Pushwall

Well aware of this and it's already fixed for next build, the blocker over the hill is too short currently. May also try out making the bridges indestructible here.

So anyway as for individual maps - most of the clearly skewed ones I already noticed the trend a few weeks ago and made some edits already. Bonsai is getting somewhat overhauled next version; less ridiculous foliage placements, Missile Silo defenses are going away, Allies get a WF side turret, Allied base is going to be much less accessible from the sides (the water on WF side becomes deep much closer to shore, and the hill on Radar Dome side is too steep to climb from outside the base), and there will be a tunnel leading to the Soviet ore field from midfield just like the current one leading to the Allied ore field. On the flip side, the Soviet WF hill will be easier to climb from inside the base so flares up there should be less overpowering. All in all it should be a bit more balanced I hope. Ridge War is getting its coil removed again and substituted with flame towers. Keep Off the Grass is getting defense trimmed and foliage trimmed. Soviets in particular will have no frontal flame towers, only coils. Foliage trimming may help the Soviets MAD rush through middle but it also means Allies can dodge a lot more. I may remove the Soviet ore silo or lengthen the AI OT route too as their mixed dumps mean they end up with much more money than the Allies even with much slower trips - plus it'll mean they can't afford to just spam MADs, only use them when they feel they can actually hold the middle. Pacific Threat Soviets are getting an island near their helipad to aid their defense against destroyers, just like the Allied frontal docks, and their flame tower is being moved into a slightly more anti-thief position. Should help the Soviets somewhat. Wasteland idk what's up here. Can't be entirely attributed to mechs feeding points to the Soviets, as they have a big lead in both points wins AND base destruction leads. Rangers will not respawn anymore next version but that's not going to shift the team balance either way. I don't feel this is as important or representative of team balance as the other maps anyway as it's not a full-on AOW map. With the other maps the win ratios aren't skewed enough to say if they're actually unbalanced.

It already does affect vehicles - and fully at that, because C4-type weapons have 0 "projectile" damage and cannot have any more than that. The issue with splash damage in this engine though is that the splash "sphere" has to touch the very middle of an object, instead of any part of an object's hitbox, in order to affect it. However this gets ignored if the projectile directly hit the object (or is a C4 attached to the object, as in this case) and applies full splash damage regardless of distance. So in order for grenades that have stuck to the ground to actually hit most vehicles, the splash radius would need to be increased drastically. And then it'd be OP against infantry, particularly inside any building where the grenadier can put enough distance between himself and the grenade. As for buildings: splash damage cannot affect buildings, except if it's part of a projectile that directly hit the building (seeing a pattern here yet?) And I'm pretty sure regular C4/projectiles can't be given the same structure radius damage voodoo magic that demo trucks/beacons get. Defenses and auxiliary buildings are technically not "buildings" though, and the splash already affects them in the same way that it does against vehicles, so it can be done against them sometimes - there are a few cases on some maps where defenses are packed tightly enough together that a single grenade can hit two at once, and deal full damage to both due to grenades not having distance falloff for their damage, so look out for those special cases! One that I can remember off the top of my head is on Ridge War where you can hit both the Service Depot and the Turret at the same time at the external outpost if you think about the things I said.

It probably won't get as much of an increase as you want though because you'll be able to buy them right off the bat next version and use them in supply truck rushes instead of starshinas (at the cost of not being able to get a vehicle first dump if you do so).

The idea is that since Allies have a much narrower variety of field infantry than Soviet, their equivalents of Soviet infantry are just better (in most cases). Captains get more DPS, but may do a little worse in close quarters compared to Kapitans who get more chances to hit. The same applies to Allied/Soviet rangers. Rifle Soldiers get marginally more DPS than Soviet ones, and more chances to hit due to throwing out more bullets, but the difference is not as significant as the Captain vs Kapitan. Sergeants' secondary fire is arguably less situational than Starshina's. Rocket Soldiers don't get projectile drop and have a scope on their AA launcher, unlike RPG Troopers. Sniper is less visible in most circumstances than the Soviet sniper (most maps are temperate/forested) Soviet infantry really don't need the help (except flamethrowers as you mentioned), especially since the bug with their weapon ready times is getting fixed (currently most of them take twice as long to be usable after exiting sprint mode as Allied weapons). Making the infantry too different means too much more stuff to balance.

TD flamethrower troopers actually had the highest infantry speed (tied with commandos and grenadiers). Makes sense from a gameplay standpoint (clearly an attempt to compensate for their range which was horrible compared to RA flamethrowers) but totally not from a realism standpoint Taking a look at my DPS sheet here, yikes, yeah flamethrowers are way too weak vs exteriors (but not defenses). It's on par with volkovs who are supposed to be the worst at that out of the non-small-arms users.

That was a result of using a script to activate scope mode instead of using the engine's vanilla "secondary fire to scope" logic like in Renegade and now. It also resulted in the scope being EXTREMELY jittery, moving drastically from the slightest bit of mouse movement, and impossible to center on someone's head... unless you used V to have smooth reticle movement instead. Or an enemy happened to move their head into the spot that you were aiming at (fat chance). Essentially, v-sniping was a fucking retarded idea supported by killwhores who wanted to snipe newbies without fear of being sniped back. It locked newbies out of being allowed to snipe because who the fuck is going to just magically know that you can use V in first person when scoping when you can't use it in first person normally? Before I knew about v-sniping I had to drop my mouse sensitivity to about 1/10 of its normal value every time I bought a sniper and reset it afterwards and figured that either this was just how all the good players managed to snipe properly (which is bad game design) or that they were just cheating (which is an entirely reasonable conclusion to jump to given how unusable the scope was by default).

Noooo. Frankly I should probably give that ability to the Light Tank since it's one of the MBTs. On the other hand Keep Off The Grass is getting its defenses trimmed a bit and a lot of maps are having their foliage trimmed a bit too which should help the Allies a bit since they like to move and bump into trees much more.

And the funny thing there is there's some bugs that are hamstringing the Soviets, which are being fixed. Turns out their AI ore truck actually moves slower than the Allied one (though it also has 200+200 more health) and most of their infantry weapons take 1 second to ready after leaving sprint mode or switching weapons, compared to Allied ones that take 0.5 seconds. Rangers are getting a sizable buff next build but I doubt that'll be enough

It certainly gets stopped if you walk on the damaging underwater material, since the drowning damage-over-time effect that inflicts cancels out any other damage-over-time effects. But that also means it cancels out electric damage, lessening the impact of direct tesla hits, which is the opposite of what should happen in reality I'll take a look in a while to see if you can be inflicted with a damage-over-time effect that does no damage as that would work for shallow water, but it'd have the same counter-intuitive effect of dampening shock attacks as deep water does. Plus it would nerf the flamer (but also subsequently the sergeant). The only effect that isn't used is C&C_Fire which would cause the character to visibly burst into flame as it shares emitters with the Fire effect... yeah...

Know who else inflicts burn damage? The apparently OP sergeant. Also not possible since the guy who did the "stuff that causes accuracy penalties" code is gone.

Hence "reliably" instead of "ever".

Might be worth giving rocket soldiers and shocks larger inaccuracy penalties for jumping so that they have to choose between being sniper fodder and being unable to reliably hit vehicles at max range?

In testing I did actually bring back the SVD's faster fire rate/lower damage. It kinda worked since getting sniper headshots period is a lot harder in Delta than before, so the Enfield didn't have a clear advantage like before. But it was still too much pain to balance back then so it didn't make it into the final release. Might be time for a comeback for that?

Only on the few maps that it appeared on. Which were DM maps. There's a reason the devs back then had them removed from actual maps, and that's that it was not balanced. I know, it's crazy, CJ actually made good choices on rare occasions. Exactly. Remember that one of the main priorities of Delta was making it so that infantry that aren't shock/kov are actually worth using in the field instead of just being funny things to look at for the 5 seconds between your vehicle dying and you dying. Instant unpreventable death to something you had no hope of seeing or countering puts a big hamper on that. Again, that's the idea. But given that they take 0.3 seconds to travel their full range and you can't really see them until they're within about 50m of you anyway, it's not exactly easy to see an enemy's tracers. Better that it takes like a dozen shots to pinpoint a sniper's location than ten minutes of searching for the guy himself. Not sure that adding a glaring weakness to 2 vehicles that are already very limited in their use (Supply Trucks after the first 3 minutes and Rangers on almost every map), and adding the same glaring weakness to the V2 but not the Allied artillery that lacks a visible driver, is the right way to go about improving the sniper's use. And I'm pretty sure it's not possible to make the visible drivers take damage anyway. I wanted it to be able to damage MCTs and light vehicles but only if it was within a certain range. Say, a little longer than the range of a tesla tank. But that's also not possible as far as I can tell without giving the sniper a whole different rifle for mid-range engagements, like an SKS for Soviet and Gewehr for Allied (and who's gonna model/texture those?) or just castrating its range (and then it's not a sniper anymore). Noted; will take a look at that. I'm not sure how higher the projectile velocity can go before the game just says no (and at a too high point it'll basically be hitscan and impossible to see the projectile again, which is bad) but I'll give this a look too.

Also as a side-effect of some economical changes, buying a sergeant at the start of the game will mean you won't have enough money for a medium/heavy on first dump (unless you get enough damage credits to compensate for the sergeant's cost) for all maps, not just the ones with fast dumps.

I'm thinking of just increasing the shotgun's reload time a tad. Say, by 0.33 seconds. This would give a very marginal decrease to DPS (about 3%, so he'll still be on top when it comes to wrecking buildings) but more importantly make him easier to overwhelm by groups or time, like with Volkov.

Some more stuff: There's now 4-5 music tracks per map instead of just the previous 1; they rotate randomly and track names/artists are printed in the chat. There's a version of Camos Canyon that has infantry and vehicle bots; good for messing around in LAN mode with, and sometimes it gets enabled on the server too. Using a radio command also prints your vehicle or infantry name, can be useful for the team to know Chinooks and LSTs now have their own "horns" to complement the Supply Truck, Demolition Truck and Ore Truck ones that got added in Gamma. Multiple Service Depots exist (on most maps) and you don't need to kill any of them to win a game by base destruction unlike before. Medics have a new weapon, the MP5 submachinegun, which has unparalleled anti-infantry power among automatic weapons but terrible accuracy and range, essentially making them CQC powerhouses that can't snipe at all, unlike Gamma where their combat was just "rifle soldier that can regenerate" or pre-Gamma where they basically couldn't defend themselves at all. This makes the Medic very useful for supplementing sergeants/captains/Tanya in building raids - you'd typically only get the chance to heal friendlies in close quarters fights anyway. Arm rigging for character models is much less cringeworthy, pretty much all of them actually hold their weapons properly now and don't have broken wrists. "New" models for the Mechanic and Engineers (actually they're pretty old, they just never got rigged until Delta) Splash damage from tesla weapons, rocket soldiers and main battle tanks now gets completely blocked if there's any cover between the explosion and the infantry. Combined with there being much more stuff to hide behind in the field than before, this is yet another thing that helps infantry survive. On the other hand, splash damage from flamethrowers, nukes and naval artillery now penetrate cover better than they did before.

Thanks for giving me an excuse to not change my avatar

Helipads are actual buildings, but yeah the rest are all "vehicles" which is why you don't need to kill them to win by base destruction. That doesn't stop them from having whatever damage resistances you want though, I could easily make ore silos take the same damage as an MCT or building exterior if I wanted, but neither of those would be well balanced (to give an example, with MCT resistances an ore silo would die to 1 engineer C4, and with exterior resistances it'd take 7 engineer C4 to take out); defenses and things with its armour type are simply partway between an MCT/exterior when it comes to C4 and non-explosive damage.

Don't think being offensive was the problem so much as its history.

I guess this must be set in ChronojamTest-era APB where weapons had like 57 degree spray

I remember your name but nothing else - welcome! Server is empty at 11am? Not a surprise, even the Renegade servers are practically empty right now; at this time a lot of players will be at work in Europe, or still sleeping in the Americas. Peak times are around 7pm-1am GMT. As for what's changed I would probably run out of space trying to say. Pretty much everything has changed since Gamma and I'm sure most would agree that it's for the better. Here's a few things: Tech Levels no longer unlock gradually (so basically it's like Beta where everything is available from the start as long as you have the money, but the game will still tell you outright what the map's tech level is), naval combat has returned, infantry that are not named Tanya/Volkov/Mechanic are actually worth using now, there's a bunch of new/revamped maps (a few old maps are missing but some of them are in the process of being remade as I speak), and there's an achievements system in the works (a few things need ironing out). There's a bunch of patch notes threads in the project news forums, just skim those if you want a bigger picture Chronojam handed over the project to me (and to TruYuri but he's no longer here either) about one and a half years ago because of a combination of heavy real life issues, hard drive failure, and almost all the previous APB staff going AWOL or wanting to work on some other project for some more modern engine that AFAIK has gone absolutely nowhere in the past year.

Silos don't have interiors, of course they take damage like a defense or it'd be near impossible for any smallarms (sans rangers/hinds) to take them out. Try an actual building exterior.

Unless you mean defenses which are a completely different thing to building exteriors.