StarDestroyer.Net BBS

That's why when I started modding Red Alert one of the first things we did was add full directional armour, and reduce turn and turret traverse speed to match, then added light tanks that were fast enough to take advantage (and turreted, for better flanking) However, there is a trade off, in that you end up doing an awful lot of move micro to make sure you have optimal facing, and it really threw the balance for a while, even lead to total artillery domination for a little while (because if you were moving towards artillery and they were firing on you, they'd always land behind and cause damage) It's something that needs to be handled with care, and I can see why they left it out of C&C4, seeing as battles tend to be insane intermixed sets of Nod and GDI units coming from all directions thanks to the crawler system and the multiplayer gameplay. Being flanked is a constant, it would mean very little.

Games that use armour types to create hard counters always have useless features like that. It's cuter when they're like Sins and have hard counter driven types AND an armour rating that's totally redundant.

Stark wrote:Games that use armour types to create hard counters always have useless features like that. It's cuter when they're like Sins and have hard counter driven types AND an armour rating that's totally redundant.

Sins makes perfect sense. That Flak Frigate has 20 damage! My Heavy Cruiser has 12. That obviously means that the heavy cruiser does more DPS, except to Beam Gun Frigates! Duuuh. (facepalm).

... how the heck does Sins system work?

(because if you were moving towards artillery and they were firing on you, they'd always land behind and cause damage)

Have the attacks use 2 damage types. HE for direct hit and explosive for splash damage. Make the first better against vehicles. Also make artillary fire less often (so having them go toe to toe with vehicles is a bad idea) but have longer range (so you can ambush enemy armor columns if they stay still- makes watching for scouts important). If you add in a random movement button, it would allow them to avoid fire... while at the same time losing concentration of fire and possibly presenting their rears and sides to the enemy.

There is already a random move button, but we went for the far simpler solution of simply removing the ability of indirect artillery to deal directional damage. It's coming down from above anyway, it's not as though armour facing matters very much in such a situation.

open_sketchbook wrote:There is already a random move button, but we went for the far simpler solution of simply removing the ability of indirect artillery to deal directional damage. It's coming down from above anyway, it's not as though armour facing matters very much in such a situation.

If you can choose between direct and indirect fire it does. Indirect fire is easier to dodge, shorter range and less damaging. Direct can be blocked by terrain, hits front armor and makes it easier to tell where the artillary is.

We've only got one unit that can do that (Vanquisher Artillery) and it works exactly in that manner. Most of the other artillery have other, wierder secondaries that take up the slot (like the Horizon Tank's ability to put enemy turrets into stasis so you can bypass turrets)

Samuel wrote:shorter range and less damaging

Howitzers have shorter range and less damage than a tank cannon? Do you know anything about artillery systems?

open_sketchbook wrote:There is already a random move button, but we went for the far simpler solution of simply removing the ability of indirect artillery to deal directional damage. It's coming down from above anyway, it's not as though armour facing matters very much in such a situation.

It seems with the directional facing you're wanting more semblance of realism, if so artillery should be able to wtfpwn any unit on the battlefield, to balance it out make your aircraft more effective against the artillery.

I was refering to an artillary piece doing direct fire versus indirect fire.

It seems with the directional facing you're wanting more semblance of realism, if so artillery should be able to wtfpwn any unit on the battlefield, to balance it out make your aircraft more effective against the artillery.

Or make it so that artillary has to set up to fire and is easier to damage while doing so that planes can easily sweep in and rack up kills.

We highly exaggerated artillery range, but gave them literal paper armour; everything will kill them if you get in range. The optimal counters are ground attack planes, stealth infantry, counter-artillery and fast attack vehicles (which, when moving full speed, will outrun artillery blasts) but poorly deployed artillery are vunerable to pretty much everything.