Alexander SquidLord Williams

My suspicion is that the current projectile-based weapons on the vehicles are railguns, though more likely coilguns. "Why?" you ask. They operate in an extremely broad swath of environments with extremely high reliability and on relatively limited logistical trains. While the ammo might be caseless and fired by micro-antimatter reactions, I believe it'd be more reasonable to suggest they have sufficient power free from the AM plant that a 120mm coilgun firing is perfectly reasonable. Why, then, do they have limitations roughly akin to the dynamics of our current weaponry? In part, to keep the game somewhat like modern warfare and allow known tactics to have a chance of being useful (as DarkAu has demonstrated, some people get quite grumpy when they don't mesh exactly with the modern), but from an in-game perspective, the weapons express a balance between range, rate of fire, and reliability that designs which push closer to the limits of the technology wouldn't. Remember, the LiveShips are doing the weapon design and manufacture in this setting, and they've lost a lot of the high tech, advanced materials methods they used to have. They can't build a Hellbore and building significantly more advanced weaponry may simply not be reasonable for them. (It occurs to me that the backstory mentions the weapons largely being caseless AM because low-tech gas accelerated guns are easy to design and build; I might twiddle that if I had the chance, but it's reasonable and also answers.)

Equally as important as what Smeltz says above, waiting and watching for the bomb to have a target takes a combatant out of play that could be firing ATGs into the enemy. Even if you put a bot on it, that's one more bot not guarding your back or flanking the enemy.

Actually, if we could define areas with PNG masks, that might be interesting, if only because normalizing from 0-255 (pixel range) to 1-100 (percentage), you could theoretically determine how many points a given zone is worth holding, meaning it might reasonably be worth setting up an Objective game where holding the center position is worth 100% of points-per-second and the ion outposts are worth 25%. Holding both outposts wouldn't be a winning position, but it could certainly force the Defender to fight for them. I think this needs to happen. As stands, given the choice, the 20mm chassis are always the better choices, not only because they do more overall damage but because they're just scarier. I don't worry overmuch at the thud-thud of a 76, but the chatter of a 20mm makes me hustle.

Makes complete sense and now that I understand the underlying method, I think I can pull it off. Which is good, because Hunt the Wumpus needs assembly areas and a couple little ragged cobblestone roads.

I don't see any reason not to have a Bot CMD. In a small engagement with only a few folks on each side, its perfectly reasonable to switch elements with a bot while the artillery is recharging if the other things are going fine. That doesn't increase their effectiveness; bots don't hide well. If the CMD is on the field, it should be functioning. To do otherwise penalizes the side with fewer people even if their orchestration is superior. That leads to bad design.

Hmmm, so, in abstract, the idea is: </font> Create your terrain heightmap and save it as PNG (or other convenient lossless format).</font>Mask the areas off you want to be roads/flattened.</font>Blur/smooth the masked area until it's regular.</font>Merge the layers again.</font>Convert to binary heightfield.</font>Seems like a reasonable process. Wish it'd occured to me to use layer masking. I hate it when I forget the obvious.

Toby, I'm really curious as to what you're doing to get nice roads into place? I can crank terrain all day, but the "developed" areas are requiring tools I don't have at the moment, apparently.

I'd certainly think this would be more than reasonable. There are too many LoS comm methods that simply can't be jammed with any reasonable sense. That any friendly in LoS forwards their sensor grid is perfectly reasonable. In that case, the CMD takes on the role of data scrubber and forwarder between non-LoS friendlies, which is a perfectly helpful role.

I think in this case, the simplest answer that works might be the best answer. To that end, I'd suggest that as long as you have a CMD on the field, every element can see anything on the mini/tac that any other element can see, the CMD providing a battlefield net hub things can route through, scrub for bad info, and redeploy. The advantage of having a CMD is, thus, obvious, and it applies equally well to both sides. The advantage of taking out the enemy's CMD is likewise obvious, and its clear that its balanced in both directions. Plus, its trivial to code. Now, if I were dreaming of some kind of CMD extra advantage that you have when there's not a CMD on the other side, I might suggest that an unopposed CMD double the range of Sensors and Sensor Jammers on their side, so the bloody things actually appear to have more than marginal use. The problem I have with a lot of the "undifferentiated jamming" verbiage in the DT backstory is that jamming is loud ... by design. If the CMD is cranking out even an appreciable portion of that static, it should glow brighter than a Bacchus in your back yard. So, I'm thinking the CMD is pointedly not a jamming platform; it tries to be as unobstrusive as possible while acting in the C&C role, marshalling the network, and being generally facilliative of other units' effectiveness. (Semi-related, I'd really like to see Platoons of no more than five elements automatically share sensor data when within a couple km of each other. This means you can have mortars being spotted for by attached infantry without too much coding, as well as coordinated shoot-and-scoot along ridges and gullies.)

I think this is a bad idea. Not the "levels of victory" idea, per se, though that's hard to crunch so that you actually consistently see some variation, but because you're designing from a "realism / logic" point of view and not a "designer / game dynamic" point of view. To wit: If, as the Attacker, I don't have to go into the Objective area, why would I ever do so? It's dangerous, the Defender has vast fixed emplacement advantage (ion towers, other pre-positioned assets), and the advantage of terrain, in most cases. If I can possibly get a scenario win out of sitting at range and sniping, trusting to 120mm HEAT and AP crit strikes to pop targets, why wouldn't I? There's no advantage to risking my assets like that. Likewise, for the Defender, there's no reason to go hunting those Attacking assault snipers at range, because doing so puts your forces at even greater risk, rather than just digging holes and berms and hunkering down. They're not coming in after you, and you're not going out after them. It becomes a game of turtling, because there's no advantage to not doing so. Not really an Objective game at that point; really an anti-objective game. Thus, the Objective points have to be worth more than 2-3x the points you can get from kills, total. Kills them become a discriminator, but not the discriminator. It's hard to get people to drive a Cutter now. Slow, no real weaponry, and it doesn't do that much of interest. It requires an escort of elements, which can be hard to coordinate. Make it any more tissue-paper, and you can just write off capturing outposts at all; it just won't be worth it. The Mercury is best plopped down between buildings or over a hill with a Jammer, and it's best use is just calling down turrets. Which, basically, are damned useless, because the bots put rounds through them before they can fire even once, even ignoring nearby Apollos or 76mm Paladins to do so. Without the ability to pop off mine zones in front of attackers, the only thing the Merc is good for in a real sense is dropping, placing arty and/or smoke, then extracting. A commander in a Merc is effectively a pretty wasted asset other than that, save in the late period when the Attackers are waving into the Objective in Paladins and Shrikes, having depleted heavier assets. Then the 20mm can be brutal. Uh, no, please. Especially for the Attackers, who generally have to go head on with Thors on the Objective out of the gate. I don't mind that 20mm can pop a hole in the back of a Thor turret. It's hard enough to get a decent flank a lot of the time. This I'll agree with. The 76mm either needs a 3 round burst mode, or to do more damage overall per round. I'd actually prefer the burst. And the HE needs a limited but definite explosive radius, since at present it just does nothing worth discussing to infantry nor buildings.

I'm an artist ...

I'm pretty sure the latter is effectively what we've been talking about; the vehicle fires a charge into the ground as it rolls along every X metres, then detonates the lot at once, throwing dirt to one side or the other. Which works neatly from the PoV of interface for a player, keeping things relatively simple. Not sure the setting backstory is supportive of a beam-weapon digging system. The old Hellbores could do it, but the 10mm ion seems to be about the most powerful beam weapon they can put on a mobile platform. Otherwise, just from a physics PoV, I'm not sure it'd be the best means. Beams pump energy into a target, radiating it or melting it, depending. For a digging tool, you really want quantified explosions to literally kinese dirt around. Or a slave Auxillia. Mmm, slave Auxillia. I think switching it a Mercury chassis will help a lot with the profile issues. Honestly, the Paladin is a little too huge and towering for my tastes in a vehicle. Drive one up next to an Apollo sometime and then cringe ...

Schuper! At some point, once this stuff gets worked out, I'll actually gain enough clue to put things like facilities and other useful things on the terrain. Wouldn't that be swell? Speaking of swell, it'd be nice to have there be some kind of switch I could throw so that the system displays my current vehicular coordinates in three-space while driving around in the terrain. If nothing else, it'd allow some kind of translation for deciding where to put objects on the map without needing the integrated placer or guesstimating ...

Luckily, Humanity developed the ability to communicate just so that we could get these little incongruities straightened out. I can see that working well enough, I suppose. It's not going to be something you work out while putting down a defensive trench/berm, but if you were hand-crafting one emplacement it could work out well enough. The issue I see (in both cases, really) is if we take explosive facing from the turret, you'll have to be driving one way and facing 90o off it to build a proper berm. Not the most fun you can have with your pants on, especially in some of the terrain we have. Thoughts?

Thanks, Hub! Now, get out there and document your techniques in exacting detail on the wiki! [sounds of whip-cracking and maniacal laughter]

It can be more than mildly challenging to hit the exact same point given the aiming system, so for UI purposes you have to accumulate all charges within a radius, and that just gets messy to calculate all around given everything else beeing calculated. Frankly, I think trying to manage depth on a single pass is too fiddly than "laying out lines" by just driving where you want things to blow up, truth be told. Make a second pass through the newly excavated trench if need be; it'll be faster to do that than to fiddle around trying to set depth with manual control of the digging apparatus. Combine the automatic "charge launcher" which only fires down in front of the vehicle with a short range, high-radius, low penetration "digging mortar" to produce pits or extra depth with automatic berming around the edge (because its a shaped-charge round designed to throw the dirt up in a berm around it, rather than out and up), and I think you'll have sufficient flexibility. If we happen to get "pre-made" digging emplacements the vehicle can deploy automatically in front of it, like a "Thor pit," I think we'll be thinking of it as gravy.

Requires you control the depth of each charge seperately. I acknowledge it'd probably be easy to do in practice in ... whatever year it is ... but our interface is necessarily more limited, and dialing in the exact penetration desired per round could be annoying. And just hard to manage. Damn, I suppenly want a Penal Auxilliary Squad armed soley with shovels and thrown rocks ...

Actually, if we've got enough AM to use as the explosive in HE rounds (and that's what the backstory says we're using), using it for digging charges seems de rigeur. Though I agree they shouldn't create any kind of "tac shadow" on the enemy tac display; since its not an active power source, no more echo from it than the HE rounds. Two digging charges on the same spot without the first exploding, then placing the second wouldn't actually dig that much deeper a hole. If we're talking simultaneous explosion, it'd just be a more oblong one, and if not, the first one would uproot and dislodge the second. That said, "charges" that act like a claymore (has directionality) is not untoward, though if we want to keep the flexibility of being able to create trenches, they'd be facing left, tossing the dug dirt largely to the left side of the vehicular facing and letting you drive along a trench line.

I've been tinkering with the scenario a bit before bed, putting the Possession right in the dead center of the map (perversely, atop a mountain, but ...), and with MaxDrop set to 200. Things go extrordinarially well ... except for the fact that somehow, at some times, things still manage to drop on the slopes or even tops of the mountains, despite the setting for height. Moreover, and possibly as perversely, I've seen dropships, particularly on extract, hit a mountain and go cartwheeling up into the sky until they hit ceiling, then flatten, drift a bit, and finalize the extract. If nothing else, the tightness of the terrain is a solid test of the dropship patchfinding, I'll say that. And watching bots try to drive up the side of a nearly vertical slope is perversely satisfying, if bug-finding.

OK, that's an odd place for the objective to be ... I'm trying to remember why in Hades' name I set the TargetLocation to somewhere out in hyperspace. Probably a side-effect of not knowing the unit the coordinate for it was supposed to be in (pixels vs metres). Luckily, however, it's an easy fix. It'll help a lot once we have an integrated scenario design aide, of course; the automatic coordinate and radius setting will be a huge boon to getting things "just so."

Hmmm. The problem here is doing things that require multiple passes; making extra deep troughs or trenches will still require driving into and outof the holes in multiple passes. Maybe we need some pre-constructed "charge patterns" that can be dropped much like infantry formations are now. Point the Cutter where you want the "emplacement" to face, hit "place Thor emplacement" and it blasts a terrace fronted drive-in hull-down position, with forward berm, ready for the occupation of the happy. With the computational resources and AM explosives the setting already assumes, that should be relative cake to justify in-game. Using digging charges like Claymores would probably not be terribly useful, at least from a "doing damage" point of view. You could certainly disrupt an infantry group by setting them off beneath, but I doubt there'd be enough metal shrapnel to kill anything with even infy armnour. Digging charges are designed to do just that, dig. Combining this with the Mercury certainly wouldn't hurt, or at least moving from the current Cutter chassis to the Mercury frame. Wider, lower, and prettier.

Sadly, no. Interestingly, when I put MaxDropElevation 500 in the scenario file, I get the <i>original</i> behaviour that I had issues with, the bots grind in a hard cycle, bogging the entire server down ... and even then, I believe I saw one trying to land on the NE ridge. Ultimately, kind of frustrating.

The scenario-editing bits will be handy for all sorts of reasons, not least being that it'll make it way easier to get the vertical flipping right given the inputs. Oi, what a pain ... Anyway, for things like drop-acceptible areas, and if they decide to go to a multi-texture terrain maps (beyond the current 3/4), we'll probably just want to go to B&W images for each layer/descriptor. That gives the 65k range without the complications of unused channels. That is, if white is described as "always OK to drop" or "complete coverage of this texture" and black as the opposite, the usage becomes fairly easy.

Hmmm, making that map would be a right PitA, for the record, since buildings don't necessarily appear in all scenarios. Map-making is already kind of dodgy in some cases. I still don't know exactly what ShadowMap is supposed to be for, for example.

Hmmm, I'm trying to think of any of the maps where you could be in the Objective zone but not LoS to it. Since it's defined as an area of ground rather than as LoS to a point, I think if you're "in the zone," by definition you have LoS to the soil under your feet.