2018-07-20 Weapon Bases and Guard Towers

[Phenoix12]

If extremely long range weapons are implemented perhaps a different option to making them incredibly week is to make them extremely inaccurate. If you're firing a weapon at a planet from such great planetary distances accuracy will probably suffer do to planetary rotation and system rotation so ti would make sense that bombarding a planet from beyond the range the planetary defense guns would make hitting targets hard.

Perhaps a combination of weaker weapons and inaccuracy?

Also if you're going to implement extremely long range weapons then it would have to be possible to also build them on planet. Which would also just negate the whole 'firing from outside the range of the planet's guns' thing anyway.

[Vectorus]

Inaccuracy is fine too instead of weakness. Could even be slightly fairer if planets fire back at super-range.


It still gives ships a chance to win, if it does splash damage. Misses against spacecraft just miss. Against planets, still chance for explosive hit.

Or make up something to prevent use by planets. Perhaps causes massive radiation in firing chamber hazardous to cities, but can be vented in space.

[5crownik007]

Real-life has this problem as well, except real life offers a solution.
Anti-aircraft guns(SAM sites and the like) can destroy aircraft with very good success rates, however, aircraft are still effective and still used because SAM sites can be circumvented.
How do real life militaries defeat SAM sites? I'm no expert, but I'm assuming they send ground forces to attack it, and if the ground assault succeeds, the ground forces plant explosives on the SAM site and detonate it.

Bringing this tangent back to SoH:
Allow a method to circumvent the air defenses that isn't completely perfect. Vehicles(space transport, space rocket) should not be targetable by these air defenses. This would allow an avatar to take a group of troops down to the surface with themself, attack the installation from the ground(which may be heavily guarded by gun turrets, but that's fine, we can't let it be TOO easy) and destroy the air defenses from the ground. Place a weak point somewhere on these buildings where if explosives are detonated, the tower is disabled until repair.

But that's just my australian 2 cents.

[Vectorus]

It's not a bad thought, but I'm pretty sure that only happens in video games.

In real life, no one knows 100% how missile defences interact, since there hasn't been a major symmetrical war since they became ubiquitous. I'm moderately certain that you combat SAMs and anti-ships by having a low radar profile and having more simultaneous firepower than they do. Again, possibly with more range, too.


That's not to say Hazeron can't take the gamey solution. But those turrets will murder ground forces and hand-placed explosives won't dent 400 million hp buildings.

Cloaking shields, inspired by low radar profiles, might work. Haxus may have his own ideas from his knowledge of modern warplanes. Fire a shot, which decloaks you, and get out before they can react. Repeat once "alert level" has gone down? Includes that "speed bump" dynamic, yet again.

The general idea that is emerging is that reducing planets from orbit should be slow and involved, but possible with about moderate risk when using a dedicated weapons system/technique. It could be implemented in more than one way at once. But it's not where we are right now.

That said, thanks to Haxus for getting bases working in the first place! Guard turrets haven't been so good in forever.

[Haxus]

For years, people complained that city defenses were pathetic. They were right.

Guard towers were pointlessly ineffective. Military units tended to be blended with the civilian populace. Shields didn't seem to shield anything. Weapon bases had problems and were easily put out of commission with a bullet to the head of the weapon operator.

The pendulum has swung the other direction.

[Ikkir Isth]

I'm ok with this while Hazeron gets stable; we still need vehicle revamp, items revamp, and even creatures revamp anyway.

No point dealing with numbers / stats till new vehicles and items get in.

[Celarious]

I'm ok with this while Hazeron gets stable; we still need vehicle revamp, items revamp, and even creatures revamp anyway.

No point dealing with numbers / stats till new vehicles and items get in.

I'm with Ikkir on this, no point balancing until everything actually works

[Haxus]

Speaking of actually working, I introduced an error at the last minute that prevents laser towers from importing lenses.

I made a change to them to import lenses only if they did not already have one. Only one is needed and they were importing enough to fill their cargo storage, which is a waste. That last minute change caused them to not import lenses at all.

You can give them a lens yourself. That should get them going. Or wait until the next server update and they will get their own.

I also made a note to show the ammo at gun towers. There is currently no way to know if the gun tower has a lens since it gets taken from cargo storage and loaded into the gun, like a turret on a spacecraft.

[Mr. Mortius]

The change in balance will keep things fresh, I guess. Now might be a good time to mention that new resource, plutonium.

[QuakeIV]

With respect to defeating air defenses, you actually generally launch a massive air attack and try to send aircraft with the countermeasures and maneuverability to have a decent chance of avoiding the missiles. Or if you are china, you try to run them out of ammo I guess (i tend to doubt chinas ability to defeat modern air defenses as they are right now). Sending in ground troops generally isn't especially desirable because their ground defenses are almost always way deadlier than their air defenses, and if you defeat their air defenses you can erase their ground defenses with impunity.

I think wearing down cities at ultra long range should be perfectly viable for star ships. Yes the cities are massive, but they are on predictable trajectories. You could easily imagine some kind of kinetic bombardment weapon that can shell the shit out of cities, and the cities could only return fire against other cities, because spacecraft can just move out of the way of said weapons. Maybe big and slow nuke lobbing systems. Something like that could be a sort of balancing factor against the power of cities I think.

Assuming shields played into this, I think this could lead to some sort of siege mechanic thing some of us have always wanted. That is to say, something that provides time to react to enemy invasion if you can't be online 24/7. For instance, maybe a special kind of shield bubble that can withstand any damage but only for a set amount of time (increasing logarithmically as you build the system bigger so there is some upper limit for any one worlds siege defenses). Then you have to potentially shell a city for quite a while before it gives in and can be taken by force properly.

e: It might be better if the siege shield only really works against the super long range stuff, so that if you really want you can close in to weapon range and try to slug it out against their guns.