I think it’s more a case of people want a game, where no skill mechanics aren’t completely rewarded.
Then, let’s change that no skill mechanic into a mechanic with skill.
For example:
-Random direction plane spawn.
-Less armour for planes,
-better AA.
-Bunker, trenches and buildings as secure zones for infantry.
-More points for shootdown enemy planes, etc
-Reload points 5 km (as in some maps in Berlin)
3 Likes
Rolling barrages during an assault were extremely common for set piece attacks - as little as 100m in front of the troops.
These were developed in WW1 - it took some training, and a couple of battles, to persuade the troops that they were in less danger from the occasional “short” than from the enemy if the enemy had time to recover - so they were better off “hugging” the barrage.
2 Likes
The enemy being alerting to an incoming strike 30 seconds before it actually comes in is an obvious exploit and has to be unintended. I am sure that if it brought to the devs attention they will correct this oversight.
4 Likes
Direction won’t matter as people remember the free kill no skill bomb spots
Agree
Agree
Yes.
Agree.
Yup… I’d prefer forced landings tbh but yea… too close, too often as a resupply atm.
Artillery shouldn’t have a speed upgrade either… as much as I like it as a tool.
1 Like
Huh? No, it was a deliberate nerf along with a couple of other things - I gave the link to the update above.
I didn’t see where they intentionally added a warning to enemy players/the opposing team.
Perhaps I missed it. If you could point out that it would be appreciated.
that’s it:
( a little bit above )
you’re going to starve today.
go back in your room, and think about what you have done.
jokes aside for the main thread,
i have mixed feelings about it.
like, it is stupid that everyone can see it, and AI will automatically leave the area.
but on the other hand, for enlisted perspective, artillery it’s not about kills, but area denayal. otherwise they can be quite powerfull tools and therefore can be somewhat decisive.
like, all defenders on the last point, and an arty wipes all of them out. i don’t know how much fun can be for how much realistic would be.
agreed. just like the mortar, shouldn’t take that long and those have been nerfed previously ( as they were supposed to. no one liked that period with spam artillery was broken and un fun )
but, as far as i can see, not everyone is of the same opinion.
so again, i’m neutral about.
2 Likes
you forget one thing, many times we have to make a choice either we go on a side, we take the mortars, planes and tanks, we manage to find a hole to survive this, and then we have the player arty who puts the circle on your face, so what do you do, you pray that you will remain a bot of your squad that will survive, so move in the end on certain situations will be useless and this situation often that it is you, your team or the opposing team, will continue to take the arty
moreover yes there is now this warning but you forget a very BIG DETAIL!!! the fact that the arty continues to fall during several seconds whereas the red circle is not visible any more, and it is there that the arty is the most deadly!
when you place an artillery in front of the arrival of the base to defend or attack, the enemies often wait for the end, but also forget that the arty continues to fall after the circle is no more. And get slaughtered because of it.
And sometimes this gives a big advantage for a defense or a capture of a base!
IMO the artillery indication should not pop up until the first shell hits the ground. There is already a designed warning…a few shots for adjust fire (fire for effect) before the actual barrage begins.
To be clear, I am not saying the warning needs to be removed. It needs to be delayed for enemy players until the first shell hits the ground. There also should be audio added to the game where bots yell INCOMING in their respective language as an audible warning.
3 Likes
Another “main source of casualties historically was artillery” thread… Yuck. This does not mean that 2/3rds of deaths in this game should be arty. A battle is not a war statistic.
This is a very biased take, of the kind you only see from people who main arty. You are not supposed to be holed up in a dark corner, waiting for it to come off cooldown. It’s an area denial weapon the way it is now.
Arty is still very effective at buying extra time to capture points, by cutting off enemy approach, and it does kill people when I do it. It’s not about “inserting it in the game again” - What you are asking for is an artillery buff, no matter what you call this post.
I wouldn’t mind it landing 5-10 seconds faster, but arty should never be a main weapon. Using it presents zero risk for the radio operator, the reward should be equally negligible.
1 Like
The radio class is useless and anyone who argues otherwise doesn’t understand game design lol. In just about every path in squad upgrades, you get the choice between an engineer and a radioman, but please tell me what idiot would take a radio guy over an engineer?
You wouldn’t because they are functionally useless to most other classes.
People might still be butt hurt about the “artillery spam” meta (even tho I never had issues during that time) but making a class useless cuz your fee-fees hurt isn’t reasonable.
Since artillery changes, I have rarely died to one and most times that ends up happening is because of AI stupidity put themselves in bad spots to die from it.
2 Likes
the arty squad is for me a so-called “scout” unit
Two arty guys, a sniper, a machine gunner, and a sapper.
I always place myself in such a way to be able to see a maximum of movement of the enemy team. To make the infantry markings but also the tanks continuously.
I don’t stay too close to the fighting thanks to my sniper, in fact it’s him who does all the work, my squad stays in the background, and my sniper goes up on the roofs, or elsewhere to find the good spot, and it’s a spam of V mark that start, I try to mark useful, mark 1 bot as many do is not necessarily useful, on the other hand I mark the mobile spawns, the AA guns, etc etc. And my sniper also kills a lot of isolated bots or a whole squad depending on the situation.
why i target isolated bots, because most of the time they are bugged or stuck or left behind, so it’s not a player, it doesn’t have the replay kill so my position will be raised as late as possible.
It’s clearly the support unit in the game, but not the attack unit and the not first kill in arty, well not anymore with the balancing.
giving a bunch of information, and also blocking a push because the arty can allow it is part of the support, the fact that he can only have one now to throw, I find makes my gameplay with this squad even more interesting, because sometimes you have to use it with a bit more wisdom.
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to use the arty or not, but after the arty, it’s not the one that has the monopoly on killing on this squad, it’s my sniper. and the fact that it’s constantly marking infantry and tanks, gives a lot of information to our team.
I sometimes join a corner of an opponent’s map at the limit of the opponent’s spawns, I don’t farm fixed spawns because it’s not my mentality, but as soon as he tries to enter a base the sniper intervenes, coupled with artillery it’s even more formidable.
Since the arty limit was put in place for 1 per team at any given time, I have no problem with the red circle going away. It’s silly honestly and makes no sense that the enemy would know exactly where you called artillery.
3 Likes
Suggestions here included keeping the red dot warning, but only showing it after the 1st or 2nd ranging shot hits (thus giving ‘only’ 15-10 seconds pre-warning and more plausibility, since the ranging shots have hit, indicating the likely area).
In real life, if an attacking force had tanks, planes & artillery, like teams have in-game, the terrain would be covered with shell holes & buildings would be leveled or almost collapsing. And the main thing that would target & pulverize infantry on the field or in i.e trenches would be artillery.
Well, but that’s the fault of planes & other game-mechanics. If the simple fix to pre-warning from artillery was implemented, the numbers would reach better levels without having to touch other aspects of the game. And it should be reminded that the amount of artillery kills varies according to the game type, a lot more in Invasion (where you have static defenses) than in Conquest.
Considering the single-strike per team limit & the fact that bots, even from newbies, are nearly-perfectly automated to evacuate the barrage area & hardly ever get killed by artillery, I think the added realism & logic to the game from fixing that would outweight any benefits to new players.
What would really be helpful to new-players though would be the reduction in the delay before the strikes because, as I’ve said, people’s common sense will always be to aim the artillery thinking of an immediate strike, not a 25 second delayed one.
As was already discussed in another thread, artillery bombardments happened even during street-to-street fighting (as was the case in Berlin, Manilla, Stalingrad, etc.), not to mention tactics such as the creeping barrage that others mentioned here. If you read stories or talk to combat veterans from the era, it is not uncommon to hear things like “small-arms are only there to keep the enemy down before artillery (‘the big guns’) hits”…
So, no, the artillery as presented in-game is an actual realistic mechanic. Artillery was the main thing used to pulverize enemy infantry & soften enemy defensive positions and it was used (and is still used) even during CQC.
And this is unlike Bomber Planes, who would never strike positions where fighting was happening because of high probability of causing friendly-fire (planes from above are much more likely to kill those of your own than artillery from behind your lines).
Indeed, and I’m not arguing for 2/3 of in-game kills to come from artillery. As I said, artillery was used in CQC and Assaults, but you also have to adjust the numbers from pre-emptive barrages (as you mentioned), strikes behind the lines (suppressing enemy artillery positions and support crews, infantry resting or moving into combat etc.) and so forth.
The point was to remind that artillery was the main source of infantry casualties and shouldn’t account for so little of the amount of kills as it is doing right now due to the unintentional broken mechanics that came from the patch. I think the game should indeed prioritize infantry small-arms combat & vehicles (which you can actually pilot) kills, but calling artillery strikes should be an useful tool to rake-up enemy casualties, area denial & to remove enemies from defensive positions - and this currently isn’t the case in-game due to the pre-warning rendering artillery almost functionally ineffective.
As I wrote, fine for me as long as I am alerted early enough and have time to get to safety. A big text across the screen screaming “INCOMING ARTILLERY” is just as well OK. With everything exploding all around I don’t think I will recognize the sound of the first ranging shot behind me.
If I have the chance to rush out, and enemy has me pinned and kills me, that’s played good. If I have no chance to rush due to too short warning, and I’m torn to pieces, that game is broken.
My bad coming up with real life, your bad responding only half of my sentence. (For my second, unquoted part, would both forces try to push in 10 of its unlucky soldiers into that levelled terrain while levelling happens?) Real life appears to be a bad basis for gameplay arguments. This is a (very good) abstraction of something else, better to keep gameplay at first and reality on second place. Similar abstractions with somewhat different AI happened earlier as well:
The important question is, who would benefit from it? Is it better for the game overall? For me unexpected and unavoidable deaths are the main frustration factor. Making artillery pointless is a bad thing, so I’m not against small changes, but I’m perfectly OK with the <5% of deaths as it is now, it does not need much experience from the triggering side. Now if the guy would need to adjust angles, take into consideration elevation and wind… That’s different.
Oh and they won’t get killed the instant they rush out to the street to the perimeter of the artillery circle and face that Panzer I’ve just rescued them from by reaching the building in a super sneaky path? They’d be dead just like always, waiting at the perimeter. (A bad argument against a bad argument again, I fear.)
Bottom line: I don’t wish much increase in artillery efficiency until plane issues are resolved.
See reply above.
Also discussed above. The pre-warning mechanic is currently so broken that artillery isn’t really effective even for area-denial. The 1 strike per moment limitation + the long delays means that people have plenty of time to just make another route and walk around that single red-dotted area. If it is not placed in a choke point, it (a single dotted area in a whole map) will not make an actual difference for enemies who want to reach a point behind it. Not to mention that the long delays + weakened ranging shots means players can easily just walk through the entire area way before the time it hits.
Absolutely this. I feel like a fool for having set-up most of my squads with radio-operators, & for upping my radio-operator squad even. An entire class was rendered obsolete by the nerfs (well, not really by the nerfs per se, but by the unintended mechanics that came after the patch & which made in-game artillery functionally broken). I already spent one ‘changing orders’ card to get rid of radio operators, but I wish I had more. In new campaigns I’m playing, I’m going for mortarmen, flamethrowers & so forth, but not radio operators, I’m not even putting them in squads, I’d rather have a trooper with a backpack.
Artillery falls for 1-2 secs max after the red dot fades, by that time people already had 30 seconds to know the area of the strike & avoid it. But regardless, this also goes to show just how broken & poorly-timed the pre-warning mechanic currently in the game is.
I think what you’re describing is not people getting killed because of the faded red dot but because the artillery was called in a choke-point, which is currently the only way to get significant kills with artillery.
That’s another valid suggestion.
5% would be quite refreshing considering the in-game percentages right now. But the thing isn’t about percentages per se - many people won’t have the ability to know where to best call a strike & get a lot of kills with it on average (and yes, it is a skill, calling artillery isn’t just a mindless buttom clicking). The issue is the efficiency of the artillery, it being able to kill significant amounts of people if you correctly point it. It being an option, a weapon at your disposal. Right now, artillery isn’t effective - as I’ve said, I’ve seen strikes called over the heads of more than 40 soldiers that didn’t kill a single person - this is how broken artillery is).
So it is ok to have just ~5% of the casualties coming from artillery if one can actually kill enemies with it when a good strike is called.
This could well be represented by artillery not hitting 100% where you have pointed it 100% of the times. Radio operators can only give as much precise orders and artillery crews aren’t damn snipers who hit the exact area the radio operator desired. This would account for wind, etc.
1 Like
I think your argument is a little muddled. First it’s not killing any enemy because they have so long to run out of the circle, but then it’s killing too many friendlies, who presumably see the same circle and yet willingly run into it.
Calling in an artillery strike within less than 100m from friendlies; especially a blind strike like you see in this game, would be considered extremely dangerous and wasn’t done except in extreme circumstances, so your realism argument doesn’t really hold up.
Bots didn’t always run away from artillery; people complained about how dumb it was so they changed it to what we have today. Some happy medium must be found: I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing a delay before the circle does show up
I was in the same boat. I used 2 orders to switch out radiomen and still need more. Before the nerfs, I thought the artillery was in a great spot. The biggest problem was the fact that 10 could be called at once making it a mess
2 Likes