Vanu Rangers

I had a blast, hooked up with a lot of the older players that actually remembered me and played in some organized battles with them.

We rolled only Magriders and Galaxy Gunships, switching off between them as the situation called for it. Both were effective when the time was right and were further effective when coordinating with outside friendly groups.

The fight stayed at Eadon on Forseral, the only base we owned for a while. The NC were to the north east at Ogma and the TR had Anu. Throughout the night, we eventually captured Ogma and the TR captured Caer. To capture Ogma, we went in at the right time when the NC's presence there was light and took it, using Galaxy Gunships to suppress the enemy as we dropped the generator. (Ogma is a Bio Lab, so the generator is on the roof.) Once the generator was down, it was easy to take the base. The TR took Caer at roughly the same time that we took Ogma.

Until I logged, the fight went back and forth across the kilometer or so that spanned between Eadon and Anu. That land consisted of a roadway down the center, a forest and lake south of the roadway and to the north of the roadway there was a clearing between the roadway and a very steep mountain. Enemy tanks, mostly Prowlers, were moving along the road and the clearing to engage troops in the forest from a distance and when they did that, we engaged the tanks with Galaxy Gunships.

It appears that the Galaxy Gunship has limited range, roughly 300 meters. The mortars on the sides, 40mm as I like to call them, have a steep drop towards the end of their range, reducing their effectiveness as you can't effectively aim at a target from a distance because in order to hit it, you must aim high, causing the target to no longer be on the screen.

The 35mm cannons do not have any bullet drop and travel quite quickly. Additionally, there is no drift to worry about. (Drift is caused by firing from a moving vehicle, typically bullets will have the vehicle's velocity applied to the bullet. So when firing at a target to the left or right of a moving vehicle, the bullets will drift sideways in the direction that the vehicle that you are firing from is traveling.)

The one big issue that I noticed was that pilots need to fly smoothly - not jerk the gunship around - otherwise it throws off the aim of the gunners. This is most true when providing high precision support to ground elements. I accidentally killed a friendly troop because the aircraft pitched when I was firing at something above him.

An addition to the game that has me excited is Battle Rank 40. That's right... BR40! Apparently every BR gives you an additional cert point and by the time you reach BR40, you'll have enough cert points to afford everything! While this may sound unfair, from what I've been told by many players, there are only a handful of characters that have actually reached BR40, even after the rank has been around for many months. This gives me something to work towards as I won't have to switch between characters in order to get my full enjoyment out of Planetside - I can just stick to one.

That's just about it. I'm looking forward to learning about other new things in the game.