Pushwall

Yeah some kind of alternate access would probably help. I think the "size" issue is more the fact that all ground traffic being funneled through 1 spot means it's pretty unlikely for any of it to reach the other side and get into the enemy base (especially with the ground defenses), rather than map size. But that is probably the worst spot for a second route, hardly anyone would even use the castle route anymore if you could just take this route which is much faster, doesn't shelter enemy infantry at all, bypasses ground defenses, and makes it impossible for aircraft to sneak up on you. Maybe the rear of the castle, since that has drivable/walkable ground that isn't used.

You know, we did have a poll on whether it should be removed from rotation a while back. Seems pretty clear cut to me. But this isn't a problem with other maps of the same size because... And due to the two ore silos, that hardly matters. I remember a game where the Allied OT was being constantly wrecked and everyone could still afford hordes of longbows. It's less a question of size and more how far the ore fields are from base (but again, two ore silos makes that less relevant). Ridge War's Allied ore field is within kissing distance of the refinery, that doesn't make it a tiny map. You're thinking of the wrong map, but I hope you can model, texture and rig the ghost medieval soldiers then. I can think of more convincing reasons why rain might be a problem (like slowdown) and the "psychological effect" doesn't seem to be an issue with the 5 other rainy maps. I've always wondered what the deal with that was myself, let's let the mapper answer that.

I don't think I would allow LST to carry more than 1 of any vehicle. Except maybe rangers. Carrying more than 1 of pretty much anything is GG if enemy team's navy is down - they are forced to overcommit a bunch of RS/V2/Arty to their shores or get insta-ganked by 5 MBT/APC stacked on top of each other, and that's just the tech level 1 units. Not to mention I don't think this feature overrides the infantry passenger limit, so you get to carry 5 infantry (not including yourself since you get into the ejected vehicle automatically, it seems) and 1 vehicle - that's plenty.

That's only obvious to the person who's in the LST though. If someone sees an LST pick up or drop off a heavy tank, they are no doubt going to try bringing a demo over to a later LST unless they've already been in one and seen the popup.

It's a feature I've wanted for a while but the issue will be finding a reliable way to communicate to the players that there are some vehicles you just can't put in the LST. Because from a developer's point of view it's pretty clear that LSTs should not be allowed to carry demo trucks. Can you imagine if for 3100, you could buy a demo truck that had 4 times as much health, moved 25% faster, took one of the less traveled roads (i.e. the water) and could also carry a bunch of infantry passengers who are protected from the immediate explosion? Yeah, that's basically the demo LST. I think we can get away with not having to tell players that you can't pack a heli or a boat inside the LST, because you couldn't do it in Red Alert and the latter would make no sense since every other naval unit is so much bigger than the LST... but I'm sure that once this feature makes it in, Coastal Influence games will be wracked by people buying demo trucks, trying to load them into the LST, failing because it's not allowed (and they might possibly continue to try to do it if there's not enough to indicate that the demo cannot be loaded), resulting in demos milling about their own bases uselessly before enemies notice and destroy them, resulting in many more games ruined by demo noobs.

Admins trying to turn people neutral on that map for some reason.

Ramming was bad back before Gamma because it resulted in either party being sent to blue hell - no longer the case. Now it's only considered bad against ore trucks, but even then, if they're on open ground they tend to not have trouble getting back on track after being rammed.

It's been around for the entire 19 months of Delta, it is fairly well known. That and the PP hill are the only places Allies can infantry rush at the start of the game since most of the base is covered by coils, so Soviets only need one scout in each of those 2 directions to completely shut those attacks down, assuming the Soviets also have anyone at home to reinforce if the attack consists of more than just rocket men. Which is probably why it's not seen that often. Meanwhile, the Allied base doesn't have such a glaringly exposed structure as the Soviet ref, but they have to spread their scouting efforts much, much more thinly because there is not a single part of the Allied base that can defend itself against RPGs like the 60-70% of the Soviet base that's within coil range can. I got more of the story from other folks ingame and it just sounds like Soviets weren't defending their base at all since the attack also spilled over to the silo which is decidedly not in the range of that cliff. Really the silo shouldn't be 10 feet away from the refinery. But really Soviets should just learn that having 2 coils is no excuse to get complacent and neglect defense.

Traction might be it, if I remember correctly the Beta V2 had a really high traction setting - though this also enabled it to climb cliffs which had hilarious consequences on maps like beta Canyon River.

If I remember right that function got killed from scripts due to some disconnect between how the server and client treat vehicles with the engine off? Whatever it was, it was nuked and never returned because it either didn't work as intended or used a feature that wasn't meant to be used in the way it was. Shame that doing this would completely remove the option of ramming these vehicles to throw off their aim. That's not something I'm about to deny this feature over though. Not possible, pivot has to be on either both modes or no mode, unless the gun has absolutely no articulation at all in one mode (see: undeployed Nod artillery which is always facing straight forward no matter where you're looking and no matter where you pointed it when previously deployed) which would be pretty damn useless and force the arty to deploy for any form of combat that isn't "hit unit that's right in front of me".

Minipatch 3.1.2.2 has gone up. This fixes an exploit with the medic flare that I forgot to deal with initially (thankfully nobody got to use it yet) and adds A4R91N's improved textures for the old building props.

Nah, it just didn't take long to do.

Also just pushed a little minipatch 3.1.2.1 to fix server crashes caused by the armour cache. Whoops.

Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update [blurb]Medic and Volkov cut down to size, Sergeants more suited for center-mass shots, new building props, two more bot-friendly maps, and Militant Force! What more could you ask for?[/blurb] General Mines and non-main structures are no longer subject to the splash cover system (only relevant for arty/V2/C4/nukes vs mines, and nukes vs non-main structures). Because of this, nuke damage to these objects is reduced again. Simplified collisions on dead vehicle and trilight props, should be much harder to get stuck against these. Esc help screen remade and updated by A4R91N to include a rundown on all of Delta's base structures. Infantry Saboteurs C4 charge time down from 1 to 0.25 seconds. (Not zero because zero means desyncs if you happen to have it equipped and are holding fire on a vehicle when you eject from said vehicle.) Clearing charges now have the same charge time as C4, for the same reason as above. Tanya C4's "Kiss it bye-bye" is now played globally. Repairmen Repair Tool now uses handgun character animations, allowing bots to use them properly and giving a slight range increase since they're held further forward. (Less importantly it's also more true to the first-person animation.) Medic Health up (75 -> 100) Auto-heal is reduced (3 -> 2.5) Auto-heal now only activates after 1 second of not taking damage. So concentrated fire, burn damage or scuba diving will prevent it from taking hold. Medic kit no longer heals infantry armour. Medic kit now has a 1.5-second charge time and an 0.5-second cooldown, instead of no charge and a 2-second cooldown; this means you can no longer rapidly swap between the kit and MP5 to fire the kit at up to 4 times faster than its intended refire rate. Medic kit no longer has a one-time use insta-heal. Added the "Armour Cache" signal flare (weapon slot 3); this causes friendly infantry within 25m to become uncrushable, refills their armour, and upgrades it to take 2/3rds less damage from mundane explosions (excluding AP mine) and become unstrippable. This flare provides its effect for a minute before expiring, and can be disarmed in half the time it would take to disarm a C4, so placing it anywhere near enemy spawn points is not recommended unless you're just using it as an emergency one-off armour refill. Shotgunners Dragonsbreath afterburn damage up (2.5 -> 4). Dragonsbreath afterburn now works against Flamethrowers and Volkovs. Fixed armour penetration on TOZ flechette shot which was accidentally 37.5% instead of 50% like the other shotgun rounds. (Volkov's "armour" had the correct setting here but that kinda never comes up... ) TOZ flechette shot damage to infantry down (80 -> 75), though with the above fix this is only a "nerf" to unarmoured infantry. Dragonsbreath armour shredding up (50% -> 75%). Slug and flechette armour shredding up (25% -> 100%). Thief Fixed bug where his stealing script would still play out if he died while inside a stealing zone. Volkov KovNade splash radius up (7 -> 8 ) KovNade splash damage down (15 -> 12.5) KovShotty damage down (60 -> 50) Vehicles Yakovlev Yak-9P Kills against Yaks are now recorded properly on the kill feed. Buildings Various buildings have been updated with new props from CMDBob's technology centre - computer consoles, mainframes, chairs and shelves. In most buildings this means extra cover, but in some they replace older props so it just ends up being an aesthetic thing. Tesla Coil Now detects infantry at 120m instead of using the anti-vehicle range (150m). Aesthetics The music track "Militant Force" will now play over the endgame scoreboard, overriding the map jukebox. Technician's flailing animation now works when running with "handgun" weapons and C4 and flares. Technician no longer does his flailing animation when running with large two-handed weapons. Repair Tool's screen glows in the dark. Makarov uses its old first-person animations again as the Beretta ones introduce some awful clipping. Added some new purchase quotes: Sergeant (Carville): "Moving to intercept" Starshina (Topolov): "Za Rossiyu" (For Russia) Captain (Esling): "There is still much to be done" Kapitan (Kukov): "Take the fight to them" Missile Silo basement now has a window into the missile tube, with a shutter that closes during launching. Performance Airfield's runway lights no longer eat up a huge amount of draw calls. Oil pumps use less draw calls and no longer have performance-hungry multimaterials. Bots Bots in the "engineer" group actually do their job now. Sort of. Instead of basically just being worthless pistol defense bots, they will head to a friendly MCT and use the Repair Tool on it endlessly, until the building is dead at which point they may move to another one. At a later date I plan to refine this so that they only repair buildings that NEED repairs, but I haven't had time to figure that part out yet. Bots in the "engineer" group may now spend their money on Engineers for extra survivability instead of only buying Technicians - not like they're ever going to spend it on vehicles or offensive infantry. Small-arms infantry bots will now "ignore" buildings - that is, if these are the only targets in their range, they will shoot them but will move forward at the same time in hopes of finding better targets. Allied bots can now buy Medics; however they do not know how to use their medic features intelligently so they just use them as a CQC commando. Infantry now treat MCT rooms as their "objective" - they will try to reach these areas if no other targets are getting in their way. Once they do so they will shoot the MCT. Infantry preferences are now set on a per-map basis: On small, cramped maps, they will buy more Sergeants, Medics, Flamethrowers and Tanyas, but no Snipers. On open, vehicle-heavy maps they will buy more Captains and Rocket Soldiers, but no Sergeants or Medics. On maps that fall somewhere in between, they get a good mix of everything. Maps RA_CanyonRiver Removed rocks that are completely underwater or hidden in marsh-grass since you really have no way of noticing and avoiding them. RA_Fissure Removed "Militant Force" music track. RA_LunarParadox Auto-healing on superboats down (10 -> 5). Chrono dustblowers collide with Service Depots properly. SPAM Site no longer announces that it is "under attack" when a spy temporarily destroys it. RA_Metro Bots can now be enabled. Same method as usual. On this map they will buy rangers. Base radar markers are present now. (Not that the map was particularly complicated before, but their absence was causing bots to derp out.) War Factory spy zone no longer needs the spy to jump to activate. Fixed the long silence after "Eaten Alive" music track. RA_Pipeline Fixed some misplaced barrels at the Allied pump. Fixed rainbow door. Added a collision safety net between the walkway and top of the oil silo so you can't fall down. Moved dead Allied turret near shore slightly to reduce stuck issues. Shorelines are now lit properly. RA_RidgeRacer Both types of cars are a little slower than before. This leaves them easier to control since high-speed driving doesn't go well with lag in this engine. The Soviet ones are still faster and more slippery than the Allied, but should be less slippery than before - while the Allied ones should do a much better job than before of sticking to the road and being able to take corners at their full speed. Time limit for each checkpoint has been raised to 70 seconds to be more in line with the slower pace of the game. RA_RidgeWar Removed external SDs and the defenses near them. Added additional AA defense on the far east side of each base to compensate (near Soviet Refinery and Allied Conyard). RA_ToTheCore Out-of-bounds border no longer bleeds into the basement of the Allied Construction Yard RA_Under Naval structures are now snow-capped. Deepened water around Allied base. RA_Wasteland Bots can now be enabled.

With regard to captains vs vehicles something I probably should do for them is shift the balance of health damage vs armour damage. Right now they're identical, just like rockets. Less damage to armour and more to health, just like the AK/M16 (but less drastic), would mean they're worse at weakening incoming tanks before the AT units arrive, but better at destroying them once they're heavily damaged and/or on the retreat - with an overall slight reduction in anti-veh DPS to pay for this maybe.

There's another quirk of splash though; if the projectile hits the target directly (server-side) then it gives the full effect of the splash regardless of how far the explosion is from the target's origin. Of course the issue there is it's server-side so this probably isn't the best idea. Nobody said it had to be an artillery As I said it could easily have the same range that the current RPGrenadier's "anti infantry only" grenades have (i.e. barely better than a pistol), upshot being that it'd be cheaper than the RS (300 perhaps), outdamage it against buildings (with the RS also being nerfed in this department perhaps), and have a stealthier report and projectile - though with so little range it shouldn't be quite so hard to detect as the old one. Unwrapping is certainly not my department, but I could see about giving it to Chop or Ice. I might as well also learn how to do it from Chop, I've gone long enough having no clue about how to do this thing that I really should know since I'm a mapper. The big possibilities on the table I'm thinking of are either the M47 Dragon (since that's consistent with what the RA manual and internal data files say he uses) or RL-83 Blindicide (alternate option since there's enough American weapons on this mostly European force already).

This is kind of why I was hoping for a non-disposable launcher for the allied RS, so that we can move the M72 LAW to every other class (or make it an optional purchase) with only one shot and drop "bullet vs tank" damage drastically to compensate. Dropping the damage with nothing to compensate is just hurting the non-specialty infantry too much again. The thing of bullets vs buildings (I guess this is specifically for ranger/cap who intentionally have decent damage, not stuff like the rifleman whose anti-exterior damage is negligible) is that without that, Allies would have only one infantry unit that can actually assault buildings from outside. While Soviets would have 4 infantry that can do this, with 3 of them also having anti-infantry power ranging from average to decent. Maybe they can go up vs "exposed" buildings (helipads and aux structures) but down vs real ones and defenses? That could be a fair compromise. I'll run the numbers and see what I can come up with and throw up a possible chart to go with the x3 and x5 ones in the OP. Another thing someone suggested before, which could help with both of these issues, is reintroducing the "old Grenadier" and giving it to both teams. Put it in a similar role to the old one but with the functionalities of the new grenades (impact or VERY short timer, and its current pistol-ish range). So Allies have another infantry unit that can hurt buildings and can put the hurt on infantry if you can't get reliable headshots. Should still be different enough from the flamethrower in that he can't stand using his own weapon at point blank range (might be reinforced further by giving him no armour but higher health, which is very bad for splash damage, and also prevents them from becoming pseudo-flamers while indoors with a medic's armour cache), can't snipe buildings from a decent distance, can't counter medics, and can't flush people out of cover if he can't get a good shot behind it, but has considerably higher exterior damage than the flamer. Either that, or if we just want to help with the headshot issue, converting some of the Remington and TOZ's damage to splash (with a small enough radius that you can't hit yourself) or extra afterburn, resulting in higher bodyshot damage and lower headshots. The splash method should work out better than how it worked on the Gamma Dragunov considering you're hitting targets that are rarely more than 30m away from you, instead of 300m. Either way, it means Allies would have an option for a weapon that's less reliant on headshots like how the Soviets have the flamer (super-splash) and shocky (no headshot bonus damage whatsoever).

This isn't Beta where the old devs deliberately made sure not to tell the public about vital gameplay features such as v-sniping so that oldies could killwhore with snipers without having to fear the possibility of being hit by counter-snipers. All (or as much as we could cram) the info for newbies is right there in autoannounce (though I plan to move it to a help screen eventually where everything can be read at your leisure). Your KD of 0.92 is certainly better than the average (it might not look like it, but the average is well below 1 due to the many deaths that don't also give a kill, such as suicides and base defenses) and your KD this month is higher than it's been the other months so I really get the feeling this isn't hurting you as much as you say it is and you're just skewed by your experiences against one old player who is known to be tenacious and different gameplay rules would not change this one bit as he'd just change his playstyle to accommodate them, and most likely quicker than the average player would. Well I don't have a "high-end gaming PC" either so I'll let that speak for itself.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm just going to assume you didn't literally mean walking to the enemy base, so I think you might be exaggerating things ever so slightly because sprinting from the inside of one of your own buildings to the inside of one of the enemy's, when taking the longer outer routes on the largest maps like Ridge War, should rarely take more than 2 minutes if uninterrupted (just checked myself - danpaul is right on the money here). And again that's just for the biggest maps. 2 minutes might still sound like a lot but compare it to how long vehicles take in the same situation - it's not that much slower. Most tanks aren't even 50% faster than sprinting infantry and that's not even taking into account speed loss from turning and climbing. Don't tell me you've never felt the same way from brazenly trudging a mammoth tank across the map for longer than an infantryman takes, then eating a triple cheeseburger mine and instantly losing your tank? Though travel time is definitely a concern even if it's not as exaggerated as you insist. Something I kinda want to do in future is paradrops that temporarily allow infantry at home to "teleport" to the front lines quickly. Possibly enabled by some kind of limited-purchase flare akin to the a-bomb, so it doesn't entirely supplant transport vehicles. So can snipers (who killed in 1 headshot even before the overhaul), AP mines, phase tank splash barrage (or track-sniping vs Volkov), V2/arty, squishing, and so on, and I don't think anyone will call for any of these to be "dealt with" (except snipers which are certainly a little controversial). Granted, several of these got nerfed in addition to being discouraged through the better-but-harder headshots. Killing infantry is now more of a job for infantry. Though the free rifles could probably stand to get nerfed a bit further to hamper the respawner advantage. It kind of sounds like you're attacking with one infantry in which case, yes, expect to die against a lone defender even if it's not right away and especially if he's waiting for you. This is also true in Reborn despite the whole "infantry are made of adamantium" thing (unless you're a commando) so I don't think applying that method here would help much...

Yep. But you can't even get Tanyas on the maps where Medics are a big issue. Besides, her lack of armour means that from the very moment she enters combat, she is taking far more damage from small arms than any armoured infantry are - sure, she has more health to compensate for that, but those small arms have an easier time of outdamaging the medic kit's healing on her right away. Plus the only benefit she gains from the medic's armour cache is uncrushable status - she doesn't become near-immune to splash damage like any armoured soldiers do, and she doesn't gain temporary armour like any armoured soldiers who've been stripped do. So that mitigates Medic+Tanya a slight bit, which you may think holds it back on the maps where it can be done, but if Tanyas could gain armour, that'd make them roughly twice as tough as they currently are against everything that isn't a PKM or direct hits of big projectiles, and survive headshots from sniper rifles, which might be just a little bit bullshit.

Not refilling armour doesn't help at all? Once infantry have lost their armour they effectively take 33% more damage from the flamethrower, 100% more damage from the AK/TOZ and 166% more damage from the Makarov/Kovshotty/Dragunov/Grenades. And the PKM only needs to cause a full health bar of damage to completely strip armour by itself, and the Flamethrower only needs a little more than that. We can always up some of the weapons' armour stripping abilities too. Once the armour is gone surely it's much, much easier to outdamage the healing? The projected medic won't be able to restore armour at all, only provide a temporary substitute for it in the radius of his temporary flare. So this means he'll only be able to continue a siege indefinitely if he's got a ST/LST/APC behind him which actually can refill peoples' armour indefinitely, and well, good luck keeping those first two alive even if you have a mechanic around as mechs heal vehicle health REALLY slowly.

I tested this offline so I'd know how to file the bug report. It doesn't dump - it just sits on the other team's refinery dump spot forever, possibly blocking the AI OT on the team with the working refinery from dumping. On the way there it is also likely to ram the enemy OT and get stuck though - you'll often have to help it out by ramming one of them away for the OT to actually reach the opposing refinery. I'll have to go see what the truck does on large maps where the pathfind grid isn't complete enough to connect the 2 bases together. Because in that case it certainly can't drive to the enemy refinery. e: it just sits still on its own ore field forever after collecting. Which is honestly what it should do in all cases. I have no idea why the ore miner script tries to seek out enemy dump zones if they're in range (it even knows they're enemy ones, if it didn't then it would actually dump at them!). It's not my script.

Red Alert isn't the Korean War or early Cold War though. The sidebar icon for the rocket soldier in Red Alert shows him using an M72 LAW, which is probably why the old APB artists made an M72 LAW for him. I don't entirely agree with it since it's a disposable launcher whereas the Soviets' RPG-7 isn't, but we have to work with it because it's all we have. Any work towards a new launcher means that work on anything else is being delayed (and I'm not sure if ChopBam would be up to the task either), unless someone from the community provides the launcher like Furs and Chaos_Knight did with the Strela. Red Alert's manual and internal data files tell a different story though, they say he's using the M47 Dragon. Which is the Javelin's ancestor! If I were to see the Rocket Soldier get a new weapon, what I'd like to see is either: the M47 Dragon - true to RA, and lets us ditch the oddity of a disposable launcher that is fired infinitely, but it looks a bit silly. Some European anti-tank weapon from around or before the time of the Dragon (Ice previously suggested to me the Belgian RL-83 Blindicide) - to help provide a bit of national variety befitting the Allies. For a force that consists mostly of soldiers of European nations, they sure seem to have a short supply of European weapons on their side. Right now it's just the Italian Beretta pistol, British Lee-Enfield sniper rifle and German MP5 submachine gun - their 6 other weapons are all American and I'm not even counting the Stinger that isn't a proper part of the game! A plus to the RL-83 Blindicide specifically is that we may even be able to make its face shield act as more than just a visual novelty, and make it actually shield the RS from frontal headshots while it's equipped. Whatever happens, the RS getting a proper non-disposable launcher would open up an avenue for allowing every other soldier to either purchase or start with an M72 LAW that only gets 1 ammo. Which would allow us to make bullets less effective against tanks without actually nerfing infantry, and give Supply Trucks more presence since they could provide LAW refills! But again, this all can't happen if we don't get a model. So don't hold your breath.

To all the people (most of whom have never played Gamma) asking why Under doesn't have Mammoths to counter the phase that has 200 HP (and practically even less to tesla weapons) and a slow mech rate and nowhere to hide from TT reveals on this cramped map and thus can be countered by plenty of things in the absence of mammoths. Just imagine that third screenshot over and over and over again.