Defence Kill Zone

[Cain]

One of the interesting aspects of EAW will be that such defences will be possible even in space.

 

You enter the map from one direction and you are confronted with 10 defence stations ships and other stuff. The combined power will surly make alot of damage ... and if you take your hole fleet to destroy the defences you make your self vulnerable in other areas not to mention that your ships will be to damaged to get a counterattack.

 

On the ground will be even easyer to construct such defence walls if the enemy will always come from one direction.

 

Thinking about such kill zones and defence zones - I wonder if the AI will avoid going in the same death zone twice.

 

How do you guys see this tactic ?! (*One of my favorite against AI's)

[DarthCycle]

As I mentionned in the ground tactic thread, it all depends on the static defense effectiveness.

 

Effectiveness is mostly measured in terms of how much it costs to build the defensive structure compared to a unit.

 

For instance, if a laser turret is 3x the cost of an ATAT unit, but it can't do enough damage even to destroy one before being destroyed by it, obviously that defensive structure is not effective at all. If on the other hand, for the same cost it can destroy 3 ATAT and still be operationnal, then that structure is effective.

 

In command and conquer, it was more cost effective to build units compared to defensive structures. In total annihilation however, you could construct various spike (group) of defensive structures that were REALLY effective and required the use of combined arms (different kind of unit) to destroy them. An early laser turret was able to destroy 3 light tank/mech and still be operationnal. Add to that the fact that structure+unit gains experience for each kill (translated into a faster rate of fire) and those turret would really kick *ss in no time.

 

Also, for ground structures, we still don't know if the player will be able to configure the layout of his base. In my opinion, such design would slow down the pace of the game (due to the number of planet in the galaxy map), even if it would be somewhat enjoyable to do so. However, repeating this process for each newly conquered planet would get tedious as the game progresses.

 

As far as AI is concerned, most AI are really bad to avoid defensive structure kill zone. Usually, they either repeat the assault with more units or with a different kind of unit. For instance, you build a kill zone of 5 laser cannon, effective against ground unit. The AI attacks with 5 tanks. They all get destroyed. Either the AI will repeat the assault next time with 10 tanks or with 5 bombers. It all depends on the model used by the AI designer.

[Foshjedi2004]

So operation Emperor's Hammer all throughout the game eh??

 

Lots of Kill Zones on the ground where the ISDs orbital Bombard.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn 889]

we dont know about the orbital bombardments still

[Revan490]

i would hope that we can use orbital bombardment because jsut the bombing runs wouldn't do as much damage. but teh trailer made the bombers pretty vicious so if you can call down multiple strikes on the enemy just sitting outside your walls you could do some damage to them.

[Foshjedi2004]

We can see in the E3 footage that there is an orbital Bombardment option, i swear that next to where you call for a bombing run there was an Orbital Bombardment strike.

[Grand Admiral Thrawn 889]

it might be but we can go by what you have seen the onli way for us to be sure that the orbital bombardment is in the game is for one of the dev team to tell us that it is. other wise its just not confirmed unless you can tell us exactly when in the vid it is.