Alexander SquidLord Williams

Thanks, Clayton. If only there were a live way to drop messages on the wiki in a sidebar, I'd have bothered you tonight.

Speaking of changes made for the Bacchus (which I look forward to driving, frankly; its a "never say stop" kind of ride), was there any more thought on the ability to have effect circles on the Hermes and the Galaxy, definitely for the side using them and, for the Galaxy, probably for the other side, too (lest its in a Sensor Jammed radius, likely a useful new tactic)? If so, it surely wouldn't hurt to get at least "faded" engagement circles for friendly Cobra Turrets that are jammed; its often hard to tell how big the circles should be when shifting between map scales between scenarios. If you do "fades" for jammed Cobras, the Hermes' perimeter should also be "faded." Visual feedback on the tac screen is a good thing.

Well, that pretty much is the definition of artillery, no? Someone reaching down from the heavens and messing with you. At least with drop pods, you have a second's warning because they show up on sensors right over your position, so you know you're being gifted with either infantry or mines. Artillery zips down out of the clear blue over a huge area and makes your life a miserable living hell. OK, it makes you blow up real good. Offensive mine deployment is actually not that far off what is in development today, if one wanted to extrapolate FASCAM and like rounds into the near future. Pod deployed mines probably are less annoying than FASCAM, both because of the inbound pod and because they're not nearly as dense. I've picked my way through the minefields in DT in an Apollo; its annoying, but not impossible. The bots get hamstrung by almost everything more complicated than butterfly wings. They require a butt-tonne of micromanagement to pull off any kind of effective tactical movement if you want anything like coordination. I was wrestling with them tonight with a couple of my friends, trying to create effective escort groups and it required most of my attention. I think, right now, I'd love it if Hull Down made the affected bots reverse if there's an effective hull down position to the target spot behind them, or if a target comes closer to them than hull-down.

I think the smoke we have is multi-spectral; it stops the ion beams dead, far as I can tell. The reason pips show up if not jammed by Hermes or Sensor Jammers is because they're not getting IR, its anti-matter drive particle emission, and I doubt any kind of smoke can block that.

Having been on the receiving and the giving end of mine dropping, I actually don't have nearly the problem that Dark and others have with the mine drops. In part because the bloody things have a really wretched area of effect once they hit. The speed of the drop pods is a significant refinement in being able to get mines on target in a timely manner. Adding new vehicles with mine clearing equipment just will make the problem worse, in its way. People will feel forced to drive one of them instead of the Thor, Apollo, or other direct engagement element. Which'll reduce the amount of actual fun folks have with the game. That is something of concern. Honestly, the response to having mines dropped on you is one or both of two things: </font> Stop moving. You don't move, you don't blow up by hitting a mine. You're now a bit of a pillbox. If you can put some rounds downrange, then super, you're still effective. If you can't ...</font>Extract. Pull out, go straight up. If you're under AAD umbrellas, then you'll just have to sit tight until someone can come out with a Cutter and clean up the area, or you suicide.</font>There are currently very few ways to actually channelize and deny terrain to the other side in DropTeam. Combat is extremely mobile, and there are almost no fronts as such in most maps because terrain itself doesn't channel folks in a consistent manner. Mines, by their very nature, are one of the very rare bits we have to push the lines of attack off their axis. I don't find using 120mm HE to clear minefields "gamey;" its the technology we're given. I'd certainly be amenable to letting lesser caliber HE do that job, too, just so we have more things its good for. It might take a few more rounds to do so, but anything to get more HE flying and to give folks a reason to slow down before engaging in a minefield. The real problems with using mines in an agressive drop pattern is two-fold: </font> The dropper can only really focus attention on a single area at a time. Especially as a base defender, axes of attack can generally be from one of many directions. You can only really focus attention on a press from about 25% of the field. Four folks on deploying mines is four folks not putting rounds downrange or on an active mobile defense, and however effective you think mines are on direct drop, they're nowhere near as effective as folks out in the field.</font>There aren't that many minefields available. Far more visibly now that they drop that much faster, you run out that much faster. With minefields getting dispersed or at least depleted by being hit, going active defense with mines isn't really as permenantly overwhelming as its being suggested. Are minefields effective when dumped on the heads of bots? Absolutely, since the things are too dumb to extract at the best of times. But if you miss with your mines and lead too far, they will slow down and divert path around them. Now, there are two things that mines need to make them effective area denial systems: </font>Once hit in particular, but coming into range should suffice, they should show up on the tac and mini maps of everyone on that side. They don't move, they don't evade. The only way they go away is by being eliminated, and that side should get that noted on the tac as well. Being visible will visibly interdict the axes of attack or movement once detected, and that's what mines are good for.</font>Minefields should have surface detectability like infantry does; invisible at range, based on the roughness of the terrain. This just makes sense, and coupled with auto-marking, keeps mines useful as deployed interdiction, which reduces the number available for active interdiction.</font>Combined with the AAD taking out mine pod drops and possibly adding HE ability to take out minefields, I think that would sufficiently decrease the overall impact of active drops and increase the usability of deployed minefields that it'd be net better.

Excellent work, Iceman! Maybe this's done soon enough to make it into the 1.1.4 rotation. We need some new win condition scenarios, and this one looks good.

If these are more UGVs than manned scout vehicles (which was the implication I gathered before), it might be reasonable for them to have the same "can't see me!" terrain cloaking that infantry get (only less so). That'd give them at least a tiny chance of remaining unseen until things get close enough for their weapons to be useful. Or for the ATGM to get a solid lock and launch.

While I am the world's greatest devotee of space biotech (keeping in mind I'd love to do an alternate set of bio-like vehicles with spiders replacing infantry), I don't think it really fits with the feel of the setting I get from reading the History they have for the "Space Vikings." They seem a lot more directed to hardtech, with nano restricted to the LiveShip (else we'd have self-repairing vehicles, I suspect). That kind of biotech manipulation is pretty hardcore, and doesn't really feel like lost technology being barely held onto by the SVs. All this sounds reasonable for existing in the setting, though I'm not sure they really fit our guys. I like the underlying idea, though, the implication that the LS are kidnapping and manipulating native populations to serve their alien (to humanity) needs along with implicit cults, social organizations, etc. The only serious drawback I see to this is that it gives the LiveShips a sort of implicit sentience (even if we assume its the human primitives doing a lot of the directing). I'm absolutely certain I could turn this into the core of a storyline set of scenarios with this as one of the factions. (Perversely, the image in my mind harkens to the Warhammer 40k Chaos Space Marines, with all that implies.) A linked set of scenarios or new campaign that centers around a crusading LiveShip crew would be just fine, I think. I don't think the idea of a braindead LiveShip is a particularly functional one, mainly because it begs the question of how they actually get it to do space nav; that implies a level of tech savvy the setting doesn't seem to offer to the humans even of the SV coming in from beyond the Rim. That said, a damaged LS, whose nano-facs are only partially functional but whose NNet is still online and of slightly more than animal intelligence, probably insectile. The force would move from scenario to scenario scrounging Mu Arae sites for repair materials and nano-fac patterns, as well as picking up vehicles from the indigs to fill the gaps. There's certainly enough to hang a story on, and therefrom a series of scenarios.

Wendigo, I imagine it'd be rather hard to get and hold a lock without a turret to rotate, and I'm not so sure how easily you'll be able to make a twin-swivel turret out of those external pods. But what really bothers me about this design is that the pods are mounted at mid-chassis. So, to get a firing solution, you'll have to have the vehicle be pretty much completely visible, with relatively unsloped armour on the front and sides. Now, if the pods were mounted up top like Mickey ears ... but then, you might as well use the standard ATGM mount, and it'd just be a treaded Shrike with a coax (which the Shrike needs, anyway).

Mace, I've created the blank template. Feel free to create an XML section under the Mods hierarchy and start filling it out.

My suspicion would be that the LiveShip processes controlled by its NNet are more complicated than running human biological processes (in entirely different ways, mind you). Not only is the LS managing massive vat-nano factories and local space maneuver, plus dropship drop / unload, but its also got the wonder of the interstellar drive, however that works. Overall, we;re talking very likely trans-biological levels of complexity. (The nano management alone is probably a nightmare of emergent complexity that it makes my puny mind shudder to contemplate.) Mind, AI's pointedly don't need to manage anything as complex as a human body, or even human kinesis. Especially if it doesn't, in fact, have a body. Mainly because (fast cut, short fade in), I'm not sure that: While the external appearance of the vehicles recalls modern human vehicular design, aside from infantry, we haven't ever seen one of the "Space Vikings" depicted, or even described. At least, not that I've seen or recall in the history section (but I fully admit, I could misremember, but its unlikely). The infantry is a whole different issue, though can be handwaved by suggesting that the kind of power it takes to drive an AI matrix just can't be squeezed down into anything small enough to hide profile and power source like the infantry require. Now we're finally over into my field. It ties in directly with the sheer amount of computing power that the Mu Arae remnant (I hate saying "Space Viking") throw around so casually. The LiveShips might be artefactual, but the sheer volume of data-crunching being done by a Hermes on the fly to do projectile interception is pretty vast. That's just the targeting system. With that kind of hardware, it implies that they're not using silicon wafers as their platform of choice. Quantum computing, crystaline computing matrices, optical circuits, whathaveyou, they have some extremely powerful, extremely parallelizable computing cores. The armour and other materials produced by the vat-nanofacs on the LS suggest that creating highly fiddly materials is well within the capability of the technology, though the MA likely don't have cultural knowledge of how to deliberately do it anymore. Neural networks aren't programmed, they're taught and trained. That should be a relatively simple process for the NNet on the LS itself, so there's no vast and complicated programming system necessary, just a highly efficient, artefactual technology that the LS "excretes" along with the vehicle itself. The best reason not to have clones in the vehicles dropped is a lot simpler, though: Clones eat. They respire. They excrete. They have a functioning mind, in some sense, that is equal to that of the source biological. This means that, when not in combat, they're consuming resources that you have in limited supply, for what is typically a few minutes of combat, because DT combat is extremely casualty-laden. Economically, if you can have machine-made crew instead of biological, and you're a space-going civilization, you pretty much have to. You keep your biologicals few and, because they're few, you keep them out of direct conflict as much as possible. Now, this I like, and it makes sense for the representation of the Players in the game-setting, we're Mu Arae on the LiveShip, each with specialized neural hardware which enable us to do remote telepresence directly. It has the advantage of making us "special" while setting the place in society firmly, and thus being a springboard for writing a bit more immersive fiction on the scenarios. Yes, my nerdity was never, ever in question.

I'll create the blank template tonight, Mace. Do feel free to fill it in to the best of your knowledge.

True. Mind you, I'd love for 'e' to be a toggle, too, since it'd be one fewer thing for me to manage in combat. In fact, I'd likely swap 'e' and 'r', just for less reaching being needed while driving and gunning.

If the mousewheel controlled the level of "zoom" (ie. first click in is gunsight, second is zoomed gunsight, etc) this'd not be a problem. (Yes, I'm still harping on this one. ) The zoom on the tac map is not bad, since mousewheel zooms in where you're pointing, but the degree of zoom either needs to be set less or adjustable.

Arguably, this has already been done in the DT-verse, large scale enough that AI's run some of the most powerful moving entities around, the LiveShips, themselves. Its multiply referred to the inhabitants trying to "convince" the LS to create a new design, with only occasional ability. At at least one point, the LS mind is referred to as a "neural network," which makes sense, as NN's are conditioned and taught, not programmed. So, the setting already has somewhat intractible AI bots; that fits in well with the description of our current bot agents down in the vehicles (particularly "intractible"). So, my feeling is that any kind of hook we use to explain how we as players control the bots on the field has to deal with how we can take over a bot at any time from any other vehicle ... and squishy human pilots doesn't really cover that. Non-squishy rat-brain NNet AIs we can take direct control of, far moreso. The nano-vats in the LiveShips don't seem to have any problem assembling iridium latices for fiddly pieces of the current vehicles, I'm betting assembling a crystaline matrix for a complex NNet wouldn't give them much pause. Inorganic constructs like that, particularly NNet bot brains, should be pretty standardized since they'd go into every vehicle produced. In fact, they likely have extremely simple network patterns, since the jobs break down pretty simply, gunners, drivers, and specialists. No complicated strategic or even complicated tactical mastery necessary. Now, LiveShip-side, they may be heavily into cloning to reproduce, given resources are tight and you can control cloning a lot tighter than reproduction, but we'd need more ship-side story to ferret out the necessities there. Looks like I can justify having both limited and unlimited inventory, but its harder to justify not having the ability to re-drop in an available vehicle. Not to put too fine a point on it, but DropTeam is, inarguable, a good half FPS. Mind you, its a FPS on the order of other tactical FPS, like SWAT4 and Ghost Recon, but both of them use the same principles as DT hinges on. Where DT excells is that along with that, there's this rather nice RTS top-down interface and the advantage goes to the team with an effective Commander in a non-battling vehicle away from the front lines. Actually, taking a page from the squad-based FPS platforms wouldn't hurt in one particular area: Being able to quickly gather a platoon of vehicles, forming them up, and giving them orders from on-field, such as "Go to that ridge and then hull-down to a point roughly 1500m away." You can do that from the tac screen, if awkwardly, now, but there'd be some advantage in doing it somewhat while in battle. (Why, yes, I play too much Full Spectrum Warrior, which is in a sense the invert of DropTeam, a RTS which looks a lot like an FPS.)

If more scenarios / servers are set with the "humans replace bots" switch on, it should be no big deal. Currently, we have about 6 bots per side. With that on, as a human drops in, a bot drops out of control. Thus, there's kind of a moving buffer, and things stay ballanced, regardless.

Man, no wonder I have trouble staying hull-down in a Paladin compared to my favoured Apollo. That front lip on the area of the body in front of the turret just adds immense space. I'd love to have a rebuilt-version of the Paladin some day, one which doesn't make a BRDM look like a low-profile vehicle, maybe. Hey, Clay ... this line-up gives me an idea. Any way you could create a nice high-res wallpaper with the vehicles lined up side-by side, both teams, alternating camo patterns between Blood and Water between ranks? Or just one wall for each lineup? Yes, I love the arctic camo patterns. I realize this makes me a loon.

Hades knows the main forum is busy enough with out madness.

As the number of folks playing increases (as we're all sure will happen ) and folks start finding the folks they like playing against, it'd sure be nice to have a way to automatically be joined to a game on the same side as the other folks you like playing with. In fact, there are folks that, for various reasons, you like playing against, because they use interesting tactics or just because they're fun opponents. Because all the logins are required to be registered with the server, there's no question of a given login name being associated with some other individual, which makes the following possible to do. I, thus, suggest, knowing full well that its not likely to happen anytime soon, the ability to create two lists in game. </font> Company: Or pick some other appropriate organizational name for the setting's military. Basically folks you like to play on the same side as and whom you know, in some sense.</font>OpFor: Folks you like playing against, because you just like blowing them up, you have some in-game rivalry, etc.</font> The idea being that when you join a game, the system automatically assigns you to the side which has more of your Company against more of your OpFor. Since it just tries to sort things out relatively neatly, if your Company-mates have different OpFor than you, you can be put against them by default and if you have multiple Company on the same side as an OpFor, you'll probably be there, too. This probably has to go along with the ability to see the player list and choose your side before being dumped to the tac map. You could then override the default for whatever reason, etc. I suggest this because I was just thinking of player-organized semi-regular playing groups who probably want to always be assigned to the same side, together. This would significantly suppliment their ability to do so. The OpFor idea came to me as I realized I was enjoying blowing up the same guy, repeatedly, so much so that I was going out of my way to preferentially target him during a game. Ultimately, we could move some of this to an actual formal "group" registration system hosted on whatever server Clay plans to host the stats from ongoing battles on the "official" servers. Then Companies could have their own badges and symbols that appear on their specific stat pages and could designate other Companies as Friends or OpFor. Just a thought. None of this can go in easily beyond the very basic Company / Opfor individual list, and that's not really useful until we get the pre-connect side-selection option.

By all means, Jalinth. Please do.

Thanks, Clay! I'm trying to do some post-pass copyediting on the pages as they go in, so if anyone sees that I've edited your pages behind you, I'm very likely just doing a little formatting cleanup, grabbing a few egregious copyediting issues, or tagging in links to other pages. I'll do less of this as folks learn the format and do more of the page-linking and formatting themselves, of course. Because I'm a geek and a writer and I can't help fiddling with things until they look right, darn it (says the guy who bought InDesign because he couldn't stand what the layout guy did to his last book, oi vey). Pretty much all content is desired! In fact, if you want to drop a personal note on the wiki in the middle of an extant page, please do! The best way is to set it off like so: That'll set your bit off with horizontal lines, indent your text a bit so its obvious what it comments on (add spaces as appropriate for the right spacing; typically one more than whatever you're talking about) and puts a bullet with a link to your personal page (if you're registered) so folks not only know who you are, but can find other stuff you've commented on, if they like what you've said. Categories are basically pages with a special format that link back to every page that links to them, and so make it easier to find, say, all the pages on "tactics" on the wiki (because they all contain a link to CategoryTactics). Plenty of examples on the site already. Remember, links to related things and pages make it easier to reference! The tough one can be linking to bits with spaces in the name; single words and extended phrases can be created like so: Either will make a link to a page with the given thing in quotes. As with categories, there are lots of examples; VehicleInfo is full of interesting bits. Why this extended ramble on formatting? Wikis thrive on making it easy to find stuff on them, even as they grow organically. Make your stuff look good, and make it easy to use, and the next time you need to find something, it'll be right there at your fingertips. I encourage everyone to help make the DropTeam wiki great!

Quite usable, but I'm not sure it doesn't seem to give the tech a bit more biotech edge than we've been puttering around with in the backstory (at least from my reading of it). Vat-nano on the LiveShips, high density materials, and neural network computing (LiveShip brains) are definitely canon in the writings (shades of Trek / gaming debates, someone kill me!) but cloning in the biological sense for AFV piloting ... I suppose my inherent question would be "why?" Especially if the Mu Arae descendents can control the biotech enough to control the level of intelligence in the clones, and create some kind of instant up/downlink system, I'd imagine there are some other issues. Other than infantry, why send squishies down at all? This last point is really intriguing to me, in fact. What if each LiveShip only contains a few biological humans at all? I'm reminded of Saberhagen's Berserker Saga, in particular the massive base ships which occasionally kidnapped and maintained populations to serve them before their inevitable destruction of all life. LiveShips existing to sustain small bio-populations within themselves? Raiding border planets to gather resources to keep them alive? Why do they take so much in resources? Because the in vitro systems are breaking down and they've lost the ability to manufacture some of the components (thus harkening back to one of my prior ideas about raiding for Mu Arae legacy technology / supplies)? (Of course, in the back of my head I really want to create an entire alternate force side that has exactly the same vehicles, but are based on extremely biological-looking technology. With infantry replaced by human-sized biomechanical spiders with turrets on their heads, because spiders with laser beams on their heads are cool.) Hey, er, Clay? Can you hire me to have a huge whack at rewriting the DropTeam backstory bible? I'm sure someone at White Wolf or Guardians of the Order will vouch for my ability. Bugger, GotO went out of business; I'm hosed.

Excellent stuff, Clay, most excellent. A credit, as always, to the responsiveness of you and your team. Btw, is there any chance we can get an alternate access mode where you zoom into / out of gunsight view with the mousewheel, along with a level or two of zoom? The hold-down 'e' interface with the gunsight has to be clumbsy for more folks than just me, I'm sure, and mousewheel zoom seems the obvious solution, since hands are already there. (That's not to suggest removing 'e' entirely; I'm sure there are folks using no-mousewheel mice ... somewhere.)

You should be able to cite an extract, just drop a url link in to the original Forum post. In fact, just drop it in pretty raw and I'll come in and clean some bits up to make it pretty. I'm pretty decent at second-pass editing, and wiki makes it easy.

I'm not so hot for a given order. That's a bit too much like the scenario designer getting too precise in telling the commanders how to achieve the ends, not just what to achieve. Probably not so useful a design technique as it might be in other strategy games, truthfully. Now, scenarios that are designed for the human players to all be on one side, co-op, vs all bots given some inherent advantages ... That kind of all co-op setup might be interesting to tinker with.