The Galaxy is pretty abusable

[yurch]

Been meaning to start a thread on this for a while now.

The AA/Point defense combo combined with an insanely fast drop response time makes for some pretty lame uses for the ship. It completely nullifies mortar units and ATGM carriers, but the real problem is it's AA ability.

Consider what you can do to an enemy Hurricane. You can drop the ship on him right before he's about to fire (thus exploding the shell in his face), drop it on one that's damaged (so he can't extract) or simply drop it on top of his dropship as he's on his way out extracting.

If you lose the galaxy, who cares, right? You get another in a few minutes - but the enemy sure isn't getting that Hurricane back.

Point defense is the primary reason you don't see me in a mortar or ATGM unit - there just aren't any options once your only weapon is nullified. I'm sure it's infuriating to see a ship come down out of the sky and shoot down your projectile in the time it takes to reach the target.

Now imagine some vindictive guy dumping it on you when he sees you dropping or extracting.

This kind of AA on demand is probably a bit too strong or a bit too fast to deploy, especially when you consider using it offensively.

The galaxy has 3 automated guns, each capable of firing once every 3 seconds. They each have a burn factor of 0.5, which I think means that they will burn (destroy) an object (dropships) 50% of the time on a hit. I don't know how long a drop takes, but I'm fairly sure it's more than six seconds, with the extract taking longer. The probability of a ship (or even a few) landing safely in range of an idle galaxy is hilariously low. The Galaxy is easier to deploy on-location than most units as it defends itself (perhaps not if we used something more like this), and can fire the moment it enters the map.

It's a 1500m anti air death circle that can be called in within mere seconds... does anyone else find this a tad alarming?

Also, what's with the thing firing beams, but with rotary-barrel weapons and shellcasings?

[adzling]

Yeah agreed, galaxy ships are open to abuse.

I think it's imperative that dropships (and galaxy and vipers) become limited use items just like the vehicles themselves.

This would make people a lot more careful in their use (and would fit in more with reality).

And if look closely you'll see the laser towers in the game also use the mini-gun barrel model for lasers.

[Jalinth]

Aye. I can't help but thinking a Dropship would be at least as expensive as a tank. The way the dropships come in is a bit odd to me as well, but I'll save that for a new post.

I've not used the Galaxy much yet. I'll have to take a closer look at it tonight.

[Caseck]

Dropships would be WAY more expensive than any of the tanks currently in game.

The game right now doesn't do a good enough job of making you hoard your dropships, and you can be overly aggressive with them.

[Alfa-142]

Noticed this being used today for the first time. One guy (I'm not going into name calling) dropped one next to him as soon as he entered an area. To my dismay it was neigh impossible to hit him as the Galaxy took down all projectiles i shot at him. Finally the Galaxy left only to be repeated when he landed the next one.

No cheating but still it detracts a little from the game IMHO

.w

[aittam]

spent the week end try to immobilize enemies with them LoL

[yurch]

Originally posted by .warspite:

To my dismay it was neigh impossible to hit him as the Galaxy took down all projectiles i shot at him.

Well, it is a defensive item, can't really complain about that. I use it to cover attack advances and as a battering ram to get past ATGM tower defenses. It's one of attacker's most vital assets. Many mortar players will park near one for the ammo/defense. It's going to shoot projectiles.

I'm concerned with the offensive use. Earlier against bots I got them to drop in a bunch through AA turret placement in the deployment phase. They all predictably drop at once and right by each other, and I can immediately call the galaxy right on top of them as my first action.

I've killed up to 6 dropships at a time with this method. It also pretty much seals the deal for those frantic mission-start-drops-on-the-capturable-tower openings. The only concievable defense against it is to drop your own galaxy in the same area, and then it's down to luck which wins.

[yllamana]

- Part 1 -

It also pretty much seals the deal for those frantic mission-start-drops-on-the-capturable-tower openings. The only concievable defense against it is to drop your own galaxy in the same area, and then it's down to luck which wins.

How about the defence of not dropping on the capturable tower, but dropping away from it and shelling it into oblivion (mortar/HE)? Maybe you could even try delaying your deployment, then hitting it all with EMP, and deploying your entire team plus Galaxy on top of them.

I guess the Galaxy has a bit of an identity crisis. It's ostensibly a resupply ship, but in general its best use by far is as point defence/AA cover. It seems balanced around being used for resupply - you can usually have one down. If you're blasting away with your mortar you can't use all your ammo from the last Galaxy before the next becomes available. Maybe the resupply Galaxy and the air cover Galaxy should be two distinct options - the air cover Galaxy could even circle around the area looking awesome instead of just sitting on the ground. Then the resupply Galaxy could have its point defence reduced or eliminated (could be a resupply Viper I guess).

- Part 2 -

I think there's another problem being touched on with this thread, which is feedback on firing through point defence weapons. When you're attacking anything under point defence cover, you tend to see a lot of your shots destroyed before impact. Maybe some of them are going through; maybe your mortar shells are causing fragmentation damage below them. It's next to impossible to tell, though, especially since due to scarcity of players online many of us aren't used to being attacked by mortars, least of all with PD cover.

It seems like you can often fire at targets under PD with some success (people hit me under it anyway) but it's hard to tell if you do or not. I'm not sure what to do about that. I'm also unsure about mortars + PD - from my perspective, being very often in a mortar carrier, PD of *any* kind seems to render it utterly useless. I think that's partly because I just can't see the damage it's doing, though. You can definitely still feel airbursts sometimes in the Hermes.

Maybe PD is too strong, but it's difficult to tell because of lack of feedback (oh no not this again).

[yurch]

Originally posted by yllamana:

How about the defence of not dropping on the capturable tower, but dropping away from it and shelling it into oblivion (mortar/HE)?

Why do that when you can just drop the galaxy on the enemy starting force in mid air? It's cleaner and you can get more shells hitting before the inevitable hermes rolls in

Maybe you could even try delaying your deployment, then hitting it all with EMP, and deploying your entire team plus Galaxy on top of them.

I question your sanity, good sir! Cutters preset for capture will protect other units from EMP, while the EMP won't stop AA to begin with!

Another interesting bit about this is that the EMP can't be fired at game-start like the galaxy can. The command track has to be on the ground first for the other assets.

I'm also unsure about mortars + PD - from my perspective, being very often in a mortar carrier, PD of *any* kind seems to render it utterly useless. I think that's partly because I just can't see the damage it's doing, though. You can definitely still feel airbursts sometimes in the Hermes.

Under a galaxy or ion tower, I'm virtually unafraid of the high-trajectory HE. Even though it looks like an autogun back there, the hermes works like all the other ion point defenses, albiet with an 'invisible' ion and slighty different stats. And as good as a job it does, the galaxy or tower is effectively 3 of them taped together, giving them a higher probability of stopping the HE shell before it gets into critical ranges.

Over a certain range, I don't even fire at point defended targets anymore. Only way to get rid of 'em is with ions (which nobody seems to want to carry lately) or close-range AP.

[yllamana]

What if the Galaxy only had one PD ion? Then it'd have a much lower chance of stopping things, though it'd still offer a little protection. It'd saturate really easily if you threw it into direct combat, too, since it'd be shooting at all sorts of silly things like 20mm rounds.

The problem is, it's pretty neat being able to use it as a support unit instead of just a resupply.

I guess the problem I have with point defence at the moment is it usually seems like an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you have something that shuts down virtually everything thrown at it, like the ion towers or the Galaxy, or you don't have any point defence at all.

I guess it feels to me like the PD items in the game should be weaker, but there should be more of them available.

I don't know why the Galaxy can even shoot down other dropships. It seems like its point defence ions would be relatively weak and short range. I mean, if it can toast the Viper so easily, why not fire it at other things like Shrikes or Paladins? The normal ions take several shots to kill even a Shrike - why can an ion with 1500m maximum range knock out the much better protected Viper in one hit?

Would it be better if it just couldn't target dropships at all? You could still drop it on the Hurricane or whatever, but that seems like a pretty risky tactic and you do only get to deploy it every so often.

[yurch]

The weapons on the thing are very digital, for lack of a better term. Since they're using that 50% chance of burn, theoretically it could kill Thor very easily if it somehow acccidentally shot one. I'd prefer it if at least it had to scratch at the dropships a bit beforehand.

I guess a point defense system that fires fast enough and accurately enough to intercept incoming missiles could probably stop a piddly dropship eventually. Perhaps those things were made into ions for playability/visibility reasons rather than immersion. I mean, the normal ions carry 6 times as far. (fun fact - those can shoot down ATGMs too)

Whatever causes the point defense system to 'miss' really doesn't seem to happen often enough. I wish I knew what it was. Pure saturation just isn't an option with many of the weapons, and the towers/galaxies aren't exactly light targets. Many of the most infuriating situations involving it are 1 on 1 fights where team-wide volley fire isn't an option.

I'm also not sure of the feasability of it all. To stop a projectile one would think the defense needs some advance warning and some prep time to swivel the guns around - but these things are practically plucking shots out of your barrel.

[yllamana]

The Hermes autogun has a property, "MaximumTargetSpeed", which is presumably what keeps it from firing at normal shells.

If I had to guess, I'd think the following can cause it to fail:

- not noticing the projectile in time. Sometimes the point defence seems to fail to fire at all.

- missing the projectile/ship (I guess the BurnChance is the chance to kill whatever it hit, too).

- not being ready to fire when the projectile goes past (like when you overload the tower with 20mm).

- the target being above the MinimumTargetAltitude. It's not clear what this is relative to. The Galaxy and Hermes guns have it set to 0; the ion tower doesn't have it at all.

- the projectile being above the MaximumTargetSpeed.

I can't see a way in the XML to get it to just fire at projectiles and ignore dropships. I'm also not sure how you'd go about making it just ablate dropship armour instead of killing them outright, or if that would even be possible to do while retaining its anti-projectile capability.

I guess the MaximumTargetSpeed sort of simulates the weapon not being able to come to bear fast enough before the projectile hits.

I don't much like the idea of it just being highly random whether it picks up or not. Winning or losing to a roll of the dice isn't very fun. There's already enough chance in how battles play out in all the different things that can happen.

[yurch]

I don't think I've ever seen it miss (shoot at, not hit) a projectile. Its possible in the case of a 'miss' it's just not playing any firing anims at all, but this is wild speculation. It seems the faster the shot, the more likely it is to do so (even without a maxshotvelocity), as with 120mm AP. There's a thing called "shotvelocity" IIRC that's set to the same for all three point defense units - wonder what that does.

I suppose some experimentation could be done with the XML to get a better idea.

Unfortunately I've got only a few hours to do some actual work I've been putting off all week.

[yurch]

Messing with the ion towers right now, (re)finding some weird things.

For the ion tower:

I can't figure out the purpose of shotvelocity.

Burnfactor is not required to shoot projectiles. The ion tower has different burn factors assigned to different guns.

For some reason the tower only tends to shoot at the dropship with 1 of its weapons.

I can't get automatedgun to shoot(as in, emit, not shoot at) projectiles. It seems to be capable of ion-only weapons.

And like always, there doesn't seem like there's collision near the top of the tower.

I'm guessing the behavior of automatedgun type weapons are mostly hardcoded. Doesn't seem like there's much we can do with 'em.

[Neutrino 123]

If one drives close enough to the Galaxy with the Hermes, the automated gun will kill the Galaxy, even if on the ground.

[yurch]

I think point defense in general would be better as a soft counter rather than the hard counter it is now. Giving a single gun drastically poorer chances of interception means we can deploy more of them and not totally break the game for some units.

A safety in numbers sort of thing rather than seperating the haves from the have-nots.

[yllamana]

The only problem I have with the idea of making point defence a soft counter is I don't like the idea of fights being determined primarily by luck. Yay I lost because the Intertron randomly rolled his number higher than mine and his point defence stopped me killing him while mine didn't.

Maybe if instead of shooting shells out of the air the point defence could slow them down to reduce their lethality.

At least with PD as a hard counter it's easy to predict what will happen in a given situation. Fights being very often decided by random rolls by automated turrets would be stupid. As a soft counter the game could be the better for it, but I think it'd lead to frustration if not done properly.

[yurch]

I'll agree on that one (the 120mm Burnfactor drives me crazy at a mere 10%), but I'm looking at it from a larger scale point of view.

Getting your projectile shot down is going to suck no matter what. When I mean 'more of them' I don't mean a point defense on every unit, but rather requiring the team to form an overlapping defense to get an effect similar to what we have with a single unit now.

I think mortars are going to need a serious looking-at soon anyway, the actual 'kick' added to the 120mm HE in this latest update has a much larger application than I bet the developers were bargaining for...

[yllamana]

Well, I'm not thinking point defence on every unit either. But it'd have to be added to more units if it was going to be possible to create overlapping defence like that. Since our only super annoying PD options at the moment are the Galaxy and the ion tower, the only thing you could overlap is those. Hermes can be a pain but not being able to shoot projectiles makes it pretty balanced.

I'd be interested in seeing a point defence deployable, actually. It'd never be too overpowered because it'd be relatively susceptible to 20mm spam and mortars would still kill it with airbursts probably, but it'd reduce the vulnerability of the other deployables. If all else failed you could always take it out with an ion.

If that's not enough then maybe some units with very limited point defence could be added (something like a Hermes but with a PD ion that wasn't strong enough to harm dropships could be interesting). Maybe they could even mount one on the Cutter to improve its use as a support unit?

I feel frustrated since I want to play with the toy soldiers but can't because 1.1 broke my DropTeam. Oh well.

[yurch]

I'm not too entirely sure they shouldn't all be like the hermes, really, being able to shoot down close-fired 120mm sounds like a hell of a feat to me. At least then you'll be sticking the galaxy hull-down somewhere and not as a wall.

And I don't think anything could reduce the vulnerability of the deployables. A strong breeze could knock them from thier stands.

ATGMs and mortars are really, really powerful, so there certainly is a need to still have a point defense in-game.

Unfortunately those carriers are a sort of second-class citizen on the field nowadays, invulnerability to thier weapons is a ctrl-r away...

[yurch]

On a related note, the towers have gone from 160 to a whopping 520 structural integrity points in the latest version.

Best start drawing up your capture-plans.

[yllamana]

I finally pinned down why I hate point defence so much. The counters to heavy tanks sitting a zillion miles away in the open (taking advantage of the fact that you can't close with them without being vulnerable to their weapon fire) are ATGMs and mortars. Point defence of any type instantly nullifies both those options, leading to stupid stuff like the ion Thor parked on the hill under the ion tower plinking away at everyone with little option to retaliate.

[ClaytoniousRex]

Finally got to the bottom of this.

Point defense is very much supposed to already be more of a soft counter in that you should be able to "roll it back" by putting enough fire into the air that it can't shoot it all down, and to a limited extent this does work. So to hit someone under point defense with an ATGM, for example, you should be able to have a team mate spam the point defense with lots of 20mm and thereby give your ATGM a chance of making it through the point defense (since it is overwhelmed and busy with all of the other incoming projectiles).

However, because of a bug we've just finally identified, the point defense is always going to switch away from those other rounds and onto the slower moving ATGM or mortar rounds. This isn't what was intended and will be fixed after 1.1.1.

[dan/california]

Clay does this apply to laser towers as well. They have pretty much been taking down any incoming fire of any significance , period.

I just want to state this is the best customer service/support of any game ever!

[ClaytoniousRex]

Yes, it does.