notDMB

I don’t have the actual stats on hand but each regular shot deals damage in the 20s in my experience, so about 60 damage for a full “salvo”. With a lower rate of fire than a regular tank. And lower damage.

A 250% increase in damage would still have it dealing less damage than any actual tank with a longer reload time than any of them. These buffs would still make it worse than any tank in it’s tier, it would just let it actually interrupt enemy repairs in a deathball scenario.

Mostly because I was trying something else, I had a huge cash reserve and could have safely tanked and repaired when needed, but I was dying. And like I also said, if you remember, was that when you’re constantly dying without accomplishing anything you do run out of money. The IA economy is a Floodplain. Either you have money or you don’t. But this is completely pointless and irrelevant. Because I still could have easily afforded !ammo call ins with the passive income without harvester drops and the money I would have gotten with an infantryman just running up points because that’s significantly less than high end tanks or even higher end suicide tactics, regardless of if it costs 250 or 500. A cooldown increase would be nice. Also if resupply tanks worked on the driver they would simply encourage even more lone wolfing. Their design is to encourage team play. You said it yourself, why would you ever buy a resupply tank if you can’t resupply yourself? That’s the mindset for why !ammo will never be removed because this player base just doesn’t really care about playing support that much. The few players who do get repair tanks. And I can hardly blame them, it’s not like you get points or veterancy for doing it. You don’t get a ton of veterancy for repairing, but repairing is the fastest way to make money in this game. Even faster than hitting buildings (though killing them nets even more, but that’s not exactly something you can farm.)

Well I’m not calling for the economy to be completely overhauled now am I? Just saying that the issue !ammo represents can’t be fixed by small number tweaks. As long as !ammo exists resupply tanks won’t be used.

The only time money matters is if it’s a silo only map, you’re throwing top tier tanks into a meat grinder and dying instantly, or you have no passive income and aren’t repairing anything. I wager most resupplies are 3-4 times a game, 6 or 7 for the high end, usually just one per trip if you get contested and even less if you’re being counter camped. The issue is if you’re calling in resupplies is you’re hitting things, and you get a shitton of money for doing that. An extra 1 or 2k in resupply costs at the absolute most, you would need to call in 8 resupplies in a single game, would make effectively no impact on anything. Every time I run infantry and aren’t being popped by a good sniper or nuked or crushed by a stealth tank, I’m always floating 10k plus. The economy is too bloated in this game. An extra 250 credits barely passes your passive income from one Refinery and one silo just ticking, doesn’t surpass harvester dumps, doesn’t even matter at all in blue tib maps, and definitely doesn’t matter if you’re scoring points hitting tanks or buildings. Money in Interim Apex is a Floodplain.

My alternative would be the same line of thinking. Infantry that cannot be crushed cannot enter vehicles. So allow LCG and Gunner to be crushed. I’m not mad about Gunner sniping defenses, more mad about someone grabbing an AMX-13 and a Gunner and driving at you. It’s pretty much guaranteed to kill whatever that person throws itself at. And increasing ammo cost won’t really change anything significant. The economy is too bloated, and you get far too much money from shooting at bases. Even doubling resupply costs won’t make a significant difference. Also infantry are pretty great you just are a glass cannon. Infantry kill more buildings than tanks do, consistently, because infantry can go where tanks can’t and are much harder to spot. And stuff like Raveshaw, Gunner, Sydney, hell Adriana is actually really good, they can all take down tanks far their paper superior by playing smart. The Melta will chew through any tank in short order. To use infantry you just need a cliff to block splash. In the open they suck and die instantly, sure, but that’s fine. I’d still prefer if body shotting infantry with tanks doesn’t kill them but there’s too many issues with armor types for that to work. Would require writing custom armor.ini and that’s a lot of work. Also I wouldn’t want infantry to be *too* durable either. Otherwise you’d end up with Renegade X where Nod actually wins more games after it loses Airstrip.

Suiciding with gunner or just casually driving with a LCG is just so effective. There’s no real drawback aside from cost which is usually never a drawback. The Melta is a powerful base defense unit, but it doesn’t get used in the field because no one wants to buy a battle taxi. Every time someone does its monstrously effective but no one ever does it. Because you can lone wolf with !ammo far too effectively. And it’s probably too ingrained into the psyche of the game to remove it without people going nuclear. I would say Mobius Infantry are still spammed and they’re uncrushable and cant drive, but it’s map dependent.

Shared/Both - Suggested Graphics Change for Explosions Make the explosions for things such as the MLRS or Mammoth significantly more transparent? I know that may be a tall order, but the worst part about fighting those things is often your screen being completely obscured by the smoke and flash graphic. - Suggested Air Overhaul Change it so that all air units use a gun/missile profile similar to the Tunguska. Quick spitball would be that the ORCA Escort would have 600 ammo, and firing a bullet would consume 1 ammo, and firing a rocket would consume 10, allowing it to fire up to 60 missiles. But any MG fire would reduce their total payload, and max loiter time in general. Anti tank variants could simply use up more ammo per missile, say, 40 per missile. It's a little gamey, sure, but the engine doesn't handle two separate sets of weapons well, and the only alternative would be target firing for an AI gunner that has missiles attached to the ORCA/Apache. But that has its own even gamier drawbacks as well as weird interactions like a visible missile pod on a stealth comanche, or an ORCA that gets a stealth crate. - More specific Air Suggestions - ORCA Fighter 1. Increase rate of fire by about 25% 2. Increase max speed by 1.2 m/s 3. Decrease deceleration by 25% (Goal, to emphasize the unit as a strafing run style attack craft, and make that more viable. Currently attempting fly by's leaves you with about two missiles left over that will completely overshoot on the same target, making the most effective method of attack to simply hover or move at low speed) - Banshee 1. Do the above except increase max speed up to 28 m/s 2. Reduce max health to 600/600 4. Rehaul ammo capacity to 6/12 5. Remove the primary fire and make the alternate fire simply the current alt fire, but consuming 1 ammo per shot (Banshee is even worse at doing fly by's, the unit handles very poorly, basically a slightly faster Hind. It should honestly handle more like the ORCA Fighter, if anything.) - Comanche Escort 1. Remove and replace with GDI's old $1500 credit Chinook 1. The beehive rounds can't hit anything that isn't a Mammoth 36 inch or a ship please for the love of god let it aim up and down or something at least - Comanche Anti Tank 1. The beehive rounds can't hit anything that isn't a Mammoth 36 inch or a ship please for the love of god let it aim up and down or something at least - Minor Infantry Change Infantry that cannot be crushed cannot enter vehicles as drivers. This includes Black Hand Laser Chaingunners and Gunners. While this may seem like an undue nerf to the units, it is for the sense of fairness and to represent how powerful they honestly are as tank drivers currently, and to simply introduce some consistency. They would still be very powerful as field units but they would simply require TEAMWORK. The game features a ton of powerful support vehicles that allow for infantry transport and ammo and health resupply instantly on demand, but no one uses it because !ammo exists and the best infantry can either drive tanks or is a walking tank. If I knew it wouldn't be Armageddon I would suggest removing all the commands, !ammo, !character, !support, !vehicle, etc they discourage teamwork, ammo and support especially. The transports in this game are very effective and very much never used because you can call in ammo anywhere even through sheer cliffs and 100 feet underground and you can cliff camp indefinitely with a rocket launcher as a result of this - Guard55 1. Remove from the game for being OP

Global Defense Initiative - Sheridan 1. Alternate fire missile damage increased by 65 shell 2. OR increase its alternate rate of fire modifier from 0.15 to 0.20 - Recovery Mammoth 1. Reduce Health/Shield to 900/900 - ORCA Bomber 1. Increase max speed by 2 m/s - Stryker Gun/ATGM 1. Increase max speed by 1 m/s 2. Increase acceleration/deceleration by 33% 3. Increase Gun max range by 10m

Not including stuff confirmed to be under work which includes Hind Gunship, Hover MLRS, ADATS, BRDM-2 AT, and several other smaller units. As this is a long post I'll separate it into Nod, GDI, and general/both. Starting with The Brotherhood of Nod - Black Hand Light Tank 1. Cost reduced to 1250 2. Speed increased by 0.5m/s 3. Reload speed improved by 0.3 seconds - Bradley 75mm ATGM 1. Cost reduced to 950 - Black Hand Laser Tank 1. Cost reduced to 1550 2. Speed increased by 0.5 m/s - Interceptor Bike Rockets 1. Price to 450 - Interceptor Bike TOW 1. Price to 600 - Wiesel 1. Give it a gun depression of 5 degrees - Stridsvagn 1. Give it left/right gun aim of 5 degrees - Black Eagle 1. Reduce the size of its turret ring jebus creebus please - Phase Tank (minor overhaul) 1. Increase splash radius by 0.5 2. Give its primary fire a damage type of shell/fire for impact/splash respectively. Improve its ability to kill both buildings and infantry with its main fire, while reducing its anti tank ability slightly. Have the alt fire deal damage specifically to kill air units and mark it as SAM while the normal fire would be Incendiary Rockets. - Microwave Tank 1. Increase primary fire damage by 50% per shot 2. Increase alt fire range by 45m, increase alt fire damage by 250%, and increase alt fire reload time by 30% 3. Increase Health/Shield to 340/340 - Infrared Stealth Tank 1. Primary fire damage reduced from 64 to 60 per shot

Stealth tanks don't shoot far because an invisible tank with the range of a regular tank is an OP tank. Same reason they're all a lot more fragile than visible tanks. Before the nerf all Nod used was stealth tanks, and stealth tanks are still being used a LOT. They're just not main battle tanks anymore. Basically git gud and play the game with units that have pros and cons instead of just being invisible Mammoth tanks with perfect across the map tracking.

It just comes down to faction balance. What does GDI have? Big heavy tanks with powerful guns and lots of health, and a super durable and powerful repair tank. So what does Nod want to deal with it? Damage. Anything else is inferior. You can't out tank GDI because that's their shtick, their strongest suit. What a GDI team wants more than anything is for Nod to try to just have a regular tank battle, because even with the T-62 being overstatted (and incorrectly modeled) it's still not a pound for pound equal to a Mammoth or Titan, especially not in a big 6v6 tank battle. Even if the Nod team has more DPS, the GDI team has more HP, and more repairs. That's why Nod relies so heavily on stealth tanks or ambushers, and what do those tanks do that other tanks don't (aside from being fast and/or invisible)? They do SIGNIFICANTLY more damage than other units in their tier. Same with Nod artillery. They need things that do a lot of damage AND can take a hit OR can simply avoid being hit in the first place, because they either have to kill the GDI repair tanks to stop the rush, or out DPS the repairs. The Microwave tank has none of these qualities. It neither outputs damage, nor can it maneuver and get behind the enemy line (more than any other tank), and it's not overstatted to at least attempt to fight a GDI deathball head on. It's the same issue with the Black Hand Laser Tank, in a way, except the BHLT can actually do damage. A lot of damage, a lot more than other tanks in its tier. But it doesn't have any significant health pool, it doesn't have insane speed or maneuverability, and it's not invisible. So it's useless at dealing with a GDI deathball. Its best qualities are shooting poor defenseless buildings. Without a proper redesign and rebalance of how basically all tanks work, separating light medium and heavy into very clear categories, you're not going to see units like the Microwave Tank or the Black Hand Light Tank, laser or no. They are not different enough, fulfill no role required of them. The Microwave is a fun unit. It's not a good unit.

I’ve tried using the microwave tank and it’s just not useful. 315/315 means you die in one shot to stuff like the Sheridan, AVRE, Titan overcharge, you go down in usually 4 railgun shots from mammoths, PICs and Prisms melt through you. It’s flimsy and has very low range. If a tank is under repair your damage is comparable to shooting at the tank with a humvee, meaning you’re not helping your team beat out repairs. My point was against a GDI deathball, the microwave tank is useless. Because it is. A proper GDI deathball could likely even ignore you because once you die fruitlessly in a microwave tank you’ll just buy something more useful instead, that can actually get a tank down to 30% health and doesn’t need to be within grenade range to do so. You can slap down disorganized GDI rushes without repair support with practically anything in Nod’s arsenal. When it comes to serious games with actual coordination the Microwave tank does not stand tall.

the main reason I find the microwave tank useless is twofold. One, it’s gimmick relies on you hitting the same tank multiple times at close range in a tank with very little armor and some hefty weakpoints. Two, it relies on the enemy being exposed and in a position where you or your team can capitalize on its success. Or finding someone solo. Often times you simply get focused down and die before you can shock anyone out of their tank, and even when you manage to shock someone out it’s not exactly easy to do so when they’re in a spot that actually matters against a GDI deathball. It’s incredibly hard to use the tank effectively, due to its design. If it simply acted as an EMP grenade instead, immobilizing the tank when you hit it, with a longer reload time and perhaps a shorter EMP duration to boot, it would be an effective support unit.

Okay

That’s exactly what a hacker would say.

Hind is being partially reverted next patch.

He shoots me and I die wtf hacks

To clarify. the T-62 is overstatted and frankly OP right now, because it has to be. It has to be able to fight Railgun Mammoths and Titans because Nod’s standup and fight ability is otherwise heavily flawed and unviable. It has is drawbacks, very weak side armor being about the only thing significant. Not as much health as GDI equivalents (though much more DPS and range). It and the Tick Tank Firebug/120mm are about the only heavy tanks Nod can actually use for tank work. And the Tick Tanks have to be deployed to be worth their price and can’t aim down when they do so heavily limiting their usefulness on quite a lot of maps as a result. For the T-62 to be nerfed, other Nod tanks would need to be buffed.

I think the issue is that most other Nod tanks are useless and/or overpriced (black hand light tank, Bradley 75mm, microwave tank) or have glaring issues with their design making them hard to use or stupidly fragile because of the weakpoint system (Stridsvagen/Black Eagle respectively). The T-62 shouldn’t be Nod’s only viable tank. It should fulfill a role of being a Mammoth equivalent, as in pretty good at all things but not great at everything. It has great range damage and armor right now, with good speed to boot. The 1900 credit Mammoth is unused because it can’t outrange defenses and is slow and inaccurate.

Thoughts on the current patch: - Un nerf the Hind or reduce its price to 800 because that’s what it’s currently worth. - Tunguska tracking is broken, unit is fairly unusable currently - Black Eagle turret ring is at the same spot as tracking weapons target causing Sheridans and Humvee TOWs to two shot the tank - Air in general is really annoying. They’re inaccurate but have huge range meaning you can get plinked at across the map indefinitely. I swear their guns used to have way less range, they seem to be able to fire almost twice as far now and are three times more annoying to deal with since now they outrange everything with their machine guns and have bottomless clips so eventually something will hit you. - Add a script that doesn’t allow Guard55 to purchase snipers

All of Nod’s high tier tanks except the Stingray are really fantastic. The Black Eagle has an issue with a weakpoint but it has an immense range, deals decent damage and it’s fast. The 120mm Tick Tank is a bad T-62 on the move but deploying it turns it into probably the most overpowered unit in the game. On top of having ridiculously high range like the Black Eagle when you deploy, you also gain a massive boost to your rate of fire and effectively have something like 2500/2500 hit points due to the armor type change. You can solo a 36 inch mammoth or fight two Railgun Mammoths and win. If Nod ever spams this unit they effectively become unbreakable and I fully believe the Tick Tank will eventually become so FotM it’s going to get overnerfed in the future The Tunguska is the best AA unit in the game bar none, and even has use against tanks, but it’s not an MBT don’t try to use it as one. You’re AA/Support. The strongest AA/Support in the game. The Koskan is great. Simple as. The Infared Tank is a great infantry killer and okay against tanks. Ezeks are kind of the opposite, but also die in about three shots. I kind of wish they would get further nerfed not because I think they’re OP but because Nod’s arsenal for the late game is incredibly good and plays to Nod’s strengths of being a skirmisher/defensive faction but all everyone wants to do is run around invisible and make it impossible for GDI to pick anything that doesn’t have 1000 health and heavy armor.

So, playing around with the Hind. I only have a couple problems with it. - One, it's way too durable. However, I think you're over-nerfing its durability. It's VERY slow, just in general but especially by air unit standards. It cannot retreat. - Two, it's got really good range, much higher than the other air unit's guns and higher than the ORCA Fighter's tracking range. - Three is just a QoL thing. It shouldn't shoot invisible bullets and not make splash. That makes it sorta hard to guesstimate how far its range actually is in practice, but it absolutely shreds through ORCA well before they can engage you, and you even outrange a few units like the Hover MLRS in practice, and since it has Medium armor Stingers barely even tickle you. I don't think it should have Light armor, and buffing Stinger against it would probably make Stinger even dumber against Apache and Comanche too. So to my point I would suggest really only nerfing its health. 760/760 seems decent. I would also say it could use a minor reduction in range, to effectively on par with the ORCA Fighter, about 10m higher at max range. I do like the idea of it going to 80 ammo per salvo, but I think you should only have the 240 ammo in reserve as it does now. I would also say the gun should do 15 steel damage and 10 splash shrapnel damage. 2.7 steel damage is too low, it would make the thing useless almost useless against the ORCA Fighter and fairly worthless against tanks in general. It kind of is, you can do a little bit of damage, but the real problem is you can do that damage largely without retaliation, which is why I would suggest a range nerf more than a damage nerf. But yes its steel damage is in general a little too high. My last suggestion would be to only reduce the fire damage to about 75, instead of 41. The total fire damage reduction is enormous, and makes the unit very bad at killing buildings. If nothing else, Nod should have an air unit very good at doing that, like GDI does the ORCA Bomber. Gutting it down to requrining at least four Hinds to kill a building under repairs is a big overnerf. The flame shot at least requires Hinds get close due to its tiny range.

So. Ships. Some people love em, I really really hate them. For three main reasons. 1. The only counter to big ships is big ships Battleships and cruisers are incredibly durable. Absolutely ridiculously incredible durable, which means killing them takes a really really long time. And their supposed counter, the Torpedo Boat, is absolutely anemic even if now its torpedoes aren't slower than engineers at least. They just don't do any considerable damage because Battleships have a CONSIDERABLE amount of hit points. Torpedo boats need to do a lot more damage than they do now, and I mean 4 or 5 times as much per torpedo. But that only really solves one issue, the other issues comes down to the fact air and land (and amphibious) units are really bad at engaging warships. The best you can really get is something like the Koskan for Nod, but either way you're either a flimsy, stationary, or flimsy stationary target for ships to murder at their leisure because even if their damage is relatively poor they still have WAY more hitpoints than you. Which brings me to. 2. Ships have way too much health They're boring to fight. They take forever to kill. They take so long to kill if the other team spams them and you have an M113 ADATS it's a fantastic way to make MVP because you will get so many points for shooting them unless they actually manage to kill a building (they usually wont) then you are guaranteed to beat them in points, especially if you intercept them before they reach your base. Their damage is significantly less than their price tag would imply. You're not buying 12,000 credits worth of damage (nor should you be able to), you're buying 10,000 credits worth of hitpoints, and 2,000 credits worth of damage. There's a bit to be said about them doing a ton of AoE damage, but that goes into my next point. 3. Help I'm getting motion sickness from this Have you ever wanted to know what a 10.0 BAC level is like? Well you're in luck because just go up against a Battleship and have it focus you and I promise you your screen won't stop shaking until 5 seconds after your beleaguered death. Ships have too many guns. It makes fighting them annoying. It makes fighting them nausea inducing. It makes fighting them cause the sound engine to shit itself like with the AMX-30's autocannon and randomly stop producing any noise for a couple seconds because there's too many overlapping SFX. It would be much nicer if the ships had one player controlled gun and one AI controlled gun with a vision range of 0 you order to fire (T) when you want it to go active. The befits of this would be that You can engage two targets simultaneously You can separate AA and anti ground abilities thus giving the player a primary fire, an alternate fire, and his AI fire to work with, effectively three weapons (for instance an AEGIS Frigate that sports a 57mm deck gun that can fire AP or HE, and an AI controlled missile launcher you can designate to fire at aircraft) You can balance the ships easier by reducing their potential damage output from 24 guns to just 4 or 6. People fighting them won't also be fighting to keep their lunch down. Also Nod needs a decent mid-high tier amphibious unit. Their highest tier amphibious combat unit is the BRDM Spitfire which is ill up to the task of engaging ADATS, let alone capital ships. I think this part is well known but I just wanted to reiterate that. But here would be my total suggestion for making ships a bit more approachable and better defined into roles so that there is an incentive to get an actual fleet together, and not just try to sneak up on a base with 4 battleships in the 6 minutes they take to arrive there. Reduce ship model size. Yeah, they're too big, it makes them hard to control and necessitates they be slow. I know their model sizes are already toned down but the larger ones are still far too large to comfortably navigate most of the maps that have water in them. By reducing their models you can: Increase their speed and handling, making them more fun to use and allowing them to be an organic part of the battlefield, rather than a fancy game of Space Invaders how they work now. Reduce the amount of guns they have. I specifically have a suggestion for this which I will make in a followup post to the thread because this one is getting very long. Reduce their cost, reduce their health. Make them a unit that exists on a comparable level to the rest of the units in the game. They can still be the King in price and hitpoints but they don't need to dwarf it all so massively. It's not exactly like they're just better armored than everything else, they just have so many raw hitpoints only units with massive damage output can reasonably dent their enormous HP pools in any reasonable time.