The good news from all of this, is that we can now confidently say that the fears of an RA apocalypse were completely unfounded. The stance change didn’t ruin the game. We still have amazing gameplay, from standard tank play to tech play; we even still have the occasional hour long epic (see Smitty vs 5a). If anything I’d say the game is better than ever, as base crawling is much less of the be all end all it once was. While still an important part of any master level player’s game, a base crawl can now be handily punished by a player that is ready for it. I counted four games I won in the Foretaste Tournament because I was able to successfully fend off a base crawl.
There are several up-and-comers that are looking to join the ranks of master level players. Eskimo and BullE come to mind. Admiral mo has gone from ‘that guy who does weird stuff’ to ‘wow he’s hard to beat now; and he still does weird stuff!!!’
And a final observation on the state of the game: I’m simply having the most fun I’ve had playing competitive RA.
![Cool 8)](./images/smilies/cool.gif)
Now, on to the focus areas we need to work on for RA balance:
- Allied tier 3 needs to see more use, especially faction specific units.
- Shock Troopers are over performing.
- Naval siege units need more damage to make them worth their price tag.
There are plenty of other things I’ll be looking at (fake buildings building off of each other is a prospect I’m excited about) but the three issues I mentioned are the ones I especially expect action on going into this. I’ve been putting my playtest together and will issue that when ready. For now, I’m making this thread so we can steer discussion towards what issues people want to see addressed or tested in my next playtest.
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And a final somewhat unrelated note concerning what I’ve learned the last few months by doing stuff on the OpenRA github:
1) I don’t know jack about coding.
2) Even though I don’t know coding, I can still contribute to the project by testing pull requests in game.
3) If we had a handful more people willing to review pr’s, especially the ones that know a bit more than me, we could get a heckuva lot more work done for this project.
If you’re interested in the future of OpenRA, I encourage you to invest some time familiarizing yourself with to project github and reviewing a pull request now and then.