dan/california

Dark, you are right about many of these things, but it is primarily a a game mechanics issue. Real AFVs have a commander, a driver, a gunner, in the Abrams at least, a loader who spends more of his time acting as a radio operator. The sitting still thing is simply a result of one person not being able to do all of these things well. People tend to sit still to improve their situational awareness and or gunnery. It is just very difficult to coordinate everything to do a proper shoot and scoot. If their were a a few hundred people on the servers all the time, it might be possible to have a driver and gunner, but that and decent bot intelligence are not quite there yet. There might be a small ping issue as well. No one in the industry has decent bots, it an unsolved problem industry wide in unscripted games. I would love to be able to yell, or tap a button and have the driver do something intelligent while I kept trying to kill things. I just wrote something about being able to tell your tank to follow its platoon leader but Clay will need a while if it is even doable. The bot coordination tools that are under discussion might help this a lot.

Go right ahead and fly a viper into Yurch's line of sight. I dare you, please take screenshots and or video of the burning wreck.

Dark, You are right on many of the generalities but missing two subtleties. The first is that game balance is really hard, anything they put in will be put to uses that were not conceived before hand. The second is that "tactical sense" changes with the technology. Part of the endless fascination of a game like this is figuring out what makes tactical sense under the rules at that time. getting back to the game balance issue, the law of unintended consequences is a big, big deal. The other part is arguing about it. Battlefront and TBG are the best out there at explaining why and taking input. Adzling, isn't that what the command track fire mission does now?

Flamingpicky, you are right about the misconception. It just so happens that if you are dealing with it from any perspective other than a CAD screen trying to improve armor or warheads the distinction is just irrelevant. [ August 08, 2006, 02:52 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Clay, I basically agree with you. The game is designed to have a different feel than a full up war circa 2006. In any tactical situation right now the use of ground troops is primarily to flush the enemy from cover, at least from the perspective of any major western power. Once an enemy has been forced to reveal himself some thing unstoppable and fatal is called in. If it was an even fight it would be a quick bloody, and ungodly expensive war between the air, artillery, and ECM of each side to establish supremacy first. Then one side is running and hiding and the other side is working the radio. Once one side can park a B-52 on loiter with tens or(they are working on it) hundreds of guided munitions all the other side can do is try to play the human shield card. As repeated references to mad Admiral Stannis point out in the back story it is basically a strategy of praying the other side has a conscience. Actually managing the place once you smash it is a different issue for a different forum. The game is designed to play on a different level where the units on the field have to deal with each other. This means some combination of game mechanics and and back story that account for the lack of unlimited, unstoppable, guided super weapons. I feel that the overall balance is very close to right, I have certainly made enough suggestions about how I think it ought to be tweaked. Still in game terms it is pretty close to right. I don't think people have had the time to absorb how effective the coax is in hammering back point defense yet. With atgms and a little practice you can do with one unit. In fact what is really needed right now, in addition to various unit coordination measures that are underway is a shrike or paladin with a 14 mm or even 10 mm chain gun as a main armament. It would be the perfect counter for point defense, infantry and turrets. It would also be completely helpless against heavy armor and require the kind of teamwork the game is aiming for. Better tools for unit coordination will help tremendously here. If the human players could group a platoon together and then switch very easily(single key even) from vehicle to vehicle within that platoon a lot of this would be more manageable. Th overall commanders job would also be infinitely easier if he could just give orders to platoons instead of vehicles. Thee real world works that way for some very good reasons. I also like the idea of using the Galaxy to lead and the assault and establish a base of operations as brought up earlier. This would allow and encourage people to drop at defined points and start out with some sembalance of coordination. Things as simple as not having the bots leave the galaxies area of influence unless there was group of a specified size would help tremendously. It is the endless onesie twosie dribble assault that really crosses up game play at the moment. if the bots waited for a player and automatically grouped themselves in a (selectable, please) formation the fighting would get a lot more organized. I am sure Clay loves it when I ask him not to sleep for several more weeks like that. Backstory tech is a whole different issue that I am trying to write something longer on. Be afraid, be very afraid. [ August 08, 2006, 02:34 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Plasma, all the plasma, mortars, turrets, and so on make less than no sense. Somebody needs to rethink that part. Laser based AAD, I just resolutely think of ions as lasers, do make at least some sense. Current tech would have to scale up by a lot but the basic bits are out there. Trying to contain a plasma into a projectile requires tech that should not be wasted outside of a live ships interstellar drive. Speaking of the interstellar drive......... :eek:

I think Battlefront appreciates the input of the people who read and post to these forums. I don't think they consider us typical.

Maybe the Galaxy need to be repurposed. Instead of using it as a resupply ship it becomes the tip of the spear. You get one, once you drop it it stays down, it has the ability to radically affect the other sides electronics and and AA in its zone of control. In effect it becomes your base for the scenario. It should be worth a LOT of victory points to kill or lose. Also give it some of the abilities currently possessed by the command track. Sensor relay at the least, maybe make it the source of the big artillery packages. You would still need forward observers to hit anything outside of its LOS Scenarios could be written to limit one or both sides choice of drop zones. All the cool electronics on board could become the primary advantage of liveship based forces over the poor planet bound fools they are preying on. it instantly creates an important influence on both tactical and strategic decisions. Here is the best trick, force teams to appoint a commander in order to place it. If the other side has the map so tightly defended there is no place to land it then any sane commander would pick another target. I still think simple drop pods make more sense for ammo. Most of it is already engineered to be fired out of a gun barrel at some ridiculous G force anyway [ August 08, 2006, 12:40 AM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

It would play right into Jalinith's new scenario.

Instead of chasing the silly flag back and around the way that flags should be counted is being able to land a dropship on the objective and get it out again. Yurch's new vehicle(the dropship killer) would play right into this. This allows for a number of scenario possibilities, each team can have an objective(flag) to defend or it could be scored on whoever got the most ships in and out of a single base, wreck, or other leftover pile of tech. Right now many people don't even bother shooting at rising dropships, but I bet they would learn. Their are also possibilities for asymmetric scenarios where one side has to get a ship in and out, and the other side just has to stop them. It is all about looting the ruins of a golden age, right.

I also would guess that since the ships are their homes, not just warships, that they are extremely shy about risking them in direct combat.

I tried the trick mentioned above, switching to the machine gun as soon as the missile leaves the launcher and peppering the target. I think it was the best kill to death ratio I ever had. This little idea wrecks people. I think the bullets peppering the vehicle mess with peoples return fire even if there is no hermes to worry about. lived long enough in one paladin to call the galaxy down TWICE, and shot off most of the last load. A personal best by a huge margin. Try it, you'll like it. The coax guns have tremendous potential to roll back point defense. Artillery effectiveness in a game like this is a hard call. Straight forward extrapolation of current trends implies that anything bigger than a cat that does not have a deep hole and good camo is not going to live long on the battlefields of the near future. And the deep hole just takes giving the location to the air force. So any first person sci fi game or story for that matter (Drake really did think the slammers' tech through very well) has to come up with a reason why some kind of guided munition is not sweeping the battlefield clean. I think Drop team strikes the balance very well on the overall. And the devs could not be more willing to take, and act, on input [ August 07, 2006, 11:12 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Once dropship availability is limited a huge cloud of chaff ,smoke, and flares would look cool if nothing else. Dropships need to be both much more valuable/rare and harder to kill. Yes Clay I read that it is on the way. Ammo resupply should just be a disposable pod. It can be argued that the vehicles and or crews need the gradual ride of a real ship but ammo? Give it the 31st century equivalent of bubble wrap and a couple of drogue chutes. If a crewman had to hop out of the vehicle for a few seconds it would be a cool animation and help keep people honest. Right now it is advantageous to run out of ammo and have to call for more. Having to pull out of the firing line for a minute or so it entirely reasonable. If you are out of ammo and taking fire from three sides you should not enjoy the experience.

A high velocity round penetrating that accel jelly would hurt the crewman as bad as if it went through him.

Flags are weird, period. :cool: I posted this somewhere else, but there is an absolute rule of AFV design. There is no empty space, unless it has room for infantry. Anything which can be done to reduce the volume of the vehicle is done. This is because a lower volume gives a lower profile and further more a given weight of armor will provide more protection if it wrapped around a smaller volume. It is a simple surface to volume ratio issue. You can argue for very lightly armored vehicles that an AP round would occasionally leave a small entry hole, a small exit hole, and no other damage other than to the crews shorts. But large caliber heat rounds put enough burning hot gas and metal into the vehicle that it should just die, or at least stop functioning for thirty seconds or so while the crew deals with fire suppression, blown breakers and other unpleasantness. Shooting a paladin three times with a 120 mm more or less in the center of mass is making me crazy. Personally I think Yurch's theory that the crew space volume should be increased makes perfect sense.

It would only take you until 2019 if you gave up sleep and family completely. :eek:

With the exception of the regular paladin, which has bay for infantry, if their was empty space in a vehicle it would be smaller instead. A lower volume lets the same weight of armor give you more protection. That is why all real life AFVs are claustrophobic. More room is more of a chance of dying.

If you tell me that there is not as much drift in the shell as there should be I believe you, But the real problem is a big expensive dropship not taking even the slightest evasive action, blowing chaff or otherwise trying to stay alive. I just figured out that you don't need to have lock to kill a dropship with a missle, if the atgm hits from any angle it dies(I am sure Yurch already new this, but then he is one bad dude). You just have to keep the pip on target. Therefore any dropship that is not clearing an atgms line of sight in less than the flight time is dead, unless Yurch is blowing me to burning wreckage, but I digress. At a flat minimum drop ships should vary their rate of fall somewhat randomly. 120 mm fire slaughters them because once you figure out the lead it is 100 percent consistent. Anyone who flew a helicopter that way on a modern battle field would not last thirty seconds. The treatise on ion physics and several other things that is awaited with such anticipation is under construction.

I am envisioning the ability to set up a formation, say a thor a hermes and a paladin atgm. that can drop together and be given orders as a unit. If a player takes over a vehicle in the platoon he automatically takes command. If there is more than one player then maybe give some hud info about the rest of the platoon. If a player could designate his vehicle to follow the platoon leader in formation it would let players other than the platoon leader the ability concentrate on other things. A formation screen like the one for infantry would be great. Another excellent refinement would be the ability to set the bots targeting priorities. So an ion bot doesn't waste four minutes shooting at a thor thats 5000 meters away when it could have killed 9 turrets and three shrikes.

I really feel that 120 mm lethality needs to be increased for both heat and AP, antyhing but a thor should just die. The reload time is so long you should be rewarded for getting rounds on target. You left out the ultimate refinement of ion camping. Which is to bring a Hermes along. If you don't bring a hermes along and the other team has it together they will drop something right on top of you. While I am rambling, a hermes and an infantry squad or two are extremely effective together. In fact teaming infantry squads with any other vehicle makes close assaults infinitely more deadly. It really increases the importance of teamwork in the game, which is a good thing. [ August 06, 2006, 07:19 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

The game is excellent. The support is excellent. The developers will talk to you. Multiplayer is stable and interesting. I am driving my wife crazy playing so much. That should cover it. BUY THE GAME! [ August 05, 2006, 06:00 PM: Message edited by: dan/california ]

Hezbollah said"we want a war". The Israelis said "okay".

I think some scenarios where one side is trying to defend a single important vehicle would be fun. Save the "interstellar com" or what what ever at all cost. It would be tricky to balance but different.

I think Ions would make them suicidal with any reasonable level of armor. They shred shrikes awfully well and helicopters are rather easier to break. Especially if they got ahead of their jamming. The little kill me triangle is a bad thnng for light vehicles. What I would like to see is infantry be able to designate for a shrikes atgms. The way it works for remote designation for the Apaches now.

Yeah but if the other side has to turn out that highly trained rifleman it will cost them a LOT of time and money.