Drusus

This is actually needed at the moment. Way too easy to spam the map (esp. the Ice map) with AA turret / sensor jammer combos. Not long ago this once again resulted in our team losing all 120mm Thors. The bots want to drop these first -> they drop on jammed turrets -> AA kill -> drop another one. I think the enemy got something like 40+ points in the beginning that time, meaning propably around 20 vehicles (dropships do count, right?). But even if you can see the turrets, you can't pick a safe spot. Actually against a 'skilled' turret spammer seeing the turrets doesn't solve the problem, he can spam virtually the whole map. But it helps a bit the human players.

The problem with Hurricane: the gun is simply too strong. The developers have (or beta testers, can't remember), that the guns are not first shot killers because this makes gameplay more interesting. But the plasma mortar is just that, a first shot killer. Only exception is Thor front. And maybe Thor generally, because getting direct hits isn't that easy. The Thor is still very much vulnerable. But on the other hand you can score kills at ranges over 400m (target to explosion range) against softer targets. I self killed myself once at the range of ~460 so I know... And this was on the Raid map, meaning the atmosphere should make the mortar pretty much useless (another dev/beta remark). Ok, so Hurricane has a great first shot kill chance. You might say that it is compensated by the fact that it has a long reload time. Which could be true if the vehicle would need to reload in the beginning of the fight. Now it is just right click - left click - burning vehicle. Except if the enemy is using Thor. Then it is only ~25% chance of a burning vehicle. Ok, so the gun is a bit too powerful. But the real problem is that if the player using the Hurricane plays carefully, he has about zero chance of getting killed himself. While still being pretty much the most lethal player on the field. Stay at around 2000-3000m and move constantly. When damaged, immediately extract. And if there is somehow too much enemy resistance somewhere, switch to indirect fire role. I tried this and lost only one Hurricane in the 25mins of fighting. That was because careless shooting resulting in self suicide. BTW I think I encountered some kind of a bug when shooting to the side of my hurricane while moving. I hit my own vehicle somehow. I had manual range set to 4000+m and shot upwards to that eastern hill on the Raid map. About the controls: Please make it possible to have 'sticky' e key. Press once and you get into the gunner mode, another press and back to the outside view. At the moment things get interesting when you are trying to move forward, zoom and change ammo simultaneously. My keyboard can't actually handle w, e and r being pressed at the same time. I have moved reload to r and t. No way I am going to move my hand away from the mouse or movement controls. I don't know if there is any rational reason for not allowing on/off pressing. As an option, ofcourse.

There is something wrong with the minimum angle of the Ion beam when using Apollo (this is atleast with Apollo). The cursor shows red because of minimum angle, but I am still able to fire. I think the beam goes to the aim point, too. And I was able to kill myself with the gun. Which was kind of fun, but I have hard time believing it would be possible to do in real life...

Feedback from a recent game. I was playing as the attacker on the Raid map. I managed the bots and captured easily the center tower of the raid map and everything looked promising. Until the Hurricane showed up. Ofcourse destroying the tower as the first thing (this seems to be easy with Hurricane). And taking the 6 bots guarding the center, much by itself. Yes, I had a Hermes there, it doesn't help. There is just something way broken at the moment in regard to that vehicle. It is easy to use, right click & fire giving almoust guaranteed kill except against Thor. But the truth is, Hurricane is better than Thor, it is simply the king of the field. Ok, it might be that a great human player can fight back when using the Thor. But if most of the vehicles happen to be bots, the game is ruined. By that single vehicle. What am I supposed to do against it? Ok, it might be that it is just good on some maps. But from what I have seen, it is _too_ good on these maps. Actually it might be one of the biggest reasons there is so little teamplay. Nice to do a coordinated attack, which _will_ be ruined if my enemy decides to use that vehicle. Hermes, Cutter and Mercury are all one shot kills. I myself don't use it. It is not even fun. Really, a _single_ Hurricane is able to break up a coordinated attack. There is 6 (or 7?) of them in the inventory. Plenty for a player who doesn't drive around, but uses some care. Not much is needed though... I have tried just driving around on the ice map and use the point and kill interface, with much succeess. I don't need to think what I am doing, just cruise around and kill stuff. Talk about deep tactical gameplay. Your worst enemy is flip over, not enemy vehicles. Oh, and you can ctrl-m fire at enemy dropships if you don't have any better targets at the moment. I think the majority on this forum agrees with this. The vehicle is just out of balance. There is nice, propably even coordinated, fighting going on. You know, countering enemy moves and so on. Until somebody takes the Hurricane. Maybe there are maps on which it is useles. The truth is I don't care. It is way overpowered on the maps we have at the moment. A vehicle that is useles on some maps and unbalanced on some others isn't fun. Sorry for the rant. But I just felt like some immediate feedback... How would I change that vehicle? Well, the fragile and bigger engine would be a good start. But I don't believe it is enough. The mortar shell should be a little bit less powerful than it is at the moment. You know, so that you would have to actually hit to kill. And maybe a bit slower rate of fire, also. Please fix or do somefink.

There is Diameter and Size. To me it seems that Diameter is the one affecting if the component is hit with either fragmetation or directly. I believe that the fragmentation is not luck based, that is if the fragmentation cone intersects with the component, there is fragmentation damage every time. I didn't found what Size is about. Maybe it affects how much frag damage is done, but I couldn't confirm it.

How to get a shooting range: Fire up your own server. It isn't that hard, check out the manual. Put 8 bots to the other team, 0 to the other (-numbots0 8 -numbots1 0). Start the game & join your own server. Name it something like "Test Server Only", so that others wont wander in for normal game play. Join the same team the bots are in. You can issue the bots different drop orders to get different targets. Shoot the bots. You can check what happens to them live through the tactical map. And after you shut down the server, the DropTeam.log should have plenty of detailed information. About the brake balance: It seems that the brakes are well balanced if you use the 'x' key. But if you press the reverse key, then you have a chance of a roll over. Maybe the reverse key should work a bit more like the brake key?

The idea is not to have first shot kill weapons. Except if you know where you are shooting from point blank range, then you should have a 50% chance of first shot kill. Or non-zero chance anyways. But not at longer ranges. As I understand, the modern SABOT rounds are extremely good at achieving first shot kills, I don't know if this is more about the pyrophoric effect than fragmentation, though. And a AP shot of DU would propably be even deadlier, given that it penetrated. Also, DU isn't too hard as a metal, it is just extremely dense and that is why it is used.

I meant that the damage should be based on internal fragmenatation, not fragmentation from the shell. Sorry for the confusion. Anyways I don't know if that is realistic either...

Hmm, I already promised to myself that no more posts today. But just a small one, Okay? Basically I'd like HEAT to be less effective against the Heavy ones when penetrating. And more effective against the light ones. Make it more fragmentation based and less about direct hit. If the components of the lighter vehicles would be adjusted, then the goal would be achieved. This way even if the HEAT penetration would be a bit more, it still wouldn't turn out to be the ultimate weapon at range, just a bit more useful against the heavy ones. But not a first shot killer, anyways. AP would be a bit less effective or as effective as HEAT now at close ranges to the side and rear of Thor and to the front of Apollo and Paladin. About as effective as AP now when firing to Thor front, Apollo side or Paladin side. And a bit less effective against other targets overall but with a better chance of component kills.

Well, my tests are at close range, so propably the gun won't be more effective at long range anyways. Quick test, and it seems it doesn't have any dramatic effect, at least. I believe the lossrate is about AP penetration, not its effect when it has penetrated. As always, just my guess.

AP does not do 50 damage. It does about 25. This means 2 to 3 _perfect_ shots to kill a tank. If you hit randomly around the tank, then it is more likely around 5 shots. Increasing this to 50% kill chance at close range means that it will be 50% one shot kill with AP if you know where you are shooting, when shooting at close range. Maybe that is too much, but I don't think so. Change it to 25%. But on the other hand if you are 10m away, and know where you are shooting, and it takes 2 to 3 hits _every_ time, it doesn't _feel_ right. Ok, there is the kinetic burn chance, but it is small and very random. At the moment HEAT is already preferred weapon whenever you can target particular part of a vehicle. Except Thor front. At longer ranges I would use HEAT, but hitting with it is _really_ hard. Paladin, Shrike and Hurricane are way too fast to hit reliably with HEAT at anything more than 1.5km. Ok, 2km max. Ofcourse you might get lucky. Hitting with AP at a fast moving target isn't that great at the moment, because if you don't hit the engine, the first hit will propably have no effect at all to the combat effectiveness. And the second hit will propably have no effect either, as hitting two times at the same place against fast moving vehicles is hard. You can hit with HEAT against static targets, Apollo and Thor. Static targets aren't that common, atleast when your enemy knows what he is doing. Thor has enough armor to survive. Hitting the | part isn't that easy, and you need a good angle even then. Suprisingly, Apollo is screwed. Ok, after too much whining for one day, I must add this: I love the game and it is already better than most games. I just feel that there might be a possibility for some small improvements. The fragmentation damage model, well I know it isn't likely to happen. A bit more fragile components to the lighter vehicles, maybe. Improved 76mm, propably. Hmm, maybe Ill try to clarify once more what would be the goal of the system: AP: great against heavily targeted vehicles at close & good at mid range. Depending on atmosphere, ofcourse. Good against fast moving vehicles at range (if you happen to hit a component). HEAT: Good against fast vehicles at close range. Good against heavier vehicles at long range. I don't know how realistic this is. But on the other hand, if we want to go for perfect realism, check out what DU shots are able to do today at 4km range. Penetration -> Kill. At the moment it is more like this (I reserve the right to exaggerate): HEAT: Great at short range against anything except Thor front. Not too good at long range. AP: Not too good at any range.

I tested a bit and it seems that 2 "directkills" is about one HP, with some random(?) variation. Atleast the amount of armor penetrated doesn't seem to affect this. Incidentally Thors on my setup have now 180hp engine and 10 points of side armor...

As the biggest whiner on this forum, I must say I agree to most of the things. First, the penetration issue: Reading some of the post from the dev team & the DropTeam site I think it was meant to be so that the HEAT is the round you want to use at longer ranges and AP at shorter. At the moment it is actually quite the opposite. At shorter ranges AP is only usable against really fast moving targets and Thor front. The Thor front is also questionable after the angle modifier fix, as it is actually quite hard to penetrate now. In any other situation you want to use HEAT, as it is much more effective. But at longer ranges getting a penetration with HEAT is hard, you need to be at almoust 90 degrees to the side of the target, and even then you need some luck. I would say that if you can't penetrate with AP, then it is propably not worth trying with HEAT. Except against stationary targets, then HEAT is actually useful at longer ranges. Anyways I think a paladin at 30 degree angle is pretty much safe (60 degree hit angle to the side, 30 to the front). So, the solution to this problem: while the current system of just having a value for the whole side is a bit restrictive, it is still a working one. Maybe the sloping is at the moment a bit too much, or maybe there should be more penetration with HEAT. Anyways at the moment I don't feel that the 120mm is that useful at longer ranges. You usually hit at too big angle. But while sometimes annoying, this isn't that big a problem anyways. About component damage: Maybe the Thor is fine as is, and Apollo too (this vehicle has enough problems already: ATGMs and Hurricane...), but the lighter vehicles should maybe be softer inside. Hitting a Shrike, Paladin or Hurricane is hard enough as is, but you are virtually guaranteed that even if you hit with 120mm AP, the vehicle will continue. You need a direct hit to a component, and if it is not the engine, the fighting ability of the vehicle doesn't change. Wheels are a different thing, but should I be aiming at a moving Paladins wheels with 120mm gun? Against these vehicles direct hits to components should be more effective. While it should also be possible that the AP shot passes through without doing much damage. I heard somebody suggest this kind of solution: lower the HPs of components (maybe not the fuel cells, though) of the lighter vehicles. Direct hit with 120mm should have a good chance of disabling a component. Against Shrike about 100%. Make fragmentation of kinetic (AP) shots based on the amount of armor it penetrates and the amount left after penetration. Little fragmentation to light vehicles, a lot to heavier ones when firing from close range. If you could get both fragmentation damage and directhit damage to a component, then it should be possible to have ~50% kill chance from the side or rear of Thor when firing from close range with AP. At the front or longer ranges no chance of first shot kill. Thor is supposed to be tough. Keep fragmentation of HEAT shots as is. This means relatively more frag damage from HEAT to lighter vehicles, but that is not a problem IMHO, it is actually good. The function of fragmentation damage doesn't need to be more complicated than this: At 100 points of armor penetrated you get a modifier of 0.5. At 150 you get 1.2. At 150 excess points of penetration you get a modifier of 1.0. All modifiers are linear, ie. 50 points of armor -> modifier 0.25, 125 points -> modifier 0.85 and so on. This is against the base armor. Result: Case 1: You fire from close range at Thor side. There happens to be 150 points of base armor -> 1.2 modifier. You will have plenty left -> 1 modifer. The total modifier is then 1.2 times the damage it would have been with the current system. If you hit directly at the fuel cells & there is the possibility of both fragmentation and direct hit damage, there is possiblity of killing the tank with first shot. Case 2: You fire at the Thor side at mid range, hitting the upper sloped part. You still have 1.2 modifier from the amount of armor penetrated, but a lot smaller modifier from the excess penetration. Case 3: You fire from far away at the side of Thor. Same as the last one, but you only have 50 excess points. Result: 1/3 modifier from penetration left, 1.2 from amount penetrated = 0.4 times the current fragmentation damage. Not so good chance of killing anything. Case 3: You fire AP at a Shrike. You will have plenty of penetration left, but there is only 10 armor. You will get almoust no Frag damage. If the AP shell hits something, it will propably be destroyed, if it doesn't it just passes through. Case 4: Side hit at Paladin: What, this vehicle has 100 side armor? Well, this means a modifier of 0.5. Depending on how much you did penetrate, there will be some fragmentation damage, but not too much. Also, this system would allow 20mm have a lot more base fragmentation damage. Situations where you get it all would be rare, 150 armor and 150 excess penetration = 300, the base penetration of 20mm is 300. This might be just my feeling, but based on what I know about armor penetration, this is as in real life. Not too much armor -> the shot just passes through. A lot of armor -> a lot of fragmentation. There could be additional tuning to the directkill factor based on the amount penetration left. 0.8 at 50 excess and to 1.0 at 150 or something. And maybe additional multiplier of 2.0 when hitting from the rear. As I have said before, I know making a change of this size at the moment is propably out of the question. But it doesn't stop me from suggeting it. Anyways, I don't think this would be too hard change from coding point of view (although not knowing the internal working of the game, it is hard to say), the bigger issue is balance. Well, as this post is so long that nobody is reading at this point, I might as well add this: From my point of view, there are 3 things that should be right: Game balance, Realism and Feeling. While it might be somehow realistic that you have always hitting targeting computer, it isn't balanced or feel right. Something that is maybe realistic might not feel right. The fact that Thor is tougher from rear than sides for example. Short range ATGM effectivenes. It might very well be realistic. It might even not affect the balance too much. But it feels _so_ wrong. Getting these three things in balance is the key to success, and I think the frag model is a step towards a more balanced and realistic game. And I think the overall feeling would be better.

With HEAT you have nearly 100% chance of killing when you get direct hit. With AP, no. Apart from kinetic burn, I claim that one AP hit will never take out the driver, even when shooting at Shrike. Now I have a extensive sample of 10 shots, and not single time did the driver die with the first shot. These are verified direct hits from the logs. I have done a lot of shooting against the fuel cells, and never, ever did I get a first shot kill with AP because of "killing" the fuel cells. The fuel cells and the driver have the same amount of hit points, and I think damage to both are handled similarly. The effect of destroying is different, though.

I have found that you can't kill with one hit to the driver. Maybe I am wrong. But I tried a quick setup, and firing at a Shrike, I couldn't kill the driver with one direct hit. First one took only 2 direct hits to kill the driver, second one needed 3. My previous tests have shown that you need 2 to 3 hits to the fuel cells to destroy the vehicle. The driver has as many HPs as the fuel cells. Also, you don't get fragmentation damage to the component if you hit it directly. Modifying this & modifying fragmentation damage to take into account the amount you have penetration left + the amount of armor penetrated might result in a better experience. Or worse, can't test... Also making the lighter vehicles internally more fragile might result in a feeling of more realism. Other things. We were testing with RIPper and Sente and some others the armor penetration issue. Some things we found out: 1. The Hermes AA gun is actually harming more than helping against the Hurricane. It can't shoot the shell down if the shell is fired directly at the Hurricane, but it will shoot the shell nicely above the vehicle if the shot is going over the Hermes. This results in wheels gone if nothing worse. 2. Try to send a message containing %d. You'll get an interesting result. If you send %s, you will get even more interesting result (crashes the game). 3. If you TEAMKILL, you will still get a point in the after game screent.

If the defender can secure a drop zone, then extract & use up your Hurricanes. When the attacker has gotten rid of those, major portions of their inventory will be used up. I don't know how much there has been testing about abusive styles of gameplay? I just tried, for fun, to set up a really nasty AA defence in the Ice map. Result: 39 dropships shooten down before the bots managed to secure a landing zone. The AA turrets werent even placed as well as possible, so it should be possible to get even better results. And the AA turrets weren't jammed. If they were and if you would be the commander and gave drop orders to the bots, then they would just continue to drop on that hidden AA turret until they would be out of the inventory item. I have done that once myself, caused an unhandled exception in my head... Now I think I got rid of the nasty 120mm Thors and propably ATGMs too. Not too bad a start for the defender...

Im at ircnet #dropteam, see you there. Other choice would be using the www.combatmission.com irc, this way there would be no name collisions with the user names. Even better would be if the devs would fire up their own irc server and maybe integrate it with the game and user names. Not worth the work, propably.

If the defender decides to jam all of his AA turrets and add in Hurricanes shooting ctrl-m fire at drop zones and emp & artillery too, then it is going to be fun... Hermes can't shoot while it is inside the dropship¸ and anyways I have bad experiences from shooting down plasma mortar shots. If you put manual drop orders for the bots, then you are really screwed. They will continue to drop to that location until your inventory gets empty. And you have no idea where the turrets are before the game starts, so your only sane choice is to let the bots drop where ever they want. Luckily bots know where the jammed turrets are, at least it seems so to me. Or maybe this is just because of no kill messages for AA. Anyways it is propably possible to break a team playing defenders AA cover, but is it fun? And really, we would drop further away, but we can't... BTW is it possible to restrict the drop zones via modding? I think one fun game type could be 3 drop zones for both teams and then just try to capture the base, nobody being the defender. The drop zones would be limited thorough the game, not only in deployment. The goal is just to have as much time when you are having atleast one unit in the objective area.

Actually I don't think the direct damage should be much affected by how much energy the shell has left. In reality it propably has plenty against soft targets, anyways. For example if you fire at a modern composite helmet with a rifle, if you penetrate you are virtually guaranteed to have enough energy left to have a high directkillfactor (the term used internally by the game) against the relatively soft skull. Penetrated, but not enough energy left to do serious damage is really, really rare in real life.

I like the engine damage as is, maybe not the most realistic way, but really well working ingame. Maybe the engine is many smaller engines... BTW I don't get it why the engine is combustion based while there is antimatter as the energy source. Ofcourse it would be seriously lame if there would be electric engine sound effects for the Thor... The driver and the gunner should be made a bit more soft. Maybe the heavier tanks should have additional inside armor for them? No frag damage to the driver, and you need a good shot to kill them off. But the Paladin and Shrike drivers wouldn't be so lucky as to have this kind of protection. This is one thing I think isn't as I feel should be, I mean Paladin being internally about as strong as the Thor. Ofcourse the game is at the 0.9 stage, which means that these kind of major changes aren't propably wise. Not that I would know that the updated system would infact work better. But I refuse to understand this.

If I remember correctly the components can survive one hit always. 2nd hit has about 50% chance of destroying the component and with 3rd you have a sure kill. With HEAT you have really good chance of 1st shot kill. BTW this same applies to the driver as well. 2 to 3 _direct_ hits with 120mm AP to kill him off... The 2 to 3 hits is the reason that the Hurricane is so great. It is really, really hard to hit the fast moving Hurricane with HEAT. Only hard with AP. If you hit, no matter, it wont do much damage, and usually to different components. This all while the Hurricane has a great chance of first shot kill, except against Thor. To balance this out, I have suggested that the engine of the Hurricane should be made weaker and also bigger. If you hit it with 120mmAP, you will have a good chance of making the vehicle to stop (get "grounded"). If the Hurricane isn't moving, then it should be easy to finish it off with HEAT. Other thing is that I just happen to have a feeling that the Paladin and the Shrike should take more damage when hit with HEAT. I mean fragmentation based damage, not direct hit to component based damage. But they should take less damage when hit with AP, again talking about fragmentation. Maybe the fragmentation damage of the HEAT shell should be based only on the amount of penetration left after armor, while the AP should take also into account how much armor penetrated? This way HEAT would be better than it is now against the light vehicles. But they are fast, not so easy to hit them with the slow velocity HEAT... AP would be better against the heavy vehicles. Just ideas, feel free to shoot them down.

The new virtualization technology should be great. At the moment I use windows from linux using vmware. It works really great and there is only a small performance hit. The system works by using something like virtual devices, that is the windows system doesn't have access to my NVidia card, but a virtual card instead. This means no 3d acceleration, which means no games. Strategic command works, though. The new virtualization technologies (Intel and AMD have similar technologies) should allow the OS instances to have direct access to the hardware. This means _no_ performance hit. And full 3d acceleration. Only problem is that you will need a lot of memory. The system works by running in 'ring -1' in the cpu, basically meaning that there is very basic kernel running behind the scenes and controlling that the OSes have privacy from the other instances running on the same machine. The OS will run in ring 0, as it does now. It doesn't even know about something running in the ring -1. What this will mean is that in the not too distant future Mac (and Linux) users should be able to run Windows games without booting. Ofcourse the technology has other uses too. One instance where you use mail & web, other where you work with your top secret documents...

When you are pinging the servers I bet the ping goes to different port. This could be why normal ping works but the games ping doesn't.

The 20mm is the most powerful gun when you know where to shoot at. 120mm HEAT is comparable, but maybe not as good. Slower rate of fire means that where you have only 1 shot with 120mm, you can fire 5 bursts with 20mm. And 2 bursts is enough to kill. But when firing with the kinetic energy weapons, it is important to understand that if you aren't hitting anything important, you are doing almoust no damage. This is propably one thing that new players don't understand, and claim that the system is broken. I would like to see the 120mm AP do a bit more damage to the target even when you don't hit directly at any component. Maybe based on how much you did penetrate. I just have a feeling that it must be so in real life. Based on nothing ofcourse. A kinetic penetration system I have been thinking about is something like this: You get fragmentation based on the amount of armor you penetrated and how much power you have still left after the penetration. Maybe add in the function the weight of the shell. This would result in AP shots going through the lighter targets without doing much damage, but you would get a lot of fragmentation damage with 120mm AP shot against heavily armored targets. I understand that this is how things are in real life. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find good books or other sources about armor penetration. So, my feeling isn't based on anything... Links needed.

I think there is need to see the ammo count. When playing the Raid map I usually deploy bots with ATGMs under the cover of the eastern tower. When checking how those bots are doing, it would be nice to see how many missiles they have left. Not something that is really important, just nice.