ClaytoniousRex

By "without effect", you probably mean "they didn't burn up" which is quite a different thing. I'll bet you a $1.13 that those Paladins which had taken multiple AP rounds had suffered plenty of effects. They probably had destroyed engines, at most one or 2 tires still capabale steering or driving, a dead gunner and/or driver, etc. Just because the thing hasn't finally gone that last inch and started to burn doesn't mean you had no effect. AP is fantastic for damaging multiple components inside of a target even when it doesn't cause the entire target to brew up. When gunning at an enemy unit, it's easy to fall prey to a black & white judgement of your effects. Either it is burning (and you've gotten a kill credit) - or you feel that nothing at all has happened. In fact, that poor bugger in probably in dire shape. But since he's not yet burning you have no way to see this. A fun and easy way to play with this is to run a standalone game with only friendly bots. Drop them all in Paladins and give them STOP orders. Now use them as target practice and, after each shot, go to the tac screen and click on them to see what kind of damage they've taken. It's quite informative!

Aittam, it's 100% free for people who already own a retail copy of DropTeam prior to its release. So you already own it. We're still evaluating how this will affect pricing *after* its release.

CTRL-L cycles between marines in the squad.

I meant to reply to your original post in the other thread; sorry about that, Iceman. We'll do this on the next account server reset. Please send me an email so that I can notify you once the change is active (since you will need to change your login on the Account tab in order to play).

On the way.

Those are vertex and fragment programs, respectively. They are GLSL shaders. You can edit them to change the way DropTeam renders some elements at runtime. For example, you could modify the way water is rendered or the way foliage sways in the wind, etc.

You're right, Yurch, there was 3rd one, too. That one was in the case of direct hits by the HE on target only.

I think there's more agreement here than it seems, Especially since you've clarified that your main objection is with the smaller rounds. It's really more of a problem of play balance now. I have to agree about the smaller projectiles. Unfortunately, if PD didn't target those then there would be no reasonable way to roll them back. The right solution, then, is probably 2 steps at the same time: </font> Reduce the accuracy of the point defenses so large rounds have a higher chance of making it through</font>Don't allow point defenses to target ridiculously small/fast projectiles like 120, 20, 76, etc.</font> It's very important with #1 above that the accuracy still be high enough that a single incoming round by itself is very likely to be intercepted. Without that, one of the main things that makes PD interesting will be lost (which is that it creates a need for multiple units to coordinate in order to get through it). The biggest side-effect of this is that rolling back point defenses is now going to be much harder than it used to be. In order to effectively roll it back, you're going to need two team mates both sending large rounds into its effective radius. It used to be relatively easy to find a buddy with a 20mm to help you put out some fire for rolling back. Now, you're going to have to find a buddy with a mortar or ATGM. There are fewer of these to be found usually. Of course, with this change (and a good team), you should be able to rally a team mate or two to coordinate with you on this. So the end result might be to make artillery even harder to use overall. I'm interested in trying it out. The only deal breaker here would be if, amongst players in general, it's simply too hard to get someone to help you put arty through a PD zone. You could virtually never do it with a single artillery piece anymore. Yes, there were 2 bugs: one was that objects between "you" and a blast weren't properly blocking fragmentation. The other, more recent one, was that 120mm HE had incorrectly high armor penetration. Neither of these effects the general lethality of the mortars or Hurricane (except amongst buildings, etc. where victims now receive proper cover whereas before they didn't.)

Were any of the 3 of you using something with a high rate of fire? In order to roll back point defense you have to put a high number of rounds into it. 3 vehicles firing 120's are never going to make it through. If just one of those vehicles were firing something with a high ROF then a significant number of the 120's would make it through. AAD is laughably easy to defeat, as was clearly demonstrated by the videos above. I can definitely understand backstory complaints about some aspects of it, but from a gameplay perspective they are not at all insurmountable. Is there any way that I can further elaborate on the various - easy - ways that point defense can be overcome? Do we really want to make it even easier than it already is? If so, then what we're really saying is we don't want it at all. We're willing to entertain that thought, but be careful that this isn't just a knee-jerk reaction to the frustration of having someone else successfully counter our actions. Let's stand back and imagine the game without them (as it was at one point). Artillery (mortars and hurricane) were able to put their rounds at any point on the map with impugnity. Think about that for a moment. No matter where you go or what you do, the enemy can place arty rounds directly on you. Fast movement gives you some protection from the indirect rounds, but nothing protects you from direct fire artillery like the Hurricane other than trying to kill it (and if it's being competently managed then it is far away, using cover and its own high speed to make that extremely difficult). What kind of tactical options do you have? Imagine yourself on the receiving end. You drop a Paladin, just begin to come up to speed and wham - your charred wreck is inside of a crater. When this happens right now, you sometimes have the option of deploying some point defense in order to counter this attack by the enemy. So on your second drop, you bring along a Hermes or drop near a defense tower and maybe begin hunting for the enemy artillery. The enemy must then react to this new development by bringing up some direct fire support to take care of the Hermes, thereby regaining the original artillery unit's effectiveness. It's a nice stroke, counter-stroke, counter-counter stoke dance (and this dance can't be performed alone). If you didn't have that point defense option, then all you can do is drop again. Wham. Another smoking wreck. Now your only remaining option is to drop much farther away and immediately hussle away from the DZ before an artillery round has time to arrive. If you're using a light enough vehicle to actually cover all of that distance and catch up to the enemy artillery and engage it then all of your work has been for nothing anyway - it's going to plaster you before you get close enough to damage it with your smaller caliber weapons. If you were equipped with a heavier vehicle then you will likely suffer damage just making it out of the drop zone, unless the enemy arty is busy with someone else. In that case, you've been forced to drop in a distant location with a heavy, low speed vehicle and a long drive back into a useful position. This is almost as good as (and sometimes even better than) having killed you. It can be frustrating right now if point defense foils your plan and forces you to adapt and try a different plan. The frustration you feel when on the receiving end of the scenario outlined above is many times worse. I know because that's how the game used to play before point defense was introduced. Does anyone remember playing during the public test when the Hermes had only a low chance of intercepting incoming artillery? Do you remember the endless stream of posts whining about how artillery ruled the entire field and made every other vehicle, action, and concept in the game completely worthless? Artillery was certainly realistically lethal - and no one was having any fun (except for the couple of guys who were first to drop Hurricanes). Artillery is lethal and accurate and rightly so. One of the interesting things about the DropTeam universe that distinguishes it from a modern setting is that there are actually some limited direct counters to it. These counters are pretty easy to overcome but you do need to adapt your tactics and actually overcome them. Point defense has made play dramatically more tactical, not less. Having said all of that, of course there's always room to tweak the way they work. We can, in fact, make them even easier to defeat if there's general agreement that this is needed. We can also simply make them less generally effective. But these things have to be done very carefully because it's quite easy to make artillery the only units worth having.

The Magic Flying Paladin is fixed for 1.1.3.

Disposable drop pods are on the way for some types of delivery. Limited inventory of dropships is on the way, too, but of course needs to have "reinforcement zones" included at the same time. This is almost done. The background story and the campaign story go into this a little bit. The short answer is that Liveships, which are relics from an earlier era where advanced nanotechnologies were still ubiquitous, are invisible to almost all kinds of detection (including optical) except in the case of malfunctions, treachery, etc. which can force a battle between Liveships. We could delve into your other two questions, too, but the real point is that you don't like dropships and you're wanting the reinforcement zones and dropship inventory limits to address that. They're on the way and are very close to release!

Killing Galaxies is fun and easy. The easiest way is to roll back their defense with a sufficient amount of fire: Rollback video Notice that it really doesn't take very much fire to roll it back. If you can't even get a single member of your team to help you focus fire on the Galaxy then there's a much bigger problem than AAD. It's also incredibly easy to simply use weapons against which it has no defense: Long range death video Some bloody bot ruined the grand finale in that 2nd video, but you get the idea. As it stands right now, getting through a Galaxy's umbrella is quite easy to do. The only way you would have trouble is if you weren't coordinating with your team at all. Lots of things are difficult if you're doing them completely alone. A Galaxy that is also within an ion tower's radius, so the two overlap, starts to become more of a challenge to punch through.

The reason for the high strength of the crew components is not that the crew themselves are so tough. It's that the crew are inside of sealed, armored crew compartments full of acceleration jelly (most of the interior of the vehicle is not pressurized). Once the armored compartment is breached at all, the crew is considered dead. The main problem with them, though, is that they're currently too small - sometimes *way* too small.

Absolutely, Poesel. The only caveat is that it needs to somewhere say that the artwork is "copyright 2006, Battlefront.com, Inc." Also feel free to let me know if you need any extra graphics - I might be able to dig up some odds & ends.

So does Yurch. I think the problem with this one is not that the bots are inhumanly accurate, but that the projectiles themselves are impossibly accurate. Over that great of a distance the deviation caused by flight through atmosphere should be preventing a hit more often (when there is atmosphere). This is very easy to remedy so we'll look at it, too. This is OK if the shooter had a target lock on you. This is not OK if the shooter was manually guiding the missile. Will run some tests.

This definitely shouldn't happen regularly and I'm pretty sure it does happen too often right now. As you say, that's a helluva shot. We'll look into it.

War of the Worlds? C'mon, challenge us, Sir Jalinth!

Let's work the kinks out and make a permanent part of future releases. I'll throw in the "unjammable" tag for you on the next update.

Agreed that this is very important and it is already underway.

There's really nothing right now to do that kind of bog effect that you're looking for. I'll let you know when something's ready.

That's a very good idea, Dark. The most time consuming part is the extra modelling. For a poor-man's version, it would be a trivial exercise to simply take some of the existing units (Paladins, Shrikes, maybe?) and make less effective copies of them with some superficial texture changes. Then put them in the inventory for the defending team of some scenarios. Our original game design had you flying your Liveships between planets in The Rim. You would drop into combat, which is the current game, steal loot and technology which would then be added to your persistent online Liveship inventory. You could use that stuff to repair, modify, and create units, etc. The estimated completion date of the game was December 9, 2037. So we scaled it back to the current game for now.

There could hardly be anything more useful at this point, especially for new players but with plenty of valuable nuggets even for the veterans. I don't think there's any problem with bandwidth but there's definitely a problem with available man-hours. If you would be so kind as to put it together, Poesel, that would be wonderful. Once you get it going we'll definitely take the time to add content to it as needed (or requested), though.

I like this unit because it represents a truly strategic target for the enemy. If the other team has deployed one of these then you really need to coordinate with your team to eliminate it. With such a wide area of effect, it's impossible to simply ignore it as you can with many other units. The presence of this unit introduces a larger, strategic challenge much like the important facilities do. How many of these do you think should be in the default inventory? My main concern would be a team using them to completely lock out the entire map (or even if not a complete lock-out, still causing such severe casualties in drops that it might as well be a lock-out). On a less important tangent, it also happens to look very cool, too. The IsJammable flag determines whether a component is affected by EMP attacks, not whether it can be sensor jammed. That's awful nomenclature in retrospect. I completely agree that in order for this thing to work as part of the game it should always be "unjammed", so you really need a new tag that doesn't yet exist. We'll get that in for you on the next update.

No, now that you said that, I already see the problem. Thanks, Konstantine!

Konstantine, if you have shaders off, try it with them turned on (if you can).