Posted: Tue Jun 16, 2009 9:42 pm
I've been thinking a bit about the problems of static, defensive gameplay, and the best way to prevent it, at least as I see it, is twofold.
First of all people should have early and good acces to artillery that has more range then defensive emplacements. Artilery needs to be made so that it is devastating against slow or stationary targets but ineffective against moving targets. This would force the defenders to take a proactive stance and go out and destroy the artilery before the opponent is capable of destroying the defensive emplacements. Destroying or capturing normal buildings should still be mainly a short-range afair, but destroying defensive emplacements should be a long range affair. This also means that we need some kind of artillery that can shoot through alephs, or some way to bypass alephs alltogheter, or else people'd just pull up a lot of defenses around the alephs.
Besides that it would probably be best if units have a decent chance of surviving long enough to get close to the defenses and disable them manualy. To acomplish this I propose a new kind of equipment, a portable defense grid. Basicly, this'd be a large, spherical shield that'd keep out at least a part of the incomming weapons, but not units themselves. It could either be a percentage of all shots, or everything untill it runs out of energy. Such a system could be mounted on a vehicle, with it's power depending on the size of the vehicle. This would hopefully provide an attack force with enough defense to make it close to the defenseive emplacements. From there they can start capturing or destroying the turrets and taking out the defending units.
Of course these two options sound a bit contradictory, since the defenders could use grid generators to keep out artillery shells as well. So I think grids should normaly only keep out fast projectiles. This means that slow artilery projectiles and possibly also laser-based weapons (are we going to have lightning and sonic weapons as well?) would be capable of bypassing grids completely or to a certain extent.
First of all people should have early and good acces to artillery that has more range then defensive emplacements. Artilery needs to be made so that it is devastating against slow or stationary targets but ineffective against moving targets. This would force the defenders to take a proactive stance and go out and destroy the artilery before the opponent is capable of destroying the defensive emplacements. Destroying or capturing normal buildings should still be mainly a short-range afair, but destroying defensive emplacements should be a long range affair. This also means that we need some kind of artillery that can shoot through alephs, or some way to bypass alephs alltogheter, or else people'd just pull up a lot of defenses around the alephs.
Besides that it would probably be best if units have a decent chance of surviving long enough to get close to the defenses and disable them manualy. To acomplish this I propose a new kind of equipment, a portable defense grid. Basicly, this'd be a large, spherical shield that'd keep out at least a part of the incomming weapons, but not units themselves. It could either be a percentage of all shots, or everything untill it runs out of energy. Such a system could be mounted on a vehicle, with it's power depending on the size of the vehicle. This would hopefully provide an attack force with enough defense to make it close to the defenseive emplacements. From there they can start capturing or destroying the turrets and taking out the defending units.
Of course these two options sound a bit contradictory, since the defenders could use grid generators to keep out artillery shells as well. So I think grids should normaly only keep out fast projectiles. This means that slow artilery projectiles and possibly also laser-based weapons (are we going to have lightning and sonic weapons as well?) would be capable of bypassing grids completely or to a certain extent.