Where are people positioning their turrets?

I place my turrets as close to the planet as possible. Im not really concerned with plugging the phaselanes (also what automatic placement places them and the AI ) as people have already said , its already easy to bypass guass platforms. I just surround my planet with them , so they are in anti-siege positions.

Yes, it is way too easy to exploit. You should've seen beta 1. There was no limit on number of structures (except trade ports) and gauss turrets could hit the jump exit points. I remember someone saying that they would regularly build 50+ hangars around their planets. And yes, the range does need to be played with. If you jump in a large fleet, the frontmost ships are in range of the turrets.

I don't think that having fleets jump in under the guns is a bad thing, personally.

If you jump into a fortress world, you know what's coming. The first wave are going to die, that's a fact, jack. That's why you fill the first wave with the crummy ships you don't care about, to act as loss leaders.

Not that it really matters much. In my experiance, with a PJI and a wall of turrets, the AI just runs the turrets anyway, the bombardment ships going straight for the planet, while the rest just faff around shooting at random things until they get killed. They never actually target the PJI, for some reason.


And the way I defend my worlds is to make a LONG line of gauss turrets, 5-10 of them, with a repair platform or two behind them, a PJI, a few more turrets nearer the planet so as to kill anything in bombardment range, and the rest hangars.

well humans won't be QUITE so dumb (except maybe Kosc) I think one of the main problems people are having is that they can't choose which ships actually go in 'under the gun.' There is currently no way to make a fleet formation in which your weaker ships are surrounded by tougher ones, they just jump in as a mob and hope things work out for the best. If formations and maybe a better pathing/targeting AI could be instituted, making weaker ships better defended and more likely to attack what you want them to attack, it would eliminate many of the defensive/offensive problems we are currently having.

Of course, that all depends on whether or not what I just said is actually possible to do...

Because we have nothing to say, for or against, and are waiting for someone else to come up with something to get the ball rolling...

I, honestly, don't think its going to happen though.

I commented on mines on about three separate threads and after that I got tired of it. Space is 3D and HUGE, any mines small enough to be undetectable would probably be too small for anything to run into it. Any mines that are large enough to be hit by a ship would easily be detectable to sensors and the ships would just shoot them. Now the explosions can't be too small or else they wont damage the ship shields at all, and if it's too big, you can't place them close together for a fear of a chain reaction.

Now if you could somehow make the perfect size of mine that ships wouldn't be able to detect, would be considerably damaged by, and wouldnt start a chain reaction that would blow up your entire planet, how do you make it so YOUR ships dont run into them? Everything is constantly moving in space so a simple map would be useless. You would have to have transmitters on each and every mine showing where they are.

Now what happens when A) A mine's transmitter fails or somebody runs into your system and jams the signal?

You would be utterly screwed   !

Believe it or not there is a trick to gauss defense, and while yes an attack bonus would be nice, I like the idea of being able to build things to suplement them. if anyone has seen/played halo then u kno the defense platforms that surrounded the plaents, if those were confined to the inner ring then those have a limited range say half the graav well then those are the uber gauss cannons that reload slow, and maybe combining them with a hanger defense or something like that because hanger dfense gets a killed so easily

So don't go for a contact mine, go for some kind of stand-off mine. E. G. a laser warhead of some kind, or give it engines to "ram" with. Also, don't forget that phase lanes essentially act as a chokepoint, giving a legitimate position for placing the mines.



Use IFF transponders so they only engage enemies.



A) give the mine self-diagnostics that signal HQ of a malfunction, then self-destruct if a counter-order isn't received within the given time limit.

If jamming is possible, thats a valid concern. The question is, are you using a type of transmission susceptible to jamming (radio) or not (ansible).

Not really, u probably never played Homeworld

What Ron Lugge said can be done. But also stealth mines can be implemented (mines that cloak). It's either that or sensor jamming.

BTW Ron why do you have a final fantasy mage avatar?

Remember the magnetic mines from Homeworld/Homeworld 2? They were devistating.

ok well off mines the whole idea of planet defense being realelistic would be coming from the suface as well as the space platforms, the planet should get a squad for each lvl of civic infustructure, or some sort of special gun on the surface that get s maned until population gets below a certain level, something like that before u go all technical and start talking about using IFF Transpoders and stealth mines.

Because thats my avatar, were'er I go! From MoO3, to SEV, to Diablo II and WoW, you can track me via my black mage avatar... Well, my "normal" one is a little animated .gif, but you get the idea. Sometimes I go by Rilbur, sometimes by Ron, but always -- always -- I bring the BM with me (assuming the board allows custom avatars).



GAAAAH! I have yet to find a copy of that game. Its driving me crazy! The only time I found a place selling it, they wouldn't take my debit card because of a stupid typo that I can not track down for the life of me (in either the billing address or my name...).

haha, I'm half tempted to mail you my copy.. Have you tried Ebay? I don't play it anymore, though I have been thinking it for a time. Only thing I didn't like about the second one is that ships (fighters) were always in groups of five, so you couldn't have a massive group of like 30 fighters in a claw formation...

Yes, the defense is a bit messed up.
But this game also forces some type of play. The gravity well is rather small, Ships are huge and have fair range. You can jump away at the edge of the gravitational field but normally ships enter at the same place. And the lack of real 3d.

Given that, static defenses are ok, since there IS a bottle neck, unfortunately you can’t place weapons AT the bottle neck?! So static defenses are NOT ok now . . Problems with the current system start here.
These two commands I need more information to use correctlyShort range static defenses are only a speed bump (unless massed), or easily avoided (if massed)
Limited Fighters/bombers are a threat but a minor one.
The planet is totally defenseless.

What needs to be done is to conceive the manor of a planetary siege should be in the game and then go about making it so rather then patching it up by tweaking the current system.

Some possibilities given he current game system (things that will not likely to be changed)

Layered planetary defense:
Defense gets more dense/effective the closer you get to the planet. (The planet is the main focus of defense) . Attacking ships MAY be able to sit on the edges of the system and use stand off weapons to pick away at outer defenses or possibly fire stand off siege weapons (minor damage to planet and attacking fleet) as fleet moves in both possible planet damage and Fleet damage increases. This allows a real siege that could isolate a planet (in well) and annoy it . . if and only if a fleet is large enough can it get in close and be a real threat to the planet. (Game wise this could be done in various ways, planetary weapons, rings of platforms, inner defense station etc . But most importantly, long range weapon fire = minimum damage, close in = maximum damage. ) . Another tactical boon here is that the planet can be raided, resource ships destroyed, but the planet may not be in “real” danger (only a economic attack) and you might need your own fleet to break the siege.
(FINALLY a good role for the pirates! They do not take over systems but make economic blocks what you need ships to dislodge)

Jump point defense:
The entry point is defended, a really all or nothing event! Fleet jumps in defenses are waiting (think beach landing) . known heavy losses and immediate combat . . long range ships are of no use here. Mines may be useful. Etc . . once a “beach head” is established the rest of the system may be more easily defeated. This seems to have less tactical elements “force wins”. The gravity well becomes the fortress and the jump point the gate.

Currently we have a bit of both and it just does not work well.

General Scientific knowledge: A planet's gravitational well extends from the planet to the edge of the universe. It's just at the furthest point from the planet the gravitational pull from that planet is so minuscule that it is almost undetectable. Technically, the gravity well of a planet would allow you to build anywhere.

You know what would be an interesting world? Being able to control construction frigates completely, so you can jump them to an enemy planet and start "towering" a planet.

Yes, but in SINs universe it equates to the dead area around a planet where the FTL drive will not work (do so some techobabble about gravity) The thing that does not make much sense here is the star’s influence. Using the same rule for the star chances are that the inner planets would be in the star’s dead zone and the larger planets may also overlap depending on position/mass.

It would make much more sense if each jump point had to be at a LaGrange point. But this is there fiction and tech and that is fine as long as they explain it and it has self consistently.

Towering . . . Owch now there is a RTS term we really do not want to transplant here!

@phoenix NO! I hated towering in wc3ft, never want to go through that again.

If you think towering was bad, this one time me and my friend in 2v2 went all faerie dragons and flying machines. The other team didn't build any anti-air, and we won.

Yeah, and they're never up there when I try... at least, not for a reasonable price.



LOL. That reminds me of a SC game I played with my brother once... He rushed to dark templars, and I didn't build any observers before he arrived. "Voosh voosh" went my few phase cannons, then "voosh voosh" went my entire base.

hmmm i wonder if there will be cloked ships from others, that would be an interesting wrinkle. perhaps the advent would become like the dark templars! would certainly make an interesting game......

Hmmm, aside from our earliest games, we never really found mines that effective in HW2.

Attempts to mine unclaimed resources/neutral zones would never work well. We all learnt to jump in a carrier a little way aways from the resource spots in order to use a scout to check for mines or ambushes. Any mine corvettes in the area quickly died without doing any damage.

Nor were they that useful in attacking. Bringing minelayer corvettes to the battle meant you had less combat corvettes than your opponent. So your opponent would win the battle while you had only laid a few mines during that time. Your minelayer corvettes would then die (and if the enemy carrier tried to pick them up, it would die too).

The only real time mines could be useful was when you were defending your base. Of course, for them to have any real effect, you would need quite a few of them. The problem with this is you no longer really had a good corvette force for going on the offensive (minelayers are not good on the offensive)

In HW2, if you can't go on the offensive and claim a new resource spot...you die.

The devs did mention that there are some kind of stealth ships involved.

[offtopic]


Hahaha, Bat riders, Gargs, Steam Tanks (teched), or hippos would own that team.



Lol, I never minded mass towers in WC3 because it meant they wasted resources and I was then able to get more units and it meant all I needed is to get some seige. Easy Pie!

i loved hoppos so much... such a misleading name though...

greatest game I ever played was a 2v2, my buddy went ud and ghoul rushed, stymied the other two for a while. Meanwhile, I massed archers throughout the game. By the time they finally killed my buddy's army, they ran into a wall of archers... kept calling me a cheater because they died so quickly...

I don't know about the gargs and hippos, copters do AOE damage when upgraded, so they can really hurt massed air units.