, and Archangel, but I've never seen a weapon called the Angelfire. As for a new weapon, it could be a railgun-launched armor-piercing rocket-propelled guided projectile. That way, it would need both the Missile and the Railgun tech trees to be researched completely before you could build it.
I don't see a point in introducing another phlebotinum cannon just to continue the Machinegun tech tree into Tier 3. We're fine with the great majority of weapons being real*, and with lasers taking over the anti-cyborg role from the old machineguns, just like how railguns take over from cannons.

*Machine guns, cannons, rockets, missiles, mortars, howitzers, rocket artillery(guided and otherwise), flamethrowers, radar/comm dishes, laser designators, and cluster/incendiary bombs exist, and have existed for quite a while. Railguns/coilguns and lasers are currently under active research, so they're very real too. The few remaining stuff in the game are either simply multiple-barreled versions of weapons that do exist(Twin Machinegun, Twin Assault Gun, Twin Assault Cannon, Inferno, Pepperpot, Hellstorm), or they are phlebotinum devices(Truck, Mobile Repair Turret, Plasma Cannon, NEXUS Link Turret, Plasmite Flamer, Plasmite Bomb).

Phlebotinum! Haven't seen that word used in a while

Shows how often I used the Angel batteries. I had always thought I saw the word "angelfire" on the emplacement's name. Maybe I renamed them once and never bothered to look them up again. Oops.



Tripling their prices wouldn't change the underlying strat to using them to dominate (I.E. wall off your base and wait for cash), and halving their range would basically make them a guided, non-splash, slow reload version of the Hellstorm. Which, while in theory doesn't sound too bad, would cause their current use (I.E. raining pain from outside any other weapon's range to base structures and slow units) to no longer be suited to such, and therefore change their role in battle. Which is something I wish to avoid; balancing weapons is fine, but rewriting their goals isn't my style.

Given that the "missile" batteries easily outrange the groundshaker (10K to 14K, I believe), its not true that the GS can do anything the missile batteries can.

Oh yeah.. you're on 2.0.10. I keep forgetting... you haven't yet seen the raw death that comes with 2.1.X and the near-flawless artillery trajectory calculations. Remember all those Gamma stages where your 30 batteries were basically evenly matched to Nexus's well placed 6? Well, now your 30 will mop their 6 in the first 3 or 4 exchanges, and will spend the rest of the map obliterating Nexus to the point where most of Gamma has been made much easier. (In stark contrast to the beta stages being much harder, due to AA guns no longer doing much vs planes). Not that your artillery being accurate is a bad thing, and IMO this is a good change for SP-campaign, as people who don't prepare every single stage by building 2938742389 structures can now compete with pre-placed artillery to some degree, but... well, it's interesting to watch for someone used to drawn-out artillery exchanges.



I agree that lasers take up where MGs leave off in the anti-cyborg tree. Thing is, with, say, rockets and cannons, all those upgrades you've been researching through the game keep applying to new generations of weapons. With MG's, all those MG researches taper off once the AG stops being useful... which is right around Gamma5 (2.0.10) / Gamma2 (2.1.X), or the point at which Pythons or a 3rd-level-cyborg-armor-research (Skirm/MP) comes into play. Cannons and Rockets don't taper off under mid-T3 (when Gauss and Scourge show up), and even then you TK's and HC's aren't rendered "immediately useless" due to a couple armor upgrades.

I was thinking something like a guided projectile designed to Airburst over an area, showering it with AP flechettes, which.. ok, maybe that's more of a tank round that an MG tech, or combination thereof, but... not entirely phlebotinum, as it's currently the most efficient way of taking out large armor formations. (Airstrikes {and well, IRL, Tactical Nukes} may be more effective, but I'm not going for the "top tier" weapon here like the ArchAngel is, but a mainline efficient one).

Phlebotinum! Haven't seen that word used in a while

You come across it every so often while rummaging around the TV Tropes Wiki. It sounds better than "Handwavium".

I agree that lasers take up where MGs leave off in the anti-cyborg tree. Thing is, with, say, rockets and cannons, all those upgrades you've been researching through the game keep applying to new generations of weapons. With MG's, all those MG researches taper off once the AG stops being useful... which is right around Gamma5 (2.0.10) / Gamma2 (2.1.X), or the point at which Pythons or a 3rd-level-cyborg-armor-research (Skirm/MP) comes into play. Cannons and Rockets don't taper off under mid-T3 (when Gauss and Scourge show up), and even then you TK's and HC's aren't rendered "immediately useless" due to a couple armor upgrades.

Oh... I see, the AG, although quite awesome, finds it's bullets bouncing off of upgraded armor. The thing I saw when I once tried to use AGs in one of the later Beta missions. The pre-DepletedUranium bullets were almost entirely ineffectual against the Collective's Heavy Cannon Tigers.

But the DU-armed AGs own Gamma. It's good to see them tapering off by Gamma 2 in 2.1.x, since I'd like the Flashlight to be more useful. Lasers are just cooler. As for tech upgrades, the Needle->RailGun->Gauss family of Mass Driver weapons doesn't benefit from the LC->MC->HC->HPV family of Cannon weapons, and the Scourge/Angel/Archie also use "Missile" upgrades which are separate from the "Rocket" upgrades used by the Lancer/TK/Ripple Rockets.

I never even knew that cyborgs had armor. I've never used cyborgs since I'm not a zerg-style person, and prefer fewer and more powerful units. As far as I've seen, cannon-armed tanks kill cyborgs quickly, machine gun tanks kill them even more quickly, artillery weapons kill them in groups, and VTOL bombs massacre them. So I've stayed away from 'em.