Ideas..

[Rampage]

Recognizing that a good amount of this weaponry seems based on today's technologies, consider that mortars have more options in real life than here. Smoke, for instance. (I know you can call in smoke, but what about the tactical ability to lob it in quickly, but on a smaller scale..kinda thinking of the other thread that talks about infantry). And as long as I'm on the topic of infantry - what about enemy infantry, something like a beehive round?

Artillery - what about a Time On Target attack? Germany today has that capability, the U.S. would have had it if the Crusader cannon program had not been cancelled. If you're wondering what that is - one or more guns are slaved together to act in concert. With the same target for all guns, the first salvo is fired howitzer-style, very high trajectory. Successive salvos are rapidly fired with each successive salvo at a lower trajectory, and all salvos of course are directed at the same target. This means each salvo requires less time to travel to the target than the last salvo. So if you had five guns slaved, and four salvos were fired, you could have twenty shells hitting the same target or area of effect at the same time. Devastating. And would be a good way to overwhelm defenses that can shoot down projectiles by giving them too many targets to handle. I realize that artillery is delivered via Liveships in DropTeam, but maybe some variation on what I've described could be an option. This could be balanced by requiring even more time between the availability of TOT attacks than you have with typical attacks. Or, a limit of only one TOT per game, or none if the particular scenario would be unbalanced by it.

And last but not least - the Copperhead shell. A guided artillery projectile. Maybe a Liveship drops it and it can subsequently be guided by some commander on the ground who is already linked in and ready. Or maybe even the capability for a smaller version of it to be fired from a 120mm gun, high-trajectory, allowing someone closer-in (infantry?) to direct it to a line-of-sight target. To avoid unbalancing aspects, maybe it's difficult to make in the nanoforge so consequently there are a very limited number of them per vehicle.

Just some ideas. Before anybody flames me, please keep in mind I'm pretty new to the game and am simply very excited by it so am percolating with ideas. And I don't think the programmers have enough to do. <ducking>

[Rampage]

Of course, that last sentence was a joke.

[Rampage]

Hmm..bonehead mistake..perhaps a moderator will move this over to the appropriate forum?

[Drusus]

Hmmh, now there is a idea I like. Painting targets for the use of other weapon platforms. A forward observer vehicle. Should be able to guide mortar shells (which should land in, say 200m of the target to get a hit) and ATGM missiles. Takes control of the missile if the missile comes 200m or closer to the target.

I don't know if this is hard enough to implement, though. The programmers definitely need more things to do.

[yurch]

Such powerful artillery and other attack options would pretty much remove the need for the hands-on approach, no? It already sucks enough in a tank (how long are infantry going to last versus that "radius" effect?) fighting multiple hurricanes that can buzz around at 60km/hr outside of your effective range, dropping near-pinpoint accuracy magic HE rounds that leave you burning at the bottom of a crater.

The only thing really keeping mortars under control are the point defenses and difficulty of hitting moving targets. A direct hit to the top with even the light mortar is usually enough to disable any of the vehicles - they are huge. Guided rounds would be downright terrifying - a team could rapidly destroy volumes of hardware (obviously, lacking point defense) with very little risk to anything but the observer vehicle.

Ion towers have 3 ions that can shoot once every 2.5 seconds. The galaxy is the same, but with 3.0 seconds. With the exception of the Hermes (which fires really fast), these defenses are possible to overwhelm on thier own with more than one person if you really wanted to. Consider that they don't prioritize between different kind of shots... have one guy spam 20mm HE at it.

Both of the Air defense towers aren't all that tough to begin with, and permanently go down to about 5 good and direct hits from either of the heavy mortar vehicles, Hurricane or Thor. 76mm can kill a tower on it's own with about 33 HE rounds.

I'm afraid the towers or the units they protect wouldn't last at all against a specialized EZ-click salvo attack. The current fire mission/emp is irritating, but at least it doesn't generally kill things you can't replace, or with such reliability.

[Rampage]

True points all. I was imagining something where these advanced options would not be options at all unless there was some sort of tradeoff.

Ok - then I'll settle for an AC-130-U Spooky gunship.

Again..joking

<sigh> Next thing you know I'll be asking for tactical nukes.

[Type98]

Previous threads already stated that the lethality of the weapons were toned down for game play reasons. Anyway...

The Copperhead concept has pretty much been taken over by fire and forget munitions. For examples, search for SMART155, Excaliber, PGMM on the Internet.

Putting point defense/jammers ( for example, smoke, look up superlense and cloaking on every vehicle can negate the advantages of guided munitions or HEAT.

A heavy projectile (rock) from space would give you a tactical nuke without the radiation.