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Firstly, artillery is stupidly accurate. A significant amount of artillery strikes accurately target your mech and the direction it's traveling in. This happens regardless of whether or not there are any enemies in site to call fire.
Now some might try to argue "Well infantry" but there is no infantry in the base game without mods, and game mechanics cannot be based around some magical force that you cannot adequately defend against such as by burning down an entire forest. Some others might argue "Well satellites," and I would agree to that if we were dealing with high-tech worlds. When playing on a low-tech world there are going to be few if any orbital assets, especially in the earlier years campaign settings allow for before the Helm memory core sparks/augments a scientific revolution.
Ultimately this smacks of bad game design, and that impression is further enhanced by how the accuracy of artillery fire is not impacted in the slightest by anything. Weather? Doesn't matter. Just dropped into the mission? Doesn't matter. Started on the ground already? Doesn't matter. Walked away from the drop ship with an entire mountain that the artillery shouldn't be able to arc over between you and artillery batteries? Doesn't matter.
Secondly, artillery hits you inside drop ships.
Considering that in terms of game mechanics drop ships are absolutely immune to all damage it makes no sense that artillery should "penetrate" the drop ship in order to damage you. Likewise mech-mounted weapons no longer cause visible damage decals to appear on drop ships thereby strongly implying that mech-based weapons cannot damage drop ships even if they weren't invulnerable due to plot armor. By logical extension artillery does not do enough raw damage to any one specific location of a mech to indicate that it could penetrate drop ship armor.
Damaging mechs while you're locked into what amounts to an inescapable cut scene is bad design, and it's doubly bad when you're in a situation where you shouldn't be able to take damage in the first place.
Thirdly, artillery damages the entire mech. If you were caught in overlapping blast areas this would make sense, but when you're being hit by a single shell this makes no sense. Furthermore even the cockpits of mechs get damaged by artillery, and considering how many mechs have their cockpits protected from the bottom by their center torsos it makes absolutely no sense that an explosion originating from the ground should be able to damage the cockpit of a mech, much less a mech facing away from the blast.
I actually like the concept of artillery in the game, and I fully understand how game design limitations can be necessary even if they fly in the face of realism or logic. I just think that the current implementation is so insufferably designed that if I have to deal with too many more missions with artillery in them I'm just going to stop doing them altogether. I don't much care for that thought as I'm trying to cut back on save scumming, and having to save the game before I accept each mission will quickly get old.
In order to remedy this situation I would like to offer the following suggestions.
#1 Increase the spread of individual shells when there are no active spotters such as mechs, vehicles, turrets, VTOLs, and even artillery batteries. Also, when there are no spotters around incoming fire should not be able to indefinitely track your mech.
If you manage to move 500 meters away from your last known location with 2 minutes since enemies last saw you it ought to be possible to turn around, look back, and see the artillery pounding the area around where you were. You should not still be making 90-180 degree turns to avoid artillery fire that is hitting where you are and where you're walking with 90%+ accuracy.
#2 Do not evenly apply damage to a mech unless the shell literally lands on top of the mech. If the shell hits to the right of a mech then there should be at least a 50% chance that the left arm and torso don't receive damage. Likewise if the shell lands behind the mech there ought to be a 0% chance of the front torso or head taking damage.
#3 Plot armor for mechs while in the drop ship and in the startup camera pan cut scenes. In the former case you're inside a hunk of metal that renders you invulnerable to artillery, and in the latter case you're stuck immobile at the whim of the game, not because you're an incompetent pilot.
Also, in any mission where you are not in a drop ship artillery should not start raining down on you immediately unless you run afoul of #1, and "Well you were spotted as soon as you got into the area by that VTOL over there" doesn't count because it, just as being immobile for the non-dropship cut scene, forces you to be an idiot.
Players should not be forced, implicitly or explicitly, to be stupid pilots.
Also, just as an aside it would be nice to see some variations in the artillery. Air burst which actually could hit the cockpit, napalm rounds to turn chunks of the map into bonfires to screw your cooling, and even EMP rounds to screw with sensors and target locks would make things a bit more interesting.
Edited by Marikhen, 28 November 2021 - 03:27 PM.
