Rampage

Oh - and if your firewall is ZoneAlarm, or EZ-Firewall (or EZ-Armor which includes EZ-Firewall) you'll need to tell Program Control to let DropTeam do whatever it wants.

Come ON man, did you even try reading the freakin' manual? Ok..open port 9967 for UDP connections. Play for a while. Come on back to the Forum with your other questions. Then realize - this is not some dumbass shooter game. To get the most out of it, YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO READ THE MANUAL.

Do you use Zone Alarm or EZ-Armor or EZ-Firewall firewall products? Or any other that uses "program control"? They may be preventing your copy from seeing the servers. If so, you need to tell the firewall to not block DropTeam.

True points all. I was imagining something where these advanced options would not be options at all unless there was some sort of tradeoff. Ok - then I'll settle for an AC-130-U Spooky gunship. Again..joking <sigh> Next thing you know I'll be asking for tactical nukes.

Hmm..bonehead mistake..perhaps a moderator will move this over to the appropriate forum?

Of course, that last sentence was a joke.

Recognizing that a good amount of this weaponry seems based on today's technologies, consider that mortars have more options in real life than here. Smoke, for instance. (I know you can call in smoke, but what about the tactical ability to lob it in quickly, but on a smaller scale..kinda thinking of the other thread that talks about infantry). And as long as I'm on the topic of infantry - what about enemy infantry, something like a beehive round? Artillery - what about a Time On Target attack? Germany today has that capability, the U.S. would have had it if the Crusader cannon program had not been cancelled. If you're wondering what that is - one or more guns are slaved together to act in concert. With the same target for all guns, the first salvo is fired howitzer-style, very high trajectory. Successive salvos are rapidly fired with each successive salvo at a lower trajectory, and all salvos of course are directed at the same target. This means each salvo requires less time to travel to the target than the last salvo. So if you had five guns slaved, and four salvos were fired, you could have twenty shells hitting the same target or area of effect at the same time. Devastating. And would be a good way to overwhelm defenses that can shoot down projectiles by giving them too many targets to handle. I realize that artillery is delivered via Liveships in DropTeam, but maybe some variation on what I've described could be an option. This could be balanced by requiring even more time between the availability of TOT attacks than you have with typical attacks. Or, a limit of only one TOT per game, or none if the particular scenario would be unbalanced by it. And last but not least - the Copperhead shell. A guided artillery projectile. Maybe a Liveship drops it and it can subsequently be guided by some commander on the ground who is already linked in and ready. Or maybe even the capability for a smaller version of it to be fired from a 120mm gun, high-trajectory, allowing someone closer-in (infantry?) to direct it to a line-of-sight target. To avoid unbalancing aspects, maybe it's difficult to make in the nanoforge so consequently there are a very limited number of them per vehicle. Just some ideas. Before anybody flames me, please keep in mind I'm pretty new to the game and am simply very excited by it so am percolating with ideas. And I don't think the programmers have enough to do. <ducking>

Weasel - you sound like a Battlezoner. I know the lag thing is prevalent in lots of games, but it's a real crippler in that game. Lots of vehicles moving around, some at very high speeds, lots of projectiles requiring vertical trajectory calculations. Any number of times I've been hot on an opponent's tail, shooting him up, only to have the screen update and find him nowhere in my line of sight and me with no ammo left..

Thought about that, Type98, but read in another post somewhere that the direct play option was not functional yet, so never tried it. Thanks!

Yurch - there's a site called DSL Reports (or maybe it's Broadband Reports) - anyway, they've got a collection of utilities you can use to identify each router between you and any destination computer, and then determine whether any of these routers are dropping packets.

Outstanding. Thanks gents! (pardon the assumption that we're all males here..)

I realize it's a multiplayer public test, Drusus. Since LAN games are not an option at this point (according to some other post I read) I have assumed that in order for a game to be accessible by other computers it would be necessary for it to be "registered" to some central server (kinda like a Battlezone game being registered on a GameSpy server, if that makes sense), meaning that unplugging would prevent registration, and cause the game to not be visible to other computers. But I'll try your suggestion tonight after work, and if it works, thanks for the correction!

Maybe I'm being stupid, you tell me. In an effort to try to learn the game without trying anyone else's patience I'm trying to run a dedicated server game in which I'm the only human player allowed. The idea being that I can test all kinds of options and deployments at my leisure, counting on the "relative inflexibility" of bots to not interfere too much. Here's the difficulty - if I set maxclients to 1, every time there are zero vehicles available when it comes time to drop. If I set maxclients to anything other than 1, I get the normal multiple counts of vehicles available. I cannot seem to find any particular parameter that determines counts of assets available. So I've been setting maxclients to 2, but then the problem is, even though I name the game something like "TestGamePleaseDontJoin" some yahoo seems to take that as an invitation to be an a--hole and joins. So is there a way to only allow one human but have normal asset counts? Am I missing something? Is this a bug? Gimmee a clue, someone, please?

Assuming that the HEAT round works similarly to the way it does in today's tanks (M1A2 Abrams, British Challenger, German Leopard) it will not have a fragmentation effect. It actually detonates as a directed jet of heat energy(directly forward with a diameter of a couple of inches) that burns into or through the armor/skin of whatever the round hits. That's why a kinetic round (AP) does better with the heavier-armored vehicles, a depleted uranium dart (more mass than the rolled steel of the armor) actually pushes the steel aside and punches through. A HEAT round will usually break through medium to light armor, but may require several hits to burn through the heaviest armor. Again - that's assuming the DropTeam ammo works similarly to today's ammo.

Roger that, Combatplus2. Played a dedicated server game today for about three hours, in an MBT w/heavy mortar. Could not once switch ammo types. Kept having to back off and call for resupply and just keep using the same ammo type. So, Yurch, is what you're saying is that it's not intended to be able to switch ammo types in a mortar vehicle? Another weird one - one time the resupply dropship simply would not disengage from me, no matter what. Ended up quitting and coming back in.