[RA] Playtest v1.6b - Still an experimental phase.

From alpha to beta!

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SoScared
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[RA] Playtest v1.6b - Still an experimental phase.

Post by SoScared »

Affiliate playtest thread (in Mapping and Modding): http://www.sleipnirstuff.com/forum/view ... 83&t=20017

Feel free to enter the linked topic above with data/feedback on the featured changes but please keep the general discussion (e.g. suggestions, new ideas) below here as much as possible.



This is an extensive list of changes. Roughly estimated we're looking at ca. 1/3 changes from the previous playtest series, 1/3 new changes with v1.6 and 1/3 new changes that are more about tweaks for convenience sake rather than balance. The listed changes in the affiliate thread are color-coded to give the reader a better sense of what's been added and what's 'on hold' to possibly be brought aboard at a later date. The list is apt to extensive modification (hence v1.6a - alpha) and with it comes a few experimental changes that might or might not be of significant value in later rounds.

As for the high risk, high reward changes we're looking at a War Factory that caps its production at 50% with 4 structures, cheaper Shock Troopers that performs more specifically as anti-infantry, reduced build time for T3 vehicles and aircraft and a slight HP buff for the MiG. These are changes that will either go really well or simply go away.



Changes made with v1.6b:

- Spy changes scrapped.
- Technician double damage scrapped.
- Shock Troopers - Damage vs Heavy: 60%, up from 50%
- Grenadiers - Damage vs None: 60%, up from 50%

- Chinook - HP: 140, up from 120
- Medium/Heavy/Mammoth Tank - Damage vs Heavy: 115%
- Chrono/Tesla Tank - HP: 450, up from 400

- Radar Dome - Cost: $1600, down from $1800



Overall the playtesting from v1.6a (distributed almost 10K downloads!) went pretty smooth. After the first week the games settled more or less on the current meta with parts of the gameplay intensified. The +1 vision to the main battle tanks has allowed for better unit preservation (engaments are a bit more deliberate) seemed to have helped counteracted one of the biggest concerns with this playtest which was pushing T2 and T3 away from the meta. In any case the game progression is pretty much the same for the time being. The new WF cap has taken a back seat after the first week, which made me really happy as it has settled as an option, not a default. Despite the 25% bonus, players still prioritize expansions, infantry and tech above the second WF.

As for the rest, in general it's still to early to say too much but I found some room to alter a few things. Additional damage vs heavy for all main battletanks and a bit more health to the frail Chrono and Tesla Tanks with their Light Armor. The big elephant in the room off course is the Radar Dome price/production decrease which will pull closer the entire tech tree a little bit. Core structural changes such as these are generally the last thing I want to meddle with but as with the WF cap gamble it's worth giving it a shot. Lately we've seen more Radar Dome rushes brought forward by competetive players which are fun to watch but overall the current strength of the Service Depot makes this a risk not worth taking. In the past I believe the steep price increase of the Radar Dome was due to how the RA mod was played at the time when MCVs had no build radius and the Artillery was the ultimate anti-hero at the time.



There's no set schedule to the playtesting but I imagine the different versions to be out for an extended period of time, preferably no less than a month in between. The featured changes can be replaced on a whim dependent on their performance and feedback from the playing community. *Also, please feel free to pick apart the .yaml for specific testing or modifying it to fit ones own purposes.


Playtest v1.6b Map Pack (.zip) download links:

Will add later. Currently just stress testing the numbers at:

1v1 (19 maps) DropBox download link.
Team/FFA (22 maps) Dropbox download link.

Some maps has been fitted with extra neutral structures. Neutral structures are also present on map previews.



Glhf!
Last edited by SoScared on Sat May 20, 2017 12:24 am, edited 17 times in total.

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Post by SoScared »

Fixed NavalYard/SubPen targetable bug. Revisions uploaded, map packs links updated.

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Post by noobmapmaker »

Im curious to see how these ideas pan out, think alot of them are interesting. Personally Im curious to see how the WF build reduction time influences the game. I hope that it will make builds that are focussed on tanks -more than infantry- more viable. This would lead to much more differentiated buildorders in midgame, I think.

In addition -but lets test out these changes first- I would mind to see barracks also recieve a change in build speed. Since they are also used alot as basepushfodder and as a remote production facility we see them alot on the battlefield anyway. I would be curious to see what happens if you need 6-7 or maybe even 8-9 to reach max. cap of buildtime reductions. As a compromise the build cap could be set at 45%, instead of 50%. It could be something like (100, 95, 90, 80, 75, 70, 60, 50, 45)

A probably shitty idea to make naval more interesting:
Give all factions the submarine, gunship and destroyer. Missile sub only for soviet and battleship only for allies. New soviet unit: transpot sub. Just a regular sub, but it can transport a bunch of infantry while submerged like a normal transport.
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Post by Clockwork »

For the features I've seen so far I have no qualms. I have yet to dabble with the high tech changes because I never tech and whenever I try it shows of my complete lack of knowledge on the micro thing. :D

The problem I have though is the War factory change and after long thought and playing around with it I think it is not a good idea. The current game at the moment is macro dominated that is a fact. Very few high tech high level players at the moment I can count them on my hand. A big problem between players at the moment is that tier 1 production and excellent macro is very powerful. This change is now allowing players with superb macro that can keep an eco to support the bonuses to now pump out 11 second medium tanks. Considering a part of the player base is very against the "spam playstyle" (in my opinion a player who can spam a lot of units/buildings/veichles is superb at macro and isn't less of a player because he doesn't bother much with the micro side such as myself. Being fast at production and maintaining eco and building is very hard and shouldn't be overlooked but that's my two cents.) this is not a good change as now a macro player will have not only a large army, out expand etc but now has tanks coming out twice as fast as yours. This just propels the current meta of macro over micro to new levels which I don't mind because I am a macro player but for the people who like using the fancy pants units it will degrade their game experience even more as macro is just the king at the moment. Having a macro playstyle should be as good as a micro playstyle like a 50/50 split so it is actual skill and perfection of your game plan rather than one is just so much better. That is my thoughts and findings.

@NMM Naval in my opinion needs a complete overhaul, would be best if you made a thread for it, I think it needs its own special place.

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Post by SoScared »

*Also, please feel free to pick apart the .yaml for specific testing or modifying it to fit ones own purposes.

@NMM: Sort of like your idea with meddling with the Barracks cap but I think it's nice to have a 50% standard so not to over-complicate the values, making them harder to memorize. As for Naval there's one idea I like that pops up from time to time, RA2's Sea Reaper (Flak Boat) to give Soviets a useful light scout and AA ship. Could be very helpful and also support a fair asymmetrical balance.

@Happy: Yeah I share your concerns regarding the War Factory cap. The idea behind it is to bring along more options, e.g. support a higher tank-to-infantry ratio (hand in hand with the more expensive barracks) and bring some more interesting timing pushes into RA. There's no guarantee this will work well and will potentially push tech options further back. We'll see tho, I've occasionally seen a few sick macro tank blobs zipping around the maps but so far (just a few days in) the games has played more or less the same way, including tech, given that the 2nd War Factory 2K$ investment eats up quite a bit of production time. As mentioned it's a high risk-high reward experiment that, if working well, would pay dividends to RA's gameplay. If all we see are big fat blobs swarming everywhere, expect it to be scrapped.

Also always important to keep in mind is all featured changes working in concert with each-other so evaluating the changes by themselves can be a challenge.

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Post by crlf »

Right now, multiple war factories is rare, and I would like to see that changed somehow... but like Happy I'm worried about effects on tech.

Anything which makes it more likely people will build more from the WF will have some effects in common; regarding 1.6a, a few players noted that this is a big buff to mechanics. First, if you go for more WF you can get more value out of mechanics becauuse you have more vehicles to repair. Second, because you will build more mechanics, you are more likely to have one in range to reclaim enemy vehicles when you win engagements. Third, that's something you'll do more often because your opponent might also go for more WF so hopefully will be leaving more husks around.

Hijackers, on the other hand, grant no value from there being more of your own vehicles, and don't especially gain from there being more enemy vehicles because hijacking is mostly only viable against slow unarmed undefended ore trucks. In fact, more WF means it's quicker for your opponent to replace hijacked harvesters, and quicker for you to just build the harvesters instead of pinching someone else's. And against Allies, if your opponent has more tanks, they are more likely to be able to hunt that stolen harvester down now than without the change.

Given there's already (I'd say) a disparity between mechanics and hijackers, I think it's important that any change set doesn't make it worse. The simplest change would be to make mechanics more expensive. I'd also suggest reducing their movement speed, and maybe giving them a short timer when they reclaim husks like engineers have for captures. Alternatively, making hijackers faster and tougher might help.

In terms of effects on tech, more vehicles hopefully means it's easier to counter arty crawling pressure, which is mostly good, though hit and run V2 micro is also affected. I'd like to see a way of making Tier 3 more enticing, rather than compensating at the radar dome level.

My first thought is faster build speeds for all Tier 3 units - i.e. just as investment in the WF, RD by way of Airfield/Helipad, and SD, by way of MCV, give you the ability to spend money quicker, so too should the Tech Centre.

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Post by Doomsday »

crlf wrote: Hijackers
Thank you for reminding me about Hijackers.

I think Hijackers should be uncrushable. Such a simple change would make them more reliable to use. It also doesn't make sense for a unit specifically trained for hijacking vehicles to be crushed by afk harvesting ore trucks. ZxGanon said Crystallized Doom hijackers are uncrushable so it should be easy to code.
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Post by SoScared »

@crlf: Thanks! That's a lot good pointers to keep track of when looking through these matches. Regarding the mechanics that's certainly an interesting point, it's gonna be interesting to see that in context of stronger unit preservation as well - a few key features aims to make suicide engagements slightly less with the +1 vision for tanks and certain structures together with the improved vision (ground position vision for all aircraft and +1 yak/mig) with the latest release.

The hijacker, as with the dog, are hard to balance against as long as they're bugging out as they do.

Cheaper/faster built Radar Dome and Tech Center has been brought up before (I think OMnom). Sounds intriguing in context of the War Fac cap.



@Doomsday: Sounds like a potential hazard, but not unreasonable. Might be worth checking out.

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Post by OMnom »

Doomsday wrote:
crlf wrote: Hijackers
Thank you for reminding me about Hijackers.

I think Hijackers should be uncrushable. Such a simple change would make them more reliable to use. It also doesn't make sense for a unit specifically trained for hijacking vehicles to be crushed by afk harvesting ore trucks. ZxGanon said Crystallized Doom hijackers are uncrushable so it should be easy to code.
I don't know how the numbers are calculated within the game engine, but the hijackers currently have a 95% chance of not being crushed. I'm thinking that the crush event probably gets run every time the hijacker tries to enter a moving vehicle, so that 95% is more like 50-60% after running that line of code 10 times or so.

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Post by lucassss »

Can't hijacker be patched by giving it a very short ranged "freeze weapon"? The weapon will have a very low rate of fire, and will freeze the vehicle that it hits for enough time for the hijacker to enter it. I remember that I saw a freeze ray in Noit's mod, so it should be possible.

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Post by anjew »

OMnom wrote: I don't know how the numbers are calculated within the game engine, but the hijackers currently have a 95% chance of not being crushed. I'm thinking that the crush event probably gets run every time the hijacker tries to enter a moving vehicle, so that 95% is more like 50-60% after running that line of code 10 times or so.
Doesn't it still have a 95% chance no matter how many times the code runs? A coin is still 50% per side even if you flip it ten times.

I have a theory that when a unit is moving between cells, if the cell they are travelling too has a vehicle on it or driving over the cell, it completely negates the crushing percentage and just crushes them since they cant move out of a cell they are moving too. This is why crushing with a large amount of units (apc etc) is really strong.

This theory is really hard to test on a small scale because of how trash the move and attack move commands but I was able to reproduce it.
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Post by MustaphaTR »

As SoScared as the fact that Hijackers are bad are fault of bad implemtation of entering code vs mobile actors. IMO, Hijackers (and Dogs) should be "fixed" first rather than balanced.

About Crushing, i think the reason why they get crushed so easily is because escaping from crusher code doesn't trigger when enter activity starts. I'm not sure tho. But yes they are meant to have 95% change to escape.

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Post by noobmapmaker »

Iirc there's a 100% crush chance when infantry moves.
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Post by OMnom »

anjew wrote:
OMnom wrote: I don't know how the numbers are calculated within the game engine, but the hijackers currently have a 95% chance of not being crushed. I'm thinking that the crush event probably gets run every time the hijacker tries to enter a moving vehicle, so that 95% is more like 50-60% after running that line of code 10 times or so.
Doesn't it still have a 95% chance no matter how many times the code runs? A coin is still 50% per side even if you flip it ten times.

I have a theory that when a unit is moving between cells, if the cell they are travelling too has a vehicle on it or driving over the cell, it completely negates the crushing percentage and just crushes them since they cant move out of a cell they are moving too. This is why crushing with a large amount of units (apc etc) is really strong.

This theory is really hard to test on a small scale because of how trash the move and attack move commands but I was able to reproduce it.
p(hijacker crushed once after 10 tries) = 1- p(hijacker not getting crushed after 10 ties) = 1- (0.95)^10 = 40%. So I was slightly off with the guess...whatever. What I'm trying to say is that the crush event might happen too many times whenever the hijacker tries to enter a vehicle, in which case, the game reads it at "crush^10" rather than just "crush." Again, I have no clue how the code is written, so I might be completely wrong. It would explain a lot about why my buggy hijackers keep getting crushed after multiple tries though.

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Post by Doomsday »

Barracks - Cost: $500, up from $400

War Factory - Build-time reduction caps at 50% with 4 structures (100, 75, 60, 50) - Cost $1800, down from $2000 [OMnom - modified]
I like the general idea of giving players more viable options in terms of build orders (mass barracks vs tech vs 2nd WF).

But I wonder if this is the correct way to apply the change. In OMnom's playtest build he tried 1600 cost WF. I would like to hear what was the reasoning behind capping WF production at 4 instead of cheaper WF as ways to reward players for building 2nd WF.

First, a comparison of "bang for your buck" 1600 WF vs 2000 WF capped at 4.
2000 WF capped at 4 (2nd WF yielding +25% production speed): 2000 / 25 = 80 creds per 1% of production speed boost
1600 WF capped at 7 (2nd WF yielding +15% production speed): 1600 / 15 = 107 creds per 1% of production speed boost


My explanations for prefering 1600 cost WF.
1) Game design being more elegant when all production scales same way.
2) Currently losing a WF early ends the game very commonly. I believe cheaper WF would give players more comeback potential.
3) Single ref into WF build already got nerfed by total of 300 credits if you want to be safe from early rush. Pillbox is 200 more expensive and Barracks 100 more.

However I have not played any games with either of these WF changes so this is all just speculation.

As unrelated note I want to point out +100 cost for Barracks is a Radar Dome boost. Yay for tech being more viable. :D
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-Sun Tzu

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