Pushwall

Back to Hostile Waters: according to the poll in the old thread, the second-biggest issue that people had with it was the interaction between air and naval units. gammae102 specifically posted that Destroyers/Missile Subs should be "very, very effective against aircraft". Of course, Destroyers/Missile Subs being "very, very effective against aircraft" has been the intended balance from day one. It just unfortunately doesn't work out very well because tracking is awful. Destroyer/Missile Sub missiles got a 25% damage boost against aircraft at one point but even that doesn't suffice. Missile Subs tend to miss Longbows about 2/3rds of the time, and Destroyers miss Hinds about 1/2 the time, and trying to lead instead doesn't work very well with a tracking projectile - so the results tend to be underwhelming for the boats. While Destroyers are still almost guaranteed to win against Hinds in a straight fight, owing to Hinds having mediocre anti-boat damage and Destroyers having a huge health pool, they aren't particularly great at protecting Gunboats from Hinds. Suicide hinds easily bring down GBs even under Dest protection, attack subs mop up the remains, GG. Meanwhile on the Soviet side, it's not even worth trying to take down Longbows as a Missile Sub - a sub group is better off trying to goad the Longbows into wasting missiles against submerged targets that receive barely any damage from them. And if the AA damage goes much higher it just runs the risk of being even more polarising: is it OP due to fringe instances where tracking actually works properly and the missile sub miraculously one-salvo's a Longbow, or UP because the tracking never actually works? While tracking has been removed from the Redeye/Strela, vehicles unfortunately have had to live with it since they don't have the luxury of being able to instantly turn to face any direction like Redeye-wielding infantry can, and the Longbow/Missile Sub in particular don't even have turrets so they would be completely unusable against anything other than buildings if they didn't have tracking. However! Not long ago, Eggman891 found and fixed a stock renegade bug that was causing tracking to constantly fail (yeah believe it or not it's not just a random % roll, like I and probably many others have believed for so long), and this has opened the floodgates for some more potential fun tweaks regarding tracking. I've checked the basic fix out on local FDS and it seems pretty consistent even against a moving target, compared to how it normally "works": 10/12 rockets managed to successfully track, and those 2 that didn't track only didn't track because my crosshair was not on the LB at the instant I fired. 8/10 of the tracking rockets managed to successfully hit, and those 2 that missed only missed because the Longbow went too far away and the missiles reached their maximum range. It may still look like it reflects badly on the Sub, but compare this to the average engagement in the current game, where Missile Subs simply cannot engage Longbows unless they outnumber the LBs 2 to 1 and the planets are aligned. With this change Missile Subs are now pretty well set for bringing down Longbows in 2 or 3 salvos and they still have the range advantage to get 1 "free" salvo. Oh, and that 25% damage boost I mentioned that dest/missub had against helis? I disabled it for this video. They probably won't be needing that anymore Tracking that actually works is also another step towards having MiGs be balanced for naval combat (assuming we ever get the assets we need). What this means for Hostile Waters, as well as Pacific Threat, is that the Dest/Missub will become formidable AA for once, and Hostile Waters won't be Hostile Skies so much anymore. I guess at that point though, aircraft will end up being used solely for picking off patrol boats without AA escort, doing scratch damage to deeply submerged subs, and for base assault (and only after the AA defenses are downed too). Pacific Threat already sees limited use of aircraft so I may remove one or two AA defenses there, but Hostile Waters' bases are probably fine as they are. Maybe I should remove the AAs from the central buildings though, so that the option of using Hinds for anti-infantry is always there so they're not rendered too irrelevant? And I guess Longbows will need to do slightly less pathetic damage to submerged subs so that Attack Subs can't just laugh them off and Missile Subs are more encouraged to engage.

Before going all out removing the cannons on Siege I might try just lowering their range, so that the outer cannons can only hit the most forward buildings in each base and the inner cannon can only hit the other cannons and units within the castle walls. Maybe also tweaking their damage down slightly again as well. e: ok, less range may not work out due to the base layouts and distances from the cannons. A 240m range cannon on the Soviet side can hit the SD, coil and CY, but the same ranged cannon on the Allied side can hit the SD, barracks and dome. Barracks being quite a bit more important than anything else there I'd say. Add 20m of range onto both of those and suddenly the Allied ref+pp+gap and Soviet bar can be hit - and at that point it's probably too many buildings in range of the cannons, especially on the Allied side.

Another possibility for HW (which I guess would be mutually exclusive with T5 infantry since it makes infantry assault more feasible): maybe enable Chinooks? They may be better than LSTs at a lot of things but aren't exactly so strong that they render LSTs completely obsolete: Upsides: + Moves faster + Avoids Gunboats/Attack Subs entirely + Doesn't get targeted by Flame Towers/Pillboxes... not that this helps much since the infantry it drops off do get targeted. Downsides: - More expensive... though under the current economy, this only really serves to prevent *instant* nook rushes and discourage spamming them onto the island. - More vulnerable to Rocket Soldiers/Destroyers/Missile Subs. - More visible - both in motion (even through distance fog) and when purchased (anyone watching the enemy base can easily distinguish a landing chinook from a landing longbow/hind; purchased nooks on other maps are the one thing that everyone who knows how to chat is basically guaranteed to raise alarm about) - Louder. (though with how far out the map boundaries are, this is negligible on HW) - Gets targeted by SAM sites/AA guns. Which the bases are very well defended with, so you can't realistically make Chinook assaults unless multiple SAMs/AAs have been cleared from a specific area - which requires the use of LSTs or Dest/Missub sneaks. - Can't refill C4. And given that the few occasions I've seen LSTs successfully used for mid/lategame assault on HW mainly involved sneaking an engineer to poke multiple targets, this is hardly insignificant. Now those are definitely two massive upsides compared to everything else, but still. LSTs are so bad at frontal assault that it's not uncommon to see Allies on HW suicide a bunch of Longbows over the ASP to try to get infantry inside, and if LSTs are made too much tankier it may break the other naval maps, especially if they ever end up being able to transport vehicles. Like the T5 infantry, this may demand a slightly more stringent economy so that the difference in price between an LST/Chinook is felt enough to make it a less obvious choice.

Yeah, that came to mind shortly after posting too. However, if Soviets commit too much into using that to hold off naval units (unlike holding vs engineers where you really just need 1 unit on the icebergs, and doesn't even have to be as expensive as kov, camping the 1 landing zone), then they run the risk of Allies deciding to go around the icebergs, kill the Volkovs' transportation, and hit a poorly-defended base or force the Volkovs to suicide and lose their $1800 unit if they want to defend. It might not be too bad, it depends on how much ground those Volkovs can cover.

That's a possible option. Something else I was considering for naval combat in general is increasing the damage that naval units to do all buildings that aren't the NY/SP (and their HW equivalents) so that boat/sub rushes (on all naval maps, not just HW) have more reason to go after buildings that aren't the NY/SP. More often than not, it's a death sentence for destroyers/missile subs to try doing this because they have to get much closer to land where they're vulnerable to more units than just rocket soldiers and arty/V2. Problem is the recent changes to HW have disincentivised hitting non-naval buildings even further; the rock formations and indestructible walls circling the islands have made many buildings impossible for dests/missubs to hit, forcing LST rushes which are underwhelming and take too much manpower off of the seas/skies. More options: remove the CY so people actually have to leave their NY/SP camp-post if a building in the back of the base needs repairs (I'd have to put ladders up to the rear Flame Towers but that's not a big issue) and also so that there's a higher chance of rushes (LST or not) against non-NY/SP buildings actually succeeding. Doing this also means there would be room to put a War Factory if LSTs ever get the option of carrying vehicles, or maybe even missile silos so that infantry LST rushes to the back of the base could be more fearsome. raise the tech level to 5 so that LST rushes can contain Tanya/Volkov, again making them more fearsome. Would the lack of mines be a concern for Tanya? Considering how impossible it is for frontal LST assaults to succeed past the first few minutes, and how Tanya has no hope of getting past the rear flame towers unless the Soviets are negligent enough to not notice a Destroyer taking 3 minutes to slowly trundle over to the rear of the base to destroy those, I feel it wouldn't be too unfair. The other problem is Volkov on icebergs now that he's basically an anti-vehicle sniper held back from being spammy by his 1800 price tag, except not really because the economy is still a joke on HW - gem silo may have to go back to just being an ore silo. (Maybe just in terms of mechanics while retaining the appearance because it's a nice asset.) Something else that Voe brought up with me before: the weapon crates encourage camping the middle and make it too hard to retake the middle (hey look, it's something similar to the Siege issue). A lone captain, sergeant/medic with a PKM, rocket/engineer with a PKM/MP5 (who also have the bonus feature of being able to repel vehicles/recapture if needed), or pretty much any unit that isn't a technician with a Dragunov basically prevents engineers from being able to land, forcing you to make a landing with units that don't have capturing capabilities, and then if the lander manages to trade favourably then they have to go back home and get engineers. And the more failures there are, the more the beaching zones get clogged up with empty LSTs. Though there is a bit of a solution for this in the works.

There's the thing though, something I've noticed from the recent times I played it is that if the naval building doesn't die in the first 3 minutes, then it never dies - it's far too easy for the defenders to spam golden wrenches and LSTs are never going to get close to the enemy base once ships and helis start taking to the seas/skies, and in the rare instance that they do the infantry rush is going to fail due to the 10 defending infantry camping inside the naval building anyway. Adding frontal base defenses back will only make it impossible for the naval building to die period.

The internal cannon actually can reach bases. Only the outermost structures though. I've seen it being paired with the outer cannons to double up on siege power.

Siege is pretty good at eliciting these kinds of reactions out of players: Shame they hardly ever actually say what the problem with the map is (even after a year or so of me requesting to hear their thoughts instead of giving them all the skips they want), but oh well. One bit of criticism that actually makes sense, from Burt: it, as well as Hostile Waters, only really work when you have a ton of players. With Silverlight's "dynamic rotation" plugin they would have been restricted to only appear in rotation when there are a lot of players, so the problem of "4 players are building up the server, they get sent to Siege, they all quit and activity is back to the drawing board again" would be a thing of the past, except that the plugin doesn't work properly and has a habit of looping maps too quickly which is more harmful to activity than Siege popping up when it shouldn't With the recent surge in activity I may be able to add the maps back, but that surge only came after I removed these maps... Some of that may be because lolrivals, some of that may be summer, but Siege/HW popping up at playercounts too small to support them and causing everyone to quit is also likely to be part of the equation. And yeah, people just don't seem to like non-standard gameplay. Here's some other maps that generate a non-negligible amount of skip requests: Antlion/Wasteland (nowhere near as much as Siege/HW), RockTrap/Forest of Illusion (even more hated than Siege which is why they're completely gone from the game instead of just not in rotation, and RockTrap is being reworked into not a domination map), and Pipeline (teetering on the border of "non-negligible" - it just gets more requests than the standard maps). All maps with varying degrees of "non-standard" gameplay.

It's based on RA multiplayer countries. The only choices were England, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, the first 3 were Allied and the last 2 were Soviet. Rantanplan does the coding, he put them in 2 years ago (though I came up with most of the ideas) and he hasn't been seen for a long time, so right now it's looking grim on the front of replacing outdated, impossible achievements such as Dominatrix with new ones. All I've been able to do is do minor code fixes so that, for instance, Range Quit and The Holy Grail aren't broken anymore.

Finally

No, because bots still count for stats and should stop existing a lot earlier than the 15 player threshold for low/high count anyway. Yes, at least once we find out what is causing the server/bot to randomly set the next map to something other than what it's supposed to be (which has been an issue long before this new system)

And one more update - a server-side update that doesn't require a patch: Dynamic rotation is working again! The next map is now picked randomly (though recently-played maps will be excluded) and the pool of maps is restricted by the player count; small player counts mean that the game won't pick incredibly large maps or Missile Silo maps, and large player counts mean that the game won't pick incredibly small maps or infantry maps. So no more 2v2 KOTG or 12v12 Antlion!

Wouldn't giving all infantry the exact same anti-building weapon (timed C4) provide the opposite effect to the intention of "make them more different" and "make them less boring"? This engine really is not designed for weapon bloat. It's hard enough to use the Engineer right now, they have five weapons and making sure that you can scroll to the exact right one when needed (for example, using clearing charges against mines instead of accidentally throwing your anti-building C4) is awkward. This also why Tanya/Volkov, who used to have binoculars, no longer have them - because it's painful to accidentally switch to binoculars when you want to switch to your C4 as Tanya or switch to your alternate anti-unit option as Volkov. Why should we make this an even bigger issue than it already is? On top of that, one of the things I see new players have trouble with is characters that have multiple weapons. It is very common to see newbies keep using Volkov's AT cannon against infantry, or keep using the LAW/RPG-7 against aircraft when the Redeye/Strela exist and can clearly be seen holstered on the soldier's back. In the past I've considered giving most infantry a LAW/RPG with 1 ammo and nerfing the power of bullets vs tanks to compensate, for the purpose of making infantry against tanks look less silly and giving further incentive for the Supply Truck - but the weapon bloat, newbie-unfriendliness, and homogenization issues just complicate matters. It's still up for debate though; it's probably the only "add more weapons" thing that I'll ever consider, but another problem is that it would shake up the balance of a gameplay area that, as far as I can tell, is in a pretty good spot right now and doesn't need much change. Oh, and if we're supposed to go whole hog giving every infantry a "full loadout" with like 2 or 3 unique weapons each, then we run into the issue of where do we get the weapon models? Most of the old team is long gone and everyone around here with modeling experience is too busy working on stuff for other projects and stuff that's more important than "extra weapons for units that already have a weapon and work just fine with what they have".

3.2.2.8: Hopefully fixed the keys.cfg issue for good (so you should be able to repair/sell now). Made sprinting animation noticeably faster than jogging. Attack Sub now fires its first shot from the left torpedo tube instead of the right, since every other multi-barreled unit fires their first shot from the left.

3.2.2.7: Fixed collision issues on To The Core and Camos Canyon. Taunt keys should now be automatically set for people playing from a fresh install. Added hint on splash damage cover penetration to the auto-announce list (since I still see people trying to use MBTs to kill infantry inside buildings to no effect)

3.2.2.6 InfantryAnimations Idle animations are now working again! And unlike in the older releases where they did work, they can no longer occur while crouching, so now they won't screw you over if you're trying to hide from people or shoot base defenses from behind cover. Taunt/emote animations are now working again! These are bound to the numpad keys by default; if you don't get them automatically bound when entering your first game, you'll have to bind them yourself in Esc > Options > Extended Options. Row 7-9 contains kicks and punches (still completely harmless), row 4-6 contains salutes, and 0-3 contain 4 assorted other emotes. Unlike in older releases where they did work, they can no longer cancel fall damage. Be aware that 2 old limitations are still here - they can't be used in offline mode (it was MUCH easier to add the taunt scripts to the soldiers via server plugins) and Tanya is still incapable of taunting (the animations aren't compatible with the female skeleton). RPG Trooper Now has his facial hair back! (It got removed back when he and the Grenadier were merged into the same unit and thus the brown fatigues became an alt camo sharing the same face, but I forgot to revert it when the "old-style" Grenadier returned as a separate unit) Volkov AP ROF up (2 -> 3) AP damage up (22.5 -> 25) AP now fires incendiary slugs, which can deal a small additional amount of fire damage and inflict slow burns. Both weapon ranges increased drastically (100 -> 120m) Added scopes to both weapons (forgot to include these before - still waiting on a proper "box art eyepiece" scope texture though; he's currently using the Enfield scope as a placeholder) Price up (1500 -> 1800) Offline Spectator No longer just a faster groundbound infantry with superjumps - it can now fly, noclip, and cycle through the viewpoints of bots by pressing Q if you have bots enabled. Since it's actually worth messing with now, I might as well say how to use it. In offline/LAN mode/skirmish/whatever you want to call it, press F8 to open the console, then type chchar 1 spec Vehicles Light Tank Reload time up (1.2 -> 1.25 sec) Artillery Price up (750 -> 900) Fixed oversized projectile hitbox. Phase Tank Splash damage down (25 -> 22.5) Tesla Tank Damage multiplier to buildings up (0.18 -> 0.1875) Yak Holding spacebar while moving forward on the runway no longer slows you down (which led to instadeath on takeoff) Splash radius down (12 -> 10) Damage received from Redeyes increased by 25% Damage received from APCs increased by 16.67% Submarines Tweaked underwater fade to be less saturated (and therefore less blinding) but still thick enough to make it difficult to see through.

You're sure nobody else decided to attack the Helipad just before the Power Plant and the Helipad warning took precedence? Only other thing I can think of is that "plant" sounds like "pad" in the BattleLaf EVA.

Alpha-blend has been the bane of phase tanks and other transparent things forever. You may have noticed this happens with water too. Since there aren't any active graphics guys currently on scripts, I doubt we can get a global fix for this any time soon. I can fix it for the manhole covers by making the mesh a perfect circle instead of a square so it doesn't need alpha, but water will need a proper fix for how alpha-blend renders.

Footstep sounds and particle effects are tied to terrain materials though. So this would probably require the map to have visible terrain and invisible collision meshes as two separate entities, with there being two collision meshes, one where certain parts of terrain are treated as dirt/sand and one where those parts are treated as mud, and then swap the wet and dry mesh on demand by object replace through scripts (the same way the siege cannon's "state" changes) instead of actually changing the terrain, because muh VIS. Would still have its fair share of problems though, you'd probably have to do it by having the swappable collision meshes be a simple object instead of terrain - and the engine really does not like having you walk around on those. Back when the Coastal Influence bridge was destructible - that is, a simple object - it was a common occurrence to see infantry spazzing between the first two frames of their running animation as they ran across it. Or falling through the bridge after they die. You can probably imagine how noticeable the issues get when they're applied to the entire map instead of just a bridge that people rarely even bothered walking across back in the day due to how exposed it was to arty fire and such. Doable but more trouble than it's worth I'd say.

3.2.2.5 General stuff Re-added the Gamma sound for the refill button so it can't be mistaken for a nearby medic. Accuracy penalties for jumping now only apply if you stay airborne for more than 1/10th of a second; this means that the various things that cause you to stop touching the ground for a millisecond (like getting off the end of a ladder, buying a new infantry, or touching a prop with collision that isn't a perfect square such as rocks or sandbags) will no longer unfairly impose accuracy penalties on you. (This has been an issue for all of Delta but only the new dynamic reticle brought it to light.) If you don't like the dynamic crosshair, or need to be able to tweak its pixel boundaries to use a custom crosshair texture, you can now edit it; use XCC Mixer to extract crosshair.ini from the always2.dat (or always.dat if it's not in always2 at some point in future) and place it in the your game's data folder (the same folder that always.dat is in). Set Enabled to false to disable it, and edit the other settings at your leisure if you're just tweaking for a custom crosshair. Soviet Rifle Soldier Fixed missing AK-47 secondary. Yak Fixed build limit. Tweaked physics again; should be less slippery on the runway. Damage multiplier to base defenses up (0.24 -> 0.3; now identical to its damage multiplier to main buildings) Construction Yard Repairs main buildings twice as fast, but defenses half as fast. Power Plant Damage penalty for buildings on low power is more harsh (10% -> 16.67%) Bonsai The terrain is finally dry again. (All surfaces with mud effects are now dirt or sand where appropriate, except the riverside and the depths of the tunnels) Coastal Influence Some minor terrain tweaks around the Soviet end of the bridge to hopefully make V2 defense more plausible??? Land route turret is now a pillbox. Removed patch of trees on the Soviet end of the island; V2s can now occupy that spot to attack the turret from just outside its range. Guard Duty Turret moved 20 metres forward so it has more coverage but is harder to defend. (Super vulnerable to yaks!) Reshaped cliffs around turret. Moved both teams' watch towers onto the cliffs for better visibility. Added rocks and deep water around the Allied side of the bridge so it's not such a safe space for artillery. Soviet Ore Silo is now behind the Airfield. Fixed out-of-bounds zone leaking into Construction Yard basement. Lunar Paradox Rangerhead "crushing" weapon tweaked to be more consistent. Rangerhead speed and handling improved. Flammoth Tank damage up (20 -> 25) Medic suicide damage down (600 -> 500) Guided V2 suicide damage down (800 -> 600) Fixed Militant Force not playing on gameover screen. Ridge War Fixed missing Allied Ore Truck airdrop terminal. Seamist Soviet defenses have been pushed back, particularly on the CY side, giving Allies reign over more of the map and thus more of a chance at taking down the inevitable CY V2 flood. Siege Fixed some awkward terrain around bridges. Fixed vehicles getting stuck on back of Soviet WF.

Let's not get into the problems of messing with the positions of player spawners mid-game No easy task to find a reasonable algorithm for "equal but opposite sides" considering that pretty much every map has too many cliffs and obstacles for this to be simplified I don't think people will apprecipate randomly being whisked out of the action - especially if they are in the middle of killing the last non-production building - just so that they can play the world's slowest coinflip (it can take 1-2 minutes to sprint from the edge of a map to the middle and absolutely nothing will be happening in the meantime and they won't run into any enemies until the last 5 seconds) People who don't read your forum post won't understand what to do. Ingame HUD text will not work, you can't guarantee people will actually read it. See also: the people who even after the recent changes, still manage to fail at flying Yaks because they hold spacebar to take off when the text in the middle of the screen says "ascend with W", then they continue to hold W while flying when the text in the middle says "forward movement while flying is automatic", causing them to keep gaining altitude and then they scrape the flight ceiling because they don't read the text in the middle that says "hold S to dive" - which appears both when you enter and when you get near the flight ceiling. Only way to ensure the objective gets read is to put it in a popup window that prevents them from doing anything until they press "ok" - and that kind of conflicts with the idea of having to get to the middle first, doesn't it? This will just encourage the KD aware to leave the game before it happens since in order to respawn someone you have to kill them - which in this case is a completely unfair death. And that's a problem because leaving starts a snowball effect of other people leaving. This will force people to kill non-production buildings before production buildings, because if you get into a base trade do you really want to be screwed over by the chance that you will randomly be taken away to play the world's slowest coinflip? This will make the map stats page less reliable for determining a map's team bias by adding the ability for a whole match to be nullified by the world's slowest coinflip. If we're going to have the world's slowest coinflip, why not just cut out the middleman and just have a coinflip script instantly hand the win to a random team so as to not waste everyone's time? Okay, maybe it's not so much of a coinflip when you consider that Soviets will just put random AP mines around wherever this button spawns when people learn of it, just to prepare for this eventuality. But that's not exactly an improvement, see point 7. TL;DR seems like a thing that will just cause more people to leave. Reminder that the whole point of this thread is to find ways to reduce the frustration that leads to people leaving early.

Rebuilding does not work well in a game where buildings provide functions that are not directly connected to the engine's basic building controller logic and thus have to be removed completely instead of merely "disabled" when the building is destroyed: Refinery non-vanilla dump zone Helipad/airfield/naval refill/repair zones Spy infiltration zones Radar Dome airdrop terminals Missile Silo flare terminals AI target spots on buildings So basically, if you revive a refinery/missile silo, have fun having regaining none of those buildings' functionalities and all of their "must be destroyed to end the game"ness (you know, that thing killwhores love to abuse that we want to avoid). If you revive an airfield/naval factory, have fun not being able to refill or repair your units there. If you revive a radar dome hoping for airdrops, well, you should have revived your war factory instead because it's better and actually works when revived (maybe). If you are Soviet and revive any other building, praise the gods for your new and improved building that can't be infiltrated by spies. If you're playing with bots, praise the gods for your new and improved building that bots completely ignore cause they still think it's dead. Base destruction victories are a rare enough occurrence already. You know, that thing you're supposed to be doing that just won't feel as great to do if someone can undo it after the fact, because it just wasn't easy enough to do it preemptively with the golden wrench? With the amount of people who go out of their way to keep repairing when they know they've lost, how will adding the option for people to rebuild a building that they have no chance of making a comeback with, not lead to more needless drawing out of ended games? Removing main buildings means having to remake VIS data. I have done that enough times, fuck it, I am not doing it again unless a map requires it, so sweeping changes of building layouts for all maps for a questionable experiment will not happen unless someone comes up with a complete replacement for VIS or improves engine performance enough that we don't need VIS to prop it up. The economy is simply not made with "4-6 silos" in mind. Remember that a silo basically provides 2/3rds as much income as a refinery and has the advantages of not being able to be sabotaged by spies, providing money instantly, and not relying on the protection of a unit which is pretty vulnerable on about half of the maps that have a refinery. So if you have 4-6 silos, the window for early infantry rushes simply does not exist - with 6 silos people can buy snipers after 13 seconds of game time, rangers after 21, V2s after 30, and by the time the infantry rush actually reaches the enemy base, anyone who bought a sniper/ranger will have made even more money during the wait so the economical setback of having done so to defend an infantry rush is a drop in the bucket. When it comes to vehicle play, Allies can start preparing their light rush 38 seconds into the game, and in the time it takes for the WF to be available for another light, everyone has another 96 credits - meaning that by the time a light rush of modest size actually reaches the Soviet base, the Soviets will already be pumping out Volkovs, Teslas, Mammoths, and laughter as they repel the light rush and then make their slow push to the Allied base before anyone can possibly hope to set up an adequate response (like large AT mine fields). Allies inevitably lose some buildings, but hey, at least they'll maybe have the money to rebuy some buildings... which will inevitably die again because they can't stop further rushes. Another possible scenario is that Allies just first thing buy rangers, give them to a thief, that thief takes another thief passenger, and everyone just fans out to all the silos, because several of those are practically guaranteed success when Soviets have no chance of mining all of their 6 silos that fast. And if any game ends up with Soviets needing to spend money to rebuild buildings, they're going to have a pretty bad time keeping up the mines on all of their silos. Pipeline is a pretty telling case study on what happens when a map has too much money: it's the most Soviet biased map in the game. It's doubtful that money is the only reason but it's safe to say that it's a pretty big one and that's why I dialed it back in this patch (we have yet to see if it works out though). Something I was thinking of is increasing the HP pool of the War Factory and then either decreasing it for other buildings, or increasing the anti-building damage of most weapons to give the same effect as reducing most building HP. The War Factory is without a doubt the most important building in the game (though in fringe cases like Under this is arguable) and there is no changing that without completely rewriting the game balance from scratch again while nerfing vehicles into the ground to the point that they wouldn't feel satisfying to use. In pre-Delta the Refinery used to be a close second since it was either the only source of income or the only viable source of income depending on whether the map had a silo or not - but even then there was still the issue that the Refinery basically can't function without the War Factory. And to this day that's still an issue, only slightly countered by the fact that on Radar Dome maps you can now buy OT airdrops which you have to collect resources with yourself. And now silo income actually matters and there's a third source of income: damaging and killing enemy units. But the War Factory is still as important as it's always been, and the Radar Dome isn't an adequate replacement (but then it probably shouldn't be anyway - and even if it was, that would require adding radar domes to more maps, and I've already said my piece on changing the presence of main buildings). Since the War Factory shares the same HP total as every other main building (except the CY which is stronger) and is so much more important than everything else, if you end up in range to hit the War Factory, there are only 3 reasons you would ever attack a nearby building that isn't the War Factory: The War Factory has a repair squad, it's outrepairing your attack team, and it can't be stopped Another building happens to be severely damaged already The War Factory is dead Making it harder to bring down, while making other buildings easier to bring down, may give more encouragement to whittle down the enemy's options by taking out said easier targets first. Or you can be greedy and go straight for the WF before anything else, but if you fail to the 10% HP emergency golden wrench squad which would've been less likely if you'd attacked a weaker building (or nonexistent without the barracks), that's on you And if this results in the War Factory often being the last or close to last building to fall, well, that should mean less stalemates, right? Could possibly also raise the health of naval buildings while increasing the anti-building damage of naval units. Or instead of raising HP, separate the armour classes of naval buildings/non-naval buildings so that non-naval buildings can be made much weaker to naval weapons, so that LST rushes against naval buildings don't get any weaker. The whole point of the gunboat having worse anti-building damage than even the ranger, and destroyers/missile subs having only slightly stronger anti-building damage than main battle tanks, is to make it harder for a surprise gunboat/sub rush to instantly shut down the other team's naval options. With the damage the way it currently is, destroyers/missile subs don't really have any choice but to take out the naval factory first because attacking any other building requires getting close to land where land units can easily shut them down - if they took out non-naval buildings much faster then there'd be more of a risk/reward factor there. We may even see people on Hostile Waters actually attacking a building that isn't the ANY/ASP. This even has its roots in the RTS, where the WF/naval have more health than every other building except the CY which they tie, and have light/heavy vehicle armour which are in most cases either equal or superior to the wood armour of other buildings.