Pushwall

M2 Browning .50 cal. Which has been used in anti-aircraft roles in real life. The gun model is distinctly an M2 Browning and not an M60 like the captain or ranger, it has a beefier sound effect and a slower rate of fire. Next patch I am most likely toning down its speed in exchange for giving it a 360 degree turret, so it'll be better at dealing with planes that fly overhead but worse at rushing towards an infantry infestation.

I don't really think we can have any more infantry-only maps than we already do. Had a big server clearout yesterday because 2 infantry maps got played in a row. The more infantry maps we have, the more likely that becomes. So don't expect this to be a permanent rotation map. Even with vehicles, don't think people will appreciate having any more "only 1 vehicle route" maps either. Looks like something like this would be a challenge to bring up to Delta's aesthetic standards while also having a playable framerate, when it comes to the out-of-bounds area. :/

You're assuming that every T5 map will have room for an airfield and room for planes to maneuver though. Aside from Siege which already has an airfield, the only T5 maps that could possibly fit an airfield and allow room for MiGs to maneuver are Ridge War and Pipeline - and those would both need a lot of their cliffs shrunk. Every other T5 map is a complete no-go for planes due to having extremely tight quarters and an excess of cliffs that reach far higher than the reasonable height for a flight ceiling (Camos Canyon, Keep off the Grass, Stormy Valley) or would require a ridiculous amount of space to be freed up near the Soviet base just to allow an airfield to be placed and for planes to have sufficient room to take off and land (Camos Canyon, Coastal Influence, Keep off the Grass, To The Core, Zama). Coastal Influence in particular would also need a bunch of new out-of-bounds terrain and would need the island reworked yet again because that projectile blocker over the middle is going to block the limited ammo attacks from planes too. You're also assuming that these CTs running away at half health aren't just warping back into their own base where they are safe. Which is what they're doing since CTs tend to just hover around their own base and defend. You're also assuming CTs will continue to be fragile and unarmoured. If they're to work, they probably need to be more durable. If a MiG can take out even 75% of the health of one of the most durable Allied vehicles in one trip, there is no denying that that is overpowered. If the APC is to do its anti-air role properly, the MiG needs to do less damage to better armoured vehicles (since the APC has its mammoth armour gimmick). And as a result, if the CT gets more armour, it becomes harder for MiGs to hunt down.

It seems that the only way it really "works" right now is if you drive it into combat and then teleport to safety when you're almost dead. Which is kinda lame and just makes it too much of a "safe defender" unit and we really don't need more of those as they mean less building destruction endings. I was cautious about letting the CT have too much anti-building damage because it'd detract from the role of the phase tank and could have been unstoppable since it can circumvent base defenses while phases can't - but the thing is, we now regularly have decent enough player counts that there is no way a group of CTs is getting around the map and warping behind a building undetected. Would a stronger CT be OP in 1v1? Yes, but the game isn't designed for 1v1 and balancing the game around it will break it at anything higher. That Pipeline rush just shows how awful the CT really is - the Soviet team had no scouting info at all, teams were stacked in Allies' favour, we had about 5 CTs, the map layout with a lot of natural walls amplified the CT's main advantage, and our 5 CTs only just barely succeeded in taking out a Flame Tower and then the Barracks. If we'd rushed with basically anything else besides rangers we'd have had much more success in such slanted odds - on a Pipeline game prior to that, where Allies were a bit worse off in team balance, Allies had a slightly more successful rush by sending 5 Light Tanks over the hill to destroy the Radar Dome - and this was a lategame rush too, at which point the Light Tank is a bit more devalued compared to the "as soon as you get 800 creds" rush due to the affordability of Tesla Tanks, Mammoth Tanks, Volkovs and emergency repair Engineers by that stage. And all for 1/3 the price of a CT rush. For next patch it already has its warp range amped up to 300 metres from the current 250 but I'm really not sure what to do beyond that. More armour but less weapon range so that it basically has to warp into action, as if it tries to drive into Soviet units head on it'll take a considerable amount of damage before it can fire its first missiles? A bit less raw DPS but no more anti-building damage penalty?

always.dat, extract it and put it into your data folder (the one with the level .mix files)

Set enabled=false in crosshair.ini to disable the dynamic reticle logic, that doesn't work with circular reticles.

The problem went far beyond just sprinting. Close quarters, extreme verticality, and splash damage is a combination which leads to grenadiers and flamethrowers being unstoppable. Tunnels that are barely wide enough to fit one infantryman pose the same problem. Then there's the economy. Both sets of silos were in places that were impossible to defend. One silo was very hard to find because the tunnel system was needlessly complicated, and the other silo was out of repair reach. So one or both teams inevitably lose all silo income after about 2 minutes, which might not be the worst thing if it weren't for the fact that anyone able to pony up the cash for a gren or flamer is going to keep it for the rest of the match while Allies can't hold onto any purchased infantry unless they just camp in their barracks with the help of a medic and hope that some gren/flamer decides to brainfart and go inside instead of just pointwhoring the bar from outside and flamers killwhoring from outside with splash penetration. And the new anti-refill measures, while they do solve one problem with the map design (it was too easy to just duck back into your barracks in combat and refill), they create a much bigger one (if multiple flamers splash the right spots on the exterior then Allies just can't buy or refill ever again... a problem that other barracks-only maps don't suffer from because on others it's impossible for flamers to get the required coverage to deny more than 1 PT zone at a time and they'd have to be taking positions that allow Allies to actually fire back at them anyway). So how to deal with this? Nerf grens/flamers? Well, the consensus seems to be that on other maps grens/flamers are already mediocre units that could use some help, so nerfing them is definitely not on the cards. Units available on 20+ maps should be viable on more than 1 of them. Remove grens/flamers from the map? Then Soviets have lost about half their arsenal (because you're not going to be pouring money into "no longer hitscan flamethrowers that also murder vehicles" shocks on an inf map and you're never going to get the money for Volkov). And you'd have to remove medics too because, while flamer corner-peek spam laughs all over medic healing in such close quarters, medic healing laughs all over standard infantry when flamers are out of the equation. Remove the upper path? Then there's not enough paths and the silos on that path would need a new home. Remake the tunnels to be more spacious like Rock Trap's? That's an awful lot of map to be redoing, might as well remake the whole damn thing from scratch, especially since the tunnels are not the only problem. But I'm really not up to that right now either. The map concept just has too many problems for this engine's infantry combat and this game's infantry balance. So it's gone and has a very, very low chance of returning (but still higher than Hourglass I guess). The path I took for the larger part of Delta that the map still existed in, involved flamethrowers having an increased price on this map only, and Allies having access to thieves which they didn't have before - also at an inflated price. On top of being a really tacky solution, it really wasn't much of a solution - it just became even more of a map of extremes (but at least one in which Allies' options were less screwed than before). Get thieves asap and zerg down the silo that they can reach before Soviets can get back to the bar to spend their money on flamers? Soviets die. If the thieves fail or Soviets spend their money at the right time? Allies die, just a slightly slower death than they normally would due to dealing with a smaller number of unstoppable flamers at first before silo income (if it's still up) and/or combat credits + donations let more people hop on the flamer bandwagon.

Can you not tag me for things that aren't my department tia

Why do people keep assuming levels got "removed" and not that, in between real life and all my other work on this game, I did not have time to take every single old level imaginable, fix their perceived problems, bring their visuals up to par and then add VIS - because even maps like Hostile Waters that only have 3 small areas containing props/trees can suffer framerate issues simply because buildings are the biggest framerate killer? Bear in mind that I am having to do almost all of this myself. Raap pretty much hit the nail on the head, Volcano is one of the hardest maps to make look good (an issue to which I just said "fuck it" for Metro since so many people wanted it to return but we also lacked any assets that could possibly make it look good - now A Path Beyond on the other hand, I actually want to see that map done justice) so since the only other mapper was doing big, glamorous projects that he didn't have much free time for, I put my time into other, easier projects so that we could actually have a decent number of maps, 16, in the initial release, and actually deliver said initial release before interest in the game died out. The only levels that legit got "removed" are Hourglass, DM_Killfields, CTT_Luna, and Fissure. Hourglass was the only AOW map in all of Gamma that I actually hated (as opposed to just hating Gamma's unit balance/game mechanics) and I am definitely not alone on that, its layout makes it completely unsalvageable. Killfields is your typical no-barracks DM dreg with no strings attached, which almost everyone seems to want to skip, so why bother reviving it? Luna is in a similar boat minus the "no strings attached", but those strings would not have played well in Delta due to inf combat being redone to discourage jumping, and it's kind of obsolete now with Lunar Paradox anyway. And Fissure, again, suffers from a layout that simply does not gel well with this engine's infantry combat mechanics. When I have the time, or maybe more mappers step up and stop expecting me to revive another 15 or so old maps all by myself in a reasonable time frame? Sure you'll see other old maps return. What about Pacific Threat then? Pacific Threat is basically an inverse Shallow Grave - water everywhere except a small island in the middle - and it doesn't seem to suffer this problem despite having longer naval base-to-base travel times than CI/Under. Fog, draw distance, and subs diving means the two lanes can't see each other, sure, but there are always other people scouting who report subs inc or boats inc wherever and this doesn't happen.

That'll just clog up the list of maps on map stats even more. There's also the issue of more frequently needing to mess with server/bot plugins that rely on specific map names. Normally we only have to do it every time we add or remove a map from the game or server rotation. Not looking forward to doing that for every patch that contains a changed map. Oh, and having the launcher install a whole "new" map file instead of just applying a small patch to an existing one.

What happens if the game ends by timeout? Or forced gameover, surrender, and other non-standard game enders? What becomes of the !nextmap command? How well would this work in combination with the "randomize and restrict based on playercount" system? What you ask is most likely doable, but effort. Back to the topic I can say with absolute certainty that Simplified Waters will be in the next patch, all I have to do is figure out how to make the SAMs lining the walls reachable for manual repairs if needed (but then again I guess RaapHW got away with not needing this for its flame towers...) The islands will be lacking aesthetically (they're just pasted onto the HW ocean bed) but with a map as polarizing as Hostile Waters, I really don't want to put all the visual work in until I'm sure it plays well.

We already have one that randomizes them and restricts them based on player count but if you can do it better than Silverlight...

Can't do anything about it without a more precise description of where the blind spot is than "near the Allied PP". I'm sure that half of the places "near the Allied PP" that I could place AA guns would make absolutely no impact on this. Also, why are we discussing making the defenses stronger when one of the reasons why the maps is bad is that attacking the bases is nigh impossible?

So the Soviet island has also been quickly mapped out. I went with airfield and letting nooks be bought from it, that way if nooks still turn out to be a bad idea in general then it's easy to drop the map back to "vanilla" behaviour where chinooks aren't available to Allies because they're Allies and aren't available to Soviets because no helipad. There's also the as-of-yet unseen snow airfield. Maybe we should get a snow missile silo too. Why Tesla coils? Because Gunboats can't handle them. Attack subs can't handle pillboxes because they can't hit land targets at all, so I guess it's only fair that the Soviet base defenses should be something Gunboats can't handle even in small groups (though 6 gunboats could probably down a coil). Destroyers still outrange them as usual. It shouldn't take much time to get this to testable levels and take a slight variation on what Raap suggested - deleting the original islands from the map, plopping these down on it (except not in the same positions because there's meant to be a shorter distance) so that the original underwater space can be retained, and axing the bigger bergs. (And if Raap sees this, yes, I know I forgot to tick valpha on some things, and the AA gun platforms are temporary and will become rocks later to continue the original island themes you laid out )

The supply freighter is actually about 2/3rds to 3/4 of the length of the ANY I'd say. The Cruiser placeholder on Seamist - effectively a +40% scale destroyer - is about a couple metres shorter than the length of the ANY too, so it shouldn't be a problem to spawn cruisers in place of that freighter. Teamwork in a different way. The current plans for the cruiser involve it being a 2-man vehicle; the pilot controls the front guns and the passenger controls the rear guns. So if people don't want to maneuver multiple of these titans around each other, they should share As for V2s the cruiser should be able to outrange them easily in direct combat - though when it comes to hitting inland buildings it may need to expose itself to V2s but it can still fire back at them. It's air and subs it really wouldn't have much of a response to.

And a quick Max mockup of a potential island layout. Terrain colour-coded by height by doing some quick sliceplanes for the sake of the demonstration; blue is just inching out over sea level and red is 9 metres above ground - those AA guns poking over the ridge will be difficult targets for boats while still providing effective coverage against chinooks even if they try to hug the water surface, as the AA guns' barrels sit 1.5m higher than the peak of the terrain. I'm iffy on the idea of no barracks. Plus side is it'd be ~unique~, would solve the easy repair problem by taking engies out of the equation entirely, and if LSTs ever get to carry vehicles, we could add MT/HT terminals to the Dome and successfully landing one of those on enemy shores would take a while to bring down without any rockets so it may actually be worth bringing in addition to the infantry in the LST. Downside is, you'd basically have no response to aircraft if the AA/SAMs opposite your naval building went down, unarmoured techies have basically no hope of repairing the AA/SAMs if they're under dest/missub fire, and spies don't exist so if we ever get a better implementation for the Sonar Pulse then that's a whole naval map that it's missing from. And the big question of "Soviet airfield?" This is thinking far ahead but MiGs are a counter to cruisers. Full blown naval with planes would be epic. But it wouldn't work right now because Yaks are not meant to be anti-boat units, but anti-infantry and anti-building - infantry just don't exist on enough of the map to facilitate that role, and the bases are designed in such a way that an attacking team needs to put in a lot of work to make them accessible to aircraft so they suffer in that role too. But in the event of MiGs - does it replace the missile silo or radar dome, or replace the Helipad because there's a lot of overlap between the Hind/Yak (but this also means no Soviet chinooks unless we specially let nooks be bought from the airfield here), or just make it an extra? Soviet island would need to quite a bit bigger to faciliate it too - the airfield spans the length between the dome and SD in this image, and the width between the helipad and silos, not to mention it needs free space at either end of the runway to allow for clean takeoffs.

"Longer than the old HW route" is still significantly shorter than the old HW route to any of the important rear buildings - and hey, it works out for Pacific Threat. In HW, in a scenario where Tanya doesn't exist, you practically have to starve a team of all their money and/or barracks in order to be able to take the naval building down. Trouble there is the original layout heavily disincentivizes attacking other buildings by making them take twice as long to reach, having auto-repairs from CY, massively limiting what buildings dests, missile subs, and LSTs are able to hit back there, and providing a big enticing pointwhoring pinata in the middle that people will happily focus on even if they have no hope of taking it down because it's free points that are much, much easier to reach than anything else is. Considering how complicated the meshes and the endgame scripts are I certainly don't see this saving a "ton" of time - and it doesn't do much for the problem of the feasibility of hitting non-naval buildings especially if the naval buildings continue to jut out of the front providing easy reinforcement and encouraging people to take the easy pointwhoring target instead of options that make it easier to actually end the game. I should be able to transplant the unconnected bergs to Greybox Waters easily enough though.

So I just made this mockup of what a new HW might look like vs the current one. After drawing it I realise having the dome that far forward might be a bit problematic. Not entirely certain on the missile silo as a replacement for the conyard either especially since the base is smaller. Due to the reduced map size it might be possible that the bergs are close enough to the base that snipers can hit rockets that are sitting on them. So even if the only way onto the icebergs is to use chinook taxis, snipers could stay relevant and we may not need the cold damage I talked about before!

I think you're missing the point I was trying to make. I never said the ANY's repair/LST should face forward. It's just that they're on the wrong side to be suitable for Coastal/Under where you are forced to go right to reach the Soviet base - and even on Pacific Threat, having the repairs on the right side would provide further encouragement for Soviets to go long and attack the left side. On Hostile Waters the ANY would have worked pretty much the same way regardless of whether its LST+repair bays were on the left or right, but you chose to put them on the left and now here I am stuck with a building that requires extra building work, terrain work, or both to be suitable for those other maps where you want to see the advanced buildings replace the originals Even if I opt to just cut holes in terrain instead of mirroring the building so repairs are on the right, there's still the problem where it would take forever to bring a boat from the sea to the repair bay, or get an LST out of the LST bay and into the sea, as in both cases you have to go all the way around the building - extra problematic for boats which have sluggish handling and are also long enough that there would need to be a lot of clearance between the repair bay and the cliff to eliminate any chance that W3D physics might kick in and get the boat stuck. And even more clearance if cruisers become a reality! (In which case I'm sure I could axe the "cargo boat" part of the ANY to make room for spawning those. Repairs, on the other hand, would be a different matter.) But I guess I would have had to mirror eventually anyway regardless of what you chose because who knows there may be naval maps in future that demand the Allies' LST/repair bay to be on the left instead of the right

Same range that everything else appears on radar.

I wanted to do this, so that you can make the choice to have an easier time infiltrating at the expense of not being able to carry on the fight if you lose your phase. But radar doesn't work that way anymore Even if I enable the option for passengers' radar markers to be visible, those markers are only visible while the vehicle is unstealthed, unlike back in Beta. So they got a price reduction instead.

Hostile Waters: Removed from rotation entirely because it can't be saved. As mentioned in the changelog I may look into an alternate take on the map. Siege: Will add a missile silo when I can find the time. As the map currently stands, once we figure out what's "wrong" with Chrono Tanks and where they need to be buffed, they may make the map a bit more interesting once they're useful enough to warrant the price.

I've been meaning to get around to this for a while but mirroring the Advanced Naval Yard while ensuring all of its extra components also mirror properly proved problematic last time I tried. Why would I need to mirror it, you ask? Well, the repair bay and LST spawn zone are both on the left hand side of the building. Plus the building is twice as large as the original. And on Coastal Influence and Under, you know what else is directly to the left of the naval yard? A big old f-off cliff. So move the ANY further to the right to allow boats to park in the repair bay and LSTs to leave? Nope, no can do, because then on Coastal Influence there'd be no land for either side's LSTs to beach at and no room for Missile Subs to aim at any buildings behind the ANY, and on Under V2s would be able to hit the enlarged, further-right ANY from the Soviet base - further enforcing the "kill rocks ASAP" mentality. I get the feeling you did not design the ANY with "other levels" in mind The ASP is also problematic for some of the same reasons. The LST spawn is on the right hand side of the building. On Under/CI this once again leads directly into a cliff. But the dilemma here is that the repair bay is on the left and we certainly can't mirror that without making it incredibly inaccessible on Under/CI and further encouraging Allies to spam ships down the short route on Pacific Threat since that would mean Soviets wouldn't be able to repair subs facing that route.

I was thinking, if I go through with Greybox Waters, of taking a page out of the book of the RA expansion mission "Top of the World" - making it so any infantry who happen to find themselves stranded on the icebergs takes gradual damage (to the effect of taking 2-3 minutes to kill a regular infantry) because it's too cold. So you can't just camp out a wall of rockets on the bergs forever. I can understand not wanting to completely axe infantry from the equation however and I guess that led to the sloped bergs with ridiculous rewards.

Really it's "hold the middle" combined with the middle being too easy to hold, basically required to hold, still being hard to launch an attack from, and then either taking forever to reach to try to break the hold, or taking forever to avoid. On HW, it costs money to get to the icebergs (which seems to turn people off of making the effort no matter how much money grows on trees - see earlier versions of HW) and there are only a select few points the icebergs can be entered from which makes them easy to camp. Avoiding the middle entirely also takes a ludicrous amount of time. On Siege, the ramparts are an incredible defensive position, nigh unassailable at times, and the ways around them are fairly lengthy. But at least there's more than one way around them now - it was such a dull map when your only choices as Allies were ramming headfirst into 10 indestructible Volkovs on ramparts, or taking a Chinook party the other way and losing all 6 of your guys to the 1 Hindkov that decided to stay at home. Under doesn't seem to be at quite the same risk - the map is very small so it takes very little time to attempt to break the hold on the middle, and while vehicles only have one way in, infantry have three - not to mention there's the 2 backdoor base entrances for infantry (killing the rocks just makes one of those harder to use instead of removing them entirely, and there's a 3rd if you count LSTs) as well as the naval factor. I'd say River Raid is closer to that, but I see surprisingly little vitriol directed at the map despite it having been permanently in rotation ever since the introduction of the remake in April 2016, and don't remember much hate for the original version of the map prior to Delta either. I've been long considering opening up the infantry-only cave/beach routes to vehicles to make the map less meatgrindy but at that point it may need base defenses. Pipeline also has a "hold the middle" mechanic in its oils, but - again - is relatively open and small, and it's hard for a team to keep all the middle objectives under control at once because there are plenty of ways to reach them by foot and it doesn't take forever to do so. All three of these maps also don't exactly have the strongest of base defense layouts - and River Raid doesn't have base defenses period. So a team "holding the middle" on them has more incentive to actually press the attack. Meanwhile Siege's defenses are pretty strong, and Hostile Waters may not have any frontal anti-boat defenses but the naval building is very easy to repair and very hard to interrupt repairs on. TL;DR hold the middle, middle being basically unbreakable, bases being hard to attack, and gargantuan map sizes/long travel times is not a good combination. If I can spare the time I might look into recreating the HW play space anew with basic visuals for the sake of testing how it might play if: the distance between bases was smaller the base layout encouraged attacking non-naval buildings for more reasons than just puntos the island layout allowed placement of AA in positions that could actually prevent a chinook from landing the icebergs were smaller and more spaced out so they could still be used as boat cover without suffering the current issue where they create passageways that force boats into single file and prevent them from turning around there was no "hold the middle" element then if it tests well I can try to recycle Raap's HW assets for it or hand it to him and see if he can spice up the visuals. The naval repair bay might even get used for that as a teamed, killable structure so that there's another spot by your island other than just your NY where you can go to sell/repair.