yurch

Oh yes, on the hovercrafts - those drive me crazy. I'm starting to think the engine subsystem should be extended to cover the entire bottom half of the craft. The reasoning is, that the hovercraft is a flying vehicle. There aren't many flying vehicles that can hover safely with control surface and engine damage. An alternative, which I've said before, is to put weak individual engine subsystems responsible for each stabilization jet. Shoot one out and watch the fun begin. I think the definition of 'kill' should also be extended to the entire death of the crew. Right now the only sure way to kill a tank (for say, scoring, or getting it to drop the flag) is to destroy the battery.

I don't mind the thor being 'slightly' resistant to HEAT rather than totally. The danger area is around, I dunno, 60 degrees from the side or so, so there's still some room to play with from the front as far as angles go. Have to remember it's not just front, side, rear, ect. 1.5km is not really a difficult range to hit the same region of space on, with either AP or HEAT, especially for something slow like the thor. Against bots who are always stupidly turning the side armor towards you, you can really get a feel for exactly where that battery is... But anyway, this is uninteresting. What's interesting is how we would theoretically fix "it" (and, of course, more arguing over what "it" is), and what we would do to compensate for "it" to make something not totally dominant. Here is part of my attempt to figure out the component system. Yes, there are things that poke out of the chassis or turret; those things obviously only apply to the part of the item they reside inside. I think the turret and hull are seperate, and subsystems do not extend between them. Which is going to create a bit of a problem for a subsystem that is supposed to reside in both, IE crew compartment. The sphere is there because the subsystems are defined by radius; I don't know if boxes or spheres are the most appropriate, so I thought I'd have one. The ammo and battery always destroy the object they reside within (KO) if destroyed. The engine appears to have a 25% chance of the same destruction. I'd like to point out that the battery lies behind the centerline - all AP and HEAT fire from the side should be directed behind the center of mass on the thor.

For the record, I just penetrated (and killed) the side of a thor on the ice map with AP at a rather poor angle (almost 45'?) at just under 4k. Whatever the falloff range where HEAT becomes more practical for pure penentration than AP, it's "area fire" range. Does everyone here know you can zoom the view in further? Pressing G while zooming in (holding E by default) switches the zoom levels. Most vehicles have 2 levels, thor has 5.

You won't make the AP round more useful by making HEAT better. Tanks have sloped armor for protection, that's what it's for. This effect is what keeps heat from totally dominating it from the side like it does the light tanks. The risk is still too great to leave the thor's sides open, this 'protection' isn't reliable at all. It is vulnerable to HEAT. I would say it's not designed specifically so, given that the thor has higher side armor than normal and a very mild sloped protection. Didn't you say earlier you wanted to use AP vs heavy vehicles and HEAT versus light? I murder Thors from the side with HEAT. So does everybody else, it's a one to two hit kill. If you're too far away to even hit the flat part of the Thor, the tank isn't much of a threat because it probably can't do the same to you. Part of an effective ambush is firing in effective range. They also gave the thor five levels of zoom and the longest ranged weapons in the game. (heavy mortar, the ion and the 120mm, although experience varies by map) It's armor appears to be designed to stand up to fire for extended periods in a long range situation. Let me break it down: No matter what changes you make, HEAT should always do more damage than AP if it penetrates. Therefore, HEAT will be favored whenever it can penetrate. This has been an absolute so far in the discussion. If you make HEAT more likely to penetrate, it's going to be favored over AP more, no matter what changes you make to the damage model. HEAT is supposed to be good for light vehicles and at ranges where AP has no chance of penetrating. HOWEVER, HEAT is a lower velocity round. This means it will suffer more from leading, scatter, dispersion, ect. Firing HEAT long range at a main battle tank at dubious angles is an act of desperation, not practicality. I fully support your right to do this, as I believe ammo is cheaper than lives, but I do not think it should be anywhere near effective as you seem to want it to be. What? I'm talking about the arrangement of internal parts - a shot down the front or rear has more potential of passing through multiple parts than from the side, doesn't it? I'm not sure if I'm getting across how well some players can aim. Your 1.5km hitting-components-twice challenge is most likely not even a problem for some players, and they will only get better through time. At close range it's trivial. You can one-hit-kill with HEAT on thors with a fairly high ratio as it is. Light vehicles are even easier. Short range gunnery is most certainly already effective, and it doesn't need our specific help to be any more so. My favorite thing with the thor happens to be digging and using a defensive array to the side of an attacker advance. It's not effective against hurricanes, of course, but nothing really is. I really don't do it with apollos anymore, since the bots always spam enough heat at me to eventually get lucky from the front. I might have to set up an even higher wall to hide behind, but then it's easy to miss a paladin coming in. The bots are dumb about thier positioning, of course, and some players really don't have a clue. Give them time. As a 76mm and hermes user, I call... LIES! I wish the hermes was faster, actually; and the 76mm user that doesn't drive doesn't survive. You're bouncing all over the place here. You saying mobility isn't needed and you said earlier you think the HEAT should penetrate the paladin easier. The tradeoff is protection versus manuverability, is it not? If manuverability wasn't needed we could put heavier armor on the paladin... What's the point of bringing up the usefulness of light vehicles in an armor discussion anyway? A vantage position that gives you a shot at the side of a busy thor is an objective in itself, and one I would expect only a fast vehicle to be able to do... Main points: Higher HEAT penetration is unnecessary and counterproductive. HEAT should not be considered an effective substitute for AP in ranged work. I don't like high degrees of randomness in a damage system, both for the shooter and the shootee. My luck is crap, I know I'm just going to get 1 hit KO'd over and over. I've been looking at the cob files and physicalobjectgroup files and I've figured how they work together, although I don't have a good .cob editor/converter. Through manual placement I can place the components (and I think the diagrams given to us are a bit misleading at times); given time I think I could devise more appropriate internals if necessary.

Right, but the need for AP is already diminishing, and this is before your proposed increase of HEAT penetration. It's already impractical to penetrate (the only real heavy vehicle) the Thor close up from the front with AP because that means staring down it's cannon. So we attack from the sides or rear, where HEAT is incidentally more useful anyway. I'd expect the thor to have at least a minor bit of HEAT protection, which it does with the armor sloping. Although I don't think it's anywhere as near as effective as you seem to portray it. I'm running out of HEAT waaay before AP. Think they'll let us redo it? Nobody likes random. You say yourself you get furious when you can't hit with HEAT from range just from the minor deviations, why wouldn't it make you angry if you land 6 (still minorly statistically probable, but an obvious exaggeration) shots on the engine and it's still going? The lack of frag damage may have something to do with the fact that there is little to frag into from the side, the way the components are lined up. And short range gunnery positively brutal. I drove the 120mm apollo around like a psychopath last night, and achieved multiple 2 hit kills with AP on several different craft (a few at 1500-2500m!), all while driving at 40km/hr or whatever the apollo top speed is. Until of course, they started pounding me with the hurricane. If we start making it easier to damage the tanks once we penetrate, I'm going to have to request that some of them recieve better protection. I can crest a hill and make penetrating snapshots very easily. I would class the paladin as a wheeled tank, not an armored car or something. An apollo trading it's tracks for speed. If you want unarmored, observe what happens when a shrike meets an ion cannon. The paladin chassis would not be very useful at all in these game situations with any less armor.

The projectile visualization is not immediately removed on detonation. It's apparent with hurricanes striking objects or hills, or artillery shot down by hermes. The simulated shell can be seen passing through objects. Also appears on minimap as it's flying through the ground.

What exactly is the relative size of these units to humans supposed to be? For kicks, I've been trying to match the size of the driver compartment in the subsystem drawings to a few diagrams of actual tanks... The result: you can almost fit an abrams inside the thor turret. At least the way I figure it. Either the component scaling is way off or the upcoming infantry are going to be tiny. Can we get some clarifaction on this before I start installing my helipad on top of the thor?

H and L, high and low. They are autochosen for range.

It's listed in my physicalobject group as having directkillfactor of 50, which is what I've been going by. I know it's not doing exactly 50 and is probably doing something well below this due to whatever modifiers are being applied. The way things have seemed to work for me has not lead me to disbelieve this theoretical maximum value; if you know a better script source please let me know. The point is that I'm of the notion that sweeping changes to AP will have drastic effects. In a gameplay sense (and even real world), there has to be a penalty for using the higher penetration (easier to damage) round. Right now there's a slight risk of a no-penetration with the HEAT. I don't think that risk is high enough to be using AP instead in a very high amount of cases. Increasing HEAT's penetration will reduce this risk further, making AP (even if it had a slightly higher damage ability) the useless smaller cousin to HEAT. and btw it's like this in real life too from my talks with tankers (they use AP (well it called APFSDS in real life against tanks and HEAT against light vehicles). not that i think everything in drop team should be done as in real life, but i like using AP and HEAT this way. The comparison to real tanks may be a faulty one. Modern tanks are packed over every inch with items, to the point where the driver practically lays on his back. Under the turret is the crew compartment, which also extends up into the turret. There's a nice picture of an abrams internal here but it apparently won't let me link to it. Compare this to the diagrams of our internals. Looking at both the scaling of the crew doors and and crew compartments of these tanks (the gunner sits IN the Apollo turret?!), it's immediately apparent that these tanks are far larger and far less dense in thier subsystem arrangement and dependancy. The thor is of an utterly incredible size, and I'm starting to wonder if 120mm is a bit too small of a primary armanent for it. How the hurricane stays afloat is beyond me. This does kill the immersion a bit, doesn't it. :/ Going by the very loose subsystem arrangement, I think that either the components are protected for maximum survivability or there are some very wasteful engineers designing these things. I might make a composite image for laughs. usually it doesn't kill a component in a single hit. we tested this a lot of times, Drusus was my target at 2-3kms and i was shooting again and again at him. against Thor HEAT has problems penetrating the side armor as i wrote earlier. and anyway several penetrations were usually needed (i aimed at the center of the hull side) because of the gun's dispersion. several penetrations usually are needed even to kill an Apollo from the side. if you don't hit the fuel cells directly, expect to need at least 3 hits with AP.... and that's 3 hits to the side of a light tank! Are you talking about HEAT or AP in the first paragraph? This is the problem with a hitpoint system with something doing X damage to Y. The difference between a two hit kill with two 90% damage shots and one with 101% is massive for player psychology. We could switch to having more statistical variance internals (but, nobody really likes random) or just weaker subsystems. Or, subsystems internals for the subsystems. Gameplay wise I'd just say use a heat for an apollo side shot, as it's side and rear armor is laughable. Against a real tank I'd say you have a high chance of killing the crew located in and under the turret. Especially for a light vehicle that's even more crammed and lacking protections. In game the vehicles don't seem to have this vulnerability. i had many situations where i hit a light vehicle (paladin) to the hull side with HEAT, and it didn't penetrate. that sure made me angry. Paladin has a respectable amount of armor for what seems a 'light' vehicle. The vital crap is located towards the belly, which is also where it's much easier to HEAT penetrate. It only usually deflects up at the top (I find players aim high for whatever reason), where you probably aren't going to do as much damage anyway. HEAT to the flat bit under the slope from the front of a paladin does catastrophic damage. i agree, Thor should be quite survivable. not not to the extreme like now. i can ambush a Thor from the side, i make 2 penetrations before he reacts...and he's still ok and shoots back as if nothing happened. Thor should take a beating from the front, but his sides and back shouldn't be that tough...and i repeat, the problem is not just that Thor's sides are tough, the problem is that it's hard to destroy components. and that applies to all vehicles Then you and I are in complete agreement. What matters now is what components are damaged and how. i know that the green map has denser atmosphere. Not everybody does. Just making sure.

What about looong distance, then? There's a "lossrate" defined for AP that HEAT doesn't seem to have. Perhaps it's related to this?

If heat had more penetration, why would you ever use AP? You can already blow through the front of apollos (which nowadays seems to be just a paladin with a track - both have a respectable 'average' armor) with HEAT, and all of the light vehicles at that. Thors and fast targets would be it, and those with advanced gunnery skills would only need it for thor. You're using the side armor of the toughest tank (that armor is equal to apollo front armor) in the game as a benchmark, and HEAT already does more than enough damage to enter from there and kill the toughest subsystems in the game in a single hit. You don't even need to go for the toughest subsystem (engine) as the fuel and ammo are both vulnerable from that direction and a HEAT hit on either effectively take the tank out. Against anything smaller it's more of an execution instead of a battle. HEAT really does not need the help. I know all the bots take Thors and there's a bit of a saturation effect, but that tank needs some survivability going for it or there's very little reason to take it. I had a guy bitch at me because he wasn't consistantly one-shotting me in a Thor with his point-and-click hurricane (all he had to do is hit the structure behind me)... enough is enough. They did give the thing a 300 front armor rating, I suspect it's supposed to be a tad difficult to kill in the right hands. AP does 50 damage(with apparently some reduction) to subsystems. Right now the fuel cell is 50 points on every vehicle I've checked. This means that with any increase in 120mm AP lethality you will be able to achieve one shot *total combustion* with it on every vehicle. You know, as opposed to two. When gunnery gets too effective, good positioning will hardly matter at all. We do have some crack shots on the servers. At what point then, does HEAT become obsolete? Right now in the balancing act between the two rounds, I see HEAT being the preferred weapon since now it's so easy to get penetrations, but it can very easily swing the other way if AP lethality enters the assured one-shot threshold. Ammo, fine, driver or gunner or engines, fine. But I really don't think the fuel should be so volitile (does normal fuel do that?). I'd much rather see tanks assaulted with AP end up with empty crews, dead engines and burning turrets. Increasing the 120mm AP specifically does nothing to help the problems with the 76mm or 20mm, either. I'd much rather see crew members (which I presume, in the year xxxx are the weakest link in the vehicle... "irridium" tires anyone?) have low enough hitpoints to be killed through frag damage. AP makes holes in things, and it makes more sense to me that a tank would 'bleed out' instead of combust out of fuel damage every time. If you want to get technical, the carbon lattice that's used in the fluff has probably lost the pyrophoric properties of it's DU ancestor. As said in the other thread, the 'green' map has a poor atmosphere for both the 120mm AP and HEAT. The inaccuracy for either at range and poor overall AP performance reduce thier effective range drastically... Ions dominate this map.

Since the directkill of AP is 50, and the component has the same number of 'hitpoints', there must be something that reduces the ap killfactor on the way to (or in) the target to have that many non-kills.

I've gotten somewhat decent with the thing, but I find very little use for it other than comedy option #1: flinging enemy units about. In capture the flag you can capture the flag directly with it (land on it) or provide evacuation for a flag carrier, but that's about it. And yes, (for those who don't know) while carrying a hermes, you are safe inside the jam radius, so you can drop the hermes in extreeeeme enemy AA territory for the team to have a jammer to drop safely under. If no enemies are nearby you can basically drop the cutter right on a tower. Good luck getting away once you leave the radius, though, if it's by an ATGM or ion tower. I do this for the big hill on the green map if it's one of those days where defenders feel like bottling up the entire region. If you're really feeling bad-ass, you can drop players into hot areas covered with the deployed turrets. Those turrets aren't very good at hitting constantly manuvering targets, so there's more chance of getting the player in than if he just tried to conventially drop in. Bad news is that you'll usually be in a hurry, so he often ends up on his turret or permanently attached to your corpse. On the cable, it has some problems. First is that if viper dies, the cable stays attached. This is annoying for the guy attached, and especially annoying in the rare occurance a dead viper lands on top of you and you get connected somehow. When the viper fades away your engine remains locked, even if you aren't attached anymore. That's probably a bug. The cable could use a bit of play, too, if possible. It acts like a stick now, and that sickening jump that occurs if you connect to a craft while the tip of the cable is in the ground can sometimes get you killed, and at the very least looks kind of dumb. I don't like flying hurricanes(I have NO problem with flinging one a few thousand meters, though) both because of the twisting bug and because the hurricane shell likes to explode in mid-barrel every once in a while. Perhaps the velocity gets high enough for the craft to hit the shell, I'm not sure. Most players don't seem accurate enough to hit with the conventional weaponry at high enough velocities to avoid fire (bots sometimes can, though), so the viper really isn't that great a platform for firing. Haven't had a chance to try myself, there aren't many people willing to fly me. (edit #685: letting us carry turrets for this purpose?) It does make an excellent scout. You can easily 'paint' the majority of the map, and if you have a commander he can relay this information and drop support accordingly. Clay, this is why the swear filter shouldn't censor "mass". ATGM's may be dangerous but ground fire from ions will end the viper's existance very quickly. I try to stay out of the way if I'm idling about in the thing, and don't generally fly really high unless I'm moving quickly or trying to avoid some other type of fire. Hermes completly erases the viper for obvious reasons. I'd rather not have that high an availibilty to it, it's a little annoying to have the sky saturated with bouncing vipers all trying to grab anything on the ground. But, I'm feeling the same way as yllamana. There's very little reward for the team for using it (other than offensive tank-flinging), especially when a standard drop is quicker and usually safer as there's no pilot error. I'd love for a flyable galaxy style point defense, I can see 'aerial shield' being an interesting role. But then, you've got a vehicle immune to ATGM running around that will bust enemy dropships left and right - too much potential for abuse if you consider the layout of the ice map. Adding a jammer to it would make it too easy to snatch enemy tanks, and none of the AA (including hermes) would function against it. Edit: I usally think in terms of the objective gametype. In CTF the viper really should be part of any strategy, as it shaves 5 minutes off a flag run. [ April 11, 2006, 10:19 PM: Message edited by: yurch ]

By pure stats you can kill the driver with a single well placed 120mm AP and the engines usually vary from 1 to 2. In some cases the engines are weaker than the driver compartment. I don't know if (penetrating)AP damage drops off at range, but it doesn't really appear so. Remember on the faster craft the engine is often located in the front.

What is the cutters EMP defense? Can't seem to find it anywhere. Is it just supposed to be immune to EMP?

How do you kill something that isn't alive? I was part of a game modification that removed kills from the scoreboard, and I can honestly say it didn't really change the general player mindset. Players that just want to kill things will still do it. In this game, kills and deaths don't even represent anything meaningful. Losing an AA turret counts the same as losing a hurricane. Knocking out a thor turret and disabling his engine is worth less than shooting a shrike with an ion cannon a few times. Letting a guy drop so you can shoot both his dropship and his vehicle (as opposed to just the dropship coming in) I think is worth more. You can switch places with a bot whenever your position looks untenable or the bot has targets that you want to kill instead. This is too many places for abuse if people want to take a standard kill/death scoreboard seriously. I think something else should be used if anyone wants any sort of meaningful indicator of who 'helped the most'.

I think only the cutter can fire it's 20mm. The autogun on the back of the hermes stays active, but I'm not sure if the jammer does.

I didn't say it wasn't possible, I said it was miserable being hurricane target practice. The first unjammed dropship drops tend to attract ctrl-m fire. Screw the cutter, (what can that do in an EMP storm, besides being the only one shooting? Does it have another special function to help the team vs EMP?) I recommend tempests and getting the hell out of the area post-haste. There's no reason to force the attackers to drop inside AA every competitive game - it doesn't make sense from a immersion point of view - we would drop further away if we could, but the boxy confines of the world limit that. We do have super-long range engines in the fluff and I'd hope for the soldier's sake that command wasn't always so pressed for time. The way to fix that is either less turrets or bigger maps, and I'm betting less turrets is the saner choice. (or, as kurtz says, the circle thing) Placing so many turrets every game gets a little tedious anyway. Anyway, kurtz's other point... Turrets that are jammed don't show the AA range at any time. Why is this?

Well, there's no kill message for unjammed turrets (or mines) either, and there IS a message for the hermes autogun...

I would also like to add that enemy air coverage should take a sort of 'precedence' in display over friendly AA. Like on that ice map, having a friendly AA turret overlapping the coverage of the large enemy tower coverage is somewhat unintuitive for new players - the green circle makes it look 'safe' to drop in range of the ATGM. The jammed turret circle behavior is supposed to represent what coverage the enemy can see, which isn't terribly intuitive either. I've had a few players tell me not to put friendly jammers over my friendly AA turrets as it would stop them from firing(it doesn't - the hermes would never fire if this was true). Perhaps a lighter circle for 'jammed' AA coverage is in order? Getting killed/dropship killed by a deployed turret also has no message. New players often think they can't deploy in an open area, when in reality they're getting shot by a jammed turret. I also think there are a little too many AA turrets availible for the initial setup. The number is about right for the map size, to replace losses, but the intial number availble is the problem. It's possible for defenders to completely bottle the map up (hermes can also be used in the AA setup), and the poor dropping bunch just gets EMP/fire missions/hurricane rounds/mortars tossed on top of them from onset. This is a pretty sour start for a game. Sometime bots have to spawn virtually off-map and clear a route for the players.

I've noticed when taking over bots, that AP always seems selected, but what's really selected is whatever the bot has fired last. This means you can have AP 'selected' but the HEAT counter will go down instead. Changing ammo types immediately clears this up.

Also, I don't believe attackers need any more static items slowing them down. Defenders can recall and redrop damn well anywhere they need to (as can attackers) - defense of a long-term rearming post is going to require many attackers to NOT be attacking, or the resupply is just going to get neglected and destroyed. It's hard enough not to be completely hunted down like a dog when trying to defend a flank with the command track. Once they find where you are, players will sometimes drop again and again in every crack of your air defense. If you fail to slow them down, they're going to be all over the rear of your attacking force, if they're dumb enough/forced to all attack from the same side. I'm finding this game is far too fluid to attempt to draw lines in the sand and expect them to mean anything. It's easy to pick out the best defenders - they're the ones dropping behind you. For a more... well, strategic game, you'd need to limit drop capability far more, like that big missile tower in the ice map. I'd like to see a map with maybe four of those, each coupled with an antiprojectile tower so you can't just shrug them off with a Thor mortar. Attackers could capture a few of those (you can't expect to defend 'em all) for some breathing room for the central objective. The standard AA turrets attacking commanders can drop are fairly pitiful; placing them in (jammed, obviously) areas not easily spotted by roving mortars or ion cannons or just plain bots often limits thier coverage even further. So, erm, back to the original topic, a 'rearming post' or other such attacker position of interest would need massive AA coverage and enough point defense to not get immediately snuffed out.

He doesn't describe the velocity relationship there, only the way projectiles are defined. You, the "modder" define the maximum penetration and initial velocity in the script; the engine then scales it as it goes downrange accordingly. You should raise the both of them together simply because it doesn't make much sense from a realism point of view to have a low-velocity sabot with an extremely high penetration. Kurtz: The FSER in the lower left stands for Fire/Smoke/EMP/Resupply. If R isn't there, a resupply isn't availible.

Underwater maps! Gravity 0.9, Atmospheric density 800...

I was going to say that but I decided not to.