yllamana

The close-assaulting infantry are incredibly scary now with their AT grenades. I approve very much. Thank-you.

The laser tower and the Galaxy shoot down regular shells. It's just that the Hermes hasn't gained super powers - the laser tower and Galaxy have always had them.

I finally pinned down why I hate point defence so much. The counters to heavy tanks sitting a zillion miles away in the open (taking advantage of the fact that you can't close with them without being vulnerable to their weapon fire) are ATGMs and mortars. Point defence of any type instantly nullifies both those options, leading to stupid stuff like the ion Thor parked on the hill under the ion tower plinking away at everyone with little option to retaliate.

Re: ATGMs, what if the minimum time to lock on was increased to something like 5 seconds? As it stands it seems *extremely* random (too much so I think). Sometimes you get a lock as soon as you take aim at them, and other times you're still there 10 seconds later trying to get it. And add some kind of ATGM lock-on warning to the target so they know to get out of the way.

I actually really like the ATGMs now. I like how the ATGM carriers generally counter the Thors, which generally counter the lighter vehicles, which generally counter the ATGM carriers. On a lot of scenarios the Thors are just so annoying with their ability to sit a zillion miles away and be close to indestructible. ATGMs make them a little more careful. That's my big use for ATGMs though. I don't really use/abuse them against the other vehicles - I just use them against Thors, and I like very much their level of effectiveness in that role. Still don't like the all-or-nothing point defence.. I think bots need to pay a bit more attention to infantry. I killed something like 10 vehicles with one rifle squad today - I ran out of grenades fast, then just kept firing 10mm into the backs of things until they exploded. The bots could easily have stopped me, but they were more concerned with the other bots firing ineffectually from a few kilometres away. In the end I ended up extracting, not because I was in danger but because I was totally out of ammo - no grenades or 10mm left.

Maybe, just maybe, there could be specific orbital drop troops who always deploy in drop pods. They could be on very specific availability (think 2 or so). This also isn't solving the other problem, that being that infantry with jumpjets deploying from a dropship on the ground looks silly, especially when the dropship is under fire. Maybe there could be some low-velocity (relatively) drop pods that most infantry use, and then big, scary high-velocity pods that the drop shock troops use - the standard ones being very vulnerable to AA fire, the high-velocity ones doing very well against it. The low-v ones could come down on parachutes or something, as slowly as the dropships do now. Just it'd look less silly. Just some ideas. Also, you can already often deploy infantry on top of a lone engaged AFV if you know exactly where it is. I've done it to Thors before.

The 20mm/76mm/ion/17mm are all great for killing infantry. Every vehicle except the mortar carriers mounts one of these. It's possible to range them all on the ground next to the infantry (better yet a trooper, but that's a bit harder) and then shoot them out of the sky. If you aim for the leader you'll be disrupting them constantly with their guy dying, too. Plus the Hermes is already overpowered enough as is. It doesn't need ANOTHER role (godly anti-infantry unit) on top of point defence/jamming/AA/short range death cannon. Yep! 120mm HE can still kill you on the ground though. If you get close enough on the side of the Thor it can push you around with the barrel of the 120mm. Additionally, 10mm can damage paladin tires and can kill Apollo and Paladin from the rear given time or if your squadmates decide to fire their weapons today. The problem is the vehicles are generally much more mobile than the infantry, so unless they're already immobilised or panic (or plain distracted) they can move away from you. Radiation concerns. It's already possible that they'll end up pulling the 6mm ions from service due to health issues - no way are they mounting more of them on an AFV, whose crew capsules are already dangerously close to their theoretical maximum radiation limit with those big ugly fuel cells inside. Listening to people talking about deploying the infantry in drop capsules, it sounds cool at first but having seen infantry flanking in action I can't help but think it might be overpowered. Deploying from drop pods on top of engaged AFVs I think you'd almost certainly score at least one kill, possibly more, before they could kill you. That's not to mention the added exposure they'd have if they turned their turrets or hulls to try and slow you down. I think if that was added then the point defence weapons and AA would HAVE to work on airborne drop pods just to balance them, and even then it'd probably be too strong a tactic (and make the stupid Hermes even more essential).

The grenades are sort of like demo charges as is. I used to be a bit cautious with the infantry, because you intuitively expect gigantic AFVs to be dangerous to be next to and you intuitively expect grenades to be at least somewhat dangerous to be next to when they land. Neither of those seems to be true at the moment - you can run right up to a vehicle and fire grenades into it at point blank range (though I think that's a little suboptimal because it makes placing them slightly harder than if you have just a tiny bit of range). I'm OK with the infantry not being killable by ramming - I mean, you can't damage vehicles with it either - but they should at least be dazed or something. It just looks weird seeing the little infantry guy being pushed along by a tank. I don't think the Hermes needs any more power against infantry. The 20mm is already a bit over the top - if you can manage to range it on something you can even shoot the little guys out of the air with AP. Hermes is already a great vehicle on top of all that, too.

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I was trying to hide in the rocks, but got sabotaged by my team. They ran around, activated jump jets and flew over the rocks. Then when you were close enough to hit with grenades, I was the only one actually shooting at all. The others were just standing there and getting killed. Infantry just don't seem all that useful. They're reasonably survivable against long-range fire, but they can't damage anything, can't interact with the flag, move slower than Thor (unless you activate the kill-me jets) and die horribly to the lighter AFVs from far outside their effective weapons range. Anything less than the 120mm kills them easily - the 76, 20mm, the ion. I'm having a lot of trouble thinking of a role for them. They don't have enough mobility to be used as radar-invisible flankers, and if you activate the jump jets you lose all the benefit of stealth. They can't defend well because almost all the vehicles can kill them easily. They can't intercept flag carriers well because they are killed easily. The only role I've had great success with them in is long-range ion fire, due to their low visibility and high survivability, and even then the ion they carry is prohibitively weak and 4/5 of the squad are useless (or straight out kill your ion guy by shooting him). I would love to hear others' thoughts though.

Okay, well I've decided the infantry are just too stupid to use most times, purely because of how badly they use the AT grenades. I know they use them - I saw one guy fire off three of them quite happily at a Shrike (to no effect). But when you're actually in combat doing something like close assaulting a Hermes, when it actually matters that they fire, they never do, and you get ripped up by the 20mm. The ion is sort of fun, but it's so weak that it takes you something like a full minute to work your way through a paladin's side hull (not to mention the trouble of telling if you're actually hitting anything with it). It basically seems like you have to resign yourself to the fact that your squadmates are just useless, or even worse than useless since they seem capable of shooting you in the back. I'm about ready to go back to AFVs.

You have to change the ammo type with the +/- keys.

A few preliminary comments: - you need to be able to walk at diagonals. Anyone who's played a first person shooter is going to try it, and at present it seems to just ignore the forwards and walk sideways. - whenever anyone in my squad fires, my circle is lighting up. (edit: the one that shows your time to reload) - when I go prone they should not be trying to move to stay in formation. I can't aim at anything without them trying to reposition. - can infantry please have a rangefinder on their scope? - infantry don't appear able to return the flag at all. Is this intentional? They're fun, though. Extras: - can they please not be worth 1 point per man? 5 points per light infantry squad destroyed is excessive to say the least. - I don't know about the whole visibility thing, but the bots don't seem to care about it. My lone rifleman was fired at from 2.5k by two bots, despite not having fired in ages and having not used jump jets in ages. I really love them though. [ July 23, 2006, 08:05 AM: Message edited by: yllamana ]

Well, I'm not thinking point defence on every unit either. But it'd have to be added to more units if it was going to be possible to create overlapping defence like that. Since our only super annoying PD options at the moment are the Galaxy and the ion tower, the only thing you could overlap is those. Hermes can be a pain but not being able to shoot projectiles makes it pretty balanced. I'd be interested in seeing a point defence deployable, actually. It'd never be too overpowered because it'd be relatively susceptible to 20mm spam and mortars would still kill it with airbursts probably, but it'd reduce the vulnerability of the other deployables. If all else failed you could always take it out with an ion. If that's not enough then maybe some units with very limited point defence could be added (something like a Hermes but with a PD ion that wasn't strong enough to harm dropships could be interesting). Maybe they could even mount one on the Cutter to improve its use as a support unit? I feel frustrated since I want to play with the toy soldiers but can't because 1.1 broke my DropTeam. Oh well.

Update: still crashes after reinstall and reupdate.

The only problem I have with the idea of making point defence a soft counter is I don't like the idea of fights being determined primarily by luck. Yay I lost because the Intertron randomly rolled his number higher than mine and his point defence stopped me killing him while mine didn't. Maybe if instead of shooting shells out of the air the point defence could slow them down to reduce their lethality. At least with PD as a hard counter it's easy to predict what will happen in a given situation. Fights being very often decided by random rolls by automated turrets would be stupid. As a soft counter the game could be the better for it, but I think it'd lead to frustration if not done properly.

DT 1.1 Mac is crashing after the loading screen, right before it brings up the main menu. I've sent my DropTeam.log and a few crash logs to Clay's email address. I just thought I should create a thread about it here. I've tried removing the preferences from my home directory (didn't work) and I'm now seeing how reinstalling (from the CD! yay!) goes. Netherby is having the same problem, which isn't too surprising as his system is more or less identical to mine.

I like the Paladin. Its speed lets it maneuver into positions where its lighter weaponry can easily score kills. The 76 has a lot of range, and though it takes a while to actually kill anything, you pretty much know that every hit is damaging what you're firing at. With a little luck and a good position you can disable Thor by blowing its turret off. With less luck you at least know you've damaged some subsystems and greatly reduced the vehicle's fighting strength. The Paladin has a few problems. It's susceptible to artillery fire; its wheels tend to explode when fired on by ion cannons. It can be killed or disabled with a single good 120mm shot; it performs best by far when aided by a distraction or by good concealing terrain. The MC-L variant tends to need line of sight to its target due to its lighter shells; it can kill Thor with direct hits, though. The Paladin also tends to be top-heavy, especially the mortar variant, and tips extremely easily. I probably lose more 76es to rolling than I do to enemy fire. I haven't really tried the ion variant much. The ion's "HEY OVER HERE COME KILL ME!" beam effect doesn't lend itself too well to use on a lightly-armoured vehicle, and the Paladin tips very easily if you try to increase your survivability with combat maneuvering at speed. Also, for raw coolness it's hard to overlook the Cutter. The slowest, most lightly armed vehicle in service, it's just plain fun to kill people with. Plus you can nuke the ice fields base with EMP and drive in your Cutter unaffected and kill everything. That is just the best.

The Hermes autogun has a property, "MaximumTargetSpeed", which is presumably what keeps it from firing at normal shells. If I had to guess, I'd think the following can cause it to fail: - not noticing the projectile in time. Sometimes the point defence seems to fail to fire at all. - missing the projectile/ship (I guess the BurnChance is the chance to kill whatever it hit, too). - not being ready to fire when the projectile goes past (like when you overload the tower with 20mm). - the target being above the MinimumTargetAltitude. It's not clear what this is relative to. The Galaxy and Hermes guns have it set to 0; the ion tower doesn't have it at all. - the projectile being above the MaximumTargetSpeed. I can't see a way in the XML to get it to just fire at projectiles and ignore dropships. I'm also not sure how you'd go about making it just ablate dropship armour instead of killing them outright, or if that would even be possible to do while retaining its anti-projectile capability. I guess the MaximumTargetSpeed sort of simulates the weapon not being able to come to bear fast enough before the projectile hits. I don't much like the idea of it just being highly random whether it picks up or not. Winning or losing to a roll of the dice isn't very fun. There's already enough chance in how battles play out in all the different things that can happen.

What if the Galaxy only had one PD ion? Then it'd have a much lower chance of stopping things, though it'd still offer a little protection. It'd saturate really easily if you threw it into direct combat, too, since it'd be shooting at all sorts of silly things like 20mm rounds. The problem is, it's pretty neat being able to use it as a support unit instead of just a resupply. I guess the problem I have with point defence at the moment is it usually seems like an all-or-nothing proposition. Either you have something that shuts down virtually everything thrown at it, like the ion towers or the Galaxy, or you don't have any point defence at all. I guess it feels to me like the PD items in the game should be weaker, but there should be more of them available. I don't know why the Galaxy can even shoot down other dropships. It seems like its point defence ions would be relatively weak and short range. I mean, if it can toast the Viper so easily, why not fire it at other things like Shrikes or Paladins? The normal ions take several shots to kill even a Shrike - why can an ion with 1500m maximum range knock out the much better protected Viper in one hit? Would it be better if it just couldn't target dropships at all? You could still drop it on the Hurricane or whatever, but that seems like a pretty risky tactic and you do only get to deploy it every so often.

- Part 1 - How about the defence of not dropping on the capturable tower, but dropping away from it and shelling it into oblivion (mortar/HE)? Maybe you could even try delaying your deployment, then hitting it all with EMP, and deploying your entire team plus Galaxy on top of them. I guess the Galaxy has a bit of an identity crisis. It's ostensibly a resupply ship, but in general its best use by far is as point defence/AA cover. It seems balanced around being used for resupply - you can usually have one down. If you're blasting away with your mortar you can't use all your ammo from the last Galaxy before the next becomes available. Maybe the resupply Galaxy and the air cover Galaxy should be two distinct options - the air cover Galaxy could even circle around the area looking awesome instead of just sitting on the ground. Then the resupply Galaxy could have its point defence reduced or eliminated (could be a resupply Viper I guess). - Part 2 - I think there's another problem being touched on with this thread, which is feedback on firing through point defence weapons. When you're attacking anything under point defence cover, you tend to see a lot of your shots destroyed before impact. Maybe some of them are going through; maybe your mortar shells are causing fragmentation damage below them. It's next to impossible to tell, though, especially since due to scarcity of players online many of us aren't used to being attacked by mortars, least of all with PD cover. It seems like you can often fire at targets under PD with some success (people hit me under it anyway) but it's hard to tell if you do or not. I'm not sure what to do about that. I'm also unsure about mortars + PD - from my perspective, being very often in a mortar carrier, PD of *any* kind seems to render it utterly useless. I think that's partly because I just can't see the damage it's doing, though. You can definitely still feel airbursts sometimes in the Hermes. Maybe PD is too strong, but it's difficult to tell because of lack of feedback (oh no not this again).

I'd just like to say I think this all looks super awesome and I can't wait to play it. Just hope they don't slow my computer down too much.

I'd like this also. It looks very messy in there. Please put it somewhere nice like suggested above, I may never forgive Mac Halo for creating a folder in ~/Documents (in the home folder itself is more forgivable because I very rarely look in it rather than in a subdirectory).

The manual is in the DropTeamSetup that you downloaded (DropTeamManual.pdf). Maybe the installer could be changed a bit, because yeah, I didn't find it for a while either as it doesn't get installed into the DropTeam folder like the public test manual was. I'm sure someone else will have trouble finding it in future, and it'd be great if it could be fixed up for them. Also, my download speed was around 9k/sec; I would have been fine with 60. Possibly just a transient net problem though, so let's hope nobody else has trouble with it. Sounds like nobody else is having big problems with it - I don't think a few hours to download is unreasonable, just at crazy times like 15 hours there's a lot of potential for it to be interrupted by whatever connection difficulties, power failures, kids eating the modem, etc. that people can run into.

If it helps at all, on my system if I zoom in by pressing e, then hold shift and release e, the view stays zoomed until I tap e again.