A Path Beyond Siege Removal

[Raap]

Hey guys,

A few people seem quite unhappy about the map, particularly the ground based vehicle meatgrinder that it was designed to be. I'm making this topic now to see how many people actually dislike the map.

If the vote for removal has no-voters in the lead, then I recommend the removal.

I won't be asking what issues some people have with this map, because I will not be doing a major revision. I'm currently working on the Hostile Waters revamp which means I don't have time for another revamp. Further more if both my contributions are unpopular enough to both be pulled, I might as well stop bothering as clearly something is going wrong. 

As a quick solution to part of the criticism, my proposition for @Pushwall would be that the Siege cannon primary damage against buildings and defenses is reduced by 1/3rd, and the projectile extension of the shrapnel blast increased to allow for a better chance to hit moving and small targets, in order to properly make it function as anti-infantry up close. Additionally, increase the health pool on both 'destroyed' cannon presets times two, in order to make a destroyed cannon stay destroyed longer, which will also help deal with 'ninja Engineers'. This should make them more manageable and still not completely useless.

Map education: Did you know there are several ways for infantry to avoid the courtyard vehicle meatgrinder?

• You can use the ore mine tunnels as infantry to breach the courtyard and attack a vehicle blockade in their rear?
• The ore mine tunnels connect to a central trench, which has a ruined tunnel on the other side, allowing infantry to go from their base to the enemy base and nearly completely avoid all enemy vehicles in the process. You could even destroy the enemy Ore Truck with an infantry rush, something nobody ever seems to consider doing!
• Both teams got a small side way passage near the main vehicle entry point into the courtyard.
• Infantry can cross the beach and attack the Flametower and Pillbox with infantry from near the water.
• Both teams have access to Chinook Transport helicopters. They don't exist for no reason, so you can use them to completely bypass the courtyard vehicle meatgrinder. You also don't have to fly your Chinook directly into an enemy base; You can drop off infantry near the Soviet beach or on the Allied cliff, fly back, and carry the next load without losing the Chinook. There are no ground base defenses near these locations! You can also attempt to ninja the long way around, past the rear of the castle.
• The scaffold bridges are destructible through anti-structure damage, destroying both further limits vehicle maneuverability.
• The castle walls are a fully connected circle with several entry points including two ladders at the main building. From up here, infantry are well protected from vehicles and can easily attack them back.

Edited May 9, 2017 by Raap

[moonsense715]

I'm still exploring some epic strategies on the map, I certainly don't want it removed...

[ChopBam]

Keep!

Maybe reintroduce the secret without all the teleporters? I know it would take reworking the whole ending room, but adds an interesting dynamic to the map.

[Raap]

25 minutes ago, ChopBam said:

Keep!

Maybe reintroduce the secret without all the teleporters? I know it would take reworking the whole ending room, but adds an interesting dynamic to the map.

It was actually a distraction from core gameplay. It was a proof of concept, it showed that mechanically we can do some weird shit in W3D, however performance didn't lie; As soon as such a large number of scripts get pushed to a server environment, the client performance suffers and reaches unacceptable levels.

There might be some secrets in the future but nothing quite as complicated as what Siege had, not until the engine team can fix things.

Side note, there is still a secret left in Siege that nobody seems to have discovered yet. It's not a big one though.

Anyhow, you seemed to have quite a distaste of the map via IRC commentary, did you know everything I listed in the opening post? Perhaps you'll find the map less grindy if you try to use infantry more. I'd say Siege is the most infantry-biased map in all of APB, but few people seem to know that.

Edit: Sprinting is key! Were it not for sprinting, the game would have ended via script sequence following the destruction of the War Factory. But sprinting is a thing, so use it!

Edited May 9, 2017 by Raap

[NoSpoons]

1 hour ago, Raap said:

Side note, there is still a secret left in Siege that nobody seems to have discovered yet. It's not a big one though.

I had a project i needed to work on for tomorrow but bump that! imma find that secret

However my 2 cents on this map is that I quite like it, earlier today I saw that chinook tactic get used, along with volk + tunnel tactics
so I do feel these facets are used just not very widely yet

Edited May 10, 2017 by NoSpoons

[Einstein]

Hey, why don't we reintroduce tech levels to force the use of infantry at the beginning of the match? Bring back the downvote button on the forums too. Let your hate flow, I can feel it now!

[Mojoman]

I've only played Siege once, but I like it!

[Raap]

3 hours ago, NoSpoons said:

I had a project i needed to work on for tomorrow but bump that! imma find that secret

However my 2 cents on this map is that I quite like it, earlier today I saw that chinook tactic get used, along with volk + tunnel tactics
so I do feel these facets are used just not very widely yet

This is why I put that list in there. I designed the map to be a vehicle meatgrinder, sort of a spiritual successor to Classic Fjord, but unlike that old map, I made sure to include a lot of infantry passages because throwing infantry into the courtyard with the vehicles exclusively would be like throwing a pet dog to a den of wild lions (aww!). Hopefully now after this thread, people will feel 'inspired' to use some different approaches.

The cannons can probably still do with the changes I mentioned however, since that was based on a collection of feedback from a few matches, as well as my own thoughts after having played the map a few times in larger population matches.

2 hours ago, Einstein said:

Hey, why don't we reintroduce tech levels to force the use of infantry at the beginning of the match? Bring back the downvote button on the forums too. Let your hate flow, I can feel it now!

You know I'm always in favor of map-specific gameplay. Hostile Waters featured capturable buildings using script logic created by Danpaul, as well as the obvious emphasis on naval combat, naval transportation and offensive air support (Chinooks unavailable). And Siege features a relatively lightweight bonus objective via repairable cannons, which I intentionally employed to differentiate from the HW capture logic. It sort of once again highlights the gameplay design flexibility of W3D - one of it's true strong points.

However... I feel I must draw a line somewhere. Special primary and secondary objectives are great for diversity and I'd love to see more of them in other maps not made by myself, however... Modifying CORE GAMEPLAY on a per-map basis would make the game very hard to learn for players and more likely very frustrating as well. But if you'd like to see more secondary objectives then the sky is essentially the limit (or, at least ones imagination is). If we had a way to create map-specific HUD elements (this is a very long standing personal request of myself), then we'd be able to clearly communicate map specific gameplay to players. Once that layer of gameplay transparency is in place, I could talk with Pushwall about adding some to other maps. But right now I'm dependent on messages to communicate gameplay, which is not ideal at all.

Speaking of the interface, the GUI really needs dynamic level maps to replace the current building health status page. If we had this, we could highlight for example who owns the abandoned Refill Pad on Hostile Waters, or if one of the cannons on Siege is manned by anyone.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Raap

[moonsense715]

Map-specific gameplay is what I fell in love with in Starcraft 2 WOT and I'm still planning to implement it into all of my maps. I'm very happy to see this approach in APB, even if just in a very few maps.

[Raap]

6 hours ago, moonsense715 said:

Map-specific gameplay is what I fell in love with in Starcraft 2 WOT and I'm still planning to implement it into all of my maps. I'm very happy to see this approach in APB, even if just in a very few maps.

Diversity keeps things interesting and encourages players to change up their tactics every match. As I said before though, it is important to uphold the concept of 'core gameplay' which should not be touched on a per-map basis due to the confusion and frustration this would cause. But engaging gameplay objectives and mechanics, now that's where no real limitations apply - outside of script availability and performance.

This just brings me back again to my long standing request of map-specific HUD components and an in-game level map with building status and such. If W3D featured those things then we can add more objectives in a consistent formula (so not like right now where every designer just does it in their own way, causing inconsistencies). Down the line this would then open the doorway to create event hooks for conditional achievements as well.

Edited May 10, 2017 by Raap

[Raap]

20 to keep the level in the rotation, versus 0 votes to remove it, after 24 hours. I'd say that's a message received.

Nevertheless I do share the concerns a few people have with the cannons, so @Pushwall should go ahead with my recommended tweaks to them.

With that being said, maybe toss in a bonus here by allowing the cannons to one-shot aircraft with the primary fire... And perhaps toss in an achievement for that? We haven't seen any new achievement additions in a little while I think. 

Edited May 10, 2017 by Raap

[Pushwall]

The cannon changes have already been implemented for next patch. Except the primary is just using a different warhead that has a much lower anti-building multiplier (Shell instead of Artillery, which is a 28% downgrade against buildings) instead of a lower base damage, so it's not gimped against units.

Not sure how I feel about making a new warhead just to let it one-shot aircraft. There are already a ton of warheads and it's getting dangerously close to the point where when I edit armor.ini, a single armour entry takes up the whole screen. There aren't many spaces left to work with, if a few more warheads get added then I will no longer be able to page up/down to snap exactly to the next armour entry to quickly compare them and eliminate weird discrepancies between them.

Achievements are in the hands of someone who is rarely present.

[Raap]

3 hours ago, Pushwall said:

The cannon changes have already been implemented for next patch. Except the primary is just using a different warhead that has a much lower anti-building multiplier (Shell instead of Artillery, which is a 28% downgrade against buildings) instead of a lower base damage, so it's not gimped against units.

Not sure how I feel about making a new warhead just to let it one-shot aircraft. There are already a ton of warheads and it's getting dangerously close to the point where when I edit armor.ini, a single armour entry takes up the whole screen. There aren't many spaces left to work with, if a few more warheads get added then I will no longer be able to page up/down to snap exactly to the next armour entry to quickly compare them and eliminate weird discrepancies between them.

Achievements are in the hands of someone who is rarely present.

Fair enough.

Maybe one of the code-guys can come up with a more manageable tool than whatever it is you're using right now.

[FRAYDO]

On 5/9/2017 at 7:49 PM, Einstein said:

Hey, why don't we reintroduce tech levels

[Raptor29aa]

I love this map because it can be very unpredictable.

like a stupid Chinook engineer rush that C4ed all the AA guns in the back (Seriously I can't disable all four explosives in 30 seconds while getting shot at.)

Or who could forget the chinook medic rush

Or using a demo to clear out Ore Truck tunnel

Or the Epic Artillery rush in the main court yard (cleared out all the infantry)

There are still many more strategies yet to discover...

[Raap]

I did always reserve map space in the rear of the castle in the event a single split-lane approach would have played better for vehicles, but the problem was that Siege was becoming far too large, so over the course of development I trimmed a lot of space; The castle underground tunnels are nearly completely axed, the castle interior got fully axed with just one room visible as a background, the castle rear (top rampart and island) got reduced to just space for aircraft pilots to climb out from if they happened to crash there, the castle roof became inaccessible by normal means, and recently even the secret area got axed because of performance issues.

The problem is if you have a map this large, you need to fill it up with a lot of detail which drains performance. I've had to cut down a crapton of detail for this reason, which is why for example the Soviet base looks relatively plain outside. I went for clean approaches on both bases, the Allied base has a theme of "lets hug the trees in the forest", the Soviet base has a theme of "let's burn down the trees and destroy the castle wall to get in". Clear visible themes that didn't require a lot of detailed props to show them.

But enabling the castle rear route for access would add more stress to the client and I do not believe that single forked vehicle lanes really work in APB gameplay. Having two completely separate lanes towards an enemy base is a tried and tested concept that works, see Keep Off The Grass. Although I personally am not a fan of splitting up fights in that way and prefer to keep the action centralized but with various means to access that fight. However, if the vehicle game did turn out to be completely unplayable, I left those rear passages as a backup to be re-opened... But I do not believe this is required at all, and also note that those rear passages had no real gameplay synergy designed into them, it's like adding a new road that doesn't participate with the rest of the match. Finally, a rear road would eliminate the blockade gameplay, which would result in giving infantry less purpose as well.

Edited May 11, 2017 by Raap

[NoSoldier]

1 hour ago, Raap said:

I left those rear passages as a backup to be re-opened...

Wouldn't it be easier to open up the front beach then? The Secret is axed and thus the bunkers get another purpose. But people have not tried to do an infantry rush this side though yet. This way several parts of the soviet part of the castle could be made up with  several blown up holes (To follow your previously stated theme) which would encourage people to counter any allied threat with infantry upon the castle. That may shift balance though.

I like Siege. It is kind of comparable to ToTheCore though. Some people had a 'small' discussion on the teamspeak several weeks ago ( @Voe, member?) and concluded that it's kind of a meatgrinder. But some did appreciate it. Some did not. My personal conclusion from this discussion was that various people like a meatgrinder because that's kind of a part of map diversity. But and that's my point, ToTheCore is a really big meatgrinder with various opportunities to turn the match around while the vehicle part of Siege is pretty much concentrated at the edge of the castle or the 'Entrances' to each of the bases. (which would make 3 vehicle hotspots [and if you include every base eachself it would be 5]). That may change over time though as people figure out how to use infantry and aircraft on this map properly. (I fully agree with Raptor here. Don't forget the OT 'rushes' to break a stalemate.)

BTW, has the secret something to do with  the chirping wonderwall?

Edited May 11, 2017 by NoSoldier

[Raap]

The beach IS accessible to infantry, though, unless you mean the rear one.

... What wonderwall... ?  The easter-egg is not part of terrain itself.

[NoSoldier]

I meant to open up the beach for vehicles.

You're driving me crazy with stuff like this

 

 

[Killing_You]

Why not touching up the back route of the castle and allow vehicles to go through there? You can already get there via helicopter without consequence anyway, might as well put it to good use.

[Raap]

3 hours ago, Killing You said:

Why not touching up the back route of the castle and allow vehicles to go through there? You can already get there via helicopter without consequence anyway, might as well put it to good use.

For reasons I mentioned. That route was not designed with any synergy in mind with the rest of the map, and it is part of the reason of why I blocked it. To open it would require the castle interior to be re-created to connect to it as well, all in all a lot of work, and performance on the client is already being pushed a lot.

However it is there as a backup if it were truly required. Similar to people having a very strong desire for a land route on Hostile Waters, and that request I am actually working on (slowly).

Edited May 11, 2017 by Raap