Alexander SquidLord Williams

Its not so much a "formation" as it is "trundle along in a vague way toward a relative position off this other unit." Its hard to configure and the bots are incredibly stupid about staying in formation. There needs to be more an awareness in all the elements of the formation and speed restricted to that of best of the worst element. Else platoon maneuver'll just never work. Myself, I far prefer the mono topological lines of not-too-contrastive colour, so you can make out where the saddle points and dips in the surface are a little more clearly. Bots don't really seem to do anything when ordered to go hull down save drive directly to that spot, and stop once it shows above the other terrain. Sometimes useful for sliding the bots around buildings with minimal exposure as well, but not often. My gut says we need some perturbation in the bot seeking behaviour to give it a bit more usefullness. Like the Boid flocking algorithm, where complex behaviours come from a set of simple rules being executed on an agent with other agents, perturbed by the environment, the bots can be a little world-blind. I'm not sure what kind of architecture Clay's been using to construct the bot-minds, but I'm sure he can work something out that helps a bit more than it does at the moment. (Myself, I've always been fond of Patti Maes' "Do The Right Thing" architecture, but I'm an old school geek.) And yet, in some cases they don't seem prone enough to extracting, preferring to suicide even when they could hope for extraction. Very odd.

Provocative title, not that provocative concept. I needed a thread to ramble about useful additions to the bot wrangling interface. As stands, there's a lot of focus on playing from a FPS-esque direction because getting the bots to do useful work from the tactical screen (hereafter abbreviated "tac") is not just awkward, sometimes its a real pain in the tookas. But, given a bit of polish -- OK, a lot of tears, sweat, and programmer-bile -- it could be a lot easier. I'll just put out a chunk of ideas that have been kicking around my head and some notes: </font> Multi-point Commands: Being able to give multi-point orders with different modes at each point will help a lot when it comes time to orchestrate moving groups together. Not only that, but it'll help a lot when just trying to get a bot to pull any moves more complicated than driving straight at the enemy without babysitting them. And that gives the players more time to come up with good tactics and even better strategy. The bots should be able to follow a path of at least five points, shifting from "Defend," "Attack," etc at each one.</font>Pause Times: It's probably a good idea to let the player specify a length of time for each point to be executed so you don't have the bots running about like chickens with their heads cut off, not actually executing things, just skipping on to the next point. This is useful for even one-point paths if the bot assumes a shift back to Autonomous once the timeout expires. An excellent use for this is "Hull-Down," as you can then get the bots to move into firing position for X period, and then do whatever seems like the right thing at the time.</font>Terrain Awareness: In particular, the bots need to use hull-down a lot more often than they do, now. The hull-down command is great, except that the bot doesn't use it well for screening during reload times, where they should back up somewhat to gain protection. This is mainly an issue when they're doing mostly-undirected modes like Attack and Defend. Probably because the others are all "drive straight there and do this" modes.</font>Platoons: This one's a biggie. We need the ability to form temporary formations of between 2 and 5 elements into a platoon which drops together, re-drops within the nearest safe radius, and can be put into one of several formations for movement, not to mention given commands all at once to execute in that formation. This should include platoons made of multiple players along with bots, in the same way Battlefield 2 squads are formed and for the same reason. Being in a platoon should give you some advantage beyond bots staying in formation, such as shared point-scoring and possibly a slightly faster drop-speed if the platoon commander is alive and on-board. This leads naturally to ...</font>Formations: Once we have groups of elements moving together, its probably for the best that we give them some way to do so together with some degree of coherence, especially with bot-facing going in to the mix. At the very least, we need the following formation options: </font></font>Line: The obvious; all elements abreast, with bots giving primary attention to the forward arc fudged slightly toward their side of the formation.</font>Echelon Left/Right: Simple slanty diagonal line, with bot attention focused toward the right or left.</font>Star: Like the infantry formation, with bot sectors being distributed in 360o, facing outwards, based on place in formation. More useful for defensive static positions than on the move, but even then it could be useful if you think you might get jumped from behind.</font> All of this improved handling of tac operations kind of begs for the addition of the ability to give one's own element the ability to drive itself, if not shoot, while in a formation, at least. This applies equally to non-platoon leader player elements, so they can designate the "driver" to stay in formation while they concentrate on watching their sector. Player-led platoons should stay in formation on the driving player as they maneuver. Together, I think this is the most coherent set of abilities that can be put together to make the tac equal in importance to the embodied view, as it stands. Toss in some extras, like the ability to draw on the tac, as well as somewhat better indications on the mini (like known AA radii showing up, etc) and we'll definitely be placed as the best tac/RTS hybrid on Earth ... or in the Rim.

Actually, a "light mortar" that's geared to more displace dirt than to penetrate armour would be useful for the Cutter. If it also detonated mines in an area, it would be a way better platform. Give me shortish range and light mortar damage that displaces dirt like a heavy, the blade for digging trenches, and a bit more rev (and maybe, just for kicks, two variants: one that carries extra ammo for vehicles and one that can carry a squad of squishies and rearm them), and I think we'd have a stone winner.

Well, I'm hoping that with the new ability to have Paladins act as IFV's for the squishies, we'll start seeing more two-player unit deployments, doing just as I suggested above. Plus, it shrinks the map a bit for the leg troops, which they need a lot.

The problem with rebuilding the irridium armour on the elements in DT is really just carting all the mass of iridium to do so around with you, which you'd have to do. Otherwise, you could move around the material left, but not anything ablated away. (Ultimately, that probably means repairing AP damage, which is largely pushed-aside holes rather than HEAT or ion damage, which actually tends to melt / ablate material.) Repairing more complicated structures in the field is probably outside the LiveShip tech curve. While Clay doesn't say so in his history, my guess would be that LiveShips have vat-nano; nanotech that's minimally functional outside specialized environments and not free-range blue goo. Thus, outside the closed factory-ship, there ain't much they can do about complicated repair. I don't see any reason you couldn't have mine-deployment via both drop pod and Cutter; the latter is for when you want no sign of anything going amiss, generally along the line of attack. Digging in the Cutter is awkward, to me. I realize that, like much else, its supposed to be a skill, but its a hard one to build. Maybe, in a perverse way, we need "pre-programmed entrenchments." Here a tank revetment, there a berm, here an AA pit. If nothing else, it'd free the pilot up to watch for attackers / think about the next thing to do.

Mine-laying sounds like a no-brainer addition to the Cutter's usefullness, since it can already plow mines. Resupply might give one a reason to actually be running around on a battlefield (cut your own turret-down position, then go umbilical for resupply to the nearby mortars; a fire mission magnet fo shizzle). If you give it the ability to fire or resupply, but not both at the same time, you can make the umbilical a turret-fired engagement. Then you can make "resupply rounds" just another ammo-type selected by +/-. Likewise, tossing deployables and mines, just another anno type lobbed by the Cutter's turret. Then, you can still use the 'b' key to deploy the blade and not need to create another binding.

And yet, deploying one without the other, especially on the highly sensor-active battlefield as presented in DropTeam, is not a tactically wise situation. The AFVs need someone who can invisibly peek over that ridge and who has a number of eyes in a larger arc to pick up similar infantry threats, and squishies need the firepower of the AFVs to "bring down the house" on their heavier targets.

Mace, I've roughed in structural pages you can start feeding ideas onto, if you'd like. I think we'll have to start bandying about some general rules for the wiki construction, soon, but I'm hoping I can figure out things like Templates before we go on much further to make things a lot easier.

I'll sneak the sections for setting and revisions in here in a few minutes if you haven't already beaten me to it.

I'm actually using Blender as a convertor solution and doing my actual model-tweaking in Wings3d, which can do UV mapping, though it can be a bit finicky. Of course, everything feels finicky when you don't have an affinity for it, and I'm surely no expert on 3d modelling or texturing. Text, text I can do.

Dan, I was reading along and you basically hit the nail on the head insofar as reading my mind goes. Clay, I figure most of the data on the core server is being stored in some kind of XML format, including the data the client gets when requesting a list of network games. Kind of going along with your poll re AAR replays, I can only guess you're thinking of just keeping nore data in general. Since network accounts are registered, anyway, maybe we can just go part-way toward that and start caching more information in some kind of web service that anyone can query and massage. Making a web site that tracks games currently in play and for the past X hours would then be easy, and doable by anyone. (More interestingly, you could have "completed games" be an RSS feed that outputs XML / formatted HTML that folks to subscribe to, and get an ongoing feed. Once you're keeping the data, building an interface that displays a ladder or stats on network players (preferred element, overall hit percentages with various ammo, whatever) would be just a matter of minor data mining.

That's a lot of data to be caching up there, Clay. Still, if it lets you observe the ongoing from any element's PoV and stops automatically at "interesting times" (ie. when an element takes a hit, for example), I think it could definitely be useful for getting an AAR put together. My own feeling is there's a lot of things I'd rather see happen first. If the AAR occured naturally as a result of putting other things together, absolutely, but things like better bot / platoon / organizational interfacing would definitely be higher on my agenda.

I've actually been trying to add some pages to give the data some structure. Not so much in the way of detail, but hierarchy and link structure. Now, we just need the experts to give up some content.

Drusus, the heart of the issue is really what the towers target more than how effective they are (in the broader sense). The ability to roll-back defenses hinges on the fact that the towers pretty much zap anything and everything they target, thus, flooding the area with small-caliber fire floods the tower intercepts and you have a larger chance of getting either part of your small-caliber fire through (since it tends to fire in bursts) or, if timed right, much heavier caliber fire (120mm, artillery), because the airspace near the tower is full of other distractions the tower's trying to zap. All that to say, basically, that decreasing the effectiveness of towers vs small-caliber fire won't really make much of a difference, since you don't usually actually aim that fire as tightly. Its a screen, chaff, as it were, for the more intentional, heavier fire. Now, if you actually meant decreasing the chance of a tower targeting small-caliber fire, then the real up-shot is there'll be fewer targeted bursts from the tower and the chances of it targeting the stuff you're actively trying to get through actually goes up. And that makes it commensurately hard to roll back that tower defense. An interesting alternate idea is giving the artillery units a bit more control over their ammo selection and letting them fire off an HE shell deliberately over a tower, which would then target it and the sharpnel them would target more tower fire. Like deployable chaff when you just have to get that drop pod or round through the defense. A couple arty-carriers could keep a tower tied up, then, for as long as they could coordinate fire and have ammo. This would give arty one more use on the field and something else to do other than lob rounds ineffectually at areas a vehicle has already scooted from.

Well, if they're integrated in next patch, I won't worry overmuch, but this is good knowledge to possess. Thanks muchly, Clay. And Yurch. Mustn't forget Yurch. If only because he has saved me from the horrific nightmare of BackLoop ...

Damn those other people, who have the horrible tendency to play things in ways you don't. So much would be better about life if it weren't for other people, don't you agree? What he might be saying is that if one of the few humans on the defender side didn't notice the points going up and sent an element out to recon, then perhaps the defenders weren't exactly being as tactically aware as they should have been. There are few enough places a Hermes can hide on the map. Making a quick patrol of them in a Paladin or even a Viper should be easy. Hiding under the bridge is annoying, but its also obvious and makes the thing a great target for top shots where the armour is even weaker than usual. (In fact, I usually put a couple ground turrets on the bottom of the trench just to catch folks at it.) Is it a kind of gamey tactic? Only in the sense that the idea of accruing points for simply being in the radius is "gamey." But plenty of others, including most of the active posters on this thread have been discussing ways to improve it or at least allow scenario creators to adjust it for their scenarios. But, pointedly, and I think this deserves reiteration and strong note, you are not being helpful. You are not saying, "OK, yes, I understand what you're trying to do here and possibly this is a better method of achieving it." You're not even saying, "Guys, this is kind of a crocked scenario as written, can we pull it from rotation until we find a solution? I suggest ..." You're whining. Repeatedly. And being insulting to folks who are actually trying to engage with you to look for mutually satisfying solutions, including Clay. That just don't seem right bright, t'me. Yes, other people play DropTeam in ways that folks gorged on modern tactical warfare would not attempt to. Sometimes, that works better either because of game conditions or because modern tactical understanding is simply wrong when it comes to describing the DT battlefield environment. If you can't deal with that, please, do withdraw from the field. But for Hell's sake, if you're going to keep engaging in discussion (if what you're doing can be called discussion), have the decency to grant the other disputants might be engaging in a good faith effort. That's common curtesy.

Yurch, can you give us a quick primer on making it a mod? I'm kind of obsessively careful about trying not to overwrite stuff, in preperation for "the next patch." (Had too many blow right up after tinkering.)

Thanks, Clay. I, for one, am really appreciative of your effort and your response to the turbulance of your fanbase. For me, the big one is that Bots can be told not to drop until you say so; that alone will improve the ability to coordinate a dozen times o'er.

Gee, thanks for that ongoing avoidance of insult. I really feel like you understood exactly what you were trying to say. That's I'm tactically shallow, even though I (and others) have provided you with multiple responses to on-board AAD that don't, pointedly don't, involve dropping your own AAD in every case, that I'm strategically impaired and restricted to only the simplest capabilities, because I disagree with your analysis even though I, and pretty much every poster on the thread, agree with your basic premises. We just don't get there from here, and for some reason you aren't willing to grant the rest of us the respect that we've provided, either in adressing the counter-points we provide or simple acknowledgement of either the ... No, really, I think we'd settle for simple acknowledgement of our points. Honestly, arguing about AAD in DT, a resource limited by the presence of defense towers and by the number of Hermes available for drop, both of which have responses in-game which either take (with a Cutter in the case of the towers) or remove (by destruction in the case of Hermes), is vaguely like complaining about the fact that forces in Steel Beasts can call in artillery, because it blows up elements real good if called well and you can't respond by some simple countermeasure. No, you can't. But its a tactical reality of that battlefield, and if that means you don't dare hold an observed position for longer than 2min 25sec (because 2min is the artillery's minimum time for call), or you need to put a dozen MG rounds into the air by the AAD before you can swat it with some HEAT, that's the nature of the beast. Please, now that's just sad. "If there's on-board artillery sources, fight over their possession because its all-powerful, and if not control the map with your own brought artillery-units." Does this restatement sound familliar? It should, because its doctrinal. Is any modern simulator "unplayable" because it has artillery that is "all-powerful?" Stating "no," because you can formulate counters would be poor argument, since there've been at least a dozen counters explored at length in the course of the thread. Seriously, at this point you've just decended to sniping at the folks legitimately attempting to engage you in dialogue, insulting them, and pretty much slagging off any point they make in the course of discussion. I've seen debate, this isn't it. Debate is creative. What you're doing is, in fact, pointless, but its not a creative act. Let's not pretty it up by suggesting it is, shall we? Though I think locking the thread would be both poor tactics and bad strategy. There has been a lot of discussion about how and why to roll-back, roll-through, and roll-around AAD in DT, and there's a bit more to be explored by folks like yurch, cool breeze and yllamana. Its that kind of strategic and tactical concerns and discussion that are the reason its worthwhile to come by the fora, and they deserve, even if I don't, the ability to continue that exploration.

Well, let us consider the options ... You could have swapped the Thor or Apollo with a Hermes, slipped in, and just cut him to pieces. Double points for rolling up on the side blinded by the Galaxy. You could have swapped to an ion platform and started putting 6km completely uninterceptible bolts into his armour, pushing him out of the Galaxy's reload range and then disecting him. You could have swapped into an infantry squad, dropped on the blind side, then simply walked up and unloaded at near point blank with ATG and 20mm / 10mm or the 6mm ion, which eats Shrike up like breakfast cereal. Of course, none of those tactics take skill ... aside from, you know, coming up with them, executing them, and/or actually hitting with the rounds being discussed. Which you seem to be fairly dismissive of, which makes folks, including me, feel rather insulted that you don't give as fair a hearing as you're getting from the vast bulk of the respondents in this thread. Lately, I keep hearing your voice dubbed by Cartman. "&^$& you guys, I'm going home," which I'm sure is not your intent, and merely the efforts of my perversely cynical mind. But there's a certain static coming off your replies that implies that if its not your way, its wrong, and you can see where that might get up folks' noses. Basically, your appeals to "the spirit of the game" aren't cutting it. When you talk about modern strategy and modern AFVs, you've got good points, but you just don't seem to be able to turn loose of it and go with what is in DropTeam, which is pointedly not Steel Beasts (though I'd give my left tentacle to have SB's strategic interface and platoon/company/battalion interface). It's just not, and its not intended to. It'd be a shame to have you withdraw your attention from the game, but as it stands you're not being helpful or illuminating, you're being rather insulting and getting in the way of folks listening to the points you have to make. Give it some thought, maybe give it a day or two break, then come back to the table and actually listen to what we folks are saying, whatever your opinion of it. Nod at the right times and avoid that glazed-eye look we get a lot, and we'll feel a lot more like a dialogue rather than a denouncement is going on.

Didn't say it was armour sufficient to block any decent shell ripping through. Some folks in this thread would suggest the Apollo and Paladin don't have enough armour to be considered tanks in any reasonable sense of the word, as is.

Good to have you, Jarhead. Remember to keep it under cover until you're ready to roll, and to always keep a finger on the HE just for the purty explosions.

Actually, a tank not designed to move is called an AT Gun, and when deploying, say, Apollos or even Thors under an Ion umbrella, that's exactly what you have. The Ion helps compensate for the fact the terrain isn't designed to keyhole, as the ground breaks and tree / foliage coverage just don't work well at all for it. The ion, then, helps keep the number of inbound fires off your gun as you plink away at the inbounds. AT guns with treads have a long history. Deploying them in essentially static positions, equally so. The reason the DT-verse puts static defensive units on high-speed treads is because the units the Space Vikings have to work with aren't theirs to design and have to be as flexible in deployment and use as possible. The Liveships have very scattered, not-always-tactically-brilliant neural networks that have to be cajoled and manipulated into creating units with any chahnges at all. In short, "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." So, you have a remnant handfull of leftover, decayed-tech and outdated-design units which are what the Vikings are using to run their raids. They are not optimal designs, pointedly not for a rain-and-run kind of strategy. Thors are too slow and Apollos have lousy turret layout for using terrain for anything (clearly a remnant design that originally had more active engaging defenses in exchange for thinner armour; the AAD-for-everyone bits got lost, but the frame survives). In the end, it comes down to understanding why the backstory formulates things as it does. Now, I'd love to see some of the elements changed so that they were a bit more balanced in regards to one another or simply more fun to use (which is why I'd like to see coax MG or ions on everything, shooting is fun), but its kind of silly to complain that the evolutionary use of the elements given the environment we have isn't "right." It is as it is. If using Thors under Ions is tactically effective, its right. Right and wrong is defined by what works and what doesn't given the setting and capabilities, not some abstracted universal application. Applying Sun Tzu naively to modern tank warfare will get your turret waxed in no time, too. So it goes trying to extrapolate that interpretation to future technological situations.

Perhaps an alternate approach is to think about extending point gain for more than "Kills." "Disablements" should earn you as much, with more points for more systems disabled.

Oh, they'll definitely have different commanders. They're stuck with us! I almost feel sorry for the li'l goons.