Playtest-20190106 / 20190209 / 20190302 - Discussion

Signal flare detected. Playtest has arrived.

Discussion about the game and its default mods.
abcdefg30
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Playtest-20190106 / 20190209 / 20190302 - Discussion

Post by abcdefg30 »

The first release candidate of 2019 has just arrived.

News post
Download
Changelog

Playtest 20190106 also comes with several noteworthy changes to the RA mod, for example engineers being consumed after capturing (see the news post for more details). Several of these changes will affect the gameplay, so we are counting on you to leave us feedback in case you notice something odd.

In case you want to play something different from RA, we have several new TD singleplayer missions ready to be tested as well.

N/a
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by N/a »

Initial Feedback



Great Work favourite improvements so far:

1. #15974 Scrolling feels silky smooth feels so modern and fresh.

2. Force Move, interesting concept, more micro'ing required will have to see how everyone adapts to that, but deals with sticky units.

3. Copy and paste being fixed, thank god and additional copy and paste filters what a delight!


I'm excited to see the path to a further optimised experience and also very pleased there are so many contributors new and old putting their time and effort into OpenRA.




Thank you very much to all the team for the improvements, I'll give more in depth feedback after more testing.

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Fahrrad
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Fahrrad »

the Hijackers are now actually usefull... thumbs up

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FiveAces
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by FiveAces »

Great changes across the board! I'm especially happy about the hijacker retaining its identity instead of being transformed into an apprentice spy.

I just tried the mission Allies 7, and the game crashed hard on me. Seems like a certain lua function got called a couple hundred times within a second, the LUA log just reads "harv 316 is not revealed for player USSR (0)!" over and over while the Perf log reads "1 ms [7740] Activity: CallLuaFunc" x1000.

NAT log gives me "System.AggregateException: Mindestens ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. ---> Open.Nat.NatDeviceNotFoundException: Eine Ausnahme vom Typ "Open.Nat.NatDeviceNotFoundException" wurde ausgelöst." ,
all the other logs came back empty.

Edit: Tried again, yep this mission has a gamecrashing bug. It appears the Yak is trying to target units that it doesn't have line of sight on. This time I got "jeep 242 is not revealed for player USSR (0)!" a couple hundred times; no idea why the function is called this often.

abcdefg30
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by abcdefg30 »

FiveAces wrote:
Sun Jan 06, 2019 6:56 pm
I just tried the mission Allies 7, and the game crashed hard on me.
Thanks for the report. kyrreso was kind enough to open an issue for tracking at OpenRA/OpenRA#16020.

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Smitty
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Smitty »

FiveAces wrote:
Sun Jan 06, 2019 6:56 pm
This time I got "jeep 242 is not revealed for player USSR (0)!" a couple hundred times; no idea why the function is called this often.
Probably because I have little clue what I'm doing.

Deathpoint
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Deathpoint »

Could it be that the ForceMove (Press a + Click) is not working like in the release version for planes?
Sometimes it looks like my YAKs are not attacking.

Example:
I see some soldiers and fly away
Soldiers are now hidden inside FoW (Fog of War)
I press A + click to the old location
Sodliers are still there, yak is seeing them but just fly above them, without attacking
The general "behavior" is not changed, means it's "stop" or something like this (the stuff with ALT + A,S,D,F if I remember right)

2ndly for the engineers:
If I enable the "old" behavior (so engineers are still alive after capturing) the capture-time is still the old-one isn't it?

Regards

Printer
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Printer »

Really enjoying the playtest, in particular:
--> the ctrl+click priority que, most of all. It makes all those units nuanced units much more viable. To be honest, it feels like the game went up a level of polish by this single adjustment to the UI.
--> Theif changes. Had a couple games yesturday vs .1 where hijackers featured prominently and I think, showed a counter balance to the allied spy not seen before. If it seems OP, I think it's only because Soviets had no espionage before.
--> Other changes like persistent building firing behind fog of war, are also really good.

I'm still testing but I was curious, when might the NE \\ SE ocean bridge tiles be added? thought I saw them on discord a long time ago but after checking still don't see them in the map editor. At present ocean bridges can only go NW // SE limiting map making somewhat (if you care about symmetry).

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Punsho
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Punsho »

Deathpoint wrote:
Tue Jan 08, 2019 2:44 pm
Soldiers are now hidden inside FoW (Fog of War)
This is not a bug rather a bug fix, units shouldn't be able to know what is under fow

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netnazgul
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by netnazgul »

I'm still testing but I was curious, when might the NE \\ SE ocean bridge tiles be added? thought I saw them on discord a long time ago but after checking still don't see them in the map editor. At present ocean bridges can only go NW // SE limiting map making somewhat (if you care about symmetry).
Mustapha split those into a separate code PR that can be found on github: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/15322
As you can see there, one bug was found that has no clear reasons of why it happens and how to fix it, so PR is delayed.

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netnazgul
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by netnazgul »

Punsho wrote:
Wed Jan 09, 2019 7:10 am
Deathpoint wrote:
Tue Jan 08, 2019 2:44 pm
Soldiers are now hidden inside FoW (Fog of War)
This is not a bug rather a bug fix, units shouldn't be able to know what is under fow
I had some similar issue I think - I ordered Yak to attack some rocket soldiers explicitly, those soldiers briefly got into FoW, and then Yak completely ignored anything that was revealed afterwards, even when I've reclicked those after they got revealed again - Yak passed by into its death. Can't confirm for sure, but feel that it requires some testing. Some air logic definitely feels altered.

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FiveAces
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by FiveAces »

Alright, time for a playtest review from my side! After playing the latest version for a good five hours on stream, here's my impression on the most impactful changes:

-I'm really a big fan of retaining the hijacker's identity. In his current iteration, he seems to be a great addition to the Soviet roster - maybe even a little too good. His stun weapon allows him to freeze any unsuspecting vehicles, mostly harvesters. Now that his actual game mechanics work like they're supposed to, it might be time to tone down his crazy speed - keep in mind that it was buffed to 72 in order to compensate for his buggy behaviour, so right now it's impossible for vehicles to escape his clutches even if you spot him and immediately pull your vehicles back.

-On a related note, I have been playing around with an idea that might make for fun tank heists: Now that the thief can enter refineries, how about making him able to enter war factories as well, stealing the first vehicle that comes out? That would cement his role as a counterpart to the Allied spy with his plethora of different gameplay options. This would further tie in to faction balance:
Up against Soviets? Better make sure to protect your ore fields and war factories with spotter rifles, or hijackers will take what's rightfully theirs!
Up against Allies? You better destroy any husks after a battle, or mechanics will salvage what's left and patch it back up into a standing army!
Imo a fair way to balance out the Sov's lack of husk salvage.
(Also, the WF heist could backfire horribly if your opponent notices and cancels the current vehicle for a supply truck to get a full refund ;) )

-One last point pertaining to the hijacker: Personally, I'd vote for a streamlining of stealth mechanics. Us veterans know how to work our way around five different stealth traits, but the burden of knowledge is too high for newcomers if you ask me. Right now, we do have:
Submarine stealth, Mine stealth, Hijacker stealth, regular stealth and spy disguise (technically not a stealth trait, but similar in that it can be revealed by certain detector units). The unintuitive part about this is its inconsistency: All infantry reveal hijacker stealth, but only spies and dogs reveal regular stealth. I'd say we axe hijacker stealth and give him regular cloak when he's standing still - maybe even reworking the stealth system altogether in a future playtest. He's got a cape after all, can't detect that level of coolness with thermo vision.

-The engineer changes: I understand that this was a necessary step towards coming closer to the behaviour of the originals, but I'd make it an opt-in for competitive games. The old engineers provided you with a great little escort-mission minigame that could yield amazing results when you managed to keep your VIP engineer alive. Right now, it feels like most of the skill of getting well-timed engineer snipes is gone since they're not on the field for a long time; as a result, the earlygame has become a lot less exciting. I'm not a big fan of increasing the cash rebait upon derrick capture or decreasing capture time either; all it does is exacerbate the problem of lowered skill ceiling and more stagnant earlygames.

-Dog behaviour: Amazing stuff, even the running animation has made it in! That might open up the viability of a slightly earlier refinery for Sovs with 2-3 dogs out for early safety, and the pac-man dog leap is gone too.

-Aircraft behaviour: There have definitely been some regressions (notably the attack move on frozen actors being broken for helicopters - this should be an easy fix, as explained by pchote in stream chat). Shift-queuing attack orders with aircraft has become more finnicky, and they no longer chase targets into the FoW - not sure whether that's an intentional change or a regression.

-Changes to actors frozen under fog: The elephant in the room. I appreciate that using artilleries and V2s got a lot harder, but I think it needs to be followed up by a fix/workaround to the bug I demonstrated on stream where a fire command on targets that you lose line of sight on turns into a move command. This makes the V2/Yak combo almost impossible to use right now: You want to scout your opponent's army with your Yak and give your V2s a fire order, but any decent player will keep his army moving. So to prevent your Yak from being shot down, you move it away from the army, briefly losing LoS - which then prompts your V2s to go on a suicide mission even if you tried to forcefire the ground instead of a unit (!). This makes it impossible to lead shots on a scouted army and takes a lot of joy out of an otherwise amazingly fun playstyle. My workaround would be to make ctrl+fire moves target a specific cell instead of a unit, and I can't see any scenario in which you'd want to target an unit instead (if you want kill your own stuff, targetting the cell they occupy will still get the job done).

-Mechanic changes: Good for teamgames, keeps the best of both worlds by still allowing you to acquire double tech in 1v1s (keep in mind Soviets just got a massively increased chance to acquire double tech as well with the hijacker buff! Ask Netnazgul who stole my MCV live on stream ;) )

All in all a really good playtest, I'm hyped for the release when most of the kinks will be ironed out!

Vamperor
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Vamperor »

Changing ctrl-fire to target the cell might make it more difficult to kill enemy spies though. Especially if you spot them early and they have ample opportunity to move around after you targeted them.

Edit: on the stealth-traits: aren't regular stealth and spy stealth sort of the same thing? (In that they are detected by the same kinds of units?)

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Punsho
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by Punsho »

Vamperor wrote:
Thu Jan 10, 2019 10:56 pm
Changing ctrl-fire to target the cell might make it more difficult to kill enemy spies though. Especially if you spot them early and they have ample opportunity to move around after you targeted them.
You don't need ctrl-fire to kill spies, you get the red attack cursor when you hover over an enemy spy (disguised or not) with a unit/structure that is able to attack ground units
Last edited by Punsho on Fri Jan 11, 2019 11:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

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FiveAces
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Re: Playtest-20190106 - Discussion

Post by FiveAces »

Vamperor wrote:
Thu Jan 10, 2019 10:56 pm
Changing ctrl-fire to target the cell might make it more difficult to kill enemy spies though. Especially if you spot them early and they have ample opportunity to move around after you targeted them.

Edit: on the stealth-traits: aren't regular stealth and spy stealth sort of the same thing? (In that they are detected by the same kinds of units?)
You don't need ctrl to kill a disguised spy - he is technically still marked as an enemy, but all units except other spies and dogs will hold fire on him. You still get an attack cursor when you mouse over him!

On stealth traits: Currently, they are not the same. Spy stealth only gets revealed by dogs and spies, while regular stealth additionally gets revealed by base defences, mammooth tanks and radar domes. Hijacker stealth, in addition to all of the above, also gets detected by all infantry units. Told you it's convoluted :p

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