yurch

I've mentioned this several times in passing, but I think it's about time for it to be considered in detail. And I have pictures! Our vehicles have a fair amount of empty space in them. Engineering wise, this is pretty wrong. Luckily, I've found something to put in that space. Crew members! There was a bit of a debate early on about how big these vehicles were in relative size to the infantry. Now that we have infantry, we can just do a comparison. Here's an internal diagram of the shrike, to the best of my knowledge of how the internals work: Now, here's a picture of an infantry unit standing on a shrike: The yellow-white ball is the pilot. He'd have a hard time fitting, no? Consider the vulnerable instruments, life support, and armoring he'd need to fit alongside with - it just ain't happening. Here's an internal of the hermes: The big ball is the engine, yellow is the jammer, and the light blue one is the battery. The red one is the driver. We all know how hard that battery can be to kill when you're aiming for it. I don't think a shot merely passing through the sphere ensures full damage. That driver subsystem is just as strong as the battery is, at a fraction of the size. Shots that can't overpenetrate, like 76mm and below, will be stopped by the engine before they can even get to the pilot. As always, I have suggestions. 1: People are squishy. It seems a bit unpractical, even with armoring, that the occupants of a vehicle (that may be in an enviroment without atmosphere) can survive an overpenetrating 120mm AP passing through thier location in the vehicle. A drop in subsystem strength is probably warrented. 2: People need breathing room. A good portion of an AFV is dedicated to housing the crew. (I love that picture) The crew subsystems could certainly stand to be made uniformly larger. I know they're spherical, but some overlap could be dismissed as abstration. As well as having a lesser amount of shots doing 'nothing', this will cause crew damage to occur more often, which brings me to #3... 3: Have a gunner subsystem in the chassis. It's impractical with the sizings that whoever is firing those guns is residing in the turret, especially small ones like the apollo or paladin varients. These could be considered remote turrets. I recommend a gunner subsystem below each turret, the loss of which causes the turret to stop functioning. The existing gunner subsystem in the turrets can be considered optics or other sighting/control equipment that the gunner cannot operate without, so they don't have to be removed. 4: A vehicle with all crew members dead should probably self destruct and serve as a kill. Gameplay wise, this will bring out a new layer of lethality to average gunnery, and may solve some issues with problem vehicles like the shrike. This is a complicated game, and the positioning of these new subsystems will continue to give the vehicles more personality.

One thing I think is wrong is that the occupants of the vehicles are practically immortal. The 'subsystem' that contains the driver/gunner has a 50 point strength, same as the Thor battery, but is almost half the size. Infantry outside the vehicle have a single hitpoint. The center of most combat vehicles has a lot of space dedicated to the crew: With our vehicles, you can't even harm the gunner with a chassis hit.

I wouldn't even go that far, really. The dropship is a positively gigantic target. We are talking about something that's large enough to transport a Thor comfortably, with enough armor to completely deflect low caliber rounds. What kind of modern direct fire weapons are used against aircraft? 20-30mm HE rounds, no? Those wouldn't even come close to harming our dropships with the armor they're sporting. I'd use my little 14mm coaxial instead of my cannon, but it really doesn't have the penetration or the hurt to knock a dropship down. Neither does the 20mm on a high atmosphere/decent range. You'd figure a automatic weapon would be the most appropriate thing to use, but these suckers are tough enough to warrent a 120mm HEAT if you want to down them with any consistancy. I practically have to keep HEAT rounds chambered (with the new cycle delay) while attacking just to keep drops off my head. With something like a point defense active you get to watch helplessly as the third-in-a-row 20mm close attack unit gets delivered over the next crest. And this seems pretty wrong. If it manuvered more, yes, players/bots would miss it more. The majority of my dropship kills are at 2500 meters and under, however. At this range the dropships become an awfully large target in my viewfinder. The fact that players and bots alike are repeatedly dropping at this range on top of me speaks for a gameplay matter more than one of realism. The ability for a ship to pick up something bizzare like a paladin with a burning turret rolling down a hill also gets pretty rediculous.

Right now I'm using an inventory count of 4. If you want to deploy them all at once then you also have a bit more risk losing them - hard to protect them if half your team is using them. This number might be a bit low, actually, as the craft has severe difficulty defending itself. With the bots deploying them willy-nilly it can get a little crazy figuring a drop point (especially without the 'circles'). Behind a tall hill usually works as the automatedGun type objects seem to have LOS restrictions. I suspect if it really gets bad, a team could always use the galaxy as a shield for it's initial drop.

I like how you guys can manage to work in a 120mm-is-too-weak comment when talking about the ion. I understand it and it's uses, but the ion is simply too tedious for me to use on a regular basis. Certainly looking forward to those new ion physics.

"The best defense is a good offense" There's a great gap in our force selection right now, and it's air defense. Specifically, Offensive Air Defense. That's where Bacchus will come into play. Why Bacchus, you ask? Because no party ever lasts long without Bacchus. My idea is to put the missile from the Cobra missile towers onto a utility vehicle. Like the Hermes, this is a heavier, slower paladin with air defense capabilities, but the comparison stops there. Because unlike the Hermes, I want this vehicle to be obvious. The Cobra missile fires at air targets up to 5k away, and to do so I'm presuming some active sensor activity. The rotary gun, while imposing looking, fires the anaemic 14mm round for purposes of attacking light vehicles and light aircraft*. Unlike the Hermes 20mm, it is not very good at attacking armored targets, and will put itself in great risk to do so. *infantry have jetpacks and are therefore aircraft. Balance wise, it's going to be a weak offensive craft with the purpose of backing up friendly advances in the most important way possible - by shooting down dropships, allowing a team some breathing room while either attacking or defending, at the tradeoff of being obvious. The missile will only engage unjammed air targets in LOS and currently fires once every 12 seconds with unlimited ammo. The launcher is easily overwhelmed by multiple targets with such a large reload time and is of course defeated by point defense. Edit: perhaps not, the 'pool' behavior may mean it attacks up to 6 dropships, but once only every 12 seconds... (?) Problems: I would like for the vehicle to bear the big red/green range circle in the minimap, and I want the launcher not to be jammable. I have given the gun's subsystem the IsJammable=false value, but perhaps it needs to be assigned to the chassis instead. Sticking the circle on will probably require a new XML var of some sort. Bots like to use it and don't seem to be properly scared enough to drop a safe distance from it. I also don't know how to properly orient the stand at all times under the automated gun. It's just 'there' right now and eventually orients itself in some manner, but it looks about as bad as just having the launcher floating by itself. Early test ultra-prelim-alpha can be found here. Considerations both on balancing strength and/or armanent details is needed. [ August 07, 2006, 07:59 AM: Message edited by: yurch ]

Raid (the map) has several antiprojectile towers located in the map. They are capable of shooting down the artillery projectiles. This is likely why you aren't seeing them impact.

The Galaxy has a better uniform armor than many of the ground vehicles and three point defense turrets. Trade out the ammo reloader deal for some long range rocket/ion pods and you've got yourself a gunship to be proud of. Not that I'd ever want to be fighting it...

There is definitely some sort of server crash related to the infantry getting into/out of a vehicle. Delta_Pavonis has gone down twice with us playing with infantry in that regard. I can't replicate it very well, though. The second time I got stuck in a bot somehow, with my view occasionally getting tossed to the corners of the map after a short exit/enter cycle I couldn't seem to break.

Sooner or later I'm going to learn how to launch/transport an entire team over great distances, using a viper carrying a paladin filled with infantry to punt piles of Thors in the general direction of enemies. If you think raid looks like a golf course now...

The numbers were halved, no? There used to be a great deal more of them in the earlier beta. It's just that this map is smaller than the others. I still think deployment range limitations are needed. It's no fun playing a guessing game to see where you can spawn - and sometimes the bots can't find a place.

Drive sideways or backwards. I don't think this could be fixed for the AI without either expensive calculations or simply blinding them further. At any rate, players with foliage off will always have the advantage in such areas. Not much to do about that.

When I came in that one game, the attacking team was down to maybe 4 20mm apollos, a cutter or two, and a few squads of infantry. The bots had totally wrecked the inventory. Are the bots less likely to take out turrets now? They left a majority of them in there for most of the game, even after some landings were made.

House to house seems to start to suffer from performance towards the center. I'm not too sure how many more objects in a map would be wise.

Hermes I can understand (but when isn't in close combat?) but I'm not too sure about the mortar and ATGM. The ATGM launcher, in particular, clearly fits on the tiny shrike and the paladin ATGM varient isn't carrying any usable extra ammunition. I have to ask - what is this "other use"? I guess the argument could be made that the rear-turret mounting removes the capability for transporting infantry, but still. These are just matters of infantry transporting for convienence, not fighting positions on the vehicle.

This doesn't appear to include the ATGM, Mortar and Hermes varient. They do not have an "Entrance" listed and I can't find any other way to get into them.

I'd like to see one where defenders have to defend a farily significant structure (say, a giant artillery cannon/orbital battery or a deployed rocket launching system) from either capture or destruction. Technically I think it would fall under the territory gametype. To what degree can you place random objects? Can the objective (capturable structure) be placed in this manner? If the objective was some sort of weapon it would be most interesting to allow usage of that weapon. This would be a technical feat, however, as you need to make a unit either automated or somehow get a bot to permanently inhabit it.

Been counting my flight times and adjusting aim to direct fire in the rear armors. Doing reasonably well with the apollo mortar once the thors are gone.

I would love an Ontos style platform. I was even trying to get a thor to kind of do that earlier - but you can't "link" weapons with the XML right now as things are. The problem is, 76mm HE is a pretty anaemic caliber lately. It's no longer feasable to take out buildings with that caliber, and not many combat targets fall under the armor range it's capable of defeating, including dropships and point defense units. Using AP kind of defeats it's purpose as an artillery piece and requires it to get fairly close... Given a blast on it's HE though, and it would shred tires, infantry, shrikes and deployables. Things that certainly need shredding lately - I think it would make a good support weapon for the opening attack. Aittam: A long range piece with that kind of firepower is problematic with our dropping capability. Imagine every time you kill a guy, he drops a rocketlauncher for his next unit and has 40 rockets incoming to your position within 20 seconds or so of you killing him. The same is true with say an EMP or a Fire mission, but these are offered once every 10 minutes or more, and don't require a player to actively spend time doing the launching. Such an artillery piece could make a good permanent unit, either manned or automated, that the objective could revolve around. A sort of VIP escort mission. The hard part would be finding a way to hide it in deployment so the other team doesn't find it right off the bat.

And armor it wasn't supposed to. The Mortars! we've been using are actually fairly puny in terms of stats. I somewhat like the need to hit directly or fairly close to the target. The problem is our mortar units can't do it enough to justify thier deployment. Increasing "yield" is a really sensitive issue. Right now if I were to increase the front/side/top/bottom armor on the tempest by adding a single point to each, it will become immune to any mortar landing in front or to the side of it. It's easy to go the other way, too, and have Thors popping like shrikes whenever a mortar lands in the same neighborhood, which certainly isn't fun. The two options I'd like to see for the mortar carriers are increases in accuracy and volume. They don't really have a problem killing or disabling light units or infantry, but the trick is getting the round to land anywhere near a speeding shrike or guessing where that squad is hiding. Having some missile launcher that dumps off 40 missiles at a time is going to be totally overpowered with our drop options. Reload time and retaliation isn't a factor when you're dropping a fresh launcher anywhere you want, unloading everything, and extracting afterward. I suspect this is why the shrike is this way already. If the devs wanted us to have that kind of artillery firepower on a regular basis they should just give the fire mission a 2 minute reload... My primary concern is to make the mortar carriers as every bit as useful and diverse as the other classes. So, here's my list of unreasonable demands: Targeting: 1: Time to hit indicator by the crosshair. Will make leading much easier. 2: Some form of efficient teammate based targeting. Ammunition: 3: A (additional?) slightly lower-impluse cartridge than what we have already for close-in situations, and for those low-gravity maps. 4: The ammo selection bug needs to go. It might just be best to let us choose our own ammo at any time, may as well have something else to do besides fiddle with our rangefinder. 5: A seperating cluster-type round for attacking light targets and/or defeating point defense. Low seperation degree. This might be related to dark's firecracker thing, I'm not familiar with the various works of fiction being referenced. Obviously this will have a lower yield. It might be a good idea to match this with #9. 6: I'm starting to lean towards some very limited guidance (presumably, like the yellow ATGM) in a select ammo type. 7: The way the mortar classes are seperated is odd. Having all three types with the same shrapnel penetration but with different cutoff distances is somewhat unintuitive I guess. Paladin's is probably too small if it's going to be fired with the same accuracy of the other two. 8: These vehicles likely have the lowest ammo-capacity-to-kill ratio in the game. Some more wouldn't hurt. Other: 9: Point defense turrets (galaxy and hermes) at the moment appear to be rated high enough to be immune to shrapnel, making a high speed ball-mount more survivable than many of the other turret stylings. I'm in favor of bumping the armorings of these down to actually be threatened by shrapnel. You'll still need to find where they are in order to properly attack them with a cluster. 10: Another weapon, like a coaxial, would be very useful for the carrier's survival.

The thor turret is rated 400 front, 150 side, 75 top and 100 rear. Thor chassis is 300/150/150/125. Turret fronts are usually the most armored thing on the entire vehicle, with the turret side usually being equal to or better than the chassis side. The ammo subsystem strength (the one that usually ends up blowing up) usually is just as strong as the battery, but in many cases you're just far more likely to hit it. Because of this, you should focus on only the chassis or the turret at any one time, but I'd really recommend giving the chassis priority.

Battery Battery Battery BATTERY! The Thor battery is here. The battery is INSIDE the vehicle, not actually located on the sides. The Paladin and Apollo have a similar setup, although the Apollo's seems to be very low. Shrike battery is located between the two rear tires, and again, very low. Dropship vitals are located in the center belly. Hovercraft are deserving of nothing else but total ventilation. Always pass the shot through the battery when possible. If you can't manage this, pass it through the engine subsystem, which has a 25% chance of killing the vehicle on death. Plus, a stationary enemy will eventually be a dead one. The driver is usually too small and tough a target to be worthwhile, plus it gives no additional destruction ability like the engine. Trickshots to destroy turrets are entirely possible, and are always an option for closerange fighting or if you just want to look cool. On the 120mm: 120mm HEAT is your one stop shopping center for wholesale murder. The reason for this is that it does a whopping 100 damage for it's direct kill factor; with the absolute strongest subsystem on a combat craft being around 60 if I recall. It is accurate enough to serve well in the ranges most battles seem to take place at - it is the reason many battles take place at the ranges they do. It is not 'blocked' by subsystems like the 76mm is, and is sure to cause internal chaos to whatever you penetrate. Use it on anything you can penetrate, which means just about anything (at a decent angle) but the Thor front. I actually have a rather low opinion of 120mm AP. The round has some applications that many other rounds can't do, but let's cover the part that sucks: AP rounds do 50 for directkillfactor. Most batteries and many other subsystems have a strength of 50. I don't know entirely how the internal damage is metered out, but it seems to mean 120mm AP never deals out the perfect 50 to a specific subsystem. Combine this with a 6 second reload time and you see why the 120mm occasionally gets embarrassed by rapid-fire 20mm's and the odd 76mm. This also decreases the window of time you have to respond to a drop, as you will likely have to hit the dropship twice. If you've got a coaxial and can penetrate, USE IT in conjunction with the AP. The last few points of damage you can do will often be all it takes. The 120mm AP round does have the (annoying) benefit of a 10% killfactor, meaning 10% of your shots will destroy whatever it penetrates. Only 81% of your targets will survive the first two chassis hits even if you miss the subsystems entirely. The round also has an amazing 430 base penetration, which gives it enough at close range to punch through the front of the Thor tracks and even the turret if you know what you're doing. This extra penetration allows you to make increasingly awkward shots on the lighter units who happen to have smartly chosen thier armor facings at the right angles to make your HEAT shots difficult. I use 120mm AP for The Shots That Must Be Made like distant flag carriers, frontally attacking Thors, or units that just have annoyed me for too long. With the ammo switching delay I use it a bit more instead of waiting for HEAT to cycle in. The new 120mm HE round is shaping up to be pretty good. While it's obviously good against turrets and shrikes, I've been using it to stun everybody's favorite flag carrying vehicle, the Hermes. Instead of a high-speed HEAT deflection shot that may or may not penetrate, I choose instead to short out all the tires on one side of the vehicle and to take it out at my leisure afterwards. It sounds dirty, but after the sixth flag carrier or so, you really stop feeling bad about it.

Attacking is pretty easy: Kill. A big thing about that objective hill is that it basically amounts to one big blind corner. Fast assaults from combination 20mm hermes or paladin while the slow 120mm's support can cause tremendous losses in very short order. Do it with multiple players (not bots) from different angles. Once you've razed everything on the hill put some sensors up for early warning. That hill is close combat of the bloodiest sort, and I've had games where I do nothing but frenzied killing. Nothing but the Thor front armor can step to the 20mm at close range. Thor should be making heavy use of it's coaxial along with HEAT rounds. Once the Thors run out nothing really matters except for pure numbers - don't let the bots waste these! Stopping players on the slopes can be difficult. Either you're close enough for them to do significant damage to you with close combat weapons, or you're giving top shots to further enemies because of that incline. If you must use shelling or ion attacks, use it to harass reinforcements instead of firing on the brawl up at the top. Early shelling is never very effective as the targets are usually just point defenses and Thors. Later, there's too much risk of hitting teammates if the assault is going well, and ion won't have enough time. However, if enemy reinforcements are limping up the hill with burning tires and damaged engines, it gives the swarm a better chance. You only need someone near the objective, and often in the smoke, jamming and confusion a disabled attacker can continue to generate points. I find the standard trenches work better in valleys. It's often awkward for the larger vehicles to shoot in downwards directions while inside them. You can alternately use the high-side the trenches build to protect tracks somewhat.

The mortar carriers can "engage" Thor and other units just fine. It's just the margin of error on a manually-aimed direct hit with shell flight times of 11 seconds and onwards is extreme. Even a hit in the critical areas outlined above is difficult. A Paladin can run you down before your second shot hits, in which case you may as well drop it on yourself... Players have little incentive to sit still in this game and our targeting is fairly primative. Combine these aspects with point defense and you have a unit type with a real losing combo and very little in the way of options. The other configurations of the same chassis types pretty much do everything better from anti infantry to hardened targets. If it weren't for the everpresent galaxy, players would be dropping infantry right on top of most of the mortars. I consider the Thor coaxial on the 120mm variant to be a great asset, and I think this would carry over for to the mortar units as well. If given a little more in the way of a independance capability perhaps they could be used with the frontline attack rather than remaining out of sight behind it. Otherwise, It's awfully hard to hit targets and observe fire with just the primitive spotting methods we have availible. It's going to take more than just a coaxial (ions?) to make them effective units, though.

To tell you the truth, the only time I've really seen defenders win that map by a comfortable margin is with heavy mine usage. It's nearly impossible to sustain enough AA coverage to keep the enemy drops at more than arms length. Mines of course, can be circumvented by anything with an HE blast type weapon.