Too Many Useless Units

[notDMB]

Brotherhood of Nod Infantry

100 Credit Infantry
Why do they even cost money? May as well be free for how useless they are. Grenadiers can abuse corridors and splash damage ignoring walls to camp hallways.

200 Credit Infantry

Rocket soldiers can 1 hit kill infantry. Barely scratch tanks. Anti-Tank rifleman is actually completely overtuned for its price range. I have never seen anyone pick a Flamethrower. Ever. I’m not sure people even know he exists.

300 Credit Infantry

Chem Trooper can walk in tib fields. Okay for tunnels, I guess. Fanatic is probably fine given their suicide role even with them being on the cheap side for how they can one shot Mobius Suit infantry. Others aren’t even worth mentioning by name.

500 Credit Infantry

Snipers feel reeeeeeally useless in a game where every other weapon is either hitscan, or has a large enough blast radius for aiming not to matter. Petrova is probably too cheap. Melta feels useless, just doesn’t do enough damage.

600 Credit Infantry

Wow slightly better versions of bad infantry for four times the price!

400 Credit Infantry

Stealth Black Hand are extremely underpriced because of their alt fire, but mostly because you can pick up weapons in this game. You don’t need to have any skill to wait invisible for someone to stop moving if you found a sniper rifle. AA Specialist used to provide a vital role when ORCAs were overpowered but now ORCAs are useless so nobody buys these anymore.
 

1000 Credit Infantry
Sakura is a hitscan sniper. As good or as bad as the person using her, but she’s mostly useless because people rarely use infantry in the open.
Raveshaw is pretty bad, objectively worse than Sydney, but still Nod’s best anti-tank infantry. Mutant Raveshaw is good if you abuse tib field regen and pick up a weapon that doesn’t suck.
Side rant about how Visceroids are three times as durable as they need to be.

Mendoza is decent, but extremely fragile. Again, just can’t match up to the durability of Mobius Suit infantry.
Technicians are technicians. Critical. Pioneers are a great way to waste 10k and have it all get destroyed by one 1500 credit tank. Sappers can spam MG turrets.

[notDMB]

Tank Commanders are gimmicky and weak for their price, not really good in their intended role but they probably should be. Their dynamite is ridiculous and the only reason I think they’re actually undervalued, but nobody actually uses dynamite to one hit kill buildings either.

Lancers exist, niche unit. Should honestly have less bullet drop.

There’s honestly way too many vehicles to list them all. So anything I don’t list I consider useless for its price, or really just in general if it costs less than 800 credits.

-          Buggy is fast as fuck boyeeeeee. Takes way too long to reload.

-           The Six Wheeled BRDM is actually hilariously durable, especially for its price. Still not actually worth getting the MG or Autocannon versions.

-          Why would you ever buy the 1200 credit harvester over the 1800 credit harvester?

-          Bradley is mostly useless because it’s too fragile, even if its TOW missile is powerful.

-          Mobile Stealth Gen requires teamwork. So it’s useless in 93% of games.

-          Black Hand Stealth Tanks do way too much damage with way too much range. Easily spammable and effective as hell.

-          The Wiesel is honestly insane. It requires a specific area of the map to work, but it’s got ridiculously high damage and a low health pool that’s surprisingly resistant to AT weapons, making it really easy to abuse a Technician and a hill with. Two guys keep spamming these things anytime they’re on Nod and there’s basically no GDI counter except overwhelming force and rushing them, because in any 2v2 they’ll win. They melt aircraft, eat light vehicles and maul heavier ones, all while being able to duck behind any terrain and repair to full with their insanely high speed. I think it’s undervalued for how powerful it can be, or maybe just have it not maul a Challenger 2 with its 20mm peashooter or something?

-          ZSU-57-2 is pretty mediocre now. Perfect.

-          The Black Hand Flame Tank is not worth costing twice what the Devil’s Tongue does.

-          Why does the Black Hand Light Tank exist at that price point. Ditto for the laser variant. I’d say they were glass cannons if their offensive power wasn’t nonexistent.

-          Infiltrators either work or GDI has more than one tank sieging and they’re thus useless.

-          T-55/62/whatevers are fine. Tick Tanks I have no idea, honestly.

-          Goliath is kinda overpowered. It should have less health. Ontos is fine. The AMX-10C sucks but it’s amphibious so it shouldn’t be powerful, but maybe it could use like .3 seconds taken off its reload time.

-          Any repair vehicle is fine.

-           I have never seen anyone use a Microwave tank.

-          Tier 2 tanks are okay but also aren’t tier 3 tanks so people never get them unless they can’t afford it.

-          Tier 3 Nod vehicles are mostly fine.

-          SSMs shouldn’t have tracking.

-          All Nod artillery needs to have a smaller lethal blast radius, especially the Pion. It’s fine to damage in a huge radius, it shouldn’t one hit kill infantry across the base because the only people who think that's fun are the people bored and holding down right click in their artillery while half of GDI just doesn't get to play the game. 

[notDMB]

GDI Infantry

Pretty much exactly the same as Nod. Except Mobius suit means you don’t die in one hit to basic tanks. Also the GDI AA Specialist sucks because Nod air units are either invisible or invincible.

 

GDI Vehicles

-          The Avenger is extremely good at its price point.

-          The MLRS is actually quite good offensively, but it doesn’t have the range to actually make use of it. If it’s in firing range, so is the enemy. Also Stealth tanks lol.

-          The AAVP kills defenses way too fast, but is a good unit otherwise. If only teams used teamwork, because one of these resupplying four mobius suit infantries in field would probably just dominate any map. Actually, the AAVP sucks, never buy it or use teamwork with it.

-          The AMX-13 is GDI’s best anti air tank.

-          The AMX-30 is GDI’s best anti infantry platform.

-          The Pendekar, Abrams, and Merkava exist, but nobody buys them unless they can’t afford a Challenger 2 or haven’t yet understood that these tanks just aren’t worth it.

-          Stryker is actually pretty good. Both variants.

-          Hover MLRS is in the same boat as the AMX. Also, it’s GDI’s best anti ship weapon.

-          Wolverine is countered by any vehicle hitting it at a speed above 15mph.

-          GDI AA sucks.

-          The 36 inch Mammoth is a fantastic way to feed Nod 5000 points, or to win the game in about 15 seconds. There are no exceptions. STOP BUYING MORE THAN ONE 36 INCH MAMMOTH.

-          Titans are a weird mixture of “wow I’m dead” and “wow everything else is dead”

-          Disruptors are useless in almost all maps because of their pitiful range and speed. Completely broken on maps where that isn’t the case, which is like, two maps.

The Air “Meta”
So, basically, everything fucking sucks for GDI. The ORCA Escort is far and away GDI’s best air unit entirely because it’s the cheapest.

Nod having an invisible anti-tank Comanche with tracking invalidates GDI using ORCA outside SAM range, and I mean they need to hide well inside SAM range, since whoever shoots first wins. Even if that wasn’t the case, the Banshee exists and was trained to fuck your face. These things can eat two and a half salvos from an ORCA but take out ORCA in one of their own. AA Gun base defenses actually just miss them, and they can just fly up and kill SAM sites. They can also just fly forward and right click on any GDI dedicated AA vehicle and win. In a 1v1 with any vehicle, a Banshee will come out on top. They could cost 5k and still be overpowered because they just don’t die unless someone gets cocky and overextends. In any fair fight, the Banshee wins because it is unfairly strong offensively and defensively and is not nearly slow enough for that to be a detriment.

Essentially, Banshees counter everything except the AGT. Hilariously, GDI basic Riflemen seem to do enormous damage to Banshees. I’m not sure if there isn’t a fucky armor model going on there or something. Try it out, riflemen melt Banshees. I'm pretty sure they do more damage than the Personal Ion Cannon over the same period of time. 

[notDMB]

Miscellaneous

-          Superweapons should be disabled on sub 16 playercount maps in my opinion.

-          You should have invulnerability on spawn for 2 seconds.

-          Defenses shouldn’t be made of broken dream and wet newspaper and hit like a mummified child who died of polio.

-          GDI artillery isn't *bad* so much as it's just not as good as Nod artillery is. It loses artillery duels and gets gangbanged by Stealth Tanks and Stealth Comanches and Banshees and Stealth Black Hand and yeah, I think GDI really needs some better artillery options, or Nod needs some slightly worse ones. 

[Testament]

Some of the things you say are wack, but inb4 someone comes in here and says that every point is invalid.

Nod base to base shit pissed me off for the last 2 years. It's not fun. Same with SSM homing... especially on air units. The SSM should be shitting its pants in fear from an anti-tank orca

[Learonys]

Hey NotDMB, I see you've put quite some time and effort in writing this down, so i'll try my best to give a proper reply back, giving my own input in this whole matter. I won't necessarily discuss the points you made, I'm just giving my own input. I'm not gonna give input on all the characters, some are too unnoteworthy, and others i'm not experienced enough in to judge.

• 100 credits infantry: (TL;DR: there is a price disrepancy here but most of the units *use, not price*, are justified for several niche purposes)
  • GDI home guard/Nod red tide rifleman: I friggen love this beast of a unit. has a very situational rocket launcher. great splash, respectable damage vs. everything but heavy armour, has *five* sticky bombs, and can throw them far enough to avoid mines in some cases to hit the MCT, of which it needs only 4 to kill a building! did I say it has a sweet ass carbine too?
  • GDI/Nod officer: it has a hitscan chaingun... I mean, the fact that it's hitscan makes it worth something, right...? mweh..
  • GDI/Nod grenadier... well... yeah it's too cheap. huge mag size, does too much against even higher class infantry. *ahem* NERF INCENDIARY GRENADES kthnx.
  • GDI/Nod base crew... you know what, I would make this guy run faster than the default rifleman, as it's completely useless everywhere outside a tank. at least let it navigate the map quickly with the pea shooter of a pistol and single timed C4 it has.

 

• 200-300 credits infantry: (TL;DR: this is such a mixed bag of troopers/infantry, it's honestly quite weird how all of these cost 200...)
  • GDI/Nod rocket soldier: Remember how the secondary fire used to home to infantry.... hey, it's fair that this is nerfed. But wait... the range has been massively nerfed on top of that too...? ...Why? This literally leaves GDI with *no* longrange anti-tank measures for infantry, barring gunner's highly inaccurate rocket launcher. What the hell?
  • GDI designated grenadier: I should be fucking paid to use this diahorrea spurt of a weapon. It has *no* impact damage, only explosive damage. I tested this thing, got a direct hit on the rear of an M113 APC 4 times, dealing 9 damage... I had to hit the weakspot of a flame tower twice to even gain a single point... What. The. Fuck???
  • GDI delta force soldier/Nod Red tide firetrooper: Uh. Hello powercreep.
  • Nod Anti Tank rifleman: This thing has a scope and honestly without it, this thing would be a lot less useful. Sniping the viewport of a turret is such a bitch and it's the only way to deal a considerable amount of damage to most defences, and that's what I mainly use it for. Sniping weakpoints of weak targets is too difficult unless you have a safe vantage point to fire from.
  • Nod flame trooper: I'll be honest, this thing is stronger than the 300 credit, backpack variant. Such a short range weapon forces you to get close and this thing is significantly faster than the other. that alone makes it worth it, but not necessarily powerful. I haven't properly tested yet how well it fares against different kinds of armour so I won't mention that.
  • Nod fanatics: fuck off... "Oh no, an enemy is outgunning me and I can't kill him with normal weapons! OH no, an infantry rush is coming from the tunnels? FUCK YOU, HAHAHAHAHA"

 

• 400-600 credits infantry:
  • Snipers: their firing range, especially when upgraded, is *biiiiiiig*. And the only one I would ever use is the ballistic sniper because it's the only one that can realistically kill sentries/gun emplacements without being spotted as it leaves no tracers. Anti-materiel snipers in this game are so irrelevant... and you know what, that's fine by me because I hate snipers anyhow.
  • Black hand troopers: The melta soldier should *actually* be unable to drive a tank, and have its gun buffed as a compromise. The old melta trooper was fine if it wasn't able to drive tanks imo. The laser chaingunner, I guess it's fine? I don't care too much about this thing. The armour is pretty sweet but imo that makes the field engineer quite powerful considering the price. The elite (and patch) has a kickass rifle and has two timed C4, I love this thing! Honestly I think their pricing is fair throughout. SBH should not be able to pick up weapons however...
  • Gunner: Same with the melta soldier, it should not be able to drive tanks... but if that's the case, I would give it a little bit more armour in return.

 

• 1k credits infantry:
  • Ramjets: I don't see a problem here tbh. it costs 1000 credits to get one and should be rather decent in return.
  • Personal Ion cannon: It has a scope, is hitscan and is 100% accurate, heck yes! I can actually snipe weakspots with this!
  • Railgun: But this thing can't snipe weakspots aswell because of a lack of a scope... but the alternate fire's grenade launcher has a massive range, the projectile is almost impossible to spot and deals kickass damage, I loooove this thing! It's a pocket Carl Gustav, does more need to be said??
  • Mobius suits: Is it fair that a unit like this makes sydney/mobious such a great allrounder, and has improved armour aswell? It should be able to do everything, you know... I like one of the ideas Kaskins talked about today with me, that it should start with no armour but have it rapidly regenerate. EMPing would reduce the armour to 0. Personally I would make it so it has less armour, has it regenerate when it's not taking damage, and have EMP grenades damage the armour too, not flatout bringing it to 0.

 

• Sappers/pioneers: Uhh... Sometimes they're far too powerful, at other times they just waste a lot of money. It all depends on how open the map is. I don't agree with the notion that tanks blow up emplacements easily, because you need to get to the emplacements first, and that's the hard part. Usually they're placed for defensive measures, if a pioneer decides to build some in the field, he's just being silly. Sentries and emplacements in corridors just don't work... Maybe a railgun emplacement works because it provides burst damage. Or a goliath just drives into a tunnel and blows everything up...
  Here's my suggestion, and I've forwarded this to kaskins already. Sentries and emplacements should be able to run out of ammo. By placing an ammo crate nearby, that you have to pay for to resupply with ammo, all the emplacements and sentries will be automatically refilled with ammo up to a certain point. By paying, let's say 500, you could refill the ammo crate by X amount which allows for X amount of magazines' worth in refilling. Now, sentries and emplacements can run out of ammo and need proper maintenance to remain effective. Too many times people place a couple of sentries near a ladder, making it absolutely pointless to climb it. That's broken.

 

That's infantry and sappers for now. I don't even wanna discuss tanks because fucking hell, this game is such a shitfest when it comes to them, and some of the horrible map design only exacerbates their issues. You know what this server needs? A 20 player limit. Anything above that and I want to hit my head on a desk, repeatedly.

Either way, let's give it a try:

• MBT's are so. fucking. boring. What happened to the slow shell speed? Dodging shells is impossible now. Remember fighting a medium in a light tank in vanilla renegade? That's the gameplay I yearn for. Reading the opponent, careful angling to maneuver properly, keeping distance or getting close, counting their reload time and see if they jerk their turret just before they fire, so you can adjust properly... Man that was the real deal. All you do now is shoot... get hit... the most expensive MBT wins... oh wait I'm wrong actually, you are supposed to die I guess because of some guided missiles, banshee, infrared tank, neverending machinegun fire from a high flying chopper, or other broken unit or mechanic...
• The peony and 36 inch mammoth should be treated as a superweapon and there should only be a purchase limit of 1 for them. Screw ruining other's fun by not being able to drive them, I want a playable game. in return I would make the 36 incher's gun slightly more accurate.
• Can someone please design a plugin that permanently bans artillery players that damage buildings, from their own hill that is fucking 3 millimeters beyond their own base so it's not considered B2B? the person who thinks that is fine should shove a peony's barrel up their ass and play with it during the entire game because that's how it feels to get camped by a salmonella turd of an arty player. But you know what, I shouldn't complain because it's just the bad map design that allows for this, right? Yeahhhhh, let's just screw everyone else's fun by designing maps to prevent b2b, because a few individuals decide it's fun to cum all over the enemy with their ridicilous splash damage. Thanks for further limiting our map design options!
• Tanks that I would, according to my own opinion, remove entirely from the game:
  • Gap generator
  • Goliath
• Tanks that i would, according to my own opinion, rework significantly:
  • The M270 MRLS needs its faster deploy time back, but also give it weaker missiles in return, so the reload time can be reduced to keep the DPM the same. now the deploy mechanic can't be abused to reload faster.
  • Strykers need a faster reverse speed. A tank that can get destroyed by a single salvo of plasma beams from a banshee should at least be able to get out of the enemy line of fire quickly, especially considering its price, don't you think? the ATGM's missile arc also needs to be improved, the thing should be able to shoot aircraft but they would still screw you over because your missiles don't curve enough. Same with a load of guided missiles honestly.
  • the SIDAM should get its accurate gun back considering how pricey it is now.
  • the Infrared stealth tank should have a charge time on its 'big beam' so it can't screw unsuspecting tanks over so ridicilously easy.
  • please give either the M113 HMVS or the hover MLRS a longer firing range.... please?
  • the AMX 13 90 and FV4005 needs an improved suspension, currently it's almost impossible to aim on the move, and you're usually forced to turn your tank constantly in a gun fight.
  • The FV4005 needs either an improved sandbag armour, or a faster deploy time. In its current state it's laughable...
  • The GCT 155mm should have an abysmal turret rotation speed considering how not only armoured it is, but also for simply having a turret at all... I mean... does the hellcat ring a bell?
  • Can the Daimler be made slightly smaller? Or if that isn't acceptable, at least a bit faster? Nod infiltrators and goliaths have it so easy in comparison to drive in tunnels, simply because they either have tracks or are smaller... having wheels on that thing is such a massive drawback for maneuvering tight spaces...

Well... that's all for now from me. there's more to discuss but i'd rather keep it at this.

[dblaney1]

9 hours ago, Testament said:

Some of the things you say are wack, but inb4 someone comes in here and says that every point is invalid.

Nod base to base shit pissed me off for the last 2 years. It's not fun. Same with SSM homing... especially on air units. The SSM should be shitting its pants in fear from an anti-tank orca

The SSM no longer homes on aircraft. 

[Testament]

14 hours ago, dblaney1 said:

The SSM no longer homes on aircraft. 

A beautiful change miblaney

[notDMB]

I've really only ever used snipers to counter snipe.

Since people don't (usually) buy Snipers (cause they mostly suck and have nothing to shoot) I don't buy Snipers here. Sometimes I get a Ramjet just to snipe aircraft as Nod in the rare event GDI is wasting money on ORCA. 

[Threve]

On 4/14/2019 at 11:00 PM, aaaaaaaa said:

Mendoza is good for defusing mines by running through them