Pushwall

And this was in the pre-Delta days where Tanya couldn't even use a supply truck to get more C4 in the field, she was stuck with the 1 C4 she had (or in some versions, 2 C4 which both had to be used to take out 1 building anyway).

So the team that already has a slight edge in total games won (51.2% currently) needs to have a monopoly on new joiners when the teams are even, almost assuring their victory in small games. Somehow this will balance them out when they already have the edge. Ok

Think I'm going to cut FoI and Rocktrap from the rotation anyway since they're the maps with the biggest outcry, probably because they're still DM maps at heart and domination hasn't shaken it up that much. But I'll take those suggestions into consideration since people may want to play them from time to time (ask a mod to set next map). In particular, the sort-of success of the Tournament plugin that rantanplan (I think) was working on may convince me to revert FoI to having rifleman spawns because the plugin means we can just have techie wars (or volkov wars or tanya wars etc) whenever we feel like it. Unfortunately spawning as a random unit is unlikely to happen, and even if we found a way to do it, it would be open to abuse because people will just hit the suicide button or jump off cliffs on RockTrap until they get what they want/whatever's most overpowered. The outpost idea is actually something I planned to do for FoI originally, though instead of an outpost it was an isolated spawning area where you were safe from the enemy and could one-way teleport to any of the 3 areas (instead of just randomly spawning in them) or use a PT with access to price-altered rifles/sargs/caps, spies (allied) and grenadiers (soviet). But it got cut due to time constraints. It would be possible to do that though.

Hey I know you lurkers are unsatisfied with certain maps judging from the occasional random look at irc. I can't be in every single game on every single map to see what the actual problem with the map is especially since your comments tend to be incredibly unhelpful stuff like "bad map" or "skip". Feel free to post here and elaborate more on what's actually wrong with them!

So... previously you said we only need one server, but here you are apparently playing on a private server. And previously you asked for leaderboards - which are in progress otherwise where would I be getting my stats? - but you also play on a separate and private server, which would have to have separate stats that are meaningless to the developer because they're not reflective of a less "scripted" game where anyone can join, or no stats at all. And you expect me to rebalance the game based on a tiny insular tribe that refuses to mingle with the main player base. Am I the only one seeing how bullshit all this is? Yeah that's a thing with the W3D engine. if teams are even, it always places a new joiner on the team that's doing worse because that is most likely the team that needs help to balance it out. If teams are uneven, it always places a new joiner on the smaller team because that is most likely the team that needs help to balance it out. That's how it is with every other game on this engine. While that can be "fixed" with a server that enables manual teaming, that just encourages people to stack teams, which is even worse. I'm guessing that's what your private server does - how else is it magically free of the joining the weaker side "problem"? So I'll be taking your experiences on it with an even smaller grain of salt than I already was. Wow it's almost like splitting the player base means there's less people on each server

I'd tell you to seek out a Gun Fu instructor: But unfortunately it's been a dead art ever since the release of Delta. On a more serious note though. The colt/pistols/shock rifle in particular are some of the easier things to headshot with - point at their head and shoot, and try not to get into the habit of bunnyhopping cause that hurts your accuracy enough to make it impossible to guarantee a headshot. The more predictable the enemy's movement pattern is, the easier it is to actually mouse onto their head, so being sneaky helps because people who are unaware of your presence are more likely to just run in a straight line to maintain maximum speed. If you're facing an enemy that suffers greatly from jumping penalties (particularly the flamethrower, captain and sniper) and you intimidate them into bunnyhopping for defense, you've hurt their accuracy enough that you probably don't even need to get headshots to win. And with the shock rifle specifically, a lot of its damage comes from the damage-over-time effect that has the same effectiveness no matter where you hit them, so for the shock rifle headshots are usually not worth the trouble. With other weapons you need to compensate for the projectile's travel time by aiming where you think the enemy's going to be when the bullet reaches their location, which makes things more complicated especially if the weapon's rate of fire or projectile velocity are very low (such as the rocket launchers).

Given this and your statement about how artillery "just doesn't compare to the V2" that lacked citations for why the artillery was worse when the game stats were showing it being better, sometimes I wonder if you've actually played the game enough to know anything about its balance. What's your real ingame name, cause System Error Message totally doesn't show up on the listings. Rifles' kill:purchase ratio is uncountable since you can spawn as them without purchasing them, and everything else either performs too horribly to care about (such as technicians who, as you might expect, suck against infantry) or has bugged stats (grenadiers) - aside from that Tanya appears to be performing really well, only coming behind Volkov (who happens to be more expensive, fancy that - but may also be getting a bit of a free pass from AP mines, not sure how those track) and Snipers (who are super-specialised into the "kill infantry" role even more than Tanya is, and are better at living and sneak-killing because of their range). Doesn't look particularly "unbalanced" to me - her kill ratio has to say something about her ability to kill things. And I have no problem killing things with Tanya, but as a guy with a lot of experience and knowledge of the game (being the one who's been tweaking it for almost 2 years) I suppose that's not saying much. Expensive units, while they are generally better than cheaper ones, have to not be massively overpowering because hey, guess what, this isn't an RTS where you can just spam oodles of cheaper units, here you are limited by player count. While in RA you would be able to get 60 rifle soldiers for the price of 5 tanyas, here you can only get as many tanyas as you have players (assuming they all have enough money) and the same goes for rifle soldiers. If a tanya is in your building you cannot divide yourself into 12 riflemen and gank her down (let alone infinite riflemen since they're free here). She still has to be somewhat balanced for one-on-one combat.

The important thing to remember with the Colt (and other pistols) is that its bullets are hitscan, no need to lead the target like you do with other small arms, just click directly on the enemy and there's your hit. The M16 secondary is nowhere near as good in close quarters due to needing to lead the target, having about half the rate of fire, and having much heavier jumping penalties than the Colt.

Hong Kong Phooey is totally a superguyhero

And also to be fair, heavy tanks have that 5m range advantage that, on maps with enough space to allow it, lets them get the first hits in on mediums AND dodge the first hits from mediums if they back up so that the med shells explode just before impact. Which just about assures the HT's victory unless they screw up aiming too much. Mediums get higher-velocity shells that don't receive penalties versus heavy or mammoth armour - a trait that helps differentiate them from the light tank which is more for handling light vehicles, since it has a higher general DPS than the medium but does suffer penalties vs heavier armours. Heavy tanks and medium tanks have the same health and armour so it doesn't really matter. Doesn't seem to stop Soviets from claiming more wins than Allies (in games with high enough player counts that unit/map balance actually starts to matter compared to player skill) on Guard Duty or River Raid where the heavy is the Soviets' only choice of tank...

Like Pacific Threat or Fissure...?

Yeah, it was an Aegis cruiser, so it followed the same rules as the other AA-only weapons: no damage to anything that's not air units or (surfaced) naval units, and very ltitle to surfaced naval units at that. On a map with no air units.

I did also meshsmooth it and put the proper buildings on but that's about it

The same could be said of Bonsai vs Zama Part of the reason I put a radar dome on Bonsai was to make up for TWT's absence (and also because I wanted more MRJ outlets and disabling radar is pretty damn useful on nuke maps) Like Fraydo I'm going to hang back because I would be happy with any old map coming back and being purged of their problems really. Except DM maps. I think we have enough of those.

He probably means having all 3 barrels be used, with the first 2 shots being instant and the third being on a delay. Because, you know, this guy has a thing for latching onto aesthetic/gameplay mechanics that either can't be done (mech animations and more-than-2-barrel animations do not mix) or break the balance ("burst fire" weapons like the TS jugg which fires 2 times then fires once are a thing that sucks in this engine because you can just click again to get rid of the intended delay between bursts, so it just becomes an OP arthritis gun unless you balance it around being able to break the delay, at which point it just becomes an arthritis gun so what's even the point in having the delay besides annoying the user? See: Gamma M16, early Gamma phase tank, early Reborn light inf, Reborn Umagon which isn't a big issue cause it's just a sniper)

This is part of why I made gems triple income. In a lot of cases it is worth it in terms of money over time but you are easier to kill. But there are some where that's not the case.

I figured since it was intended to be useless (on CI at least) I might as well take the opportunity to remind everyone of what a great gameplay mechanic Drunk Missiles are. Oh yeah in case anyone still doesn't get it it was an April Fools joke. Forklifts, on the other hand, are well-balanced and thus here to stay You can always just fill out pathfinding for the whole map, anything infantry can't climb will not have pathfinding. Of course, even though the map is small enough to not crash when given full pathfinding, I still had to restrict the pathfinding to "just enough to get to and from the ore field" because of how RAlistic the ore truck AI is: With full pathfinding coverage, the ore truck prefers to take the cyan path. If the cyan path is unavailable due to it not being on the pathfind grid, the ore truck takes the much shorter red path, which it does currently.

What if I were to tell you that River Raid is the real joke here and cruisers are here to stay?

Yes. Well now you have more of a reason to get one instead of a medium

Act on Instinct, and later Face The Enemy 2 which shared its leitmotif. The latter became associated with the second Soviet mission of RA for me as a kid, which is why it's now one of the songs for Guard Duty

Another patch has been released! Get more information and the changelist in the full update! Red Alert: A Path Beyond Update Hey everyone! Another patch has just been pushed to the launcher and server based on your feedback! Changelist INFANTRY Volkov AT range up from 90 to 95. M16/AK-47 range up from 85 to 90. Grenadier range up from 125 to 140. Grenade is no longer disarmable/targetable. Flamethrower infantry (and FoI fireproof suit) no longer takes 50% extra damage from explosions. Flamethrower projectile speed up from 75m/s to 100m/s. Sniper damage up from 37.5 to 55, but suffers a 50% penalty against armoured people instead of 25%. So its damage against people with armour is almost identical to before, but it becomes much more lethal to people with no armour. Volktillery damage down from 62.5 to 42.5 but uses Shell warhead; this makes barely any difference to its damage against buildings (its main purpose) but makes it clearly inferior to the AT cannon against tanks at close range. Jumping with Volkov AT mode has a much larger penalty (+6 sprayangle instead of +2), but accuracy recovery afterwards is up from -4 per second to -8. VEHICLES Cruisers are in the game now! Actually no this was an april fools you fools Light Tank turret rotation speed up by 33%. AESTHETICS Added another first-person sleeve variant: darker grey for Mechanics. Fixed RPG Trooper's vehicle-riding model (it was not updated when the on-foot model was, so it had some issues with the new texture) MAP CHANGES River Raid has been remade by Pushwall and is now playable again! Here's how it's changed since Gamma: Terrain is completely remade from scratch. Added infantry-only side areas that provide alternate attack routes; the mouth of the river now leads to a beach that leads to the back of the Soviet base, and the river cave now leads to the back of the Allied base. Added ground defenses - 2 pillboxes/flamers each, one at the front and one at the rear. There is now only one Ore Silo. Added ore fields near each base which the AI truck will collect from. The island in the middle now has gems instead of mixed ore/gems. Added tunnels to the bases that connect all the buildings and allow safe repairing of the Service Depot. Tech Level reduced to 1. Added visibility culling system. The map's jukebox plays the following tracks: Scrin, Chaos, Crush, Renegade Jungle. In case you missed the teaser shot last time, here it is! RA_ForestOfIllusion: Secret items take 3-6 minutes to spawn (was 1-6). RA_ForestOfIllusion: Added Grenades and Volkov's AP handcannon to the crate pool. RA_HostileWaters: Removed an Ore Silo, Service Depot and Refill Pad from each team. RA_HostileWaters: Moved remaining Ore Silo to a more defensible position. RA_HostileWaters: Removed stealth crates. RA_HostileWaters: Fixed grenadiers costing 160 instead of their intended price. Get to the launcher and grab the patch! Be on the lookout for more updates, and we hope to see you on the battlefield!

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Same reasons people use volktillery? Being able to hit buildings without having to get through the defenses first? Being able to hit buildings/defenses from certain well-defended spots in the field whereas RPG troopers would have to stand closer in the open and get dunked by artillery? Having a better chance at self-defense if infantry come your way, which they will if you're in a place vehicles can't reach?

Since uhhh willing to share what map this happens on since the changelog says they have to be on the MCT floor?

Tried combining the alternate views with free-aiming?