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Thread: Gameplay: Fire/Airstrike missions
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Old 2011-08-01, 06:41 PM   [Ignore Me] #1
NapalmEnima
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Fire/Airstrike missions


Originally Posted by Me
Yeah... speaking of arty... make bases choose between the Heavy AA and a nice artillery piece. Not the end-all-be-all, but something capable of bringing a serious hurtin'. One shotting infantry (over a fairly wide area) that were out in the open sounds quite reasonable for a dedicated AP round. Ditto for dedicated AV. If you sit in one spot long enough for the round to actually get to you, and its a round designed to take out whatever you happen to be... it should bloody well take you out.

Now there's a cool command ability: Fire Mission.

"Please blow the tar out of coordinates X,Y. That round was a little short. Okay, dead on. Fire For Effect"

And watch stuff go kaboom.

The down side of arty is that its not all that much fun to Actually Do. You just point at some spot in the sky and pull the trigger. Not very satisfying.

Two possible solutions:
1) Make it more interesting. A: Wire guided missiles. B: Shell cams
2) Phat Lewt (or BEP in this case). Blowing up lots of stuff should pretty much rake in the BEP, but then that's kind of a given. Just don't reduce their BEP because they're slaughtering folks "the easy way".

So make it more fun, or make it "pay" well.
That got me thinking about how fire/airstrike missions would work:

An air or arty group would have to make themselves available for missions.
Grunts On The Ground would then have to request missions from them.

And there'd have to be some kind of limit on it so the first arty squad that showed up didn't get spammed by 50 different fire missions in some heated battle.

One way to control this sort of thing would be to only allow such requests within an outfit or platoon. There'd be no "pub" artillery/air mission list that squad leaders/infiltrators/etc could add to.

Another option would be to make it an Arty/Air squad leader unlock: Available mission slots. Once those slots are full, you have to wait until they're completed/rejected in order to accept new ones.

Come to think of it, publicly requestable mission slots sounds like a handy general ability for higher-ups to use to manage squads. Squad-of-Type-X ready for mission types A & B. Squad-of-type-Y ready for missions types B, C, and D.


(and do you allow "subcontracting"? My squad is supposed to blow up Target X. Is it kosher for me to ask infiltrator group Y to do it for me?)
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