Jump to content

AAD


Dark_au

Recommended Posts

Sorry but AAD has killed this game for me. Its too easy to abuse and leads people to do tactically stupid things and survive. Like sitting out in the open relying on AAD to keep them safe.

The damn things even swat 10mm out of the air..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 56
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

I suppose muttering "tell that to all the Hermes I've lost" will only result in you impuning my driving ability.

Rightly, as it so happens, but that's neither here nor there. smile.gif

Mind you, the AAD can be overwhelmed pretty well if you get enough folks pouring fire in that direction, but that does keep that fire from going elsewhere.

Mind you, the best counter to folks riding the AAD umbrella is infantry. Now with Paladin transport! Hustle them up behind, unload, and scoot away. Let the infy eat the guy under the umbrella with ATG. It'll be ugly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, if it's stupid and it works... it's not stupid. :) One main reason not to be out in the open is that you will get shot. If you have a defense that keeps you from getting shot, then being in the open isn't so bad.

That said, I do understand what you are saying, and agree to a certain extent.

I do think the Anti-Projectile beams are a bit too accurate. Quite frankly, they are the most impressive tech in the game. Not only can they spot projectiles moving at such high velocities, they can swing an Ion gun in line fast enough to engage. Most Impressive. Even more impressive is the fact then can tell friendly shots from enemy shots. Each round must have an IFF system or something I guess.

The performance of the Towers I can almost buy. It's the Galaxies that get me. With a tower I can believe that each one has a massive computer system, redundant sensors, and a highly detailed, full 3d image of the surrounding terrain. Meaning that when an anomaly whizzes by at a kilometer a second, the computer has a chance to recognize it and engaging. The Galaxies are a mobile platform. Logically they should have less room for sensors and processors, given that they need to carry a massive amount of ammo and engines to fly. Also, being mobile, they don't have the detailed data files to help ID where a shell should or should not be.

Still, even though I think both versions are a bit too effective, I DO like most of the things they do to the tactical situation. One of them being you can't just sit back and shell your target into oblivion. You need to actually go in and take the ground from them. Like Alexander SquidLord Williams said, infantry are a great way of sneaking up an killing off the guy under the AAD tower. Most of the time someone focusing on blowing away guys with impunity is not going to notice a Thor sneaking up on them, much less some guys with ATGs.

An idea that just occurred to me is a deadzone. If a shell is to close to the tower, then it will not be engaged, because the rate of aspect change it too great.

[ August 08, 2006, 01:05 PM: Message edited by: Jalinth ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Killing Galaxies is fun and easy. The easiest way is to roll back their defense with a sufficient amount of fire:

Rollback video

Notice that it really doesn't take very much fire to roll it back. If you can't even get a single member of your team to help you focus fire on the Galaxy then there's a much bigger problem than AAD.

It's also incredibly easy to simply use weapons against which it has no defense:

Long range death video

Some bloody bot ruined the grand finale in that 2nd video, but you get the idea. ;)

As it stands right now, getting through a Galaxy's umbrella is quite easy to do. The only way you would have trouble is if you weren't coordinating with your team at all. Lots of things are difficult if you're doing them completely alone.

A Galaxy that is also within an ion tower's radius, so the two overlap, starts to become more of a challenge to punch through.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I know dark_au is hating the aad but that's only because he likes his artillery WAAAY too much.

Like i've said before there are many ways to counter it, the one exception being using only artillery.

depending on the map it might be rolling up the defense first, sneaking up with a hermes or infantry or simply driving away from a galaxy and focussing on a weaker area for a while.

Basically it quite often means you have to get INSIDE the aad umbrella and run and gun rather than plinking from a distance (well you could do that with an ion and i often do) or grab a 20mm to overhwelm it or a 120mm firing AP which moves so fast with such a flat trajectory that it will most often make it through.

If you don't adjust your tactics to the situation on the ground then you're just rehashing tactics of the past...and this is the FAR FUTURE.

Dark_au is a really good player, I've had some gripping shoot-outs with him and I know when i face-off with him its most often a toss up as to who's going to come out alive......imho he just has a preoccupation with indirect mortar fire ;)

It is a little daft that a laser tower would fire at 10mm rounds, i'll give you that.....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No its not just about artillery. I've hardly been using them because they are pointlessly ineffective now. Mostly of recent I've been in either a thor or an Apollo. The damn AAD knocks out MBT rounds, HEAT, HE, 20mm, 10mm. I'm just sick of people using the defence of those rather than come up with a tactically sound sollution. I mean infantry out in the open using the AAD to swat incoming 10mm rounds is a joke. I've even seen people moving through open ground calling the Galaxy to defend them when they take fire. Rather than displacing and doing something realistic.

Clay this business about bieng able to overwhelm a galaxy isn't right... We had 3 of us the other day trying and it still kept batting away all the rounds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

When you say "tactically sound" you mean tactically sound for a moderncombat situation, right? Im not interested in modern combat right now. Too single shot kill, extreme range, and uber artiller and air support (too much for fun firstperson playing, not too much for fun combat mission). This game doesnt simulate modern combat but fictional far future combat. In the enviroment simulated defending an open ground inf crossing with a Galaxy does seem to be tactically sound. Dark_au if you want to make a mod which simulated modern combat i'de be happy to try it. I would not pay 40 dollars for it as I happily paid for Dropteam. I imagine all three were firing atgm arty or 120mm?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I tried the trick mentioned above, switching to the machine gun as soon as the missile leaves the launcher and peppering the target. I think it was the best kill to death ratio I ever had. This little idea wrecks people. I think the bullets peppering the vehicle mess with peoples return fire even if there is no hermes to worry about. lived long enough in one paladin to call the galaxy down TWICE, and shot off most of the last load. A personal best by a huge margin. Try it, you'll like it.

The coax guns have tremendous potential to roll back point defense.

Artillery effectiveness in a game like this is a hard call. Straight forward extrapolation of current trends implies that anything bigger than a cat that does not have a deep hole and good camo is not going to live long on the battlefields of the near future. And the deep hole just takes giving the location to the air force. So any first person sci fi game or story for that matter (Drake really did think the slammers' tech through very well) has to come up with a reason why some kind of guided munition is not sweeping the battlefield clean. I think Drop team strikes the balance very well on the overall. And the devs could not be more willing to take, and act, on input

[ August 07, 2006, 11:12 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

well I do agree with everybody from Dark_au (we shared the same frustrating situation against aad) to dan, great idea to overload the aad system BUT is still think their range should be reduced and at list on the hermes ammo limited

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Maybe the Galaxy need to be repurposed. Instead of using it as a resupply ship it becomes the tip of the spear. You get one, once you drop it it stays down, it has the ability to radically affect the other sides electronics and and AA in its zone of control. In effect it becomes your base for the scenario. It should be worth a LOT of victory points to kill or lose. Also give it some of the abilities currently possessed by the command track. Sensor relay at the least, maybe make it the source of the big artillery packages. You would still need forward observers to hit anything outside of its LOS

Scenarios could be written to limit one or both sides choice of drop zones. All the cool electronics on board could become the primary advantage of liveship based forces over the poor planet bound fools they are preying on.

it instantly creates an important influence on both tactical and strategic decisions.

Here is the best trick, force teams to appoint a commander in order to place it.

If the other side has the map so tightly defended there is no place to land it then any sane commander would pick another target.

I still think simple drop pods make more sense for ammo. Most of it is already engineered to be fired out of a gun barrel at some ridiculous G force anyway

[ August 08, 2006, 12:40 AM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

If the AAD only dealt with Artillery, Dropships and Missiles I could live with it. I've resigned myself to artillery bieng useless now. Even if you can get a round past all the AAD its yeald is so low as to make the effort pointless. I still think its too effective against Arty (even in the slammers AAD isn't infallible and there are ways around it when they need to like submunition rounds). Personally even having a 1 in 3 chance of arty getting through would be better. What I really can't relate to is the AAD taking out MBT rounds and smaller especially 10mm from infantry. It just doesn't add up to me. If there is a way to defeat the rounds then the basics of military science says you would come up with a counter to the counter. If they can produce the plasma turrets which have an infinite ammo load that can't be defeated by AAD(and fits in such a small package with a great recharge rate) then why isn't that the main weapon of tanks.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Plasma, all the plasma, mortars, turrets, and so on make less than no sense. Somebody needs to rethink that part. Laser based AAD, I just resolutely think of ions as lasers, do make at least some sense. Current tech would have to scale up by a lot but the basic bits are out there. Trying to contain a plasma into a projectile requires tech that should not be wasted outside of a live ships interstellar drive. Speaking of the interstellar drive......... :eek:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right I agree ion's / laser do make some sense.. however they are also hideously easy to defeat too. Putting a strong enough magnetic field on a round would defeat charged particle. if its laser then just make your KE penetrator out of some dense crystal with a suitable refractory/ reflectory index. Or have sand casters, or ablative layers. Or use rail guns with your limitless energy and kick out slugs at 4km / sec. Intercept that one....

And if the intercepting round is some form of pellet then show me the calculations for dual curve intercepts with appropriate lead quick enough to hit a shell in flight as it leaves your barrell.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Right I agree ion's / laser do make some sense.. however they are also hideously easy to defeat too. Putting a strong enough magnetic field on a round would defeat charged particle. if its laser then just make your KE penetrator out of some dense crystal with a suitable refractory/ reflectory index. Or have sand casters, or ablative layers. Or use rail guns with your limitless energy and kick out slugs at 4km / sec. Intercept that one....
Arguably, some of these countermeasures have some rather extreme drawbacks:

Magnetic rounds would either require in-built EM generators or be innately magnetic. The former is actually more plausible, given the level of miniaturization implied in the setting, but the sensor signature would be massive for every firing and it'd give away your exact location every time you opened up. Sort of like now with ions, actually.

A penetrator made out of crystaline matrix wouldn't really be plausible, if we want to stick with physics and get a bit further away from DT Unobtanium Superscience. One reason being that crystaline structures would simply be too brittle to be a useful KE penetrator. And if the intercept lasers have any degree of frequency variability at all, your crystal core'd rounds are all useless. Which would be bad.

Sandcasters and ablative layers have some basic shared issues, the biggest being that they're both fairly massive for a given amount of effect (and, moreover, sandcasters are really only useful in a 0g environment with non-accelerating ships; the moment you introduce either a gravitational field or an accelerating element trying to hide behind it, you have it moving away from where you need it). Given that these units need to be as lightweight as possible to be space-transport-worthy, it would seem to counter-indicate any serious ablative effect.

The one that one can't really handwave around is the relative absence of railguns as the standard KE armament. A railgun or coilgun is way simpler to create and build than a high-yield "ion beam" of nearly any incarnation, and probably easier to build in varying calibers than comperable chemical-propelled weapons, which is sort of the implication given what we have defined now. Take a 3g mass, accelerate it to 4km/sec with our hungus anti-matter drives, and interception just makes no sense. As you've said.

(I may not be as grognardy as some regarding modern military hardware, but I can hold my own in SF-analysis. Years of practice and I didn't get to write Iteration X because of my good looks. tongue.gif )

But Clayton has certain desires about what he wants DropTeam combat to look like, we can judge based on presentation. He wants humans to be in the loop at a level where it makes sense to have me actually aiming at another unit instead of just making sure my unit is pointed in the general direction and given RoE (because otherwise we'd be playing TacOps 4 DropTeam, an idea which I'd enjoy, but is even more niche than what we have). He wants AAD, through whatever technology, to explain why there aren't any aircraft, though its faded from the in-setting prominance it once had. He wants different caliber weapons which aren't insta-kill on hit, because that's not a lot of fun most of the time and because different things that go boom are fun. He wants some kind of beam weapon because its the Future! and beam weapons are fun, too.

SF setting design is one of those places you often have to start at the end state you want and work backwards to why things are the way they are. DT sometimes suffers from insufficient "why," in part because I think that Clay and his other designers were way more military grognardy than they were SF grognardy. That means there are some things that, otherwise, don't quite hang together all the time.

It might, therefore, be somewhat useful to try and figure out how to get there from here, rather than just say, "hey, this part's a game-breaker," given we're all clearly playing and enjoying the game. Yurch is a particularly outstanding member of the forum that goes with this approach, going the extra mile not just to say, "this bit's broken" but generally cranking out solid, hardcore ideas to fix them in reasonable ways or incorporate the things that aren't going away more fluidly.

Me, I'm just a writer-geek. smile.gif

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Current DU and the German Tungsten based alternative both use a defined crystaline structure which causes the shards to be sharp WHEN the penetrator shears. If you notice I have been trying for a while to come up with options to the AAD problem. Its become more defined when they can swat 10mm rounds.

I just can't believe the miss-use of AAD tactically is in the spirit which the game was intended.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Okay. First to clear up my position, as my first post was a touch rushed, and seems to have come on too strong.

I like the Anti-Aircraft elements of the game, and I think I agree with yurch about adding more. I'll have to play more to get a clearer idea on that.

Being able to drop right on a target is a huge advantage, and one that should only be an option if you are really rolling your enemy back. Like with Dark AU's castle map - Once you manage to start dropping tanks onto the hill your enemy is in a really bad spot.

I have no problem with energy weapons. Beams are cool. I am very interested in seeing the upcoming new beam weapon physics.

My only 'complaint' is that I have trouble from a PSB standpoint on how the towers shoot down high velocity shells and never engage friendly ammo by mistake. My suggestion is perhaps having the systems occasionaly get confused in a high fire situation, or the writers give us some more story with some nice PSB.

The last few patches have been VERY good steps in the right direction with AAD. In the games I've played most recently versus AAD towers I've found them to be far, far more enjoyable to attack. They are very effictive, but not invinciable. You have to be a bit crafty to roll them back, but it can doing so is great fun.

I just can't believe the miss-use of AAD tactically is in the spirit which the game was intended.

Tactical miss-use of AAD? Doing leap frog manuvers and taking advantage of the cover is a PERFECT example of using your resources to your advantage. Advancing under an umbrella like that is to me at least, a logical use of the tech.

Does it allow for manuvers that make no sense on a 2006 battlefield? Yes. However this is not a 2006 battlefield. It's a ~4006 battlefield in the aftermath of a major technogical spike and crash. Sci-Fi is all about changing things and seeing what happens.

[ August 08, 2006, 09:22 AM: Message edited by: Jalinth ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

this business about bieng able to overwhelm a galaxy isn't right... We had 3 of us the other day trying and it still kept batting away all the rounds.
Were any of the 3 of you using something with a high rate of fire? In order to roll back point defense you have to put a high number of rounds into it. 3 vehicles firing 120's are never going to make it through. If just one of those vehicles were firing something with a high ROF then a significant number of the 120's would make it through.

AAD is laughably easy to defeat, as was clearly demonstrated by the videos above. I can definitely understand backstory complaints about some aspects of it, but from a gameplay perspective they are not at all insurmountable. Is there any way that I can further elaborate on the various - easy - ways that point defense can be overcome? Do we really want to make it even easier than it already is? If so, then what we're really saying is we don't want it at all. We're willing to entertain that thought, but be careful that this isn't just a knee-jerk reaction to the frustration of having someone else successfully counter our actions.

Let's stand back and imagine the game without them (as it was at one point). Artillery (mortars and hurricane) were able to put their rounds at any point on the map with impugnity. Think about that for a moment. No matter where you go or what you do, the enemy can place arty rounds directly on you. Fast movement gives you some protection from the indirect rounds, but nothing protects you from direct fire artillery like the Hurricane other than trying to kill it (and if it's being competently managed then it is far away, using cover and its own high speed to make that extremely difficult). What kind of tactical options do you have?

Imagine yourself on the receiving end. You drop a Paladin, just begin to come up to speed and wham - your charred wreck is inside of a crater. When this happens right now, you sometimes have the option of deploying some point defense in order to counter this attack by the enemy. So on your second drop, you bring along a Hermes or drop near a defense tower and maybe begin hunting for the enemy artillery. The enemy must then react to this new development by bringing up some direct fire support to take care of the Hermes, thereby regaining the original artillery unit's effectiveness. It's a nice stroke, counter-stroke, counter-counter stoke dance (and this dance can't be performed alone). If you didn't have that point defense option, then all you can do is drop again. Wham. Another smoking wreck. Now your only remaining option is to drop much farther away and immediately hussle away from the DZ before an artillery round has time to arrive. If you're using a light enough vehicle to actually cover all of that distance and catch up to the enemy artillery and engage it then all of your work has been for nothing anyway - it's going to plaster you before you get close enough to damage it with your smaller caliber weapons. If you were equipped with a heavier vehicle then you will likely suffer damage just making it out of the drop zone, unless the enemy arty is busy with someone else. In that case, you've been forced to drop in a distant location with a heavy, low speed vehicle and a long drive back into a useful position. This is almost as good as (and sometimes even better than) having killed you.

It can be frustrating right now if point defense foils your plan and forces you to adapt and try a different plan. The frustration you feel when on the receiving end of the scenario outlined above is many times worse. I know because that's how the game used to play before point defense was introduced.

Does anyone remember playing during the public test when the Hermes had only a low chance of intercepting incoming artillery? Do you remember the endless stream of posts whining about how artillery ruled the entire field and made every other vehicle, action, and concept in the game completely worthless? Artillery was certainly realistically lethal - and no one was having any fun (except for the couple of guys who were first to drop Hurricanes).

Artillery is lethal and accurate and rightly so. One of the interesting things about the DropTeam universe that distinguishes it from a modern setting is that there are actually some limited direct counters to it. These counters are pretty easy to overcome but you do need to adapt your tactics and actually overcome them.

Point defense has made play dramatically more tactical, not less.

Having said all of that, of course there's always room to tweak the way they work. We can, in fact, make them even easier to defeat if there's general agreement that this is needed. We can also simply make them less generally effective. But these things have to be done very carefully because it's quite easy to make artillery the only units worth having.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Clay, I basically agree with you. The game is designed to have a different feel than a full up war circa 2006. In any tactical situation right now the use of ground troops is primarily to flush the enemy from cover, at least from the perspective of any major western power. Once an enemy has been forced to reveal himself some thing unstoppable and fatal is called in. If it was an even fight it would be a quick bloody, and ungodly expensive war between the air, artillery, and ECM of each side to establish supremacy first. Then one side is running and hiding and the other side is working the radio. Once one side can park a B-52 on loiter with tens or(they are working on it) hundreds of guided munitions all the other side can do is try to play the human shield card. As repeated references to mad Admiral Stannis point out in the back story it is basically a strategy of praying the other side has a conscience. Actually managing the place once you smash it is a different issue for a different forum.

The game is designed to play on a different level where the units on the field have to deal with each other. This means some combination of game mechanics and and back story that account for the lack of unlimited, unstoppable, guided super weapons. I feel that the overall balance is very close to right, I have certainly made enough suggestions about how I think it ought to be tweaked. Still in game terms it is pretty close to right.

I don't think people have had the time to absorb how effective the coax is in hammering back point defense yet. With atgms and a little practice you can do with one unit. In fact what is really needed right now, in addition to various unit coordination measures that are underway is a shrike or paladin with a 14 mm or even 10 mm chain gun as a main armament. It would be the perfect counter for point defense, infantry and turrets. It would also be completely helpless against heavy armor and require the kind of teamwork the game is aiming for. Better tools for unit coordination will help tremendously here. If the human players could group a platoon together and then switch very easily(single key even) from vehicle to vehicle within that platoon a lot of this would be more manageable. Th overall commanders job would also be infinitely easier if he could just give orders to platoons instead of vehicles. Thee real world works that way for some very good reasons.

I also like the idea of using the Galaxy to lead and the assault and establish a base of operations as brought up earlier. This would allow and encourage people to drop at defined points and start out with some sembalance of coordination.

Things as simple as not having the bots leave the galaxies area of influence unless there was group of a specified size would help tremendously. It is the endless onesie twosie dribble assault that really crosses up game play at the moment. if the bots waited for a player and automatically grouped themselves in a (selectable, please) formation the fighting would get a lot more organized.

I am sure Clay loves it when I ask him not to sleep for several more weeks like that. :rolleyes:

Backstory tech is a whole different issue that I am trying to write something longer on. Be afraid, be very afraid.

[ August 08, 2006, 02:34 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well I'm obviously the only one who feels this way so its not for me. I guess I'm on a different book of strategy to the rest of the community, let alone a different page.

In answer to your comments Clay and others:-

Artillery isn't even deadly anymore without the AAD. With it its tits on a bull. There is no point to having arty in this game anymore. Its like having a Bow on a modern battlefield. Unless you get a direct hit even paladins ignore it. And to use your example if the guy drops his paladin within range of an arty piece then he deserves to die. This is the whole point I'm getting at, Instead of finding a new dropzone which is a tactically sound sollution just drop inside their arc with a hermes and let the hurrican kill itself when it tries to fire at you. Result a system that rewards tactically bad play and assists that bad play to work.

Again though everyone goes back to artillery. I was originally and contiuously refering NOT to its effectiveness re artillery but with its effectiveness re tank rounds and smaller. This leads to things like Infantry lying around in plain site under an AAD relying on the AAD to save their ass from their own tactical ineptitude agains other infantry. It rewards someone who is doing tactically unsound things like parking a tank in plain site under an AAD tower over someone who is doing tactically sound things like combat manaeouver. Sound tactical use should be rewarded so should skill, Unsound tactical use should be punished ( by dying when someone in a tactically sound position gets the drop on you). The whole point of a tank having the ability to move is for Tactical Manaeouver warfare. The Idea bieng that you don't sit still with your tanks in one place. Or just travelling out in the open. This is the sort of behaviour that should lead to someones untimely end. Instead they can cover their mistakes with the overpowered AAD. In the circumstance where I have a tank in a good ambush position and open fire on a target that I have a good chance to hit then I should be rewarded, the person just scooting in the open deserves to die. As it is they can call down the magic galaxy to protect them and I am supposed to switch to COAX to defeat their AAD first when i had the drop on them?. And then I can't defeat their AAD on my own and fire 120mm so they get cheap shots at me as a reward for tactical stupidity. The same goes with the Tanks sitting under AAD. The defencive tanks should gain their strength from utilising the terrain, Adopting Hull-down positions with a quick displacement route. That should be rewarded by alowing them to mount a cohesive defence when called to. Having this magic AAD to protect you against other tanks means that you don't have to do sensible tactical things but yuo still get rewarded.

That is not what I paid my $40 for.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

the only thing i would change about the current aad towers is not bother to shoot at 10mm rounds

same for the aad on the hermes

perhaps add an option for mortars to be able to drop multiple/cluster type munitions that pop open well above the aad and rain multiple he bomblets down on target.

The aad would get some but not all.

They would be too small to injure afv's but unarmored targets would go up like velveeta on a griddle (shrike's, inf, cutters).

This would be nice as it would offer the arty obsessed (i.e. dark) something to plink with so they don't get bored ;)

well ok it would actually be a really useful round because in addition to taking out unarmored targets it would offer mortars the chance to overwhelm aad so others can shoot on through...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Dark, You are right on many of the generalities but missing two subtleties. The first is that game balance is really hard, anything they put in will be put to uses that were not conceived before hand. The second is that "tactical sense" changes with the technology. Part of the endless fascination of a game like this is figuring out what makes tactical sense under the rules at that time. getting back to the game balance issue, the law of unintended consequences is a big, big deal.

The other part is arguing about it. :D

Battlefront and TBG are the best out there at explaining why and taking input.

Adzling, isn't that what the command track fire mission does now?

Link to comment
Share on other sites


×
×
  • Create New...