Honestly there isn't any reason tanks shouldn't have an AoE Cannon Blast. If things are set right, that should absolutely be an option. It's a give/take and balance thing, but a slow-firing, high-damage AoE blast isn't unreasonable for a tank. There's dozens of games that include that, and do it well. Great for clearing bunkers and such.

It's dependent upon how the hulls are implemented. If they're done like DUST? yeah, no let's stick to the point-fire turrets.

My honest opinion is that light turrets should be basically sentinel heavy weapons on a pintle mount. Forge guns, HMGs, etc. Heavier vehicles (not HAVs) might have twin-linked heavy weapons like twin-assault forges that alternate barrels, etc. Sh*t like that. I highly recommend we think less "DUST did it this way" and look at interesting ideas (I'm fond of W40k vehicles).

Heavy turrets should be big, slow, and carry a rather large, noticeable punch, IMHO. I detest the amount of pussyfooting around that we've had to go through with the turrets. An M-1 Can theoretically do a bit over an 8 second rotation 360 degrees. That's about 40 Degrees per second, according to internet sources that I may or may not find dubious. Similarly a challenger has a 9 second rotation.

That rotation rate isn't what I'd call great for tracking lemming infantry in close. works just fine for distant enemies with a coaxial machinegun though. All heavy turrets should have a coaxial. There's some real-world conventions that just work WELL. There are some that may not translate to the game well.

But i like tanks that can punch hard. I actually felt better about gunnlogis when they had splash, oddly enough.

There's a LOT of neat room to play for turrets. I just hope we don't repeat the Madrugar .50 caliber anti-infantry machinegun.... err, I mean Plasma cannon....

Seriously that thing fired more or less identically to an M2 .50 cal machinegun.

Perhaps those specialized AV options would be useful for dealing with Tanks? Adding new AV options to deal with LAV's is like cutting two of your chair legs shorter because your floor is not level.

It seems a little odd to require specialized AV weapons to take out a jeep.

Well as for dropsuits I think it's mostly that a dropsuit has flesh directly underneath it, where vehicles just have more layers of armor beneath them. Lets also not forget that from a purely gameplay point of view, it's a **** load easier to tag a vehicle or its weakspot than it is to hit a dropsuit or its weakspot.

As for needing AV to hurt vehicles, again what if we had AV sidearms and personal deployable turret installations? Then basically only people who refuse to deploy AV wouldn't have AV, in which case that's their own damn fault. I mean maybe LAVs can take 10-20% damage from small arms (possibly dropships too), but anything more than that and vehicles would just evaporate the second they try to move past a few enemies.

maybe LAVs can take 10-20% damage from small arms (possibly dropships too), but anything more than that and vehicles would just evaporate the second they try to move past a few enemies.

But literally every single player on the map then has AV. Without boosting vehicle HP a ton, how do vehicles not simply explode when moving past basically anywhere on the map? Automatic weapons can maintain damage at range very easily with virtually no way for the pilot to tell where it's coming from. Maps would have to be massive with small player counts for this not to immediately imbalance every engagment against vehicles.

Also don't forget that on top of almost 100% of players on the map now possessing AV, there are ALSO actual AV weapons and other vehicles on the field. I guess I'm more in favor of everyone using teamwork to take out various threats as oppossed to simply taking the thought out of things and giving everyone AV all the time.

Oh, and who said anything about a rifle being able to take advantage of a weakspot?

If it's a weapon tagged to do full damage to that type of vehicle? Sure, weakspot.

If it's some chucklef**k with a scrambler pistol?

No weakspot for you.

I just worry about that idea a lot since LAVs were already tremendously useless despite having potential to be useful additions to the battle. They're already paper trucks as is, so if kept similarly there would literally never be a reason to deploy one because any jackass could shoot in your general direction and take you out, or severely wound you before even getting where you're going.

I feel that 10-20% damage is better, but have more sidearm AV options, possibly a dropsuit with two grenade slots, and the long since "promised" personal deployable turret installations. This would make it so every single player would have options to handle vehicles at all points in any given match, unless they straight up refused to use them.

"Weakspot" is a relative term. It might be more literal to say "Weaker spot".

Just popping in to say this. A weak spot doesn't have to be a "critical hit" location. It can simply mean small arms do damage when hitting [insert location].

That's incorrect. We came up with many ideas that would were agreed on by both sides, like lock-on warnings and countermeasure modules.

The reason nothing ever came out of those discussions is because the solutions we found that made both sides happy were apparently beyond the developers to implement, so we could never go beyond futile attempts to try and create a TTK for Swarm Launchers against aircraft.

Mobius Wyvern has a point. We did figure out how to balance Dropships and Swarm Launchers in a way that would be fun and engaging for both sides. It is just that the solutions we came up with were out of scope for the DUST on the PS3.

But with NOVA on the PC, we have a chance to do aircraft and anti aircraft right. So lets talk about that a bit.

Lock-on Missile Counters:

- Missiles and their con trails rendering for pilots.. imagine that!

- Attempted lock warning, Lock on warning, and Missile pursuit warning. (Better than not knowing until the first one hits.)

- Missile proximity warning. The beep for the Missile pursuit warning beeps faster the closer it gets.

- Counter Measures (flairs, flack, chafe). Chance of decoying a missile increasing with proximity so that timing on releasing the Counter Measures directly effects their effectiveness. The flack/flairs/chafe only hangs in the air for a few seconds before it falls away and become ineffective.

- Fighters should be maneuverable enough to turn more sharply than a missile, so a good pilot should be able to out maneuver them. This is dependent on the pilot being able to spot the missile and getting their timing right.

- Dropships should be tough enough to take a few hits.


The swarm launcher would still be the bane of the existence of inexperienced or incompetent pilots, but good pilots would be more concerned about Forge Guns.



Fighter Wing Hardpoints for Missiles:

- 4 hard points to mount ordinance on the wings. Need to land at a supply depot or base facility to reload.

- Locking missiles with the same lock on mechanics as a Swarm Launcher. A single Fighter missile would do damage equivalent to a Swarm of the smaller Swarm Launcher missiles.

- Dumb fire missiles that do more damage than Locking missiles (one shot other Fighters, and do significant damage to tanks).


Fixed Nose Turrets:

Fighters should also have a medium turret (possibly a pair of medium turrets) mounted in a fixed position firing in the direction the fighter is pointed. (If paired turrets, the streams should not converge enough for both turrets to hit a target as amll as a solder.) Having the turret fixed is a balance measure to prevent fighter pilots from camping infantry on the ground. We know what happens when an aircraft points its nose at the ground for too long.


Fighter Mobility:

Fighters should use the same type of propulsion as Dropships, but being lighter, they should be much more responsive. They should also have stubby wings which provide lift when they are moving at high speed. Have a button to toggle to fix the fighter engines in a forward thrust configuration, or release them into Dropship mode. Have flaps and rudder engage when engines are in forward thrust configuration. Make the switch a manual toggle, so pilots are able to engage in stalling maneuvers, which an automatic switch based on flight speed would not allow.

It would be a bit like a Harrier Jet, but with the maneuverability of a helicopter in hover mode.

I also don't want fire & forget missiles ever again.

A VTOL fighter doesn't have to have slow lateral movement. It can be fast. Make 'em fast, light and violent.

I also don't want fire & forget missiles ever again.

In order for the missiles to hit their target, the AV should keep the lock-on on the vehicle as much as they can. Doing so increases the speed of the missiles, while losing lock-on would slow the missiles. If they get too slow, or change target, the missiles detonate early.

The Launcher would have an X-Range for activating lock and releasing payload, while their lock could extend up to Y-Range so as to balance vehicle speed.

A properly designed Fire-and-Forget weapon would have restrictions in turning most importantly such that you can out-turn the missiles if you fly well. Countermeasures like flares and chaff should also be available to try and break their lock.

Now, I do like the idea of a weapon that requires you to hold a lock and thus fires a missile that is harder to defeat.

I would say if you lose lock, missiles go on terminal ballistic path. IE they fly straight and fast in whatever direction they were pointed.

And traditional fixed-wing aircraft are problematic in the extreme on maps that aren't huge.

I was thinking somewhere between Harrier and Cobra gunship for intent on flying vehicles.

Auto-Target would be fun. Except they might also auto-target your friendly vehicles as well. Happened in Eve Online one time when someone brought in a Caldari ship to a PvP fight in low-sec but ended up wiping out his own roam fleet because he used Auto-Targeting missiles. Needless to say, his intended targets got away.

As far as missiles not rendering, that was a PS3 issue above anything else.

The missiles would be fired from beyond projectile/effect rendering distance, and then move in faster than the PS3's GPU could process them.

Running the game on something other than a potato wouldn't have issues like that.

It was a programming issue, the systems limitations should have been well known to everyone that needed to know. Not that a more powerful system wont help... But power alone doesn't make up for bad code... I can program something that will slow down the whole system while doing absolutely nothing of use, no matter how decent the hardware.

I would say if you lose lock, missiles go on terminal ballistic path. IE they fly straight and fast in whatever direction they were pointed.

I'm sure CCP could make sure that doesn't happen.

As long as they're designed not to fire forwards this would be fine, otherwise you'll get a lot of people not holding the lock for more than a millisecond, because it's already launching forwards.
Not a huge problem for vehicles that move a lot on multiple axis like dropships, but ground vehicles and possibly infantry would be at risk of fire and forget gameplay.

If however the missiles follow the lock, it would allow for interesting manoeuvring of the missiles, allowing the person launching to fire around multiple obstacles and friendly assets, or even just to juke a dropship into dodging one way and ending up in a whole world of trouble.



Hopefully they keep the risk, misuse should have consequences... And it would be funny as hell.

I also don't want fire & forget missiles ever again.

For a jet, VTOL needs to be for landing only. We don't want some kind of multi-mode aircraft that can do everything and makes other aircraft obsolete. Even if it doesn't do that, balancing will be a nightmare.

There's a reason why no one takes the "ESF"s in Planetside 2 seriously.

Jets and helicopter-type vehicles need to be separated in order to have both be balanced and fun.

Are there going to be other aircraft besides Fighters and Dropships?

Fighters (Light Aircraft): light, fast, and nimble. No passengers.
Dropships (Medium Aircraft): Bigger, slower, heavier, and tougher than Fighters and carry 6 passengers.

There is not a whole lot of overlap there.


And as Breakin Stuff mentioned in another post, exclusively fixed winged aircraft are problematic on small maps, and let's not forget that a huge map for infantry is still a small map for a Fighter.

Allowing the Fighter to hover does not necessitate making it tanky. Being able to hover and be maneuverable at low speeds would allow them to take cover between buildings, or fly down a street in a complex. Then they only have to deal with local dangers, and if things get hot locally, they can head up, pick up speed, and head out. Either that, or just duck around a corner.

Fixed wing mode is really more to give the full fighter experience in Fighter vs Fighter combat. But entirely fixed winged Fighters would have little use on maps sized for an infantry game.

I'm not sure if that would be a good idea for a game, but I do remember a hilarious instance of a YouTube recording of DCS World where the player fired a heatseeking missile without knowing his friend had hit his afterburners above and in front of him, which caused the missile to make a sharp turn up and detonate right behind him, which wiped him out in one shot.