Author Topic: Artillery -- display *absolute* gun elevation/azimuth?  (Read 801 times)

Offline Badger

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(Could not find this point via the search function, so if this has already been discussed, etc.)

Could it be possible to display the *absolute* gun elevation and azimuth of an artillery gun? Currently, if someone with binoculars made a spot for you, the display tells you how much you need to adjust your gun to zero in the target.

However, I've found that there are a few situations where it would be very desirable to also know the absolute elevation+azimuth, like the following examples (lets assume using a static howitzer for simplicity)

1) there is a single spotter which keeps switching between targets -- you've just zeroed in on an AT position/MG nest, which will likely get repopulated/repaired soon even if you just hit it.
2) there is an obvious chokepoint (like a single bridge) which you probably want to be shelling during the downtime where you have no active spotter/ no current targets -- because all spotters are dead/too far away for spotting

In both cases it would be useful to know the needed gun angle to be able to blindly fire at that position, even without the magic overhead target camera that the spotter provides (of course when firing blindly, pay close attention to the minimap to avoid friendly fire blablabla).

So, could the current gun angle be displayed, just two numbers in the corner of the screen?

What I've been doing so far in those cases is, once zeroed in on a target (with help of a spotter), to remember the part of the skybox the gun is pointing at ("ok, to hit that crossroads, point the gun at this-and-this corner of that skybox cloud"). It's pretty coarse but just spraying the general area of a chokepoint sometimes yields some hits, and might also discourage the enemy from moving there.

What do people think about this? Is this feasible, or even desirable? Is there some obvious balance-breaking aspect to adding this I'm missing?
« Last Edit: 12-07-2019, 16:07:49 by Badger »

Offline jan_kurator

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Re: Artillery -- display *absolute* gun elevation/azimuth?
« Reply #1 on: 12-07-2019, 16:07:48 »
I don't think shooting blindly is desired. I personally don't want people to shell spots without spotters. People will quickly learn exact coordinates they prefer to shell (like spawnpoints) and will exploit the shit out of it.

Offline LuckyOne

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Re: Artillery -- display *absolute* gun elevation/azimuth?
« Reply #2 on: 12-07-2019, 19:07:55 »
Agreed, I think the main issue here is the lack of spots...

That should be focus of the fix, not encouraging players to "game" the system.

I feel this is the kind of a situation where giving back some "gimmicks" to the commander might be a viable solution.

After all, in vBF2 the job of the commander was to strategically shell the flags after gathering info about enemy movements via the minimap/UAV/sat scan.

In FH2 commander has lost most of his purpose and has been reduced to providing situational arty and support on larger maps.

Being a commander is probably the most boring "role" in FH2 today (besides the "medic" but nobody actually plays that...) because you're reduced to staring at cooldowns, especially since there's the "no fighting commander" rule on most servers...


Now, I'm fairly sure this can be done relatively easily:

Replace vehicle drop with "spot drop / Artillery recon mission". Spawn (invisible?) vehicle that shoots one a "spot projectile" at the ground.

Then it's just a matter of balancing the cooldown on different maps...


I think there might be a way to use the UAV instead of vehicle drop for that but I can't really remember if PR has something similar...
« Last Edit: 12-07-2019, 19:07:59 by LuckyOne »
This sentence is intentionally left unfinished...

Offline Korsakov829

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Re: Artillery -- display *absolute* gun elevation/azimuth?
« Reply #3 on: 13-07-2019, 19:07:32 »
I have wanted this for years! Actually, I was tired of the spotting system entirely because too often you would have nobody calling for strikes or they wouldn't be that great, and cloud spotting while you could memorize your favorite targets and where to aim at for them, it's too tedious. But my reasons for wanting it are slightly different because back in the day I worked out how to aim artillery at any spot on the map once you knew your range to target and angle of the barrel, plus familiarity with the gun itself. Slow as hell, needed a calculator on hand. Once you had it all figured out it was much easier to memorize azimuth and inclination than a visual landmark on your screen.

tl;dr
I don't think it's a good idea, because I'd abuse the hell out of it. Not only that it's way too much of an edge for more practiced players to have over others.