Should Flame Throwers explode?

[Doomsday]

Please no explosions to flamers. Grenadiers' explosive nature makes them a pure rush / sneak eco sniping unit. Flamers are usable unit from mid to late game mixed in with rifles and rockets. So right now grens and flamers have different uses. I would be dissapointed if these two units would become too similar. If flamers explosion was added, they would be pretty much strictly worse than grenadiers because of higher cost and slower movement speed. I would only see explosive flamers being used for APC flamer rush.

I think Grenadiers should explode and should deal high damage. As they are not really expensive, they can be used for moving in enemy blobs and letting them die. Kinda like a suicide unit. Of course you shouldn't put them in your infantry blob.

I'm not sure if you are talking about current game balance or what if scenario with higher explosion damage. Right now grenadiers' explosion diameter and damage is unusable to be used like a demo truck.

[noobmapmaker]

Also... should flame TOWERS explode?

[Materianer]

Please no explosions to flamers. Grenadiers' explosive nature makes them a pure rush / sneak eco sniping unit. Flamers are usable unit from mid to late game mixed in with rifles and rockets. So right now grens and flamers have different uses. I would be dissapointed if these two units would become too similar. If flamers explosion was added, they would be pretty much strictly worse than grenadiers because of higher cost and slower movement speed. I would only see explosive flamers being used for APC flamer rush.

I made a map where you can test the flamerexplosion with of course not as much damage as grenadier do to they'r surrounding units.
the normal flamer does 15 damage and the big 20. Both is acceptable and does'nt impair the flamer so much in my opinion.

http://resource.openra.net/maps/18063/

[AMHOL]

A few problems arise when you add explosion deaths to units.

First one is they become very situational and limited to their use. This scenario happens and happens only then don't build them anymore. It was the same problem that happened to flamers in CNC95. If the grenadiers had their explosion removed you would see some more use out from them.

Second thing is you alienate the unit build combos that RA already rarely has. Some players have infantry mixes of minigunners, e3, flamers, etc and are a good and smart unit combination. If the flamers explode you won't see this anymore because they will start killing infantry packs. Reducing the flamer explosion damage will still harm e3 to much due to their lower HP pool.

Strongly against explosion damage.

I do an rifle/e3/flamer mix myself, and you're absolutely right, if this were the case I'd use them strictly for flame rushing. Same goes for if the explosion was removed from grens, I'd probably mix them in, although I'd have to experiment as they're faster than units in my normal composition. Completely agree with you, against adding a damaging explosion to flamers.

At first glance it looks like Soviet has more to offer on the offence with their Grenadier / Flamethrower units but come late game the Allied Tanya easily weights just as much as the early game Soviet advantage with her C4 and dual Colt .45 pistols. However since it's the early game when Grenadiers are the most dangerous those helpful explosions do come in handy when defending against surprise attacks, feels like they are needed.

I agree with this bar the sentiment that the availability grens in the early game is remotely comparable to the availability of Tanya in the late game.

As for the Allied Spy the Soviet's Dog actually feels like a fair counterpart and the Soviet Hijacker of course covers the Allies' Mechanic. I'd like to see some kind of alternative purpose with the Hijacker though, just for fun and more ways to play the game.

Really? A buggy dog that costs $200, takes a single rifle shot and can detect spies (although you'd have to spend 2k on dogs and scatter them liberally around your base to deter a $250 or $500 unit) and jitters 4 times when it targets before going in for the kill is a FAIR COUNTERPART to a unit that can put you into low power for 20 seconds, steal half of your cash, grant the spawning of vetted infantry, tanks or air units (and naval units?) or cover the entire map with shroud even when explored map is on?

Overall things feel pretty balanced on the infantry front after thinking about it! Soviet got the early game but Allies got the late. Its for different playstyles for sure though.

I strongly disagree with this, Allies have the early game, and the late game. Gren/flame rushes are actually very difficult to pull off effectively, they can be game ending vs a low skill player, but they're generally a waste of $1650 for a gren rush or $3850 for a flame rush, especially vs an allied player who can counter that immense early investment with a $400 pillbox and then sell it for $200 + a vetted minigunner.

So to sum up, Soviets have grens which explode and are only useful for early game rushes, dogs which are too expensive and/or buggy to be useful for anything beyond lucky engineer snipes, hijackers which are expensive, buggy and even if they weren't buggy, it would take luck and great scouting, planning and micro to pull off and an actual useful unit that people seem to think should be nerfed...

Allies have medics which do decent AoE heal (Allies get AoE heal and Soviets get AoE damage?), take zero skill to use, are very tanky, and IMO increase infantry effectiveness 3 fold, along with increased chance of retaining vetted infantry. Mechanics, which are nice to place next to naval yards, helipads and ore refs for healing, work mixed in with an army with zero additional skill or micro, and you can pick up tanks/harvesters/MCVs that you kill as you go along. Spies which I've already listed possibilities for, and Tanya, who you can sneak in for tech snipes, stick in a pillbox for infantry desolation (as if artillery wasn't enough), or a-move with your army to leave nothing but tanks for the e3s.

/rant

[Fortnight]

But they are still dogs! You don't like animals?

Jokes aside, you make some good points. I shall think on this further.

Meanwhile I found an issue in the Grenadier logic inside infantry.yaml, looks like Grenadiers actually aren't supposed to deal as much damage upon death-explosion as they currently do. Inside the Explodes trait it has "UnitExplodeSmall" set as Weapon but nothing is overriding the EmptyWeapon-value. So the default is used, "UnitExplode", which means 500 damage is dealt instead of the intended 40 damage. Ouch! No wonder a group of Grenadiers always explode all at the same time.

The onion here is that when you force-fire your Grenadiers and kill them yourself then "UnitExplodeSmall" is used by the game. But when the enemy kills your Grenadiers the correct "UnitExplode" is used. Why is that the correct one? Because EmptyWeapon should be used if the unit carries no cargo, which Grenadiers never do. Looks like we've got a bug here!

[anjew]

But they are still dogs! You don't like animals?

Jokes aside, you make some good points. I shall think on this further.

Meanwhile I found an issue in the Grenadier logic inside infantry.yaml, looks like Grenadiers actually aren't supposed to deal as much damage upon death-explosion as they currently do. Inside the Explodes trait it has "UnitExplodeSmall" set as Weapon but nothing is overriding the EmptyWeapon-value. So the default is used, "UnitExplode", which means 500 damage is dealt instead of the intended 40 damage. Ouch! No wonder a group of Grenadiers always explode all at the same time.

The onion here is that when you force-fire your Grenadiers and kill them yourself then "UnitExplodeSmall" is used by the game. But when the enemy kills your Grenadiers the correct "UnitExplode" is used. Why is that the correct one? Because EmptyWeapon should be used if the unit carries no cargo, which Grenadiers never do. Looks like we've got a bug here!

If you feel this is a bug and not balancing feel free to post in the github. (idk why 2 different explode values are needed) The only issue I saw was https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/10114 which doesnt straight up call it a bug but its the same scope

[Fortnight]

If you feel this is a bug and not balancing feel free to post in the github.

Well it's both a bug and an oversight. The oversight is that only Weapon is set and not EmptyWeapon. The bug is that Weapon is still used by the engine during friendly fire despite the fact that Grenadier has no cargo.

It becomes a balancing issue though because if fixed it takes 5 Grenadier death-explosions to kill another Grenadier, meaning that Grenadier rushes becomes extremely powerful. So question is if the community want the issue to be fixed or not. If it is fixed then something else needs to tip the scale, like for example lower damage against wood armor for grenades.

I call it a fix because we know that "UnitExplodeSmall" is in fact the intended death explosion that Grenadiers should have, why else would that be defined in "infantry.yaml"? I might make a commit for this myself since I've been thinking about becoming involved in developing OpenRA, this fix is so easy so it seems like a good start point.