yllamana

It sounds like a very strong asset for attackers to use to limit defender drop advantage. I can imagine it on Ice Fields already. Does it carry a weapon other than the SAM launcher? I guess it's probably like the Hermes, with the launcher mounted on the back, but it wasn't mentioned in the description. It sounds cool to me. What if someone parks it under an ion tower? Depending on available cover they might be able to dodge ions and use the tower as cover from HEAT. Could that be too strong? Dear Dark_au: I am sorry that you're having problems with the game. However, it's really hard for them to be addressed when you don't make coherent points in your posts. An obvious counter to your hypothetical situation is to use a force of tanks with some air cover to keep silly mine dropping tricks from working (like the Bacchus!). The force you listed has no significant ranged capability at all, so anything with a gun bigger than 20mm will be able to rip it up from a distance. Voila! Cheesy tactics defeated through the power of teamwork, and the children sing and dance and play. I would really love to hear a nice, precise response as to why this is impossible, though. Edit: forgot to add, the whole "HerpesLOL" thing makes you look a little childish. I just thought you might like to know.

I like the idea of not having any unified "score" field. If there is one then people will feel obliged to chase after it. It'd be cool to see lots more statistics, though. I just don't think any of them should be presented as "the" score. For example, in World of Warcraft, say, the scoreboard is sorted by the number of killing blows a player has. Sometimes that causes players to chase killing blows instead of doing more productive things to actually win (because in a way, getting the most killing blows is presented as winning on an individual level). I think it'd be good to take conscious steps to avoid that sort of thing. It also subconsciously devalues players who want to try things that aren't directly rewarded in the "win" score.

I think the biggest problem with the Cutter is role confusion. It's built as an entrenching vehicle but needs to fill an odd forward assault electronic warfare role as well. I think it should really be two vehicles, the digger and another vehicle, less ungainly (the Mercury springs to mind as a vehicle adapted more for this purpose) and designed to capture structures. Maybe the Mercury itself should be able to capture structures. It doesn't seem far out at all - I'd sort of expect it more from the Mercury than the Cutter. Maybe give it the EMP shield too to encourage people to use it. When designing an effective support "class" in a game, I always think of Return to Castle Wolfenstein's medic class. It's immensely popular. I think the big reason for that is it has teeth. It has the basic weapon for the side (MP40/Thompson) and that weapon is very deadly in the hands of a skilled player. Combine that with health regeneration and the ability to drop health packs that the medic can pick up themselves and you have a very nasty class to fight against. I think that's key. To avoid horribly gimping the support classes (in this case, vehicles) for fear that they'll become too powerful. In Drop Team, you rarely see Cutters because although buildings are very powerful, the Cutter itself sucks. I'm the sort of player who does try the crazy support vehicles like the Cutter and Mercury, but it's so horribly slow and vulnerable that I don't use it much. Mostly the slow - usually you have to drop it a zillion miles from the objective, then drive it in and watch as it gets killed. The alternative, using jammers or the Hermes, is much more expensive in coordination terms and much more difficult to pull off. I do think the 20mm is a fine weapon for it to have. It's very strong at close range and I've killed a fair few Thors with it before on Ice Fields. It's just too boring driving it across the entire map when it's so vulnerable. It also suffers a lot from severe role confusion. I think turn it into two vehicles, go through the planned remodeling of the Cutter and make its engine stronger. But then the Cutter would be more a specialised digging vehicle, and another would be in the electronic warfare assault role. I don't know. I've confused myself with too many different ideas. I'll have to think more about it later. The Cutter does need a cool mine-clearing animation. I guess the problem I have with the Cutter getting cool support tools is I don't see it as a support vehicle but as a badly-designed bulldozer.

I have seen a lot of games where the attacker wins that the tower is not brought down or captured. That right there demonstrates that the tower isn't "all-important" as people are managing to win without it. In fact I would say the majority of attacker-wins games I've seen on Ice Fields the tower remains under the control of the defenders, simply because it takes so long to capture or destroy it that the attackers don't bother. If it was "all-important" then they'd have to. It's not.

You don't think that maybe "fight over its possession" and "control the map" are rather far from granular to gloss over?

My first thought is: how big? My second thought is that the bot wrangling and the ions are a lot more important. Well, not so much "bot wrangling" as improved coordination tools for everyone, bots included. It would also need some kind of way of seeing which games were interesting... bot vs bot battles would probably not be worth downloading, but an energetic game with a lot of players in it would be cool to watch. So I think it could be a great feature, but I'd put it below the ones that have more to do with actually playing the game right now. Alternatively, something that wasn't exactly a replay but which showed the rough troop movements, kills and extractions could be cool. Like a tacmap view where we can see what was done strategically even though we might miss some of the specifics. Maybe that would be a little less ambitious and smaller to download while retaining most of the coolness of a replay.

I think the point defence is probably mostly a problem for two bad reasons: 1. Lack of teamwork, partly due to inexperience, partly due to difficulty of coordinating with the current UI 2. Lack of experience with anti-PD tactics In a hypothetical situation where a coordinated attack force assaulted someone whose only effective cover was PD, I think the attackers would annihilate their enemies. PD is strong when not countered, but when countered I don't think you could rely on it at all, and trying to do so would get you killed almost as well as if you just sat in an open field. So all other questions aside, I don't think the ion towers/galaxy would be all they're cracked up to be when assaulted by a coordinated team who knows what they're doing. Part of the difficulty is that DT's coordination tools are a bit cumbersome and weak right now, but hopefully that'll be fixed up in future.

Why are you assuming that my entire force is in my castle? I don't have to completely surrender the initiative and all information by sitting in there. I just need a unit or two there to benefit from it. The ion tower is a very powerful structure. What sense is there in not making use of it? Why are you dictating the tank's role to me? Why does the tank having mobility mean that I have to reposition it constantly? What vehicle do you suggest I use to cover the tower in place of one? Surely the tank's role is what I make it. If I want to deploy it in defence of a fortification I don't see why I need to send it wheeling all around the countryside if it's more effective staying there. As far as I can tell, your argument amounts to, "it can move, therefore it must move, even if it is more effective staying put." Is that an incorrect reading of it?

A couple of vehicles waiting in the vicinity of an ion tower isn't the same as broadcasting to your enemy the location of your entire army. I'd argue that you can even use it as a tactical tool, far from people yelling about "noobs" and whatnot - if the enemy is forced to attack your position then you, again, can gain the upper hand by exploiting that. Oh, and: Neither do ion towers - what's your point? They're a fortification. Your rule seems to be based on there being no significant type of fortification available (because the enemy can blow it up with missiles/artillery/airstrikes/etc so actually using it as a defensive tool is counterproductive). That clearly doesn't hold true in Drop Team in that there is no cruise missile/artillery/airstrike that can kill an ion tower. All I am saying is your rule appears to be wrong in that it's not universally true. It may be true today, yes, but it has not always been true and for all we know it may not be true in the future. Of course, there's also the argument that you can't depend on ion towers being effective because they're easy to counter, especially with the new coaxial MGs - but since your complaints by and large appear to be based on the premise that they are effective, I guess we can skip over that.

I'm a little confused about this one. It sounds to me like more of a basic of modern tactical warfare than a general rule. Castles and other fortifications, for example, were very visible, yet viable (in their time) due to their defensive strength. I bring this up because it seems very relevant to your grand pet hate of DT's point defence. That is, as far as I know, founded in this "basic rule" that seems to me to be flawed.

As a general rule, if its turret isn't on fire, it's still capable of shooting. It's very rare for a Drop Team vehicle's gunner to be dead without the turret exploding from the ammo going up. Which is really one of the points of this thread, I guess.

I think the passing through makes sense if the damage is to the periphery of the crew compartment, since the compartment has more *around* it than just the crew in the middle (i.e. it's possible to damage the compartment without breaching it, by shearing clear through the hopefully-redundant systems around it). Having said that, it makes no sense for the crew compartment to be so tiny as in the picture. I would worry that making the crew bigger will change the balance of the game a great deal, though. You can explain away being able to extract with no crew by saying the liveship dispatches the dropship on its own - we do have full status information for our entire team available at all times. I'd be very interested to see the results of those changes. And I love that picture too. I have to agree with the sentiment that it's wrong for there to be so much apparent dead space inside the vehicles.

I think I had the same problem going from 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 on the Mac. I had to run the external updater to get it to update. Some new bugs that I saw last game: Magic Flying Paladin (bonus picture) There's a crater there (from my heavy mortar as far as I know) but my magic flying Paladin KC-M is undeterred. Those are two different craters, and neither fazed the magic flying paladin - it just rolled over them like nothing was there. Bot Death Valley Early on in the game I noticed a curious anomaly in the bots' navigation. They were streaming, lemming-like, off the cliff. One or two opted to avoid doing this, but the rest happily trundled off the edge. Later on I looked in the canyon and saw this. Whoops? I'm not sure what made them do that. Possible thoughts: - there were turrets of some kind on the other side of the gulch (you can see them on the minimap) - there were mines on the southern approach to the bridge, though I believe the bridge was still accessible from one angle; you can see the mines scattered all over the place in the first picture

I've always found them reasonably dangerous against AFVs they could hurt (well, except the Paladin MC-L, which I don't think I've ever had much luck with even using direct fire). The difficulty I have is that they have no hope of hurting Thor at all past blind luck, and of course that the ion towers seem to make them pretty much useless. I tend to deploy them around friendly AFVs, so people dropping on me and whatever else isn't a huge problem. It's just I can never, ever kill Thor. Incidentally, I have had what were, as best I could tell, direct chassis hits with the heavy mortar on Thor (who was completely still, firing enthusiastically at me from 6km away) to no apparent effect - he would disappear into the dust-covered crater, then crawl out of it and start shooting at me again (so no apparent driver damage either). This repeated a number of times. Note that my post said "effectively engage". I don't think any of the mortars can effectively engage Thor - none of them except the Thor MC can even reasonably hope to survive being in a Thor's line of sight, and any shot that doesn't directly hit the turret top seems completely ineffective against them (short of making them crawl out of a crater, which has some humour value at least).

Maybe the foliage directly in front of your sight could become transparent. That could help? I don't know, my system has enough trouble without foliage, and I don't actually even have the option to turn it on in the menu.

Paladin MC-L would have the counterbattery computer mounted in place of the transport bay, I'd imagine. I did think the Paladin ATGM would be able to carry infantry, though.

Have you seen this page? Unit Page It has schematics of most of the vehicles and especially the major ones. With the ATGs, remember your accuracy is highest when prone, lower while standing still and even lower while moving. I find the most effective way to use them is to assault the vehicle and get to 20-50m and fire grenades while standing at it. Firing while prone is more accurate, but if you go prone too quickly you'll be facing the wrong way (remember the view through the sight is NOT really where you're facing, just like it's not really where the tank's turret is pointing) and you turn very slowly while lying down. Also, remember clean shots perpendicular to the armour's surface are best for penetrating.

Ah, thank-you for the clarification. I tried using an Apollo MC earlier, but had problems because of how Thor-happy the bots are. I managed to kill a Shrike or something, but then I swapped over to Apollo KC-H to kill the Thors. Thors kinda need to be very resistant to mortars if they want to be useful (otherwise we'd just shell them to bits) but it's something to think about that the mortar carriers are the only vehicles that can't effectively engage Thor at some range. All the others can. Just something to think about.

Combined with the part about how the shrapnel range is at most 13.3 times the blast diameter, this implies that the blast itself is somehow damaging. What damage does the blast itself do?

That's what I've been thinking. I've never even played it before. Oh, and I don't think Objective is ideal with just bots either. On a lot of maps like, Dead Gulch and the-map-with-the-hill-in-the-middle, the attackers seem to very frequently win because the defending bots never manage to kill all the enemies inside the scoring radius, so the defender points never go back up.

I agree with pretty much everything here. One thing I think the game needs is for the command & control interface to extend into the 3d view better, allowing selection of units and especially the accurate placing of waypoints. It's a pain trying to drop waypoints on jammed targets. I know where I am and my rangefinder knows how far away what I'm looking at is - I should be able to place waypoints there. My biggest issue with counterbattery fire is having to tab through ~50 presses of the key to get it into the appropriate range sometimes. I've managed to use it to great effect with the Apollo MC on that green map with the hill in the middle. I also think the Apollo and especially the Paladin could really use more ammo. I don't think we'd be seeing everyone deploying in the Paladin MC if it had as much as double the ammo capacity. Even if you're careful to expend both types of rounds, the Paladin takes very little time to run out of ammo and it seems wasteful to call a Galaxy down to resupply the little thing. Interesting thought: pretty much all the units are dangerous to all the other units, with the notable exception of... the mortar carriers. In particular, Thors seem pretty much invincible unless they're immobile. Even then I haven't had success killing them with direct heavy mortar fire aimed at the hull - they just end up sitting in a crater even when it appeared to hit. With the Paladin MC I've managed to set Thor turrets on fire, but again, they need to not move at all, and you need to have the elevation to aim directly at the top of the turret. Another thing that could help is better indications that a mortar round or shrapnel has penetrated a target. As it is, you usually have no idea if you did anything unless whatever you hit catches fire or explodes. Actually, maybe that'd be a good thing for the game in general. What if all damage was more obvious somehow? Like if you damaged the engine it might make a different noise and maybe you can see oxygen leaking from the vehicle (unless it expires, in which case you might see some smoke come out and then nothing). If you hit the fuel cell, maybe you can see mysterious sparks appearing around it, or some other visual distortion. You know, the usual thing you see around an imminent antimatter containment breach. Just some thoughts.

That sounds very much like it for 5.1 and 6. I thought it'd be interesting to try and fly the Viper through the first person view, but it didn't seem very practical, since you're zoomed in and you don't have great instruments for it. 5.2 remains at large though. I don't know if anyone has seen that one, or if it's just my imagination, or if it's related to something entirely different. For 7, that would explain why I haven't noticed it before, since I very rarely switch to control a bot. I don't remember specifically whether I changed soldiers, but it's very possible.

I've also heard a rumour that there's a bug in the infantry ion where the beam can be invisible to whoever's being hit by it. I haven't observed this personally, since it was my ion, but I've had a couple of surprised comments by people who exploded without ever seeing the beam. Good point about the beam size, maybe that was the problem. The crosshair was well above the target though. Maybe they'll revamp the ion effects when they change its mechanics. It really is hard to tell if you're hitting anything when it's moving fast and you have a fair bit of latency. I would love a pretty particle effect to replace the Generic Smoke #1 that we get for hitting anything at all now.

I thought I'd make a thread for a few mostly minor bugs/issues I've found. Pictures are included for some. 1. Building Clipping Taking over this building, I noticed the cutter could drive inside it a little, as if it were smaller than the model indicates. 2. Viper Tagging Objectives I thought it'd be funny to try this out, and lo and behold it worked. The Viper can "tag" the objective if it's close enough (though there are other friendly units nearby, my score at the game's end confirmed it). Is this intentional? Given that it ostensibly has no offensive capability, it seems like it shouldn't count for purposes of the objective, like infantry. 3. Building Hovering Off the Edge of the World This building was half flying off the edge of the map. Don't know why, but it doesn't seem like a thing that it should be doing. 4. Shrike That Drove Inside a Building Charlemagne* managed to drive his Shrike into this building. The Shrike, as you can see, is actually partly inside the building. Netherby took control of it and was unable to free it, so it was apparently stuck in there rather than just graphically inside it like the Cutter. 5. Viper Controls Having been playing with the Viper, there are what seem to be two different errors in its handling. Firstly, sometimes it seems to stop responding to the mouse direction. My understanding is that its pitch and yaw are meant to be controlled by the camera heading, such that it tries to orient itself in that direction (much like the aircraft in Halo do). The problem is, sometimes it appears to stop responding to the mouse control for a while. It'll just drift off in one direction. To be clear, this isn't it overshooting the heading by a bit and then coming back - it's as if it's responding to a different camera orientation altogether. It usually recovers from this after a short while. This could conceivably be caused by packet loss, since the game occasionally seems to have issues with that, but my connection didn't seem particularly lossy at the time. The second issue is the Viper appears to get less and less responsive to its mouse control over time. When it's just deployed it seems great, actually reasonably responsive and quite usable. As time goes on it responds worse and worse until it's really not properly controllable. 6. Infantry Turning Enthusiastic Pirhouettes for No Reason Since 1.1.1 (I don't remember it before then) my controlled infantryman will sometimes turn in circles away from the camera heading. This seems to happen most when jump jetting - he will just start rotating in the air, away from the camera facing, for no apparent reason, and usually comes back to facing forwards shortly. During this he ends up facing directly towards my camera. Very odd. 7. Wrong Ammo Type Fired by Infantry Earlier I had a little infantry guy and saw some infantry ahead. OK, 10mm is selected, fire, and boff, boff there go two ATGs. Oops? When I cycled the ammo types it fired 10mm again. Yurch tells me this is a problem on the vehicles too, but I don't remember seeing it before. That's all I remember for now. I might add more later.

I think the big problem with the ion aiming is how the beam appears visually to be fired directly out of the gun sight - which it isn't, because if you're in an ion firing from a hull-down position you can end up striking the ground ahead of you when your target is well above it. If it appeared to be fired from, say, below and to the left of the sight, it might be a lot clearer what it's actually hitting. I agree with all the rest, though. I'd like to see an emphasis on getting a lot out of the particles used so the game runs super well as well as looking great. P.S. you need to make a thread on mortars.