SoScared wrote: ↑The discussion around basepushing has been one of the most difficult and confusing subjects in relation to the stance changes.
Ok sorry, maybe I brought up this subject in a wrong way.
I wasn't necessarily thinking about basepushes per se, but about how easy it was to lock down positions with small armies protected by meatshielding buildings. A smaller army could deflect a bigger one, or at least slow it and mow it down, unitl reinforcements come.
This allowed players to split their mobile armies (which I agree was the core of the meta by now), but without too much risk in their backbases !
What is happening now, is that it isn't possible anymore : sending out and splitting your army comes at a price of higher vulnerability.
But why is this a problem ? That should be the real behaviour. It's logical that the rewards of an aggressive playstyle should be compensated by a higher vulnerabilty, that the opponent could take advantage of if he's aware of it.
SoScared wrote: ↑
Also we have to be extra careful with arguments that involves players "not playing the game the right way" as an excuse to why a big sector of OpenRA's playerbase are experiencing this shot-in-the-dark feature as bland, tedious and stressful without adding to the game. We can't just waive aside these players' opinions with a simple adapt-or-whatever attitude and I'm not sure how people can even envision this sort of gameplay balance strategy survive development in the long run.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming the players.
What I'm seeing is that, right now, the immediate reaction of the current meta is to spam arties, to be able to defend bases with less units, while being on the agressive. It's an adaptation of the previous meta, with another flavour. And that tends to slow down games, because arties can't be used efficiently as a mobile army.
What I'm trying to say, which is a corollary to my first point, is that now aggressive playstyle must be combined with scouting, because bases can't be defended by themselves anymore. It will induce a change of meta, from a meta of split armies that launch blind attacks, into a meta where attacks must be combined with scouting (in case a defensive retreat is needed), therefore emphasizing on the importance of scouting units. This will take time to appear, as in every meta change.
Maybe now the way to go is to look at artillery and scouting units, and see if they need to be modified, to allow a more dynamic gameplay.
For instance, the only good Soviet scout is the Yak : does it need to be cheaper ? to have more HP ? ... do we need a better Soviet T1 scout, if we don't want to force players to play air ? In TD for instance, that's not a problem, because both factions have cheap T1 scout units.
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Now on another point, I understand that people are unhappy with the difficulty to easily destroy buildings.
But I think those are two distinct issues (the effects of non-targeting on the meta / and the ease of using stances and attack moves), and the solutions to improve them are different, and should not be mixed.