Caseck

I agree, but maybe this will have to wait for the campaign add-on where you have soldiers, skills, money and a mercenary company to keep operating...

How do you defeat point defenses? You either: A) Blind them (jamming/chaff) Overwhelm them (MRL/high ROF weapons) C) Bash through them with hardened rounds. I was actually hoping there would be more point defenses employed in the game, but I wasn't expecting them to be as fool-proof as they are. My thought on PD was a gatling or railgun type system, that would begin firing when it detected an incoming round. The engagement times for PD in DropTeam are exceedingly shorter than I expected... If you've ever seen a Phalanx engagement, it lasts several seconds. I was hoping for a gatling PD ammo counter you can watch count down, as the PDs engage incoming rounds on most vehicles... But I was also expecting multiple ATGMs in a salvo, and main guns with significantly higher rates of fire... Still waiting on a railgun equipped tank or artillerypiece!

Gotta' love the infantry! My only big issue thus far, is that all infantry should be able to seize buildings! Because, well... They're INFANTRY! And no command unit to call for fire is a problem... I know it's in the works somewhere, so I'm not worried: It will be nice when Infantry can actually occupy buildings! All these guys so far, seem to be LIGHT infantry... Very slow on the ground. Nice and sneaky though. Curious what the plan is for HEAVY (assault) infantry? Curious what sort of different squads are in the works! ATGM teams? Scout/Recon teams to call for fire? And I still hate the Ion weapons done in millimeters instead of output megawatts! I don't believe in jumping, so I'm happy with infantry being automatically spotted whenever the jets are firing. I haven't actually shot at a squad in the air, so I don't know how hard they are to hit. You gotta' be careful with how you use the jets!

I agree. Why mount one PD when you can mount two? They should have limited ammo though. On the opposite side, why can ATGMs only be launched singly? What is the limitation driving this?

Hurricane. Reminds me of what the M551 Sherridan was supposed to be. (small, fast, manueverable with a 152mm gun!) I love the combination of manuverability and unparalelled firepower. I like watching THORS try to drive out of the craters I put them in...

Dropships would be WAY more expensive than any of the tanks currently in game. The game right now doesn't do a good enough job of making you hoard your dropships, and you can be overly aggressive with them.

And they have jump-jets.

They said the same thing about the machinegun...

Well, lets think about it here... If a tank has high power consumption, most likely it's not going to be a hover tank, unless you trade most of your armour off... So, for a laser tank, most likely it'd be tracked. Or very expensive... Maybe if you traded the turret weight off, for a front mounted laser, you could have a hover-pulse-laser-tank-destroyer (?). And even keep some modicum of armor. Then again, the Hurricane can do it. Why can't I? Not that it's justification. I still wish there were a dollar value attached to each vehicle, and you could purchase at the start. Maybe someday... Getting back to the subject... I think you could get away with a 120mm front mounted on a hover-tank. Might give you some interesting recoil effects, but I don't see why not. Hell, I'd like to see a better armoured hover-tank destroyer with that rapid-fire 76mm. Reminds me of the old ARES cannon that was supposed to be mounted on the RDF light tank... (Back in the good old cold war days, when NATO was going to form an international Rapid Deployment Force.)

Other than my Hurricane's plasma gun... (Which is more like the WWII Brit Archer/Achilles, or German Elefant variants with 210mm big-ass gun/rockets.) Hurricane is like a 203mm low velocity... But I digress... Should there be bigger than a 120mm HV gun? Opinions?

Was thinking of Damon Slye's Stellar7 and the evil cloaking Stalkers at the end... Got me to thinking there aren't any "Tank Destroyers" in the game... Yet... (Maybe I'm missing my PZIV Tank Destroyer with the fast firing HV 75mm gun in Combat Mission?) Fixed big/rapid fire gun, no/limited traverse. Of course, there aren't cloaking devices or Raven's either! Don't know if it'd be unbalancing though. (You can put a very nasty front glacias plate on a tank with no turret. Saves a lot of weight. Low profile. A lot to be said for it. Everything about the Tank Destroyer favors firing defensively in a sector. Hit hard, hard to hit, hard to hurt.) Food for thought. Curious if it's come up.

Not that I've seen... Prolly with infantry. I remember reading somewhere the issues they're tackling are with optimizing the code, not that it isn't there in a prototype form.

We did a huge thread on this initially. I'm still of the opinion that putting Antimatter drives on ground combat vehicles is like making a phased array, nuclear powered fly-swatter... I think at one point they were saying superefficient flywheels power the ground vehicles. I wouldn't bother putting high-tech antimatter propulsion on a combat vehicle if something simpler and cheaper would work. I'd save the antimatter for bases, mobile factories and such... Take a look at the older threads, I'm sure you can find some interesting discussions.

It would also be nice to have an initial $ amount to purchase units prior to deployment... I hate that I only get a handful of Hurricanes! (multiplayer) This would mean having an elected commander before the game starts, and a pre-deployment screen. (I guess you could do it all from the deployment screen too, just a popup window to elect guys, then buy units...) [ June 07, 2006, 05:04 PM: Message edited by: Caseck ]

The 120mm will fire underwater? That is pretty goofy, unless there are separate underwater rounds anyway... That would be one fix.

Ah, I love Sundays. Nothing to do except run, workout, play raquetball, and post on my favorite SCIFI forum... IR FOLLOW-UP MISSILES: Requires: 1 ATGM equipped with flare/strobe. 1+IR followup missiles, tuned for appropriate flare/strobe. Simple. "Lead" ATGM launched. Followup missiles launched subsequently. Followup missiles follow flare/strobe [i.e. guidance] of lead ATGM all the way to impact. Just like multiple warheads to combat reactive armour, except separate missiles. Hit same location as lead missile. If the lead missile gets shot down, followup missiles go ballistic. Maybe they hit... Maybe they don't. In effect they become a close sheaf of artillery if the "Lead" missile doesn't make it. If "lead" missile outright misses, IR followup missiles will follow to point of impact. Bigger space between missile "train"=looser sheaf. IR followup missiles are simple and cheap. They can be fired by either the "Lead" missile launcher, or by other units able to see departing missile flare/strobe.

What's annoying about that? They aren't airbreathers. Aside from 120mm main-guns working there, which would be weird. I haven't tried that yet though.

And of course, in a vaccuum, beamers and pulse lasers should be invisible. And flames on vehicles [in a vaccuum] from oxygen fires should look more like a blowtorch. Smoke would cloud in more of a ball instead of rising straight up through convection... [ June 03, 2006, 09:08 PM: Message edited by: Caseck ]

PULSE lasers: I would assume putting that much energy through that small a space would have a similar thunder-type sound effect by ionizing the air. Similar to lightning. Would be cool to hear in an environment with atmosphere. Beam divergence/attenuation depends very much on atmospheric density. If the atmosphere is very thick, it would cause the beam to spread out, and it WOULD have an effect similar to a very powerful beamer. If you like using your laser tank on VENUS anyway.

Forgot to mention, a PULSE laser would act more like a conventional round. It would have a specified penetration of steel it could vaporize. Not an ablative type weapon like the BEAMERS. (More like the effect of a long-range plasma beam, of the type a HEAT round generates...) If you've ever seen the "beam" from a shaped charge it looks just like a 50m incredibly straight fork of lightning. [R/L: Courtesy of the US Army providing me with 84mm HEDP delay fuzed rounds to bounce off of tank hulks, and watch detonate in midair... RAAWS.] Plus, unless it's a multi-lens type laser, the lens would have a cooling period after it shot. (Concurrent with the battery/capacitor probably not a big deal.) [ June 03, 2006, 07:19 PM: Message edited by: Caseck ]

Absolutely! I understand your budget constraints! Will there be a boxed set at some point? I will continue my guerilla marketing campaign if you guys jump off that bridge... (Always put my pet-games in front, like a new release if I browse through best-buy and so forth... You gotta' be willing to fight for what you want!) Here's some good sites... http://www.mpogd.com/ http://pcgames.gwn.com/ http://www.wargamer.com/ http://www.simhq.com/ http://pc.ign.com/ [ June 04, 2006, 12:01 AM: Message edited by: Caseck ]

I actually first played the computer ver of OGRE on my apple IIc. One of the first games I ever played. Was playing CAR WARS pen & paper at the time. Do you guys have some kind of deal with Steve Jackson Games? Or are they defunct? [ June 03, 2006, 06:42 PM: Message edited by: Caseck ]

Ogres are uneffected by Biological or Chemical attacks. Ogres need not make a confidence check if nuclear weapons are used. A direct hit on an Ogre by a nuclear weapon attacks all weapons at Power Die d12, Impact Die d12, but does not automatically kill the Ogre.

I wouldn't mind seeing the "LIMITED DROPSHIP SORTIES" a user option. I'm curious to see it both ways.

Specifically it should be output wattage... But I'd still be happy with light/medium/heavy. I do not like the millimeters. It's not technically accurate. Keep the SCIENCE in SCIENCE-FICTION...