Balance Redefining shotgunners and Volkov

[des1206]

So instead of a tank-hunter, Volkov will be more like an infantry version of the mammoth tank - can soak up a lot of damage, decent firepower against everything but slow and can not choose his engagements. Unique for sure, but I'm not sure people would like a 6m/s infantry on most maps. Also does being that slow make you really vulnerable to headshots?

Lastly, can we give him more armor than health in keeping with the theme that he is a cyborg?

 

Edited March 30, 2018 by des1206

[Pushwall]

Being generous with his armour has led to problems in the past. When he had more armour than health, this was at the same time when armour was made of paper and basically anything that wasn't a pistol melted it pretty fast, so it was somewhat balanced for him but not for everyone else who had no longevity at all. And when he had infinite armour he was just a virus that if played by a skilled player was impossible to remove from inside the Allied base unless he was outnumbered 5 to 1. And that's not what he's supposed to be, he's supposed to be attacking buildings from the base perimeter, or crushing units in the middle of the field - where, on many T5 maps, supply truck respawns are available to refill his armour. And he already has more health than any other armoured infantry.

[des1206]

I think I'm starting to see what Volkov is to the Mammoth tank as what shocks are to the TT. If I want to bring an extra durable (but slow) tank to my attack, I will buy a Volkov. This could work.

"Hey Soviets we heard you love tanks so we are going to let you put a tank inside your tank!"

Edited March 30, 2018 by des1206

[Pushwall]

Yeah it's kinda odd, currently Volkov compared to the Shock Trooper is like if a mammoth tank had the superior speed, range and anti-building-exterior power of a TT while retaining its armour and reliable anti-infantry rockets, and if a TT had the inferior speed, range and anti-exterior damage of a mammoth tank while still being stuck with its own inferior armour and a weapon that isn't always great against infantry. It probably makes sense to have the shock trooper beat him in more than just the anti-mechanic niche.

Taking into consideration just how much the shock will get out of this though, maybe they could do with a bit more of a health difference. Like either bringing the shock down from 70 to 60 health or Volkov up from 100 to 110 or something.

Or as you said, more armour for Volkov (but not too much).

Or alternatively perhaps I need to reinstate the Ranger's unique armour class that let it survive an extra shock trooper hit; I forgot that that armour type was actually doing something worthwhile for mainstream gameplay when I removed it - whoops! So that would further reinforce the "Volkov does best vs light vehicles" thing.

[OWA]

I like the sound of these changes. Will be good to try them out when the time comes.

[Pushwall]

I'm still keeping the old shotgun/volkov settings sitting around just in case any of this ends up being such a bad idea that I really need to revert quickly though.

I've just gotten done implementing everything and a patch will be coming later today. Let's get a game going this evening to see how much of a bad idea all this really is  

[Pushwall]

Right, that iteration of Volkov didn't work out. Sergeants don't seem offensive from what little we played earlier but it was pretty clear that Volkov was a problem.

Main problem was dealing way too little damage to pretty much everything (not just the things it was meant to be bad against) and increasing damage is probably not the answer because then we'd just be returning to the same old problem of him dethroning the intended Soviet infiltrators at the infiltration role because he can just lol over everything with the shotgun. Lower price also probably wouldn't help because really the only instance I could ever see anyone wanting to buy this nerfkov instead of a shock trooper is for sniping buildings. Which, while a decidedly less rare niche than the old shock trooper's "oh god the Allies have 3 field mechanics making their tank push invincible to non-tesla weapons and we can't get a V2 out to splash them, who can we call", still doesn't justify nerfkov.

My next thought was focus him even harder into anti-tank/building and cripple his anti-inf prowess by replacing the AP arm with just a makarov or something, but then he'd just be a better RPG trooper (except for anti-longbow) instead of a better shock trooper...

[des1206]

How about just Kovtillery + nades? Long range anti-building/infantry, but NO Anti-Tank rounds or building infiltration ability, and give him his speed back. Want to kill tanks or hit MCTs? Better grab another unit. Long range building & infantry killing? Get a Volkov.

Edited March 31, 2018 by des1206

[Pushwall]

8 minutes ago, des1206 said:

How about just Kovtillery + nades? Long range anti-building/infantry, but NO Anti-Tank rounds or building infiltration, and give him his speed back. 

The nades are still arguably viable for infiltration depending on the building, definitely not to the degree they were with Oldkov though. I might try this. Returning speed in this case seems fair so he can escape from things harassing him in the field, since he's still not going to have long range damage potential coming anywhere close to a TT/V2 whose sluggishness force them to commit.

[des1206]

This way, ironically the best counter against Volkov will be Allied light vehicles, and also snipers. At long range, the kovtillery should still give artillery/demo trouble, and wear down Medium Tank over time. You should also make it that at VERY close range, the tri-shot can still do very good damage to all vehicles - it encourages Kov players to ambush! To discourage infantry CQC, maybe up his own vulnerability to his own nades a bit?

 Lastly, I do worry people may point whore with him.

Edited March 31, 2018 by des1206

[Pushwall]

1 minute ago, des1206 said:

 Lastly, I do worry people may point whore with him.

No more than they did with Oldkov tbh. At least having a weapon entirely specced for artying so it can get target boxes means kovs can more easily coordinate attacks on a building to try to take it down, rather than just spraying at random buildings for points.

If people don't like being pointwhored they can always go and attack him since he'll be so much more vulnerable up close than Oldkov.

[Pushwall]

Until we can get a good grasp on how to get him "right", I'm just going to revert him to how he was before the patch and before this discussion, but with a couple of tweaks:

• Rewards 125 points on death (so like it is in the current patch)
• Movement speed is the same "average" speed as a rifle soldier, not the pre-patch fast speed or post-patch molasses speed.
• Shotgun damage up from 45 to 50. So there's a little more reason to not just nade everything.
• Volktillery range down from 170 to 150m. Still quite a lot.
• Price up to 1750.

[des1206]

I think we can either make him a dedicated long-range sieger (as discussed above), or a walking mammoth tank that doesn't do much against buildings - exterior or MCT. For the latter, we can try this:

 - AT DPS is old Volkov, range is new increased range. (Allied vehicles FEAR him!)

-  Get rid of Voktillery, so he does almost nothing to buildings.

-  Keep the shotgun and nades, so he can still clear defending infantry.

-  Use the molasses speed, so he can't run away from fights and run circles in the Allied base. 

-  Price should be ~$1,500, significantly more than other AT infantry. 

- You can play around with his damage per shot to further differentiate him. Alpha strike is good, we can also do more damage per bullet but less ammo total so each "shot" carries a lot of power, but penalizes you for missing. Wnat to deal with fast Allied units? Maybe a shock is better.

This way, he doesn't hunt units, but forces everyone he comes into to "deal" with him. Great for spearheading an attack and absorbing enemy attention while the more fragile units do the real damage. Just like the mammoth tank. 

 

 

Edited April 1, 2018 by des1206

[Pushwall]

The problem with "walking mammoth that doesn't do much to buildings" is that having a unit deal strictly bad damage to buildings, especially if they're a slow unit in general (which encompasses all infantry, even the fastest ones), is that they mostly just end up as a counter unit you buy to deal with enemies in/near your base and then switch away when the threat is gone (see also: snipers). With a unit the price of Volkov, that second part is never going to happen, anyone who buys him as a counter will just stick with him to save money and camp the game out, and since he's also a counter to almost everything especially with your suggestions, that leaves Allies in a bit of a predicament where they also have to camp the game out because they can't really attack once the Soviet base is full of "stronger but slower" Volkovs pitching tents and maybe one V2 to ward off arties. Of course that's not to say he'd be fair if he did do good damage to buildings on top of that.

Rangers are probably one of the biggest current examples of the bad-vs-buildings counter unit, and they work and see use without being overpowered or camptastic because they are extremely limited in what they can reliably deal with - it's pretty much just arties/v2s, low-tier infantry, and flame towers if you can keep the juking rhythm going without some anti-tank unit interrupting you - as well as being more than just a combat unit: they have utility in being good scouts and taxis for c4/support infantry due to their unmatched ground speed. Soviets have quite the lack of utility units - the only thing they have in that department that Allies don't is the phase detector TT - though it may be odd for Volkov to take up a utility role and really what additional utilites do the Soviets need with all their power? Nothing can really be added there without swinging the game even more heavily in their favour.

[Pushwall]

So I'm thinking of giving the Volkov overhaul another try, following similar philosophy to the "failed" one but with some important tweaks.

A little history: At the outset of Delta, I kept Volkov as basically the same unit that he was in Gamma/Beta because I just had no clue how to fix him - even after Pyryle's unofficial patch removed his C4, he was still far superior to the Shock Trooper in almost every way. I then added some extra stuff to make him more counterable. Now fast forward to the more recent patches where I've been trying to employ the philosophies of "Shock Trooper has the damage, Volkov has the field longevity" and "Tanya is the urban commando, Volkov is the field commando". There are 2 problems with these philosophies:

1. Volkov takes more damage from anti-tank weapons than other infantry do

A feature that's been inherent to Volkov for longer than I've even been playing APB, I don't have enough old versions lying around to have an accurate idea of when and why this became a thing, all I know is that it doesn't exist in .9935 but it does in Beta and stayed ever since. It may have been inspired by Tiberian Sun where cyborgs don't go prone when under fire (massively weakening them against AT units) because nobody bothered to install Fear Simulator or Self-Preservation Simulator on them. Or maybe it's a "Volkov's a walking tank, so use anti-tank" thing. Now due to tank cannons being affected by gravity in Delta, and Volkov being one of the many infantry benefiting from increased range, it's hard for many AT units to exploit this weakness without luckshots (let's be fair here: unless your enemy has no idea how to dodge, you're not getting direct LT/MT/LAW hits with any degree of reliability). This benefit is mostly enjoyed by Longbows, Phases and Destroyers - which brings us to point 2.

But first, a sort of sidetrack Gamma rant for those who care.

Spoiler

What isn't very well known though is that in Gamma this extended far beyond just an intended penalty to anti-tank weapons. He had penalties against pretty much everything - he was just advertised as being weak to AT weapons. I'm convinced this is an oversight; part of the agenda of the Gamma devs involved giving infantry 25% resistance to all damage on their health, and even more resistance on their armour (this was back when armour was just a second health bar). Volkov did not receive any such resistance bonus - in fact his armour behaved exactly like his health, just like all Beta infantry, while everyone else got an upgrade - and these exceptions were never noted anywhere.

Here's some examples from the Gamma armour sheet:
Resistance to Shell (one of the many AT weapon warheads): -10% for Volkov health/armour, 60% for infantry health, 75% for heavy infantry armour
Resistance to Shrapnel (Rifle soldier bullets): 10% for Volkov health/armour, 25% for infantry health, 65% for heavy infantry armour.
Resistance to HollowPoint (Sniper/Tanya bullets): 0% for Volkov health/armour, 25% for infantry health, 50% for heavy infantry armour.

So if you do a bit of math you'll find that a Kapitan with 75+50 health could take exactly as much punishment from Tanyas/Snipers as a 100+100 Volkov could (if you discount Volkov's mid-battle regen). Most small arms/splash followed a tradition of killing Volkovs at roughly the same speed that they killed a Kapitan, some a little worse, some a little better. Even sillier, Snipers could one-shot Volkov (and hitscan!), but couldn't one-shot a Tanya despite her only having 100+50, less health/armour than a Volkov. So Volkov's high numbers were just lies to make you feel strong (not that they stopped his mid-combat regen, weapons and C4 from making him a living god).

2. Volkov can be locked onto by homing weapons, other infantry cannot

A Delta addition (or subtraction); around 2015 a scripts addition made it so that devs could choose what units are vulnerable to lock-on, instead of the original engine default of all of them being vulnerable. So in APB it got removed from various immobile objects because nobody likes bringing a Longbow to a Tesla Coil and having the rockets home towards the very bottom of the coil and hit the ground as a result, and removed from infantry as part of the "Make Regular Infantry Great (but not Again because they never were in the first place)" agenda. Volkov, however, deliberately stayed lockable to make him less difficult to counter, and because he's part machine.

 

Both of these features combine to make his field longevity (i.e. against tanks which are what he mainly faces out there), while better than the shock's, not nearly as superior as his health says - in fact it can even be worse if the Allies have massed Longbows/Phases. Whereas his urban longevity is always ahead of the rest of the Soviet flock due to a combination of having the highest health/armour pool, not having to worry about his lock-on/AT weakness inside buildings, and having probably the best CQC weapon in the game for handling a lone target or a tightly packed group: the napalm grenades. Even the trishot can be a surprising emergency melee weapon if your AP is empty because it's a shotgun spray of 3 projectiles, doing about 10 a piece each if they hit and 50 on a headshot. All of this undermines the whole "field commando" thing and is likely a big contributor to why he just ended up being preferred as an uber infiltrator. (Higher price + slight all-around nerfs have reduced that but he's still ultimately just a better shock trooper except in the fringe circumstances that exploit his few weaknesses.)

So, maybe removing these aspects - meaning he'll take just as much damage from AT weapons as anyone else will (and survive better due to more health), and be much harder for longbows/phases/destroyers to randomly one-shot. So the field durability against vehicles will be real and Allies will want to bring their anti-infantry game. But his offensive capabilities will be somewhat toned down again, being reduced down to just 2 firing modes: AT with slightly better range and trishot-esque anti-building damage but reduced capabilities against heavy vehicles, and... not 100% sure what to do for an AP weapon. Perhaps a hitscan Tanya pistol esque cannon, giving him competent mid-range without being completely ridiculous at point-blank like the napalm grenades? Or replace the napalm grenades with something that he has an excuse to be weak against (god knows what though) so you can't spam it inside buildings? And of course removing his other fire modes (the trishot and whichever AP mode is furthest from the new one), raising his speed again and dropping the price.

With real durability vs tanks combined with the speed and range, and not having the horrible damage of the "failed" attempt at new Volkov that wasn't even good against light vehicles, he should hopefully still have his place over the shock trooper when circumstances call for defense over offense or Allies are spamming lights/phases instead of meds/APCs.