Pushwall

Reborn certainly does have the feel down, you've got that right. Too bad feel isn't the most important thing huh? I rarely ever see people actually playing it, except for the occasional tryhard killwhore that joins the empty server, gets the unit that's unkillable in 1v1 unless someone on the other team does the same AND can match their "skill", and just camps out waiting for someone to join who then very quickly gets bored and leaves because they don't find the game to be enjoyable when they always find themselves facing down a unit that they cannot kill or avoid. APB is not trying to be Renegade or Reborn. It's trying to be APB.

Correct. That's one of the reasons AI cruiser turrets would not be a good idea, unless you just gave them no bullet drop which looks odd next to your own ones which do. The only reason the Seamist "cruisers" are able to get around this is because their gun is forcibly elevated to a certain degree and they are placed at just the right distance from the base for the shells to fall on the base and nowhere else. If you did this with a movable cruiser the AI turret would just be useless unless you're parked at a very specific distance from your target.

So... that thing that it already does on maps that have a radar dome and therefore allow this to work? This is supposed to happen but I think the logic for it is broken, BuildTimeDelay is 2 which could either mean 2 times longer or 2 seconds longer, but neither of these actually seem to be the case. I've paged the scripts guys so hopefully they should be able to fix this (or clarify if the function is for something else entirely). Lighting is baked into terrain so all this will do is lead to rooms still being bright but containing shadowed infantry. And the Renegade approach of "paint all the walls red" looks dumb.

Too bad the actual RA one only has a lobbing range comparable to grenadiers (which aren't even the super-arm-strength bugged or APB grenadiers) and is actually more fragile than a Tanya or medic (uncrushability notwithstanding). It might as well be a medieval catapult.

Something that came up in the staff chat before was the idea of a deathmatch/domination map set onboard a cruiser. Kind of like the freighter mission in Renegade, where the vehicle in question is just a big pile of geometry that you can move around inside and on top of rather than an actual vehicle. That seems a bit more plausible than what Isaac's going on about - if there was no land how would you get into the cruiser vehicle to begin with? How would players get from their fixed spawnpoints to the cruiser if it moves away from the starting location? How would players get from the cruiser to the gunboats when vehicles have to have a worldbox that is cube-shaped and does not remotely correspond to their actual geometry, so you wouldn't be able to walk around on it properly?

What does this excerpt from the Red Alert manual say though?

Well since there's been some delays getting the patch out I decided it would be a better use of my time to cram more fixes into it instead of repeatedly explaining things that I've already explained to certain people. So in addition to most of that stuff you put up on the bug tracker, and some other things, here's something I've done that's relevant to the thread: next patch hinds are getting a 20% damage reduction to main buildings (this may sound a lot but it still leaves them killing buildings considerably faster than in Nuclear Winter where I remember a LOT of stronk hind rushes) and longbows are dealing 90 damage per rocket to heavy vehicles instead of 80.

Do I really need to expound on this for you? Unfortunately over the span of 2015 the dev team has dwindled down to just me and a couple others who just don't have the time to do much, and everyone else at W3D Hub is either too busy with their own projects which are in development and actually have teams, or are again too busy with real life. "Version 4" is a pipe dream, stop thinking about it. Before you pitch any more grand ideas for APB in future, you should really ask yourself how long you think it would take one person to do it, if you would like to spend that much time doing it, if the game ABSOLUTELY needs this change, and if it would be worth all the time you spend on it. I'm just here to do bug fixes, minor balance adjustments, fix up another couple of AOW maps, and maybe include a couple of features that we already have most of the framework for, because anything bigger is a massive timesink for one person working on a free game.

Uh, when was this ever a thing in RA2? Spies only enabled the ability to build veteran versions of their own units when they went into a factory, and going into a battle lab enabled a unit that wasn't even initially buildable by either side anyway. Engineers being able to flat-out steal technology is a thing that's been tried already, it was on MPF's APB server back in version 2.1.4, and it was almost as much of a disastrous decision as tech levels. Somehow I don't think the AR devs want to do something that someone else has already proven to be a bad idea, but I'll let them speak for themselves.

Maybe I should make a list of everything that's been mentioned and confirmed/turned down and why because holy shit I will never hear the end of ADD CRUISERS ADD CRUISERS ADD CRUISERS otherwise. Actually screw that the "why" for everything pretty much boils down to "major dev is over and the team is basically just me and W3D's scripts boffins at this point, so aside from bugfixes and aow maps we're only adding more features if the effort:reward ratio is really good".

Submarine bots would definitely not work out. Subs are VTOLs that pretend not to be, and the AI is not very good at moving them even in the environments VTOL AIs normally get used where they won't accidentally snag on any flight ceilings (remember that the ocean surface is essentially a flight ceiling), bots wouldn't be aware of the "no firing while submerged" limitation, even if that limitation was lifted they wouldn't know that they can't hit things that aren't at the same height as themselves, they wouldn't know that submerging can save their life either, vehicle bots are not good at turning to face their target because they all seem to assume they have 360 degree turrets or homing weapons, and if they were given homing torpedoes to account for their turning/aiming troubles they'd start firing them at ground targets too, and that's where we get into "can't stop that" territory because there are only two ways of categorising vehicles for the AI to prioritise: "heavy" and "light", and we already use those to tell base defenses that they should prefer certain targets over others. Like if a pillbox is given a choice between shooting a tesla tank and a mammoth tank it prefers the tesla because the pillbox can actually tear through the tesla's paper-mache armour. Boat bots on the other hand, that would work, except for destroyers focusing on submerged subs that they can't hurt, and without functional sub bots to pit them against why bother anyway?

So in the end you need pathfinding everywhere anyway. Unless the only AI units that exist are ones that don't shoot (OTs) or only have the ability to shoot as a joke and aren't expected to actually be shooting every enemy that a normal player would notice (OT technicians).

Well hey there's something that's within reach; it doesn't involve the use of Renegade's flaky AI, there's already some scripts that would work just fine to implement it with a few minor alterations, there's a relatively small amount of balance concerns for it compared to all the other stuff that's popped up in here, it shouldn't require us to completely redefine the game, and there's only one required asset that's missing this time: a texture. The model also has a few rigging issues but that's better than no model.

What "version 2"? This game's gone through many iterations and versions over the past 12+ years by the different people who've spearheaded its development at different points in time, and all of those versions left the core gameplay mostly intact because it works and doesn't need to be changed. When you try to change a formula that works, you get Gamma, and as I mentioned before, its big "selling point" of units gradually unlocking killed it because (almost) nobody likes having their choices so heavily restricted for the first half of every match.

Also to even build an MCV you would need to start with a war factory, and to acquire the money to build one you would need to start with a refinery (or a silo but that takes longer and is less engaging because it involves protecting something that's inside your base rather than outside). So the end result of this is that you have to spend time and resources on unlocking infantry, air and naval, but not tanks or resource gathering. Infantry, air and naval would have to be pretty damn overpowered to encourage people to actually unlock them instead of just massing the war factory units that they can build right at the start, at the time when they would in fact be most useful because there would be no defenses to slow them down and no engineers to quick-repair buildings.

Alternatively we could not make such a major alteration to the core gameplay because it works fine the way it is and the effort required for that massively outweighs whatever potential reward could come of it. Did nobody get the memo about how major development is over so anything that requires spending ages completely redefining the core gameplay will not happen?

+1 for ranger rush. I heard MPRA2 was complaining about OP arties during a stormy valley match... looks like this was it. OP arties on a map where hinds exist. What a laugh. Little hint, if one team is using teamwork and the other team is being discouraged by defeatists, the teamwork team probably doesn't even need good units to trash the other one.

They can if at least one of them has a rocket soldier and jumps out to finish the job, in much less time than it takes for 3 hinds. "Loitering longer" is a bad thing when you're just unloading everything on one target because it means the enemy has more time to destroy you before you've used all your ammo. In any case the Longbow's already been given a minor buff for next version, doubled projectile velocity, because I noticed it has a lot of trouble hitting moving objects on the edge of its range. The new patch is already waiting to be pushed so I can't add anything else without forcing another massive upload.

Yeah, if we did have a model I would definitely include it on Seamist at least, since right now the base just gets bombarded by shells coming from invisible objects in the distance fog...

Read the reasons why we can't put the cruiser in a little harder.

Yeah, and all that has stayed that way because they're some of the few Red Alert gameplay mechanics that were either sensible to begin with or become sensible when you transition them over to an RTS environment - for example, Red Alert's 5-shot minelayers were a joke, AP ones for the reasons I mentioned above and AT ones because tank rushes can get too big for a small minefield to be a concern (and again they can just start shooting the ground when they notice because in RA mines died from being breathed on), whereas here there's a much smaller number of units going around, infantry actually matter, and mine removal is less of a trifle unless you're using an artillery/V2/demo (or in the upcoming patch, an engineer) so the 5 mines per trip approach works. Gamma actually shook that up and made it 8 for some reason but it got reverted pretty quickly. Yeah I never saw any documentation on how tech centres should be so when I joined the team all hopeful and optimistic to get a lot more shit done than I did, I was imagining for Tech Centres to be tied into tech levels - like on a tech level 5 map, lose your tech centre and you drop down to 4. This was when Destroyers/Missile Subs were tech level 5 and I was hoping to get the Chrono Tank included, so you'd lose a lot more than just tanyas, demos and MADs. I took part of this idea and applied it to Radar Domes; now losing them means you just lose access to Tanyas and Volkovs which is still noticeable.

Ughhhhhhhhh bots have been brought up so many times for different purposes and I'm just going to give you the same answer I always have: no, that won't work because most maps only have enough pathfinding sectors to cover the area between a base and its respective ore field, because that's all the Ore Truck needs and because the editor crashes if I let it generate pathfinding across an entire large map. And not only will bots obviously not venture outside the pathfind grid but they don't even shoot at things that are outside the pathfind grid. Have you ever seen the AI OT technicians pursue people across the map? No, they stay inside their comfort zone because that's all they can do except on maps that are small enough to support full pathfinding coverage like Camos Canyon, which is why that map happens to have a bots version.

Because making enough open space in bases on all the maps to support that and then fully modelling out/texturing/animating both tech centres is not a good use of time that could be spent on things that actually matter. Also it's stupid.

Only if all of its floor is above ground level (such as any defensive structure). Try that with a construction yard and you'll get a lot of z-fighting on the ground floor and won't be able to get in or out of the basement because it's blocked off by earth. Even then, if a building uses main building logic (i.e. required for base destruction victory), I'm pretty sure if you put that in midgame it doesn't function properly. Defensive structures certainly work though.