Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Discussion about the game and its default mods.
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Orb
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by Orb »

For slow vehicles like the mammoth this will still appear quite buggy as units can not stop when they're between cells.

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FiveAces
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by FiveAces »

As someone who's naturally biased towards micro and flashy plays, I'm strongly in favor of keeping the hijacker.

Yes, it was not in the original, but it's by design a high risk/high reward unit that creates ample opportunities. There's nothing quite like having a hijacker as an ace in the hole and turning an enemy's tank flank against him, or abusing the abysmal turn rate of mammoths by flanking them from behind.

Yes, this unit is buggy as hell, but with good timing it can be used to great effect. I recently played a game on stream against Mo where I rushed 2 hijackers and 2 mine layers, and while I lost, it was one of the most fun games I've played in a while.

Yes, I know the code isn't easy to fix and they are janky as hell to use. But goddammit, is it rewarding to pull off a tank heist, and I'd hate to see this unit go.


Considering I'm so much in favor of fixing the hijacker, I must surely have a suggestion on how to increase its viability?
... Not really. I've been trying to mess around with some parameters and even tried giving them an emp weapon with 1 cell range, but everything I tried ended up just being a bandaid fix. The one change I liked best was to streamline his stealth, which is currently revealed by infantry. I did instead give him regular camouflage after standing still, which effectively allows him to camp ore fields before your opponents claims them and act as a scout/mine who can then steal an ore truck if you time it right.

In addition, I'd be in favor of giving the hijacker the ability to reclaim husks. This would fix a longstanding imbalance, give them a reason to be built and keep the engineer from becoming an overloaded unit (remember, it does already have three abilities if you count capturing neutral structures and stealing enemy real estate as different tasks!)

In conclusion, i'm not asking to give the hijacker a free pass, but to sit together as a community and think about how we can fix this unit, because it has TONS of potential for fun plays.

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WhoCares
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by WhoCares »

"I did instead give him regular camouflage after standing still" I like that, even if does not fix the main problem, i would spend 500 to control a key point with vision and prevent flanks. regular camo is detected by dog and spy right ?

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FiveAces
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by FiveAces »

WhoCares wrote:
Fri Sep 28, 2018 8:38 pm
"regular camo is detected by dog and spy right ?
And mammooths/defences/radar, yup. Also, we might want to look into making them uncrushable, even though that'd require lots of testing.

lawANDorder
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by lawANDorder »

avalach21 wrote:
Fri Sep 28, 2018 6:09 am
IMO the best solution would probably be somewhere inbetween... making mcv caps some sort of exception case where they would switch to your own faction upon capture so as to not make tech transfer unique to the Allies. That would keep the fun feature in the game and also mitigate most of the basis for the "imbalanced" complaints.
I really like this suggestion: it doesn't touch the role of the mechanic (if there wasn't the problem with easy double tech in teamgames then nobody would want to change the unit, right?) and in this case it seems to me that it is reasonable to make an exception here. All other options involve changes to units that do not need to change.

Think about it this way: should a player be able to gain access to both allied and soviet tech? It doesn't make sense to me from whatever perspective I look at it. Why would allies get access to everything soviets have by just restoring the husk of a single unit? Why do they sound russian if everything was build and trained by allies? Double tech just doesn't feel right, you shouldn't have a blob of shocktroopers, medics, mammoths and flak trucks that is covered by artillery and longbows. Even the overloaded queues don't look right. I see no reason for this to exist in non-modded maps tbh.

Instead, I would like to have a spy or thief that can steal tech plans from enemy production structures. Not sure how this should work, maybe just get access to a random unit from that production queue, maybe define a unit for eac production queue, I don't know. Just, think about if we really want full double tech in the default mod and why. If you don't have an answer to this it might be better to drop that ability instead of making lots of changes to "balance" it. Just my two cents ;)

Edit: You probably should still get access to double tech after capturing a conyard. My point here was just about the double tech gained by restoring an MCV husk because double tech is super powerful and restoring an MCV husk is much easier than capturing a conyard.

If we wanted a solution without any exceptions I'd vote for what Sleipnir quoted on the previous page because I wouldn't want that the ability to restore husks is completely removed from the game. However, i expect that this change will make double tech in teamgames happen more often which I consider a bad thing. It should be a very rare occurrence and not something everyone has, especially not by restoring MCV husks from teammates. I'm afraid that the main factions could become irrelevant by this.

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netnazgul
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by netnazgul »

FiveAces wrote:
Fri Sep 28, 2018 9:24 pm
WhoCares wrote:
Fri Sep 28, 2018 8:38 pm
"regular camo is detected by dog and spy right ?
And mammooths/defences/radar, yup. Also, we might want to look into making them uncrushable, even though that'd require lots of testing.
Making hijackers uncrushable was considered several times and won't work cause it will introduce a $500 tier-1.5 unit able to block refineries easily.

GDave
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by GDave »

netnazgul wrote:
Sat Sep 29, 2018 7:40 pm
Making hijackers uncrushable was considered several times and won't work cause it will introduce a $500 tier-1.5 unit able to block refineries easily.
How about giving hijackers 100% chance of evading a crush? If feasible, they'd then move out of the way for a harvester, but not be crushed by it.

SirCake
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by SirCake »

They already have 95% evasion chance. That won't make the hiacker any better.

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netnazgul
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by netnazgul »

FYI as this topic concerns engineers - engineers will become consumable (enter the building) by default next release https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/15661

AMHOL
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by AMHOL »

SirCake wrote:
Sun Sep 30, 2018 10:08 am
They already have 95% evasion chance. That won't make the hiacker any better.
The discussion was around giving them standard stealth and a 100% chance of crush evasion, to counter the "invisible refblock issue" which is currently present with the phase transport.

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FiveAces
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by FiveAces »

netnazgul wrote:
Sat Sep 29, 2018 7:40 pm
Making hijackers uncrushable was considered several times and won't work cause it will introduce a $500 tier-1.5 unit able to block refineries easily.
Are you 100% sure about that? As far as I'm aware, uncrushable just means that the unit will always dodge whenever a vehicle tries occupying the same cell. This would mean they'd just step aside like a gentlemen when the harv tries docking - and reveal themselves in the process.

Also, they are not stealthed while moving, so if your opponent gets one to your ref pad and you haven't noticed, you already messed up ;)

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anjew
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by anjew »

FiveAces wrote:
Sun Sep 30, 2018 4:32 pm
uncrushable just means that the unit will always dodge whenever a vehicle tries occupying the same cell.
Im curious what would happen if it was made uncrushable and then tried to dodge into a cell where another tank is already occupying.
For everything else it skips the evade chance.

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ZxGanon
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by ZxGanon »

Uncrushable means it is not crushable. Cyborgs in SP have this trait. Tanks trying to crush them rather step aside themselves than the Cyborg. Usually tanks just stop right infront of the uncrushable unit.
Last edited by ZxGanon on Mon Oct 01, 2018 3:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

SirCake
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by SirCake »

@anjew nothing will happen, since the hijacker won’t even attempt to evade because it cannot be crushed. evading is never triggered.
It will just stay there and stare down the tank.

eskimo
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Re: Mechanics, engineers and scrapping and restoring husks

Post by eskimo »

Sleipnir wrote:
Wed Sep 26, 2018 9:39 pm
Sleipnir wrote:
Wed Jun 13, 2018 5:33 pm
Engineers: One-shot capturing of things.
- Capture buildings with a short external delay, then run inside and are consumed (C&C3:KW behaviour) - with an "Reusable Engineer" lobby option to restore something approximating the current behaviour to help compromise with the people who will object to the change.
- Capture husks immediately (no external delay), running inside and being consumed (C&C3 behaviour).

Mechanics: Vehicle support and cleanup
- Repairs friendly vehicles
- Salvages husks for a small cash bonus (5-10%)

Hijackers: RIP
- Removed from the game.
- Could possibly be reintroduced in a different role in the future, but this is IMO outside the scope of the current discussion.

IMO this checks all the boxes we could hope for with the the topic at hand:
- Fixes the MCV capturing imbalance by making it accessible to both sides
- Keeps a unique ability on the Mechanic to encourage its use on the battlefield
- Hopefully addresses engineers well enough to resolve the "kick in the teeth" deal-breaker style complaints.
- Removes a unit that has no compelling reason to exist and hurts the perception of OpenRA as a bug free and well polished game.
- Gives units intuitive roles, instead of relying on players to learn a grab-bag of features.

Think i'm probably on board with this. IIRC i think i supported this somewhat before. However i do remember stating that Hijacker removal would be a very sad thing. The Hijacker isn't game unbalanced so imo would always prefered it stayed as with anything else that's not game breaking and adds fun/variety, but do appreciate the overall goal.

Be interesting to see how much difference early games would become with the engi change.

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