Infantry

[yurch]

ATGMs can be fired on infantry in top-attack mode.

[adzling]

im for keeping the infantry pipper as is, we had a great game last night where it was a king of the hill type game (base) and yllamana kept hopping in with his inf and distracting me while his team-mates afv's moved up the hill.

I think the hermes anti-air weapon SHOULD fire on incoming jumping infantry.

They are airborne, clearly giving off a signature (hence on sensors) and moving slow enough and large enough to be shot. Especially when considered to an ATGM which the hermes has no problem with (except up close).

If for game balance reasons the hermes doesn't shoot down airborne infantry i think we should take them off sensors completely, otherwise there's no logical reason why they shouldn't be shot out of the air.

I would like to see infantry be able to hitch a ride on AFV's.

I tried jumping on top of a few last night but just kept slipping off the top. Bah!

Fer sure hand-placed demo charge, one per infantry man, would be very useful and sensible for all kinds of devious uses.

It would also make AFV's a lot more hesitant to drive in amongst a bunch of infantry and mow them down.

Which brings me to another point.

Death by crushing.

I had an inf squad last night lying out in the open in the oncoming path of a herd of enemy afv's holding fire waiting for them to get in range.

A bot in an apollo actually ran over two of my infantry men (after screeching to a halt and "bumping" into them for about 20 seconds). After passing they got up and shot his ass off.

I think when being run over by a 20+ ton tank you ought to end up like jelly oozing out of a tin-can rather than feeling fine and fit for action.

And as far as entering buildings yay!

Send over that .obj importer and i'll get my building add-ons done and ready to placed clay

keep up the good work!

[aittam]

Originally posted by adzling:

Fer sure hand-placed demo charge, one per infantry man, would be very useful and sensible for all kinds of devious uses.

a couple of big claymore/satchel could def be added

still not sure about the AAD, most of these systems just rule off something that's not fast enough to be a missile

[bboyle]

Regarding getting run over...last night a dropshop got shot down and landed directly on top of my squad. Next thing I know, I have no more squad and the drop screen pops up unbidden. And no losses were recorded for the other team. Did the program just ignore a freaky situation?

[yllamana]

The grenades are sort of like demo charges as is. I used to be a bit cautious with the infantry, because you intuitively expect gigantic AFVs to be dangerous to be next to and you intuitively expect grenades to be at least somewhat dangerous to be next to when they land. Neither of those seems to be true at the moment - you can run right up to a vehicle and fire grenades into it at point blank range (though I think that's a little suboptimal because it makes placing them slightly harder than if you have just a tiny bit of range).

I'm OK with the infantry not being killable by ramming - I mean, you can't damage vehicles with it either - but they should at least be dazed or something. It just looks weird seeing the little infantry guy being pushed along by a tank.

I don't think the Hermes needs any more power against infantry. The 20mm is already a bit over the top - if you can manage to range it on something you can even shoot the little guys out of the air with AP. Hermes is already a great vehicle on top of all that, too.

[yurch]

I suppose if collisions were on, fleshy squishing would be an issue. Should an exception (squishing always-on) be made for infantry?

Screw the hermes, point defense has enough uses as it is.

I'm really liking the concept of ion-infantry less and less. Rather, the idea that they are supposed to be the ranged method of attacking armor.

I've been using these guys quite a bit, and have modded in a team consisting entirely of ions. Right now I've got them deployed along the road the bots use for flag runs. I imagine it would murder enemy infantry if the bots bothered to deploy them. It's moderately effective at weakening armor of the various passerby (and tires get shredded), but I don't find it particularly interesting, immersive, or sensible.

First off, it's a hand weapon, held by infantry, hitting at full accuracy and with a fast rate of fire, at a distance of several kilometers. Even while standing.

This alone sets off a few alarm bells for it's potential anti-infantry capability. For the most part this weapon is in every way superior to the 10mm assault rifle with the exception of very close in fighting. Sure, it isn't a one hit kill, but you're hitting, which is exactly what the 10mm rifle isn't doing. The 20mm strikes me as a bit more fair.

Secondly, you won't find a single handheld antitank weapon in existance today that involves infantry sitting for long periods exposed to the tank and it's fire. Compound this further by the fact that the ion is an extremely visible and obvious implement. Intuitively, the last weapon you would want to be using as infantry versus heavily armored units is the ion.

Having an infantry specialist with the purpose or ability to outshoot a massive dedicated weapons platform while staring down it's barrel? This is pure insanity.

This miracle 6mm ion can be carried and employed accurately by a man, so there certainly isn't any reason a slightly bigger and badder variant couldn't be mounted on every vehicle in the armory along with the standard weapons.

Most of this ranting is of course ion-related. Once beams are changed to the 'sweepable' form planned and if infantry inaccuracy for the ion is introduced, I think we'll naturally find infantry ion quite a bit more ineffective at massive range, much like infantry's other availible weapons.

The question is, what are infantry going to use for range?

Realistic anti-tank weapons would be quick, violent, and above all require minimum exposure for the infantry to enemy fire. However, everybody already hates getting hit by the ATGM as it is.

I'm thinking some form of unguided rocket (or plasma weapon, for the sake of ammo) would be best. Getting closer means an easier shot but more risk.

[adzling]

yeah i just don't see a logical reason why the hermes can't shoot down incoming power-jumping infantry if it can shoot down a similarly slow moving drop ship and similarly tiny projectiles.

I dont see it as a game unbalancer at all, there are still plenty of afv's the inf can hop-assult on and this just rounds out the hermes general cloak/aad role.

it's almost impossible to shoot down power-jumping inf due to the aforementioned ranging situation so having at least ONE vehicle that can fill this role would make sense.

Any team play at the moment seems to require the presence of a hermes somehwere on the battlefield anyway.

+ it shoots at grounded dropships (i.e. while reloading) and at hovering hurricanes

---------------moving on---------------

i love the idea of drop capsules for the troopers coming replete with some ammo reloads and throwing off chaff as they drop to screw up sensors.

it would be a lot of fun to come screaming into a hot lz with a squad and disrupt the defenses then hop out.

Something a dropship landing afv could not accomplish as the laser tower/ aad would knock it out of the sky.

would make infantry have a real interesting use beyond hide and wait.

[Hub]

[ October 21, 2006, 08:04 AM: Message edited by: Hub ]

[dan/california]

I have a suggestion for infantry that makes some sense but might be a balance issue.

Step one: Be able to group squads in formation, so one human player can command more that one squad.

Step two: Have the bot squads shoot at the same target as the human player. Given the assumption of even basic radios and the the ease of following an ion beam by eye it seems very doable. For that matter why can't you slave bots that way to the human player in AFVs

Might make ion squads a little too popular, but their availability could be more limited.

On a related issue, if an infantryman can carry a six mm ion, why isn't their a thor turret with about 50 of them installed laying waste to everything on the map?

[yllamana]

it's almost impossible to shoot down power-jumping inf due to the aforementioned ranging situation so having at least ONE vehicle that can fill this role would make sense.

The 20mm/76mm/ion/17mm are all great for killing infantry. Every vehicle except the mortar carriers mounts one of these. It's possible to range them all on the ground next to the infantry (better yet a trooper, but that's a bit harder) and then shoot them out of the sky. If you aim for the leader you'll be disrupting them constantly with their guy dying, too.

Plus the Hermes is already overpowered enough as is. It doesn't need ANOTHER role (godly anti-infantry unit) on top of point defence/jamming/AA/short range death cannon.

I believe I have seen + / - elevation info as part of the vehicle physical object files. If true, than it is possible to get in close enough that the weapons can't depress enough to hit you.

Yep! 120mm HE can still kill you on the ground though. If you get close enough on the side of the Thor it can push you around with the barrel of the 120mm.

Additionally, 10mm can damage paladin tires and can kill Apollo and Paladin from the rear given time or if your squadmates decide to fire their weapons today. The problem is the vehicles are generally much more mobile than the infantry, so unless they're already immobilised or panic (or plain distracted) they can move away from you.

On a related issue, if an infantryman can carry a six mm ion, why isn't their a thor turret with about 50 of them installed laying waste to everything on the map?

Radiation concerns. It's already possible that they'll end up pulling the 6mm ions from service due to health issues - no way are they mounting more of them on an AFV, whose crew capsules are already dangerously close to their theoretical maximum radiation limit with those big ugly fuel cells inside.

Listening to people talking about deploying the infantry in drop capsules, it sounds cool at first but having seen infantry flanking in action I can't help but think it might be overpowered. Deploying from drop pods on top of engaged AFVs I think you'd almost certainly score at least one kill, possibly more, before they could kill you. That's not to mention the added exposure they'd have if they turned their turrets or hulls to try and slow you down.

I think if that was added then the point defence weapons and AA would HAVE to work on airborne drop pods just to balance them, and even then it'd probably be too strong a tactic (and make the stupid Hermes even more essential).

[dan/california]

Of course, the leaking gamma radiation from the antimatter cells is all but frying the poor @#%&%$%@s anyway. How could I have overlooked that.

Of course given that infantry are supposed to hold them next to their head it gives you a feel for the expectations of their long term survival. That might explain a lot of infantry behavior come to think of it. Memo to all live ships, remember the infantry get the "special " radiation badges. :eek:

Deploying infantry from pods that could survive being dropped on enemy positions would definitely put the drop in drop team would it not. It would be great to see a coordinated three squad drop cause panic in the base on the ice world for instance. I do think it would also put a premium on the job that infantry do in a real army. Which is to discourage the other sides infantry from such pursuits.

[yurch]

Originally posted by dan/california:

Deploying infantry from pods that could survive being dropped on enemy positions would definitely put the drop in drop team would it not. It would be great to see a coordinated three squad drop cause panic in the base on the ice world for instance.

Not really.

*yurch kills yllamana's hermes with 120mm HE

*yurch kills yllamana's dropship with 120mm HEAT

(pods)

*yllamana kills yurch's thor with AT grenade

(more pods)

*yurch kills yllamana's rifleman with 10mm

*yllamana kills yurch's rifleman with 10mm

Can you see how old that would get? (sorry yllamana, you got volunteered )

Drop ability is a operational/strateeegery advantage, and I hope that it never becomes a really tactical advantage. It's for getting ahead of the enemy advance, or encircling a position from 6km out.

NOT for dropping amongst enemy units. "The confusion" is on a larger scale. And to be honest, we don't really need the confusion. Our AA is so pathetic the primary weapon of choice for killing aircraft is the 120mm HEAT round.

If command could feasably put drop pods amongst enemy tanks in the walls of a base, why aren't they dropping piles of explosives instead?

[Type98]

Totally off topic.

You can do skimming hops and even nap of Earth flight with practice. They're vectorable, too, using the forward and back keys and turning while in flight.

Sounds like Starsiege Tribes.

Goes back to lurking.

[Jalinth]

Actually, it sounds like Starship Troopers, the 1959 Novel.

Between excitement and anxiety to catch up I jumped too high and too wide. It’s always a temptation to get the most out of your jump gear—but don’t do it! It leaves you hanging in the air for seconds, a big fat target. The way to advance is to skim over each building as you come to it, barely clearing it, and taking full advantage of cover while you’re down — and never stay in one place more than a second or two, never give them time to target in on you. Be somewhere else, anywhere. Keep moving

[dan/california]

Yurch said

"Drop ability is a operational/strateeegery advantage, and I hope that it never becomes a really tactical advantage. It's for getting ahead of the enemy advance, or encircling a position from 6km out.

NOT for dropping amongst enemy units. "The confusion" is on a larger scale. And to be honest, we don't really need the confusion. Our AA is so pathetic the primary weapon of choice for killing aircraft is the 120mm HEAT round.

If command could feasably put drop pods amongst enemy tanks in the walls of a base, why aren't they dropping piles of explosives instead?"

It all makes sense to me, although it does depend on the size of the base and the precision/effect of the available munitions.

From a game perspective what is needed is make the AA more effective, make dropships only available in limited numbers and at the same tim reduce the effectiveness of point defense against main gun rounds. artillery shells are much harder targets than missiles.

From the real world why in the heck didn't they do it this way perspective, If antimatter is available a 20mm round should leave a hole about the size of the big mortar. Antimatter_ matter annihilation energy is literally found from e=m*c^2. That gets to be a large number very quickly since c is the speed of light. For .1 grams of antimatter meeting a like quantity of matter that works out to about 1.8*10^14 joules of energy. For comparison purposes an M1 main gun apdsfs ect. hits with about 8 *10^6 joules plus or minus a couple of decimal places. .1 grams of antimatter is a small nuke, why bother with anything else.

Yes Clay I know this is really a back-story issue as opposed to a game mechanics issue, but it is a big back story issue. Ultra high effeciency fuel cells would have been much easier to talk around.

[ July 27, 2006, 02:18 AM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

[yllamana]

Maybe, just maybe, there could be specific orbital drop troops who always deploy in drop pods. They could be on very specific availability (think 2 or so).

This also isn't solving the other problem, that being that infantry with jumpjets deploying from a dropship on the ground looks silly, especially when the dropship is under fire. Maybe there could be some low-velocity (relatively) drop pods that most infantry use, and then big, scary high-velocity pods that the drop shock troops use - the standard ones being very vulnerable to AA fire, the high-velocity ones doing very well against it.

The low-v ones could come down on parachutes or something, as slowly as the dropships do now. Just it'd look less silly.

Just some ideas.

Also, you can already often deploy infantry on top of a lone engaged AFV if you know exactly where it is. I've done it to Thors before.

[aittam]

so stormtroopers?

if it's feasable: why not use pods but the coordinates have to be called by the command veihcle, once called onlly one/two platoons/squads could be dropped that way?

[Thomm]

dan/california:

The problem I see with your 20mm antimatter ammunition is one of containment. One would suppose that the problem of using antimatter in a sensible way is that of storage and containment, which would surely require a complicated fuel-cell which allows for a controlled matter-antimatter reaction.

It should not be possible to "extract some antimatter and put it into a 20mm round". An ICBM warhead, maybe, or a large bomb, but nothing of small calibre.

Best regards,

Thomm

[Dark_au]

and what happens as soon as the 20mm antimatter round hits its first molecule of air or whatever fluid you are in?

[Neutrino 123]

Well, that's why the antimatter would need to be contained. The cannon round would need to generate the necessary magnetic fields long enough to contain the antimatter before a hit. Then the detonation method could simply be turning off the containment.

Clearly, in Dropteam, only 'primative' antimatter containment is avalible, so it is only used as a power source rather then a weapon. Furthermore, new antimatter in the Dropteam universe can't be created (at least in signifigant quantities) due to technology regression, so what is avalible needs to be used sparingly.

[dan/california]

A containment field of some sort is assumed. If the vehicles are running on it then the basics of controlling it have already been worked out or they would instantly go boom. You just have to be able to miniaturize the the system. And from what I know of current systems for attempting this, which only work with a very few molecules, it is easier to do in a very small space because it reduces the size of the field you are trying to hold. So a round would consist of a containment field generator, control electronics and a tiny bit of antimatter. Impact with the target causes the field to fail and the antimatter does its thing.

The current Drop Team vehicle schematics assume some way of doing this for vehicular power. They show separate antimatter storage systems and engines. So a way of getting the stuff from one to the other has to exist already. If you can move antimatter that effectively you move it toward the enemy. Among other things the munition only has to work once and is planning on eating itself in the process. The engine has to do it continually and with much finer control.

Current hydrogen bombs vs fusion power are an excellent example. The first generates nuclear fusion for a split second blows itself and the entire vicinity to very small pieces in the process. The second has yet to produce one watt of net power for a commercial power grid. It is harder to make an engine than a bomb.

As I said in my post above what I am really arguing for is that they change they change the back story to state that the vehicles run on hydrogen fuel cells or ultrahigh energy synthetic hydrocarbons or any of a number of proposed future systems. I just don't see antimatter being used for anything except the liveships stardrive. They do not even really need to change the schematics, just the labels on the drawings and some text. It is a small thing, the game works very well. I just want this little piece to make a little more sense. Hammers Slammers really provides a much more coherent theory of vehicle power and so on. And the important parts are generic enough to be mostly borrow-able.

This should really be its own thread.

[Alexander SquidLord Williams]

Actually, there's a great reason not to use uncontained antimatter explosives on the battlefields we're fighting over:

We probably want to actually have folks live there, after.

I'm thinking not a lot of folks really want to deal with a gamma-saturated city. The cascade effects, the irradiated plant-life, the utter lack of airable farmland ... No, thanks, antimatter may make a pretty and effective attack vector outside the atmosphere, but I think I like to keep it out of the planetary biome that I'll be shifting colonists to.

That said, I have to wonder how the vehicular systems keep from going critical in big, ugly ways when their engines get a penetrating hit. Forget catching on fire and emitting smoke, why don't they go up and take a foul chunk out of the planet? The AM cores have to be sustaining the AM in some unknown fashion, so that a rupture in containment shifts the AM into a less, shall we say, energetic state.

This seems to be the critical bit of energy-supply technology the backstory doesn't really cover well enough for my tastes.

[Alexander SquidLord Williams]

It occurs to me, after a leisurely breakfast, that the only reasonable way to figure the vehicular AM cores are to assume some sort of passive containment system.

What we're talking about is some form of Unobtanium© which creates a magnetic matrix, probably in a crystaline matrix. During its formation, its injected / innoculated with AM hydrogen, each atom suspended within a crystaline / magnetic cell, and requiring no power to maintain seperation. Liberating power from the system probably involves physically damaging the matrix, liberating the AM in a way that propels it away from the remaining coherent fields and toward what they hit the matrix with, which then reacts with the AM and liberates a relatively small quantum of energy (comparitive to, say, a full-bore unconstrained AM detonation; the energy needed to liberate the AM has to be a tiny fraction of the released energy to be worth the effort).

Juggle the numbers on the volume of the matrix material vs the volume of the cell vs the volume of AM contained to get numbers which fit the size of the AM cores on the templates. They specify "micrograms of AM," which is reasonable.

Of course, they have to be using "combustion" in some sense which we don't in regards to their "ICE Engines" (shades of BattleTech), since on Earth "combustion" is about materials combining with oxygen energetically. Since AM really doesn't require any specific form of reactive matter, oxygen or nae, they can't be using it in the conventional sense. If we assume they use the term to mean any energetic release from a physical matrix, it makes some vague kind of sense.

As dan / cal suggests, it probably makes more sense from a hard SF perspective if the fuel cells and patently not antimatter, because of all the points he makes. If its important they be so, we can certainly construct reasonable things around that, but its harder than it looks, in part because of observed failure-modes in the game as we clearly observe.

[Bnej]

I like how effective AT grenades are close in. You can ambush vehicles and get them really fast.

I think it looks silly to have the full drop ship. Have pods but make them extra vulnerable to AA defences. But no changes on jet packs. It'd just look better.

Inf Ion beam sucks. Sorry but it does. The Ion tanks are already boring (fire for half an hour to get any effect) the infantry version is more so. They're just annoying from either end. Have some kind of anti-tank rifle specialist instead. Or a wire-guided missile with no "Lock on" capability. (but I've always thought the "lock on" ATGMs were BS, forced SACLOS guidance would be so much better)

But what is needed most of all is the ability to set up the spawn lists. i.e, map with lots of infantry and wheeled vehicles only, or no ions, or no ATGMs, or none of whatever you don't like today... Or 30 hurricanes each side... omg craters...

[Hub]

"But what is needed most of all is the ability to set up the spawn lists. i.e, map with lots of infantry and wheeled vehicles only, or no ions, or no ATGMs, or none of whatever you don't like today... Or 30 hurricanes each side... omg craters..."

The ability to do that already exists - it's a matter of changing one .xml file and putting it in a mod folder...except for the omg craters