I can see where this is a bit of a problem. The whole point of a red zone to to give teams a somewhat fair chance of spawning and fighting back. If players are able to camp the other team while sitting in a safe zone it defeats the entire purpose of having a red zone.
Now that said i dont know if addressing the range of the weapon is the right way to go about it. Maybe making all players and equipment immune to damage. I would also remove turrets from the red zones though.

Was it the enemy team that pinned you, or was it a lone forge gunner? If it was just one guy, you need to get good.

Large Rail Guns have a range of 600m while the Forge Gun has a range of 300m with absolute max of 320m.

EDIT: Removed incorrect info, my mistake.

That. And some of them don't even actually hit to 320.

Then they would be able to shoot out but not get shot themselves?

I Forge snipe tanks in this manner all the time. They like eating my Breach blasts.

This sort of leads into my next topic, the assault forge guns do not fit the game's usual definition of assault class. A proper name would be Tactical forge gun, seeing as the only people I've seen use the things use them as fast firing long distance sniper rifles. The assault (not capable of holding a charge after 2.5 seconds) leads me to believe that this is a close quarters infantry weapon, not a long distance one.
A proper balance for this gun would be to lower the range but give it significantly greater splash radius, a forge gun that doesn't hold a charge is clearly meant for anti infantry and should be balanced more towards it.

I don't often complain about weapons or vehicles in this game, but 90% of my tanks being blown to hell by the assault forge gun tells me that there's something off with the overall balance of AV in the game. This topic will probably **** off a bunch of die-hard forge gunners, but anyone who specs into vehicles will tell you that this weapon is a menace.

You're doing it wrong Tots. These forums are about calling for nerfs, not exploring game design balance. We have many fine archived threads filled with toxic conversation for your edification. Also helpful for getting a handle on the forum metagames.

As an I-FG that kind of change would be welcomed indeed. Although I suspect those with boots on the ground would get rather angry (rightfully so) since already with half the blast radius of a grenade has some calling for nerfs.

Now that's a proper AV weapon. The Assault however is not, it offers mobility, flexibility and range that is currently being taken advantage of and gives a very unfair advantage to vehicles.

The assault (not capable of holding a charge after 2.5 seconds) leads me to believe that this is a close quarters infantry weapon, not a long distance one.

Honestly, in my experience it's the opposite. To use FG against infantry you need that quarter-second after your shot is fully charged to line your shot up just right. Because the Assault can't store a charge, it works better the larger the target is. So I'd say the weapons are working as intended. (Much to the detriment of tankers.)

Also, on another note: I agree skyscraper sniping is a problem. It always has been whenever the flight ceiling is raised. But in potentially biased defense, people FG Sniping from up there may want to consider a career in laproscopic surgery. You're lucky if you can hit the single pixels standing still with the draw distance, much less a moving target.

Any time I get FG sniped I think, "Damn. Skill." not "Damn. OP!" But that's the anti-infantry perspective...

Forge sniping is not all that difficult, especially with a variant that can hold a charge. I do agree that most cases involve tracking a few pixels, but once those small pixels are seen, lining up a shot so that the crosshairs turn red becomes relatively easy. In my experience, the farther away a target is, the less movement a forge sniper would have to perform on his or her joystick. When things get too close, then the problem of chasing down targets becomes more apparent.

I can't remember in what post, but i did read that the "Z" distance does not count as distance.
also
heavy turrets rendering distance suck, little turrets have a better rendering distance.

So apparently the forge gun has a range greater than that of a particle cannon. Apparently there's a new bug where forge gunners now sit on top of the tall spires where they are so high up that their player model and red dot doesn't even show up when you're looking at them, yet they can still nail you with a forge blast.
I grabbed my madruger and tried to do some tank sniping when some forge guns forced me to take cover, I was literally pinned down the entire match because they had me camped. Every time I looked right at where the shots were clearly coming from no player model showed up, only the occasional name tag whenever a sniper looked at them, but the issue was that they were able to snipe players without being hit by a particle cannon.
We've all been abused by forge gunners in the past before but this is going too far, if a tank cannot take these pricks (let along see them) out when they can easily shoot me then there is something clearly wrong here.