Pushwall

It cares about target type (infantry, light vehicle, heavy vehicle, aircraft, or building - different AI objects prioritise these differently), as well as HP (more HP lost = higher priority), distance to target (closer = higher priority) and unit cost (more expensive = higher priority). Since there's only two different units that AA defenses can even attempt to target in the first place, which are both aircraft that have the same price, the deciding factors in what they target in this case just boil down to HP and distance

You're still not close enough to your target and want protection from flamethrowers/stray bullets for as long as possible or are waiting for engy to clear mines? Or, in a scenario where the enemy naval factory is gone, you want your LST to die in the attack so that the enemy doesn't take it?

Crashland logic works for aircraft because they don't care about their gravity setting unless their engine's disabled, and they don't need different collision settings when falling. Boats, however, need to be a separate object so that they can: fall through the water fall slowly without also having the following side effects on living boats: making their handling way, way more slippery than even the initial release of Delta where it was intentionally slippery. slowing their acceleration to a crawl making them get knocked into the stratosphere if something bumps them. And anyone who was around to test the "old" Chronotank script back at BHP might have an idea about how irritating the workarounds are for taking a vehicle that is currently occupied and replacing it with a separate vehicle preset for different physics, while still retaining the occupants. I'll see about replacing the helis' "projectile" death logic with crashland logic. Hopefully it won't look much worse. Something to note is it has a slight unintended nerf to AA defenses in that AIs continue to treat a crashlanding unit as a valid target - and in fact a preferred target since it has 1 HP (you might have seen this on Lunar Paradox), and also a nerf to Volkov since everyone else can also survive a helicopter crash (unless the crash explosion is instakill), and a nerf to Chinooks in that even if you manage to reach the enemy base, you'd better be able to get everyone away from the Chinook before it blows and heavily damages/kills everyone...

Problem is, on maps that aren't Hostile Waters, shorelines tend to be shallow enough that if you lose your boat near land you can salvage your infantry. Not to mention LSTs can die on land where everyone would definitely be safe. So a flat out demo-truck-style "if vehicle dies, all passengers die, no questions asked" is kinda bad. However, there is script logic for a zone where, if a certain kind of vehicle is outside it, not only will all passengers die when it dies, but you also can't eject from the vehicle while outside this zone. Which means nobody will accidentally abandon their destroyers in the middle of nowhere (unless they suicide or quit). It also allows use of an animation to show if you're in this zone or not, which we could use to let LSTs open their ramps when near land (at the cost of their radar dish not spinning but whatever). This'll take a while to work out for boats though. Since some people seem to be confused on where to get out of the LST I think I'll just make only the forward ramp animate for this instance (while keeping the classic all-ramps animation for Seamist's cinematic LSTs).

At one point a solution for water that I was hoping for was a "gravity multiplier zone" that would slow your falling when you entered water .Fall damage is based solely on distance between where you fell from and where you land rather than speed, and can be set on a per-map basis, so it wouldn't impact fall damage through water but this is why it's still able to be different for Lunar. This would have also allowed us to easily affect the gravity on every object for Lunar rather than tweaking gravity settings individually for every unit (which I didn't bother doing for vehicles). But sadly it couldn't be done.

Something else I could do - I'm going to take a look and see if I can ship armor.ini/bones.ini on a per-map basis. If so, I'll make an RA_Fissure_Headshot map or something for next patch (with full tech to test all the inf) so the damage aspect can be publicly tested in a decently-sized game without potentially messing up the whole game's gameplay. I'd rather not steal testing time from games that aren't even released.

Nah, as I said before, if we could make armour behave differently for certain body parts I'd just make headshots completely ignore armour. (Though thinking back on that, that would have the odd effect of making pistol headshots get far more of a benefit than machinegun headshots, which probably isn't needed when pistols can headshot far easier than machineguns.) So I'm thinking on some more possibilities on how to counterbalance the system proposed in the OP: Infantry regen being upped to 5 HP per second instead of 3, or regen timeout being reduced from 30 to 20-25 seconds. Armour shredding values being lowered again, so no infantry can go from full armour to 0 without having regenerated at some point in their life. Since the headshot changes would obviously mean you're much more likely to be able to multi-headshot someone to death from full health, regen and armour will be even less pivotal than before - so they could surely stand a buff if it happens.

Looking back at the bones.ini files over the years, it got dropped to 4x sometime in Gamma and then 3x sometime before Delta's initial release. Probably CJ's fault.

Perhaps this could be a good time for the return of Beta!APB scope logic, which was activated by a custom keybinding instead of secondary fire (so presumably doesn't uncloak)? And since the binoculars can't actually fire, their ability to "v-snipe" wouldn't gate their usability to only people who know that V arbitrarily works in this one first-person scenario when it doesn't for any other.

Less standing/running accuracy and more crouching accuracy for those 2 headshot machines (and the AK) then? I don't see how the captains don't benefit from this, given that they're the only unit with better penetration than before and no other changes to even it out (APC is more fragile with the upcoming patch, whether this headshot thing pulls through or not), so they actually have better bodyshots than before (except against snipers). Sure, they have low accuracy for headshots, but it's not bad enough to make the entire idea of headshots unreliable in the close-quarters scenario you're imagining. Captains should stand a much better chance against respawning rifles in that scenario than they did before, where the machineguns' anti-infantry DPS was actually worse than the rifles. But yeah, it definitely hurts them in the open unless they're crouching (which just makes them headshot magnets) It should also benefit flamethrowers/Kovnades in CQC since they can bunnyhop, make themselves hard to headshot, and take less bodyshot damage from nearly every other weapon while dealing the same splash damage that they previously did (unless they magically score a fireball headshot which can now kill a Tanya, unlike before where it only killed every other infantry). It also benefits all the non-slug shotguns in CQC for a similar reason - they don't have much of a bunnyhopping accuracy penalty (it's a little worse for Volkov, but at point blank that's not going to be what causes you to fail) so the benefit of making their own head harder to hit may be a good tradeoff for that. Another way of looking at the respawn issue: it could be easy to headshot someone who's just spawned, depending on reaction times. So the respawning team might not have as much of an advantage as you'd think. Better headshots should also discourage people from going up to a purchase terminal to refill/swap character in the middle of combat, as it makes them stand still for a bit. So that's another downside for defenders to consider. Agreed on spies - they can land the first strike and headshot more easily in the circumstances that they're meant to be used, so they probably get some of the biggest benefit from this. But they normally don't have much going for them, so I don't really see a reason to intentionally hamstring them if I go through with this overhaul.

So for some reason the thought ran through my head: what if we returned infantry combat to being more rocket-tag-ish like in Beta, by improving headshot damage? How would we go about this without nerfing infantry into the ground? Right now here's how the damage of every small-arms weapon (plus the Flamethrower for kicks) lines up against regular infantry, sorted by headshots vs armoured health. Grey = needs 10 or more shots to kill a regular inf (armoured rifle infantry, naked techie). This is only for body shots, thank god. Cyan = needs 4-9 shots. In the case of headshots, these things might as well be airsoft guns, especially the PKM. Green = needs 3 shots. Yellow = needs 2 shots. Orange = needs only 1 shot to kill regular infantry. (with shotguns this is with all pellets) Red = can kill any infantry in 1 shot. And here's how everything would line up if the global headshot multiplier got raised to 5, a bunch of weapons had their armour penetration values adjusted, and a couple had less/more base firepower: An explanation of armour/base damage adjustments: Since captains and shotgunners have a harder time of getting headshots due to their accuracy, they don't have a penetration penalty to compensate for all this (so they can still bodyshot decently against armoured infantry) - on the other end of things, the pistols are very easy to headshot with due to their accuracy and hitscan nature, so they have the harshest penetration penalty and thus their headshots are not much better than before - unless they're facing naked infantry who die with ease. Higher armour strength in general means that bodyshots are less desirable (except with the captain/sergeant) which could somewhat compensate for the beefier headshots. APC's 6 -> 7 is completely unrelated to all this and is a balance change coming in the next patch to compensate for some other changes, don't worry about it. Hind's 7.5 -> 6 would be a thing that would happen if this headshot multiplier change went through; firing from above gives it a better chance at unintended headshots, and machineguns all piercing armour better means it essentially has a higher damage than before against normal infantry if its base damage is left untouched. And it really doesn't need help against infantry. So a base damage reduction (compensated by increased multipliers to hard targets to even its damage to them out) really shouldn't hurt it. Snipers' 50 -> 60 would happen if the armour/HS change went through, because it's difficult for them to get headshots; since they use the same warhead as the other "can only hurt infantry" guns they share the same armour penetration capability so I can't just leave them with 50 damage and their old 50% penetration at the same time. Pillbox's 9 -> 10 would happen if the armour/HS change went through, because it doesn't intentionally go for headshots. (It shares the assault rifles' warhead which is why it happens to have a weaker armour penetration settng.) It already sucks versus vehicles, this extra damage point probably won't change that much, and if it does, it can just reload slightly slower as its alpha strike matters more against infantry than it does against vehicles. The big question here would be how to do all this without making infantry worthless again - or whether I should even go through with this at all - and that's why I opened this discussion. So talk away! Something I could do here: making the "neck" hitbox just act like the body (1x damage) instead of the head (5x) so headshots are harder to pull off. Unlike helmets everyone has the same neck box so this affects everyone equally, and somewhat nerfs tanks against infantry since their low ROF makes a failed headshot pretty punishing. I brought up an "aesthetic change" in the video thread; this would be that if the headshot overhaul happened, I would give head hitboxes a new material that would have a more satisfying headshot sound effect attached to it, instead of the current generic flesh impact sound. (Which would get pretty silly if I did that with the current system where Tanya takes 12 PKM headshots to kill.)

Not even a day ago I was talking in dev chat about how a certain potential aesthetic change with regard to bullet impacts might not be appreciated because when you take PKM - which is the weakest per-shot weapon - and try to kill the toughest infantry (Tanya/Volkov) - it takes 12 headshots. (A sniper dies in 7 for the record.) I was planning on coupling said aesthetic effect with a "better headshots" overhaul but I'll leave that for its own thread. It probably wouldn't help the kapitan much in an engagement with a sniper though, given that his strength against infantry is that he gives less of a shit about armour, which the sniper doesn't have.

They already are. 300 Mammoth health/armour barely resists more bullets than 400 Heavy health/armour and I can always compensate for this by making Mechanics repair mammoth vehicles 33% slower (how many other mammoth vehicles are getting meched?) Regen isn't a property of mammoth armour (just the vehicles themselves) so the APC won't have that.

Then it'll still do poorly. By my count it'll take 17+ magazines to take out a mammoth with the damage multiplier I'm currently using (16 on paper, but regen is a thing) compared to the old 28+ (26 on paper). Mammoth tusks will easily kill the hinds first.

A similar thought though: I could do something like this with APCs? If I gave them "mammoth armour" to compensate for the reduced health they'll be getting, they could just charge right through flame towers as long as their armour stays up, while still getting wrecked hard by any real anti-tank weapon. This would still leave them at the mercy of coils though. Flame weapons are the thing that's impacted the most by mammoth armour - small arms come second but with the health drop and the ease of hitting an APC with them, the armour boost won't make that much difference here. I can always increase Hind damage vs mammoth armour so APCs don't become even more of a hard counter to them (it's not like Hinds have any reason to waste ammo on ore trucks, mammoths or MADs anyway so it doesn't affect that).

As for team donate you'd have to ask @Silverlight.

If you mean compared to Beta... well... The tint really doesn't look that different. Differences are likely due to rendering changes over the years and Pacific Threat having a different sky colour, and there's no "brightness" setting for the screen tint so idk how we deal with that.

Define "before"? It hasn't been touched for all of Delta, why's it only an issue 17 months later?

Yeah now go back and look at how much of that portion of the video is on Coastal Influence and Seamist. CI is pretty much heaven for defensive V2s because Allied boats are huge targets and the island is a really tight chokepoint that can be faced by V2s on a service depot. And on Seamist Allies don't have many vehicles to retaliate against V2s with. Meanwhile arty's strangehold extends to pretty much every map that has a slow economy. Hence a price hike should affect it a lot on those while barely hurting it on the high-income maps. For Seamist, I could add that "use Radar Dome to buy expensive tank" thing I was going on about before to give Allies a chance to get a couple more tanks to fend off V2s with.

#SpyLivesMatter

I've paged the guys who should know more about the launcher side of things so they should be able to give you an actual answer later, but first, since the issue happens with APB and not TSR, I have to ask: is your friend on Windows XP? If he is, then that's the problem - scripts 5.0 doesn't support it.

It's a tech level 1 map, of course not.

Well, on Guard Duty specifically, I can tell you artillery are going to have a bad time in the near future.

See my previous comments about new warheads. Turrets share a warhead with the medium, mammoth, phase, RPG and LAW, and Tesla Coils share theirs with the Tesla Tank. None of these units need a nerf against ore trucks I'm pretty sure so that means making new warheads to nerf the defenses without nerfing the units - and I have little room for new warheads. Ore Trucks do laugh at pillboxes and flame towers, but that's because mammoth armour just laughs off small arms and flamethrowers in general.

We already have that - 3x head/helmet/neck, 2x Ant thorax, 1x chest/abdomen/pelvis, 1.5x Flamethrower's fuel tanks, 0.75x limbs/hands/Shock Trooper's battery pack, 0.375x feet. We just can't make armour affect these multipliers separately which is what you asked.