Pushwall

Under is already the most soviet-biased map

Allies don't seem to dominate the oil pumps on pipeline. Allied Chinook access is totally going to lead to Allied bias though, unless each Soviet SAM/rear auxiliary building has an accompanying flame tower or tanyas don't exist. It doesn't seem like it would be hard to fly low and bring in a tanya army and shut down a bunch of SAMs at once or brute-force 1 building with an engy/bunch of sacrificial soldiers.

I've been spending months trying to fix r34ch's horrible design decisions - I guess you haven't experienced the initial Delta version where the "island" was a peninsula that the Allies could never lose access to while the Soviets had a bridge to worry about, and I know for sure you haven't experienced the test versions where the dirt patch behind the house was a gem field that Allies could farm from with no risk after blowing the bridge, and was dug-in enough to give arties an even better defense than currently against V2s. A lot of the fixes have had their own repercussions though, so your feedback is appreciated Oh yeah also the pier that used to be near the lighthouse (i.e. opposite the pier near the Soviet ore silo) will be returning for LST teams to drop infantry at to handle arties and/or chuck grenades/kovtillery at the refinery. Though that only benefits the sovs if they still have their sub pen. Client side damage. He'll have the same thing happen to him if you aim at him. Only way of fixing that is to make the arty's (and v2's for balance sake) damage all server side, which instead means that if you want to hit an arty/v2, you have to predict where the server thinks the arty is (and where the server thinks your arty is and what direction it's aiming!) instead of the current and more user-friendly system of aiming at where the arty appears to be on your screen. Take a guess at how well that'll be received. Try it yourself, it won't work because you do have to directly hit the SD, it just shows differently when filtered through the server and to other clients as I mentioned.

https://secure.w3dhub.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=415613&p=621209 On top of that a bunch of Allied defenses are already being removed in the next build, but the remaining ones will be moved closer together so they cover each other better.

I'd prefer to just have water mask bubbles (and water wakes/smoke/transparent glass) properly, so that spotting a submerged sub from far away is very difficult and the same applies to subs spotting boats. As long as the bubble effects are easy to see, the sonar pulse won't even be worth the effort, and making subs invisible will also not be worth it. There's issues with static sorting though; those will have to be solved first.

I believe you're thinking of TS_Gear. I don't know what happened to it either.

I've added a link in the OP to an album of Red Alert 1 map screenshots; this should be a handy reference for anyone wanting to recreate maps from RA1.

As for Camos Crossing: I feel the defenses could be spaced a bit further apart from each other, so they don't cover each other as well and are harder to repair. I like how the barracks are facing away from the field, sniper camping should be much less of a concern now. The resource field being gems might be a tad much. One dump is enough for the entire team to get Tanyas or Volkovs and still have all their previous silo income to spare. I figure the original map was based on the bottom-right section of RA's Camos Crossing, so I'm not sure where that river below the Soviets is coming from Then again, Camos Canyon doesn't look anything like the "real thing" either, so whatever. Yeah, you can add/remove units independently of tech levels (see also: how any map that doesn't have a radar dome doesn't have MRJs, and Hostile Waters previously didn't have shock troopers despite being above their tech level) Problem is that involves making a custom "temporary" purchase list, so any time a patch alters the default purchase list, you have to manually go through and update the list on any map that doesn't use the default list. Or else you get stuff like Hostile Waters a few versions ago where Grenadiers still costed 160 credits when they were 500 on all other maps.

With regards to the "offensive Seamist" idea: Soviet vehicles OP. In order to prevent V2 arc shots from damaging the base, the cliff that the Allied base is positioned on would have to be around 120 metres tall. For reference, the height difference between the Allied and Soviet bases on Ridge War is only 50 metres, and there's a lot of space between them to make the height difference less jarring. A plateau 120m tall would probably look very silly, and it would take a pretty long time for infantry to climb/descend the access tunnel connecting the Allied base to the bottom of the cliff if it was that tall. In fact it would most likely be impossible for Allies to get to the supply trucks first. To prevent MAD tanks from damaging the base, the cliff would have to be 250 metres tall. Volktillery would likely also be able to hit the base if the plateau was too low (think trying to hit the back of the Allied WF on RidgeWar). Pacific Threat's flight ceiling is 50 metres high as well, and the flight ceiling would obviously have to be quite a bit above the plateau for Longbows to actually be able to move around - and then Longbows would likely be able to fly over the Soviet base without getting hit by SAMs because of how high the flight ceiling is. If you make the plateau less tall and add a projectile blocker to blue-ball V2s, you also prevent snipers from shooting into or out of the base, and on the rare occasion that someone steals a Longbow, they'd likely end up hitting the blocker while trying to shoot pillboxes or something. Which is pretty dickish considering they're limited ammo units that the Soviets have no way to refill. (So you might also want to add a refill pad to the Soviet base.) Projectile blockers really only work if they're surrounding something that no unit can stand on. If you get rid of V2s so there's no need for a blocker, and MAD tanks so the cliff doesn't need to be insanely tall, that leaves the Soviets with these WF options: Supply trucks - instant access to these means the Soviets have an even easier time of rushing to the town, letting each passenger take a neutral truck, and taking them out of Allied reach. Heavy tanks - fair. Without any buildings or vehicles to shoot, they are pretty much just "faster than sprinting" transports that put some hurt on infantry that are out of cover. Tesla tanks - sort of bordering fair and unfair; on their own they're fine, and the only base structures they'd be able to hit are the pillboxes, but a whole army of these is going to be a pain to bring down. Minelayers - well this certainly isn't OP when the Allies' only real offensive force on this map is in their infantry (until the SAMs/power is down) and the only way out of their base that doesn't involve buying a $1200 unit is going through a tiny chokepoint. What tech level is the map? If it's 5 I can definitely understand needing a Tanya deterrent, if it's lower then these are OP. Ore trucks - fair. Well, until someone parks their ass in front of the Allied tunnel and delays the shit out of them. Mammoth tanks - Soviets can probably just sit in their base until they get the money for these, then sit in their base some more until the time runs out. While that's obviously what you're supposed to do on defense missions, the Allies don't really have many ways of attacking a base that's full of mammoths without vehicles, especially if it's mined up to deny Tanyas. Demo trucks - in the rare instance that Allies actually get into one of your buildings, you can just get one of these and solve the problem immediately. Boo. Rangers - since Allies have no tanks, RPG rangers are basically longbows that also decimate infantry, have unlimited ammo, don't draw the ire of redeyes, and cost less, but can't attack the base cause they can't scale the cliffs. So everyone will probably get them because while they have less firepower than mammoths, they can easily move to counter any air/inf rush anywhere. As you can see, for most of the armed vehicles, the main argument is that too many make it too easy to defend. Look at how well Allies do on Seamist with their only replenishable vehicles being longbows, which can't even be bought that frequently due to silo income. So you might as well just go the Seamist route of giving the Soviets a limited supply of vehicles and ditching the WF - and having them only come in after the first 2-3 minutes so the competition for the neutral supply trucks is a bit less one-sided. I like the map idea itself, so thumbs up for that, but giving infinite vehicles to the defender when they have a higher income than Seamist Allies and better infinitely-buyable defensive options than longbows probably won't end well.

Pfft I don't even know what you're talking about, and that's not even a humility thing; back in NW, nearly all of my time on the Allies was spent goofing around in a mech-ranger to make a statement of how ridiculous mechs were, but rangers were still useless against base structures. Well, except the tesla coil. As for "players I dread" I pretty much take the same stance as Alstar; it's more a case of who will make the game interesting. It's just no fun when hardly anyone on the enemy team knows what they're doing. There are plenty of people I could list, but here's who stands out the most to me out of the people who still actually play: Silverlight; other people have explained his merits enough already, I don't need to rantanplan; just an all around competent fighter. Basically a toned-down a1ph4riu5 who also actually ventures out of the safe zone around his base, so at least you don't need divine intervention to deal with him. forg0ten1; sure, all the old hands know what to expect from him, but that's not going to stop the newer teammates who don't know from creating a hilarious disaster.

Another solution I just figured out: extending the entry zone of the submarines further beneath the sub itself, so you can still enter your sub if you fall into the water. On the other hand, this will make stealing subs easier too, but people should be buying from the pen PTs anyway. I've tried this with the normal sub pen and it works but given how deep the advanced sub pen docks are I'm not sure how well that would pan out.

Oh him... He was unbeatable. I used to think he was part cyborg. Oh, I once took down his volkov with a single rifle solider on ridgewar. One of the two biggest highlights of my APB life I remember when he was med-meching on Classic Fjord, and while using my Volkov AT to put pressure on his med, he just happened to eject in my line of fire, get accidentally shot in the head and die. He immediately (rage?)quit and I got a free med. (For any newbies here, this was when a good medmech was practically invincible - you could repair a vehicle AND fire its weapon at practically the same time, because vehicles continued to reload when you got out and the mechanic's wrench instantly repaired a big chunk of health at once.)

Extra gratings or altered entry zones really won't help in preventing entry issues, because the worldbox of the sub is entirely underwater (which it has to be or else it'll just get stuck) and the game checks if there's any colliding surfaces/objects between your infantry and the vehicle and denies you entry if there's any blockage. This also holds true when exiting vehicles, which is why an Allied LST that wedges itself between the sub pen's docks will just doom everyone because it can't deposit them through the fence. And the floor obviously has to be a collidable surface or infantry would just fall through it. So the floor is what gets in the way of trying to enter from the dock, so adding extra floor does nothing to help. However, since the LST is above water, the floor doesn't block entry, so the side docks of the sub pen are being given grates that extend out just enough to ensure that you can't drown yourself trying to enter LSTs. A mercy teleport zone or ladders in the water will just make it even easier for Allied engys/tanyas to get into the sub pen. Automatically teleporting to the naval units solves the problem at the minor expense of spies. But when we get the sonar pulse working, there'll still be a purpose to them.

The next build will come with proof of dual turrets (but not cruisers)

We can totally do cruisers now because I've found a substitute for 2-turret logic. All we need is a model. People were just asking for this ingame yesterday :/

Or maybe the pillbox could use a buff against vehicles (though not a big one - it shouldn't be anywhere near as strong as the flame tower)? I feel like they're just completely irrelevant the moment vehicles come into play... As for flame towers hitting your "side armour", it's possible they're actually hitting your tank's barrel, which is an 100% damage zone. Looking at the LE parameters it turns out that I actually removed projectile extensions from flame towers due to issues with the projectile easily snagging against trees, but forgot to do the same for turrets. Whoops. So the flame tower's fireball hitbox is pin-sized (so that's certainly not your issue) and the turret shell's hitbox is a fair bit larger than the shell itself. I'll be sure to amend that so the turret shell's hitbox is also pin-sized; while this will make it less lethal against infantry it'll also improve its ability to shoot through forests and other obstacles. Bear in mind also that turrets also have a much larger anti-vehicle range - 140m versus a pillbox/flame tower's 120m. With a clear line of sight they can start damaging Soviet vehicles earlier than the vehicles can damage them, unlike pillboxes/flame towers where both parties get their first shot off at roughly the same time. And turrets, just like tesla coils, have 25% more health than flame towers or pillboxes - which, even with the heavy/mammoth's slight DPS edge over the light/medium, lets them survive a little longer than a flame tower, and a little can be just enough to matter. Given how many turrets I've seen get taken down to <20% health and then saved by engineers, compared to flame towers which tend to just die, that 25% extra health is certainly doing them good.

Problem there is that makes it easier to throw C4 into high places that repair tools can't reach...

How often did anyone actually use grenadiers in older versions of APB? Outside of infantry-only maps like Fissure and Camos Crossing where, in some versions, they were actually removed from such maps due to being too overpowering (because back then the barracks did not have tunnel exits on inf maps, so the 1 remaining exit was easily splash-camped) making them once again useless in every map that they were allowed in? In its original role it was in competition with the flamethrower who does pretty much the exact same thing but better and for a slightly higher price. Since their roles and prices were so similar, no matter how much you buff or debuff them while retaining their original roles, one of them is undoubtedly going to be seen as the superior unit and the other as the useless unit, unless they're made completely identical and then what's the point in them even being separate units? This is a bit different for, say, the rifle soldier/captain since the rifle soldier is completely free, and the RPG trooper/shocky where there's a hefty 600 credit difference between them (and even then they're pretty different because shocks are much more capable of handling infantry but have no long range AA option). We could alternatively have followed that trend and made the flamethrower much more expensive, but given how much outrage there was over the new "Volkov lite" grenadiers when they were 500 credits, I doubt that would have ended well.

No excuse to add a luck-based anti-building weapon. Bear in mind that there's a much smaller gap in DPS between weapons that are weak/strong against buildings than there is for weapons against vehicles. An unlucky grenadier would be so badly affected by this that he'd do better damage to a building by being a kapitan shooting it from outdoors with his machinegun. If his damage was increased to compensate for that, then under the luckier circumstances he'd basically be a tesla tank at 1/4 the price in a barely-hittable infantry package.

Charging weapons are a thing that's in the engine, but the delay of the charge is dependent entirely on lag (either that or an RNG that only kicks in when playing online, cause charge times are consistent in LAN mode). Remember the Gamma shock rifle which was intended to have a 1 second chargeup but really ended up being anywhere between 1 and 2 seconds? Which, in addition to making it near impossible to hit infantry, also meant that its DPS was random? Yeah how about no.

Why would it need that? Even at 2/3 its previous power it can still repair defenses from 1% to full because no defense has more than 2/3 as much health as a main building.

Subs may have VTOL physics but are still treated as ground units by the AI - see how turrets and pillboxes shoot them but AA guns do not.

Nope. This is why the area the depth charge turret can "see" within is so restricted. And it'd be shooting at land infantry/vehicles too if it was unrestricted enough to target aircraft.

The Refinery is a pretty big target.

On another note, the scripts team have just delivered a version of the cyborg reaper script that doesn't have the downsides I mentioned before, so we can totally have people teleport into the naval units they just bought. I'll still see about making some sort of exit from the docks (either ladders or ramps) so that players can actually get out of their subs at their base without risking dying or having the sub die (which also means spies will still be able to steal them in different circumstances). There's also the issue that Soviet LSTs can be tricky to board from the sub pen since they are just slightly small enough that you can fall into the water when trying to enter from certain sides depending on the map - I'll add some blockers to prevent accidental deaths when boarding.