Balance update 4/22/18
After hearing some of the feedback over the last few weeks I feel the need to post more frequently to keep people in the loop. I don't know if I'll make this a weekly thing but I'll at post when I have something to talk about.
Lorrydriver wrote: ↑IMO, there's only one problem that makes this game unbearable sometimes. Slow mid-late games including allies. We need to change how artilleries, pillboxes and aa guns work, before we do anything else.
I hear ya.
There are a handful of reasons I've gone with small scale changes to alleviate the situation instead of attempt to do a thorough overhaul of how allies work.
- The pillbox price change was a gigantic change to game balance, and that single change actually brought Allies and Soviets into a happy place in terms of balance vs each other. I fear that changing the core of how Allies works will shatter that balance, probably in the favor of Soviets.
- Overhauls take a heckuva lot of time to prepare and test.
- Overhauls are likely to be pretty controversial
- I've always been a fan of small scale changes
That said, I don't mind the testing of an overhaul that restructures Allies away from the arty/AAgun/Hind/pillbox core that attempts to shoot the moon and fix everthing.
I've enlisted help for making such a playtest, and I believe he'll begin testing soon. If this test....
a) fixes the problems of stale play with AvA,
b) Keeps it to where Allies aren't being steamrolled by Soviets,
c) Isn't so controversial that I can't get it through review,
.... I can see myself agreeing with and implementing an overhaul.
A couple side projects I'm working on...
Per-unit Veterancy Perks
An idea I've been toying with to make veterancy add more flavor to the game (especially to non-infantry units) is to give units abilities on certain ranks that go beyond the standard extra damage and speed. Using conditions, units can be given abilities on certain ranks. For example, the ranger can be given an extra cell of vision on each rank, and the artillery can be given a range boost on elite rank only.
There's quite a lot of possibilities here but it's also important to not get carried away. The main thing about this is that it'll probably require it's own playtest, and every combat unit needs a proper perk for it to make sense. I'll write an update when I get to that point.
ENGI HUSK SALVAGE
Lets talk about the engineer. The engineer currently has two abilities:
1) He touches the side of a building to slowly convert it to your religion (can we get wololo in the engi voice?)
2) He enters a damaged structure where he is promptly sacrificed to the Aztec goddess Chalchiuhtlicue, who then honors the sacrifice by restoring the building to full health and provides bountiful rains for the next year.
After an engineer has completed his primary task of capturing oil derricks, players will either send him on a likely suicide mission to try to sneak capture an important enemy building, or, put him somewhere and completely forget about him for the rest of the game.
I think the engineer could use more tools in his tools box. In this case; a blowtorch.
Engi husk salvage (scrapping) is an idea I've wanted to use for a long time. The idea is simple; using the ExternalCapture trait, the engineer 'captures' the husk of a destroyed vehicle, where it is instead removed from the battlefield and converted into credits.
The two variables for implementation are capture time and amount of credits per husk. I've gone with 5 seconds and 40% of the destroyed vehicle's value (i.e. 800 for a mammoth tank, 280 for a light tank) These values can be altered as needed.
The sad thing about all this is, don't get your hopes up; there's still
a major blocker in the way of this being doable. It's currently impossible to use CatureTypes with GivesCashOnCapture, which makes the mechanic husk restore also award the player with money. (I wrote up the engineer part of the post when I thought I might have a shot at fixing the blocker myself. I left it in because I tend to laugh at my own jokes.
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"Do not trust the balance tzars (Smitty, Orb). They are making the changes either for the wrong reasons, for no reason at all, or just because they can and it makes them feel good." - Alex Jones