Comments on 16 September Rat Chat

[odonovan1 279]

 

Although I missed today's Rat Chat live, I watched it on YouTube and had some thoughts.  I'm sure I'm not the only one.  Seeing as I didn't see a thread for this yet, here we go! 

 

Flight Model Audit - All planes should be done ASAP.  It DRASTICALLY changed the 109s controllability, making 109s MUCH easier to control for new pilots.  Although I don't fly Axis, I do know that several Allied planes still suffer from "the flop."  That should be dealt with, as soon as it can.  As an "LTAP," I speak from experience.  It will improve and grow the air game when the planes don't break the laws of physics, uncontrollably bouncing back and forth, 30 degrees each way, in a fraction of a second.  With ALL marks of the 109, the Axis' primary fighter, already done, that's quite an advantage in drawing new pilots to the Axis side.

United States P-40F - Please do NOT use the markings for the 325th Fighter Group, "The Checkertail Clan."  They ONLY flew their P-40s in North Africa, NEVER in Europe.  Please choose a more generic paint job.

Bunkers - Interior walls should be dark, especially behind "murder holes." Light walls show defenders' darker uniforms too much, as they use the murder holes.  They should allow a certain amount of "hiding in the shadows" to simulate the ability for soldiers to minimize their visibility behind the holes.

 

 

 

Thanks!

 

-Irish

 

 

Edited September 17, 2018 by odonovan1

[Capco 1,195]

I was happy to see the segment start with an overview of 1.36 and especially with the Allies' concerns about town supply.  Chaos seems to have a great understanding of how things should work and look in the hybrid system.  I look forward to the next development update on 1.36.

 

One question I have for @chaoswzkd is in regards to Air and Navy supply for the Allies.  As I understand it, the Navy and the Air will be garrison-based rather than in the form of movable brigades like they are now.  You said that the Allies would be able to switch ownership (within certain limits) for the Army supply.  My question is, will AHC be able to differentiate the Air and Navy supply from the Army supply?  Continuing off your Namur example in your presentation, standard operating procedure for AHC is to always try to blend units from different nationalities whenever possible in order to give the playerbase their choice of weapons.  So in that example, if we had a French army brigade in Namur, AHC would generally place a British navy flag to supplement the French army flag.  

 

Likewise with the Allied airfields, will we be able to blend aircraft from multiple countries in 1.36 like we can now? If we have a French army garrison in Brussels East (the section of Brussels that has the airfield), will the aircraft from that airfield be exclusively French? This is even more important than the being able to blend the navy with the army of different nationalities.  It would be very unfortunate if a town that has docks and/or an airfield may only be garrisoned with one country's soldiers at a time (outside of the movable supply that will remain of course).  

 

I loved seeing the sample of new goodies by bmbm and the 3D and Environment presentations.  

 

I really like the Easter Egg approach to some of your work too, guys.  It not only gives the game character, but in some ways it also allows you as developers to put your own personal stamp on your work and thereby give it more meaning.  In my experience, the final product is better when you personalize it.  

 

I think the overall plan is really solid.  CRS has both short and long term goals.  I think the DLCs have added additional revenue streams for CRS and I hope they end up being successful.  

 

PS - I would have attended it had it not been on a football Sunday afternoon.  Maybe another time or day would be better next time (if there is another one during the football season).  

Edited September 17, 2018 by Capco

[Elfin 183]

Can anyone provide a brief summary of the chat?

 

[ZEBBEEE 421]

57 minutes ago, Elfin said:

Can anyone provide a brief summary of the chat?

 

Very cool stuff ib!

[propa 300]

Something's going on !

great work !

 

[Chaoswzkd 155]

10 hours ago, Capco said:

I was happy to see the segment start with an overview of 1.36 and especially with the Allies' concerns about town supply.  Chaos seems to have a great understanding of how things should work and look in the hybrid system.  I look forward to the next development update on 1.36.

Thanks, and I'm glad you liked it!

10 hours ago, Capco said:

One question I have for @chaoswzkd is in regards to Air and Navy supply for the Allies.  As I understand it, the Navy and the Air will be garrison-based rather than in the form of movable brigades like they are now.  You said that the Allies would be able to switch ownership (within certain limits) for the Army supply.  My question is, will AHC be able to differentiate the Air and Navy supply from the Army supply?  Continuing off your Namur example in your presentation, standard operating procedure for AHC is to always try to blend units from different nationalities whenever possible in order to give the playerbase their choice of weapons.  So in that example, if we had a French army brigade in Namur, AHC would generally place a British navy flag to supplement the French army flag.  

 

Likewise with the Allied airfields, will we be able to blend aircraft from multiple countries in 1.36 like we can now? If we have a French army garrison in Brussels East (the section of Brussels that has the airfield), will the aircraft from that airfield be exclusively French? This is even more important than the being able to blend the navy with the army of different nationalities.  It would be very unfortunate if a town that has docks and/or an airfield may only be garrisoned with one country's soldiers at a time (outside of the movable supply that will remain of course).  

If I said AHC will only control Army Garrisons, I mispoke.

The ownership of the town governs the Garrison nationality. AHC will be able to change the ownership of the town, which will flip all of the garrisons to the corresponding country.

There are no plans at this time to allow AHC to further differentiate a town by having, say, French Army, British Air, US Airborne, British Navy. The game could theoretically support that, though. It's something we'll have to see after 1.36 drops and if CRS and/or the Allies would even want to do that, because it could cause some headaches with trying to arrange supply, overstock, and the like.

Mixed supply, as in "One garrison with French, British, and US supply", is something that came up during design, but the game can't accurately handle that without a lot more work. What would happen is that the garrison, or brigade, or whatever, would be owned by a single country - let's say France. If we put UK supply into that flag (and you can think of garrisons as a kind of static flag), that might cause issues off the bat because UK supply is set up in the data to be owned by UK. Might cause issues to begin with, might just screw up stats, not sure. Even if there were no issues, the only people able to spawn from that flag would be French personas. So you'd have French Army players driving Churchills, for example. You couldn't have a UK persona do it because the flag is a French flag.

So, it's not feasible at this time for the game to have mixed supply, because the game can't currently support it correctly. In light of the difficulties involved, there are no plans to pursue this.

As far as Navy and Air goes, there may very well be some movable supply with that. I can't say one way or the other because the exact amount of supply and exactly how the movable flags will look and how many of them there will be are all up to OHM and XOOM, and will likely be based off of research done by Scotsman and Hatch (and whoever else may have been involved).

The 1.36 work Development has been doing has been getting static supply back into towns and covering all the bases regarding that; nothing we're doing should be changing the behavior of the movable flags directly.

Edited September 17, 2018 by chaoswzkd

[pbveteran 0]

Good to see the PZ IVH and StuG III with top Lmg seems like justice but I don't see any good axis toy to go head to head with the Firefly and Achilles both of these over-penetrate so easily the PZ IV , StuG and Tiger.

I will add that giving the PZ IV G smoke grenades would be an awesome addition.

[GrAnit 321]

I am most excited about the new bunkers and city blocks!  Rooftop access, balconies, alleyways, with lots of clutter nooks and crannies.  Gameplay will be awesome!

Now the rats just need to give us a reason to go there more:  like put these new buildings by CPs and other strategic points first.

[Chaoswzkd 155]

36 minutes ago, GrAnit said:

I am most excited about the new bunkers and city blocks!  Rooftop access, balconies, alleyways, with lots of clutter nooks and crannies.  Gameplay will be awesome!

Now the rats just need to give us a reason to go there more:  like put these new buildings by CPs and other strategic points first.

First thing I thought of with the building and the courtyard with the fountain: make the courtyard a capture point and add more clutter. Have to take cover from tons of angles, and attackers have to actually clear it.

 

Probably a terrible idea for a number of reasons, though.

[Capco 1,195]

5 hours ago, chaoswzkd said:

So, it's not feasible at this time for the game to have mixed supply, because the game can't currently support it correctly. In light of the difficulties involved, there are no plans to pursue this.

As far as Navy and Air goes, there may very well be some movable supply with that. I can't say one way or the other because the exact amount of supply and exactly how the movable flags will look and how many of them there will be are all up to OHM and XOOM, and will likely be based off of research done by Scotsman and Hatch (and whoever else may have been involved).

So the garrisons have to be all from 1 country?  Understood.  

 

Like I said, it's not a huge deal for the Allies to be able to blend navy from one country with army from another within the same town.  That's manageable.  

 

However, the air game is entirely different.  If you're saying that air garrisons can only belong to one country, that is bad news bears for the Allied Air Forces.  It's just going to create lots of infighting about which nationality should be in which airfields (aka the gripe that TOEs completely fixed), and then when people don't get to use what they want, they just log off.  

 

Movable supply for the air (and navy) would alleviate all of these issues.  I really, really hope that @XOOM and @OHM think long and hard before deciding to saddle the Allies with the side-specific constraint that I have just illustrated. 

 

Please don't feed us the line "well it's war soldier! make it work!"   When we had to fight each other before we even fought the Axis, it was a miserable time for the Allies.  

[ZEBBEEE 421]

They didn’t speak about how extra supply flags will work. Maybe you will be able to move a French flag in a British garrison, offering larger variety of units to spawn and fixing your worries about AF at the same time? @Capco

[Capco 1,195]

2 minutes ago, Zebbeee said:

They didn’t speak about how extra supply flags will work. Maybe you will be able to move a French flag in a British garrison, offering larger variety of units to spawn and fixing your worries about AF at the same time? @Capco

Yes.  Chaos did say that there will be some movable supply, but he also said that Xoom and Ohm have not decided on whether or not movable air flags will remain in 1.36. 

 

I am just trying to make my case for them remaining in some form in light of Chaos' answer.  

 

[GrAnit 321]

The Rats should put CP’s in random city buildings now that they have rooms.  Put the CPs in different building, different rooms, different floors.  Huge tactical variation in trying to capture these.  Create a new depot as part of the the city ‘blocks’.  That would be awesome for gameplay!!! That alone would probably bring a ton of people back.  No more rinse, repeat on CP captures!

Edited September 17, 2018 by GrAnit

[SCKING 508]

46 minutes ago, GrAnit said:

The Rats should put CP’s in random city buildings now that they have rooms.  Put the CPs in different building, different rooms, different floors.  Huge tactical variation in trying to capture these.  Create a new depot as part of the the city ‘blocks’.  That would be awesome for gameplay!!! That alone would probably bring a ton of people back.  No more rinse, repeat on CP captures!

I think that would be great but we would need a new model for each capture location.

[rotsechs 93]

4 hours ago, pbveteran said:

go head to head with the Firefly and Achilles

As killable as current Allied armour. 

No concern to me. 

Just waiting for the tank that suits me. 

[GrAnit 321]

55 minutes ago, SCKING said:

I think that would be great but we would need a new model for each capture location.

Couldn’t you designate a room as a capture area and make that a ‘CP’, much like the capture room in an AB bunker?

[SCKING 508]

capture areas inside of buildings are defined in the model itself

[GrAnit 321]

I see.  Well, if it’s not too hard, it would be awesome.  Especially in big cities.

[GrAnit 321]

CPs should be RPOs (Rat Placed Objects).

[Actonman 66]

I think garrisons should be small company size 100 tickets,  and brigade flags battalion size 300 tickets or the town supply thing will be silly and rubbish,

Town supply is a silly and rubbish idea already just will be more so if ever implemented.

Edited September 17, 2018 by actonman

[SCKING 508]

If HC participation were higher, I would agree with you personally.. But with the struggle to get HC participation in all time zones, we need an alternative to take care of the issues seen when no HC are on. 

[HATCH 258]

20 hours ago, odonovan1 said:

Flight Model Audit - All planes should be done ASAP.  It DRASTICALLY changed the 109s controllability, making 109s MUCH easier to control for new pilots.  Although I don't fly Axis, I do know that several Allied planes still suffer from "the flop."  That should be dealt with, as soon as it can.  As an "LTAP," I speak from experience.  It will improve and grow the air game when the planes don't break the laws of physics, uncontrollably bouncing back and forth, 30 degrees each way, in a fraction of a second.  With ALL marks of the 109, the Axis' primary fighter, already done, that's quite an advantage in drawing new pilots to the Axis side.

Agree. As soon as everything dies properly, that's where we go next...
 

20 hours ago, odonovan1 said:

United States P-40F - Please do NOT use the markings for the 325th Fighter Group, "The Checkertail Clan."  They ONLY flew their P-40s in North Africa, NEVER in Europe.  Please choose a more generic paint job.

Going to have to disagree with you there...

Technically that was the same for the P39's. Hard to find Free French P39 in Europe as well... Interesting situation as A) its not easy to find ANY American P-40s actually IN northern Europe, and B,) it IS near the end of the P-40 service life in the European/Mediterranean Theater. However, I think we are relatively safe with these markings as C) the 325th,  along with the 33rd, 57th, 79th all participated in the Salerno operation. That's considered ETO, and therefore close enough to Europe for me. As well, after transitioning from P40's to P47's and later P51's, they moved to Italy and flew bomber escort missions to Regensburg, Berlin, Vienna, and hit other targets such as airfields, marshaling yards, and communications targets in France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Maybe they never flew their P40's farther north than Italy, but the squadron itself ranged all over Europe. So if we can give the French 322's and Bell 14a's that they never actually received, I think we're safe with allowing a squadron that DID range all over Europe to do so with a plane that they were transitioning out of during the Italian campaign. If the Allies had progressed faster on that Southern front before the P38's and P-47's were available, who's to say the 325th might have had to hang onto those P40's a little bit longer...

So we're going stick with what we have

[OHM 484]

The supply numbers will need to reflect the size of the Town vs City .. Also back line supply will need to be considered as the amount available to move up for over supply the neighboring town. 

Moveable supply also will be looked at and i my thinking is that is should not be anything large ... i really dont want to see magic surprise supply show up in a fight .....in all reality paras should be the reinforcement or the lead attack   squad.

 

Navy movement is not that big a deal as it is equal on both sides ...Air and the equipment issues will be looked at to ensure it is right for game play .. 

 

Once i am allowed into a version that is in testings i will have a much better idea as to how it will start working in all areas.  

[dropbear 108]

I cannot believe that ANY  game developer in 2018 would knowingly introduce non mixing of bdes in this case. You know it was broken before TOES. You FIXED it with TOES.

I am sure CRS won't jeopardise the games future with a short sighted system this time...it's make or break time CRS.

[Actonman 66]

12 minutes ago, OHM said:

The supply numbers will need to reflect the size of the Town vs City .. Also back line supply will need to be considered as the amount available to move up for over supply the neighboring town. 

Moveable supply also will be looked at and i my thinking is that is should not be anything large ... i really dont want to see magic surprise supply show up in a fight .....in all reality paras should be the reinforcement or the lead attack   squad.

 

Navy movement is not that big a deal as it is equal on both sides ...Air and the equipment issues will be looked at to ensure it is right for game play .. 

 

Once i am allowed into a version that is in testings i will have a much better idea as to how it will start working in all areas.  

I don`t understand why they always say `magic` supply movements. Anyone who knows or has played wargames (DOC) is familiar with flag / counter movemets as being integral to the strategic layer and a realisitic simulation of miltary movements, deployment and logistics. It`s not `magical brigade warping` its WARGAMING, lose that and the game loses its raison daitre.

 

Edited September 17, 2018 by actonman