Pushwall

We did have unit tutorial videos back in Gamma, back when the launcher had a built-in game manual. Judging from the flood of ingame questions relating to unit functionalities at the time I don't think the manual actually saw much use though, plus some of those videos weren't very accurate even at the time they were made. Updated unit tutorial videos would be greatly appreciated, though I have no idea where we'd put them that new players would know to go. This might be fruit for a new thread as well - how to script them etc.

Another thing, this whole dynamic balancing thing seems like way too much work for ??? reward in a community with hardly any coders with hardly any time to pull it off in between the other things they're doing. And such a system is bound to be incredibly open to abuse which just means there's even more stuff to constantly fix. Like, going by the discount example, why should it be a valid tactic for a Soviet team to just sacrifice riflemen to pillboxes (or even rooftops if it goes by deaths and not points) for a few minutes so that the rank difference then widens enough for them to unlock the arbitrary discount and afford mammoth-kovs earlier than the Allies are able to deal with them and stomp? Should I disarm that signal flare the enemy put near our base defenses, or should I deliberately ignore it and go idle with the rest of my team so that when the flare goes off, our team gets the arbitrary pity buff that'll help our superior team snowball the game even harder when we decide to actually play instead of feigning being AFK? Maybe the enemy put that flare there hoping for us to disarm it so that they could get a pity buff! But I'd better not play too well, don't want to trip the points threshold and give the enemy an advantage that might let them come back, I'd better just stop playing the objective right now and type !killme and afk at home for a few minutes to let the enemy's points catch up so that we can start attacking them safely again... assuming they're not also aware of how BS this system is and also play hard to get until the last 2 minutes. It doesn't even sound like the same game genre anymore, and I can't claim to follow many competitive games but I've never heard of anything as bizarre as this.

That's... not what I meant. I meant that giving a team bonuses for having less players would mean that new/bad players on a team effectively would be worth less than the empty slot, whereas now they have to try pretty hard to be worse than that.

Yeah, something I really feel this game is missing is bad/new players being considered literally worse than an empty player slot...

Given that the Pillbox has the same priority settings as a Flame Tower and people keep talking about how the FT suddenly switches targets away from a heavily damaged ranger to hit the higher-priority captain when it sees a captain, and the FT already has much higher priority for hitting rangers than hitting heavy vehicles, I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen unless the Soviet infantry aren't even in the pillbox's range.

Ok, did some testing and with 1 silo and an exposed coil, Allies could feasibly start a light rush and bring it to the coil before Soviets even get a dump, for an almost certain stomp. Granted engineers can stave that off, but it's going to be difficult especially since I'm integrating the "no bunnyhop" wrench. So I definitely can't do both of those or the pendulum just swings the other way. So I could either leave out the economy overhaul, or place the coil back behind the wall to make it harder to rush initially before the walls get taken down, or add a second flame tower to cover the front to make an instant LT rush harder, which can easily be taken out by LBs later so it won't be a thorn in the Allies' side for long. Or maybe a combination of the latter two. For now, to avoid delaying the next patch further and to avoid changing too much on a whim, I'll just leave it at a cannon power buff, the coil being moved outside, and fixing AA positions so SAMs can't potentially cover wayyyy more than AA guns can - no eco changes.

Well, it would certainly be a lot harder to pull off on KOTG/RW due to the wider range of attack routes. The issue here is that it's too easy to do on Siege.

So... do a thing that you were specifically watching out for anyway, and unlike the other things, its entire chance of success rides on not being noticed. Sounds like that just would have failed. The base of the coil is behind a wall in a place that's pretty impossible for arties to hit while the wall is up, and by the time we knock said wall down, we'd be even further behind in points and/or a V2 would have appeared and sniped the artillery. Also seems I was right on the money with regards to the entire strategy you employed, I just reviewed the chatlog and found this 10 minutes into the match. Not even near the end of the match where it's typically employed due to the difficulty of either team forming an effective rush in time - but 10 minutes in. Like you know there's absolutely nothing the Allies can do to turn the game around in the next 20 minutes...

Another thing that didn't play into this match, but I'm sure it will play into some eventually if I don't fix it: the placements of SAM sites vs AA guns. If I recall correctly, the idea behind the defense placement on this map was to allow air to attack the frontal defenses and chinook infantry to attack the rear entrance, both of them not running into any defenses. This works out for chinook infantry, but as for frontal air assaults... not only do SAM sites have more range than AA guns, but the "central" SAMS on this map are much further forward than the "central" AA guns. So if the Soviets take the time to blow up their own frontal walls (an art popularised in Gamma and lost in Delta, since now very few walls on other maps are placed in such a way that they block defenses), those SAMs can cover the whole base including the frontal coil/FT from Longbow assaults (unless the LBs are extremely careful about stopping in the exact right spot where they'll be out of SAM reach against the coil... which then gets them sniped by players). Whereas the Allies' AA guns only cover the rear buildings (which is what I'm sure was intended)... the helipad, WF, ore silos and refill area. Whoops?

I thought the consensus was that the cannons had to be made weaker, which had the adverse effect of making defense too easy.

Chinooks and cannons were already tried and failed. Surely keeping on trying that would be insanity, hence why we switched to longbows. Win ratios are slightly Allied right now but that's a result of the cannons actually being worthwhile in previous patches and Soviets not realising until recently that if they get the point lead early on, they can just keep it by sitting in base for 30 minutes because their base is completely unassailable if they're not attacking, thanks to not needing to care about economy or defending the front. This is probably true for Allies as well to a lesser degree. We probably don't need to go that far. The coil really just needs to be in a place where it can actually be attacked by ground units so that Allies aren't forced into "insanity". After all, the Gap is exposed.

Here's the thing though, we did try different targets. And you can't just "split" longbows and expect them to still take a building out. In several of our LB rushes we made an attempt to look like we were going for one building and then go for another, and it turned out they seemingly just had an engineer sitting in all the buildings. The "insanity" argument would make more sense if there were more than 2 things Allied could do on this map. Of course they're going to keep doing the same thing if the map layout forbids them from doing different things.

Not a lot of meat to grind on when both teams are heavily discouraged from using ground vehicles by an impenetrable Soviet ground defense and crazy AT mine chokepoints both blocking off the one ground attack route (though at least one of those things can be dealt with from the ground), and have no reason to attack the ore truck that travels this route because most of the teams' economy is contained within their own bases. Allies' only chance was to go all in on air because going ground is impossible and Soviets knew this so they also went all in on air, just in a more defensive manner. So instead of Soviets having to dedicate someone to scouting the rear to shut down the only Allied rushes that have any chance of success, they can dedicate someone to doing that and boosting their income at the same time... e: Okay, found two somewhat sane places for this. The tall hill behind the Soviet ref (which is surprisingly climbable by OTs and is not an out of bounds area) and the road behind the Allied base. From there the OT can't also shut down all air assaults.

A gap can be seen from miles away so they'd be able to move half their Hinds up front in time. Wild Hind spray would either kill the gap or the demo. Leaving us with even less tanks to try to assault the coil with. Also they had a second ore truck, that would have just sat in the 5 metre castle wall chokepoint and denied the convoy for long enough for infantry to drop out of the hind/OT and deal with it.

I'm likely going to get rid of the external SDs and their associated defenses as they tend to just die before they can be used for anything (especially the Soviet one). That opens up a wide attack route for Soviets.

So it's not a problem that the Soviet base layout and ridiculous map economy makes it completely impossible for Allies to win if the Soviets decide to just do nothing but defend here? The combination of the two mean the only Allied strategies that have any chance of success are longbow rush and chinook rush. Hence why they're the only ones that are ever seen. What are the Allies supposed to do when Soviets have finally wised up to this questionable map design and left a skeleton crew of 1 engy/hind to defend the front because that's all that's needed against an LB coil rush (and they don't have to worry about a tank rush because that can't work with the coil in the position it is now), put everything else at the rear or engycamping inside buildings, and nothing to attack at all? Hell, what do Allies do if their Helipad dies? Just give up because their chances of success at that point are even worse than if you lose a WF on any other map, except here it's not obvious because the existence of ground vehicles gives the illusion of a chance at success? It would probably help if both teams only had one ore silo. Two silos makes it not even worth trying to kill the ore truck for anything but points (hence why we never tried). With this it might actually be worthwhile for a team to try to starve the other of money so people aren't encouraged to just have 80% of their team sit in base and engycamp for 30 minutes. There's a reason Seamist Allies have only 1/3 the income of the Soviets. Plus, you know, it'll help play into the whole "central control" theme now that the cannons are mediocre at Raap's behest and the secret is too slideshow-inducing to keep in. Another thing that might help (maybe or maybe not combined with the 1 silo) is moving the coil outside the wall. Right now the coil position completely prevents any attempts at ground-rushing it, so air-rushing the PP is a requirement when it should be an option. And the cannons are too weak to kill the coil with especially when the enemy can afford all the engys. You seemed pretty adamant before that it had nothing to do with the economy...

I'm already planning a flight ceiling increase and opening up the map boundaries in areas that ground units can't really make use of (like the river and mountains).

You're nearly two months late on that

Another thing that's forbidding us from using crashland mechanics for helicopters is that right now, kill tracking doesn't work properly against anything that uses them. You get no killstring and no kill points/kill cash for downing them. You may have seen this already with the Yak, but that's an issue constrained to one map currently (and apparently not having much impact as Yaks still don't seem to be giving Soviets much of a fighting chance anyway). Having that fixed is another thing on the scripts to-do list and once that's sorted, we can try this out.

Yeah, that works! The whitespace could be the same blue as the border to reduce the chance of haloing but I can do that myself.

You could always shrink the rest of the picture down to 1024x1024, but leave the soldier as he is. I need a power of 2 texture size for the mipmaps to work and increasing it to 2048x with a ton of blackspace, just for a texture that barely overreaches the previous threshold by being 1280x1024, isn't preferable as it bloats the filesize.

I already applied it to a new board on Ridge Racer. I kind of wanted to have it over the central ore field instead but there aren't many points in that area where you'd be able to easily see it.

Yes. Well, he can't be whittled down to a more vulnerable state anymore due to infinite armour, so he has better field survivability in places that don't have supply trucks. But his shotgun is a little worse at handling armoured infantry and he dies slightly faster to AT weapons.

Look nicer than the normal stealth effect.

Lower some peoples' framerates to slideshow-tier.