Zarel wrote:How's about reversing the range order?
Needle - range 14
Rail - range 13
Gauss - range 12
You'd be able to start the rails with a stronger weapon.
Don't; that would be totaly unlogical.
In guns; if a barrel is longer,pressure from explosion accelerates the bullet longer and alows it to travel on bigger distances when it leaves the barrel.
Same is with rails; if a barell is longer bullet passes through more electro-magnetic coils and accelerates more.
Zarel wrote:Yeah, well, I'm planning on buffing Heavy Laser a bit more. I bet people will be more likely to use it then.
I already use it because of it's long range; great for weakening attackers forces.
But making it stronger would be good...
Ya but I think they are still set for anti-borg use, thats 3 weapon types doing the same thing, I think HL should be set for bunker buster, or AT, also the weight needs to be dropped on them, I will add more thoughts on this later today or monday testing all a few things in a game before I add more, but for now I got this.
Flashlight Laser = Anti-Borg
Pulse Laser = Anti-Tank or something close to them lines
Heavy Laser = Bunker Buster
RBL-4NiK8r wrote:Ya but I think they are still set for anti-borg use, thats 3 weapon types doing the same thing, I think HL should be set for bunker buster, or AT, also the weight needs to be dropped on them, I will add more thoughts on this later today or monday testing all a few things in a game before I add more, but for now I got this.
Flashlight Laser = Anti-Borg
Pulse Laser = Anti-Tank or something close to them lines
Heavy Laser = Bunker Buster
I wouldn't apply the thing that is done with rockets to lasers.
Rockets and missiles carry explosives or warheads that can be very diffrent, while lasers have only heat, and rely on materials melting.
KukY wrote:I wouldn't apply the thing that is done with rockets to lasers.
Rockets and missiles carry explosives or warheads that can be very diffrent, while lasers have only heat, and rely on materials melting.
This.
If anyone can provide a valid reason for why two lasers should have different weapon types, I wouldn't mind doing it.
Although as mentioned earlier, rails are in more need of diversification than lasers are.
"If anyone can provide a valid reason for why two lasers should have different weapon types, I wouldn't mind doing it."
Well, pulse lasers are very different from continuous lasers.
A continuous fire laser would just melt a hole through the target.... a point is heated, but significant amounts of that heat radiate to the surrounding material, and it all melts.
If you deliver all that energy to a single point in 1/n seconds, as n-> ∞ , no heat is absorved by the surrounding material for the duration of the laser pulse. Rather than melting through the target like a long range flamer thrower, you vaporize the surface of the target. When Solids turn to gases in short order, that is an Explosion, such as as when hit by a high intensity short duration laser point.
When making really small holes for technical applications, pulse lasers produce clean circular holes, continuos lasers leave irregular holes from the melting of the surrounding material.
And then there are Free-Electron Lasers, which use a plasma as the lazing medium, rather than a solid, liquid, or gas (such as Argon), by alternating a magnetic field at a certain frequency, you can produce a laser of any wavelength you want - you can optimize the laser frequency for the optical properties of the target (what wavelength does it reflect best, what wavelength does it absorb best?).
Lasers can indeed be very different.
Free electron lasers are very complicated and no where near being weaponized, most military applications of lasers today use continuous fire lasers for melting the skin of a projectile/missile, or potential use against "soft" targets like people and normal cars/trucks.
For penetrating armor, a pulse is what you would need, vaporise a little, the resultant explosion blows off some chunks, saving you the energy needed to heat up those chunks to the melting point.
Note a pulse laser may fire several (or even hundreds of) times a second, for less than a thousandth (a millionth?) of a second each time.
Vaporizing a small portion a few mm thick at most on the surface of a vehicle isn't going to make it explode like a DU sabot hitting it, or a HESH warhead though.
Doing that a thousand times a second, from beyond the ballistically effective range, might be effective.
As to gauss artillery, if gauss weapons ever are used, artillery is likely to be their first application, onboard a ship.
Its just a howitzer with a high muzzle velocity, such that it shoots "flatter", or if angled up at 45 degrees, it goes a LOOONNNGGG way.
Thing of an ICBM: the booster fires, it accelerates, and launches the warhead along a ballistic path, ICBMs are actually unpowered for most of their flight.
Gauss artillery would just fire a shell/flechette at a real high velocity to begin with, in theory giving a 100+ mile engagement ranges, with much more accuracy/less "flight" time and flatter trajectory than the various "super guns" that try to boast ranges like that (very prevalent in WW I).
They might even be able to compete with cruise missiles...
Expensive to build, but much cheaper to fire.
Something not modled in WZ at all (otherwise rockets wouldn't be nearly so popular)
While playing online in different setups ( 1v1 up to 8 player ffa ) mostly on high oil maps, it gets down to one fact for me:
I cant win against a skilled rocket player right now wichever other tec i try with these exceptions:
- Truckrush with mg towers ( minipods work too here, but need aeons to kill structures, which is fine cause they are the dominant antivehicle weapon that state of the game )
- flamer cyborg rush ( only works if you can get close to the units of your opponent and he cant evade you plus he sticked to bunkers to defend instead of hmg-walls ) wich is fine too, cause this is a dead end in tec and so its risky to play
- early and massive vtol attakcs ( just works fine if he lacked researching some AA, go for his researchers and then he is just dead meat ) wich is fine too, putting some effort into AA research most of the times keep you alive, AA balancing is great.
Issues regarding rockets tec so far:
Ripple Avail too early in comparison to howitzer and too powerfull in comparison too. SInce ripples have way more range it should be weaker then howis or howis way cheaper/quicker to build. RIght now, ripples is mostly a one shot one killed emplacment thing in cb war. Damage against structures is just too big, damage against vehicles is fine though.
In comparison, howitzers need way too much additional tec to research, getting the shell upgrades from the canons would be a fix imo, i agree that game balancing will be difficult because this is a major change.
Minipod/Lancer/ Tankkiller and scourge+seraphin rule the field against vehicles. There is just no other matching tech avail at the same time in other tecs. Even cannons ( wich were pretty beefed up ) cant match the rocket tec at any gametime. Only thing i cant quote on is rail/gauss, i never survived long enough for testing them against skilled rocket guys.
The only exceptions are cyborgs, but mrl/seraphin are great choices here too when used wisely against them.
One additional thing: Lancer ( full researched ) and Scourge ( at pretty any state ) are extrem deadly wall/tower defences ) trying to tankrush a defence like this ( even without a protective wall ) most times ends up in tons of units to loose. Its pretty impossible to assault a base without beating it down with artillery before.
Example: Attacking a defence line with mg bunker, second line lancer and third line scourhe with 100 heavy body tracked vehicles ( whatever you put on it except artillery ) will mostly end up with all vehicles ripped if the crete is research well. I am not sure how to explain, but it feels somehow that battles got much quicker in T3 because things got more deadly.
In the old days, you were pretty able to retreat at least some of your tanks when you made a mistake, recognized it and commanded your units back, today its just a massive explosion and intantly 70+% of your units are crunched.
This happens even if you have good armor research, is a statment regarding mantis body ( the most used ones afaik ). its simply impossible to tankrush a fortified base with out tremedous losses in T3, wich i personally like because i like the option to turtle instead of assault, but it smply brakes it down to 1 strategy: get ripples/arcs first.
Thius might be realted to the splash damage rockets do, even the ones that do not hit kill units behind the focussed one wich leads to this instant loss of tons of units.
Last problem:
Arcangles are way too strong against vehicles. This is related to 2 facts imo: First they spray there fire to multiple targets, because they dont shoot volleys like ripples but more like single rockets one after the other, wich just makes them way more efficent. Second, they cause a tremendous splash damge or/and a quite accurate.
This is a bad thing imo. In the ld days ( i hate this phrase but i dont know another thing ) rocket artillery was good for long distance base crunching but failed to hit moving stuff accurate, so if you were going to turtle you had to research howitzers too to keep units at bay. Now, with the beefed up scourge walls/towers and arcangels, you only need this 2 tecs plus AA to keep sitting in your base and watch the show.
I managed to win all games this style to proove this theseis ( and i played against some of the best out there ):
Turtle with mg walls and survive early rushes, go maximum reaerch for any rocket tec.
Get lanmcer towers, turte a second line behind the hmg walls ( protectd by just a wall in front), get lripples as fast as possible, do some additional scorpion track lancer units in your base to get rid of breakthrus, upgrade the production to tankkiller and scourge as quick as possble, gor for arcangels tec. Beef defence up with scourge towers when avail.
Get rid of any opponent by moving out of your base with a combo of sam AA ( when needed ), missile fortress ( as a damagedealer against counterattacks whiile using your units wisely behind them ) and active/cb sensors as needed to keep your arcangles firing.
With this strategy, you can have mantis tracks scourge tanks produced in 26 mins ( maybe even a bit quicker ) in a t1 no base high power and get arcangels pretty quick too ( somewhere under 50 mins, no exact time avail tight now )
If you keep an eye on wall tec and do some AA research and building as needed, this tec is pretty unbeatable right now, it has some vulnerability against cyborgs though, but then can be matched with updating your mg-wall damage/rof if needed and doing some hmg units to aid your vehicles to sweep off breakthrus.
The strategy though lacks the option of vtol usage or getting sat radar/laser soon, there are juust not enough researchers avail.
But honestly..sat lasers is for kiddies and a good player loves the intel he gets from an early built sat radar, but does not really depend on too.
There are other and cheape ways t find out what your opponents are doing..just sacrifice some hovers bug cb tower units to get the intel needed. The rest of information needed can be gathered by frequently checking the diplomacy scrreen.
So bottom line:
Rocket tec has merly no weaknesses and dominates vehicle/artillery and defencestructures most of the time of the game. I dont say its unbeatable, but i can win 99% of the games with it right now while loosing aproximatly 50-60% when trying another tec tree against a skilled player. So its just tec of choice in any means with 2.3 b10.
T3 weapons are too deadly, especially scourge walls/towers and arcangels.
Oh and one thing more, which is not really relted to this thread: 40 oilrgiggs are just too much. YOu can do full research plus full units productions ( 5 facs ) and some defence/artillery building with merly ever running on low power if you watch it a bit. Please, reduce the maximum number of oilriggs to 30 again and make the amount of oilriggs avail settable in the srtucture menu ( gamesetup ) again.
Last edited by Mabsterone on 15 Feb 2010, 10:41, edited 1 time in total.
What if we make ripples/archangels unable to fire close range? Now the min. is 8-16, if we made it like 30 or even 40...
Generally, my idea is to force players to mix artillery. Ok, ripples have long range, but as soon as enemy gets past ripples you need mortars/howitzers. Seraph could act the same for archies.
I haven't yet thought about what range/which weapon, it's just a loose idea.
Mabsterone wrote:Oh and one thing more, which is not really relted to this thread: 40 oilrgiggs are just too much. YOu can do full research plus full units productions ( 5 facs ) and some defence/artillery building with merly ever running on low power if you watch it a bit. Please, reduce the maximum number of oilriggs to 30 again and make the amount of oilriggs avail settable in the srtucture menu ( gamesetup ) again.
Just limit number of Power Generators.
1 Power Generator = 4 Oil Derricks
What if the rocket artillery would be made ineffective against cyborgs just like the rest of the rocket techs?
Cause this is what they are supposed to be: kick ass anti tank weapons, but useless against everything else. Thus, focusing exclusively on rockets should make you very vulnerable against cyborg attacks, unless you invest into other techs heavily, too.
Mabsterone wrote:Oh and one thing more, which is not really relted to this thread: 40 oilrgiggs are just too much. YOu can do full research plus full units productions ( 5 facs ) and some defence/artillery building with merly ever running on low power if you watch it a bit. Please, reduce the maximum number of oilriggs to 30 again and make the amount of oilriggs avail settable in the srtucture menu ( gamesetup ) again.
Just limit number of Power Generators.
1 Power Generator = 4 Oil Derricks
The reason I suggested the oil derrick be removed is because you should be able to control an oil resource even if you aren't getting any power out of it. You should be able to build as many derricks as you want, but there should be a limit on power generators. I was suggesting to Zarel to make the default power generator limit 8, but have the max possible be much higher than 8 if people wish - of course, this presents coding challenges.
Try out Dylan's Mod if you want test feedback. Currently, while some of your feedback is useful, most of your feedback is things I already know and am planning on changing.
Mabsterone wrote:Oh and one thing more, which is not really relted to this thread: 40 oilrgiggs are just too much. YOu can do full research plus full units productions ( 5 facs ) and some defence/artillery building with merly ever running on low power if you watch it a bit. Please, reduce the maximum number of oilriggs to 30 again and make the amount of oilriggs avail settable in the srtucture menu ( gamesetup ) again.
Oil is limited by powergen availability, not derrick availability. Derricks are useful tactically for tagging oil resources, so they really shouldn't be limited at all (I'm planning on removing the limit for the next version).
Fred wrote:What if the rocket artillery would be made ineffective against cyborgs just like the rest of the rocket techs?
What do you mean by "ineffective against cyborgs"? You mean they should be anti-tank-type? That would make them FAR too overpowered (they'd be 3x more powerful against tanks, and they're already too powerful against tanks). Or all-rounder-type (they'd be 2.5x more powerful against tanks, and they're already too powerful against tanks)? Or anti-structure-type (now there's a possibility, but they look nothing like long-range bunker busters)? The other types, flamer/AP/A are all super-effective against cyborgs.
I've been toying with reassigning the rocket artillery's type, but there really isn't a better choice for them.
off topic a bit, but it has come up: why not restrict the amount of "oil" in any well? This always worked very well in the Earth2150 series. It would revolutionize map-making as well as gameplay.
