OpenRA

Good news! https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/13817

r0b0v wrote: Good news! https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/13817

This is a good start, as long as the default stance is what it is currently( in the latest release) I think its a good compromise.

Happy wrote: But what we're asking is not for the devs to join us on the discord, have conversations and be friends. What we mean by interacting with the players is just a simple why?Why make this change? What is its purpose? Does it affect the game in a positive or negative way? Now I can say for myself there would not have been such a huge uproar if these points were all explained than thrown at us and to be accepted.

A "huge uproar" is an overstating the controversy. In this thread so far we have Happy, 3.Lucian, OMnom, and barf specifically objecting to the defend stance change. The main objection is that it makes the defend stance less useful, point is noted and addressed below. That opinion is not the majority even in this thread, let alone across the entire community. In this thread we have we have Orb, Raishiwi, AoAGeneral, maceman, Smitty, and anjew specifically praising the stance changes, and a number of other folk who don't mention stances specifically (which I interpret as them not thinking they are a big deal). Netnazgul's survey is currently sitting with 13 "love it"s and 4 "don't care"'s to 5 "hate it"'s.

WhoCares put some effort towards an alternative that tries to please everyone, but it's not clear to me whether this is motivated by his own dislike of the change, or by trying to find a compromise specifically for Happy's sake. This is a reasonable and well thought out suggestion, but in my opinion it does not fit with the points I outline below.

As mentioned above, all the planning, development, and discussion is done in the open where anybody can follow and participate in them. None of the changes in the playtest needed to be a surprise to anyone. Happy says he isn't asking for devs to join in on discord, but then blames us for not informing him about the changes beforehand. Well... If you're not going to come to us, and you don't expect us to come to you, then how are you supposed to find out about these things?

Happy wrote: Which leads me to the question. Why is implementing the auto target changes correct? What reasons justify it happening. Other than the "we wanted to do it for ages and now we can" justification. The continued hostility lies with this. There still isn't a justified reason why its happening, just the players being crushed with the burden of truth to prove it's bad. I'm sure if a valid reason was giving everyone would put down our swords.

As above, I consider "everyone" in this sentence to be a bit of an overstatement because the majority of players like the change or don't really care. And again, this info is available to anyone who wants to search for it.

For the sake of moving past that I will summarize some of the main points here:

1. None of the games, from C&C1 through to RA3 have units attack buildings by default. This is not a question of classic vs modern game play, it is as much a part of the C&C formula as the sidebar or mammoth tanks. Arbitrarily changing this is a bad choice for a project aiming to recreate and modernize the C&C game play.
2. The plan from the start of the stance feature was to match the behavior of C&C3 and RA3. Unfortunately this plan stalled early on due to technical limitations that were only just solved. Yes, it sucks that it took seven years to fix this, and that newer players believed the old behavior to be intentional, but that is the nature of open source / hobbyist development.
3. (this is really a corollary to the last point) The "Defend" stance was never intended to be the "automatically do the best thing in all situations" stance. The distinction is there right in the names: "Attack Anything" and "Defend". There needs to be a meaningful choice in the stance selection to justify its existence as a game play system, and switching to the best stance for a given situation should be part of what makes a good player good.
4. Having units attack buildings as a standard game play feature has nerfed engineers into a small and very specific niche that hardly justifies their existence. This has lead to an increasing number of suggestions to try and make them useful by moving even further away from the core C&C game play (e.g. detecting and clearing mines, or resurrecting dead tech structures). This is not a direction that we want to go, and this is the first step towards a better compromise.

I'm sure you could (and probably will) come up with reasons to dismiss or deflect these points, but ultimately this comes down to priorities of the people who are currently driving the development. The feedback from players before the playtest was that the stance change isn't a big deal for most players, and the feedback so far after the first playtest supports that for most players.

The objection from Happy et al is that this change directly nerfs their preferred play style. We didn't realize before this topic blew up that their play style was based on their discovery of the disproportionate advantage that came with using the defend stance combined with timing the attack-move and stop keys.

One of the founding principles of the RA mod was to fix the "q-move" tank spam that was the only viable strategy in the original, and so it has been distressing to see a very similar play style start to take over the top-level OpenRA matches. If this change disrupts that, and gives us a chance to refocus gameplay on tactics and unit command, then good. Bases can still be cleared by units in the defend stance by issuing attack orders, and the control group and queue features can make that more efficient, or units can be put in the Attack Anything stance if the situation allows for it. Nerfing the "stop micro" wasn't an intentional goal, but i'm willing to deal with the controversy if it means we can replace the blob trend it encourages before it trickles down to be a regular and dominant game play strategy for everyone.

Yes, it sucks to have someone unexpectedly break a strategy that you rely on to win, and i'm sorry about that. But I think this is an acceptable trade off for the gameplay depth improvements that are starting to be discovered (see e.g. Smitty's latest comment), and for finally finishing a long-incomplete part of the game.

The next playtest will include some quality-of-life improvements to the command bar, including suppressing the hotkey sound, reactivating attack-move by holding the hotkey, and setting default stances for units/defenses built from a factory/conyard.

Fortunately R0b0v has said on the discord he will communicate the changes which I am thankful for and if it is successful will end the the gap between the dev and player communication. If it's not a majority that's fine I'll stop shouting as loud for the silent since its clear they don't want to join the fray. I really like whocares alternative it has the exact same effect but with the toggle makes harder game play but better results for doing it the hard way. Right now there's no bonus for having it harder its just now a new nuisance. I didn't say to not join in on discord. What I said was we don't expect you to join in on games, in discussions and be our friends. But to keep an update on planned changes like what R0b0v is doing now so I guess i accomplished something.

The problem with saying it's what makes a player good is that there is no bonus for using the attack anything stance. It's always a disadvantage as what AOAGeneral said the units chase. It was never used in the last release because of this. If you wanted your units to not shoot buildings you would put them in return fire stance. People already played around with stances it isn't new contrary to popular belief. That is good play, using the return fire stance to take enemy oil derricks. In the old release you had defensive and return fire. Now its basically just hold fire but disguised as defensive and now you can shoot first, but with no secondary stance option. Come on, nerfing engineers? this stance change nerfs attacking armies for the sake of the engineer unit which will always be killed by a good player with good awareness.

It does in fact nerf my play style. My play style is uber aggression and always attacking. It's exciting to watch. I've had to adjust myself and Barf watched me play once and his comments were "Happy you're so boring to watch now what happened to your exciting play?". The changes are promoting a static play style of defense which I have no problem in playing I will always alter my play style to best fit winning the match. Unfortunately this will not nerf or stop the blob play in any way. It's resulting in more defensive tactics from what I've seen and played myself like my above point. Unless you play around with values, inf will always be the damage dealers. Tanks will soak rifle shots and the combination of the two are the major powerhouse. What seperates the best and the average is their use of multiple armies and as kazu puts it - playing a game of chess. High level RA is beautiful to watch seeing multiple armies prodding and baiting and retreating all to try and push the oppenant into a check mate situation. Not both players building huge armies and whoever can get the hard counter in their army faster wins. I feel that's the beauty of RA. There's no hard counters it's all tactics and manipulation of the units. I do not rely on my play-style to win. I can play many play styles but that is my preferred.

This will be my last post on the forum regarding the matter as it's clear I have lost, it is happening and like the RAGL season 3 map pool it has to be accepted and moved on with. I apologise for the aggressive tone throughout but it is just passion and never meant as offence. I like the sound of the quality of life adjustments you have put out here especially the hotkey sound. I also would suggest maybe a way to turn on and off the UI for the better players who don't need it. I hope with r0b0v communicating there will be less of an episode with the next controversial change. Now I wait to see if I'm gonna look like the biggest dickhead if it is a good change, or the smuggest cunt the game has ever seen if it isn't. Peace.

I'm starting to wonder if the 'stop micro' issue doesn't have more to do with the stutter step bug reported by AoA: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/issues/13722

It feels like rocket soldiers are particularly suffering at the moment. (And if you've seen me play, you know how much I like rockets.) They seem to be having trouble getting timely shots off which makes them weaker vs aircraft and charging vehicles.

Sleipnir wrote: WhoCares put some effort towards an alternative that tries to please everyone, but it's not clear to me whether this is motivated by his own dislike of the change, or by trying to find a compromise specifically for Happy's sake. This is a reasonable and well thought out suggestion, but in my opinion it does not fit with the points I outline below.

I'll explain the why and origin of my suggestion and will back it up with some arguments.

• personal background :
  
  In the past, I have been a huge fan of the 3 first games of westwood : Dune 2, C&C, Red alert. those were amazing solo games and with the non existence of internet, unpopular lan network gaming and let's face it a too young age from me to aprehend and enjoy multplayer game. I have been very disapointed by everygame coming after those 3, It just felt repetitive, they were done with the innovayion while other game were pioneers. One of those game that makes me leave the C&C series was Total-annihilation. Cavedog studio brang strategic mechanics on another level by having so much features in this game. Sadly it was never as popular as a stracraft for whatever reason, it's not the subject.
• Where the idea comes from
  
  In Total Annihilation, you had a stances separated in 2 categories :
  
  1. first stance cycle : gun related : hold fire - return fire - fire at will
  2. second stance cycle : movement related : static - maneuver - chase.
     
     And in the end as an hidden feature, you had to type a command console "attackeverything". By default unit were ignoring non weaponized structure and you had to enable this behaviour manually as a global behaviour. So in this game you had the choice to tweak your units in details according to every strategy coming to mind

• My motivations :
  
  disclaimer first : I don't want to emulate total annihilation in openra.
  
  I have been suggesting the implementation of the "ignorebuilding" and even testing it 2 month before the playtest. Omnom generously made me some modified maps but due to his knowledge limitation on the matter, he only could insert the behaviour as a general and frozen attitude wich led people not having the choice; the unit will behave in any stance ignoring building until told to focus fire. I had great games and could see lot of gamelay evolution material (such as bringing back the engeneer). Unfurtonatly I had to drop the testing because the lack of flexibility and "let's face it" the fact that people were forced to play "that" way created repulsion more than interest.
  
  So I was in favour of the "ignorebuilding" before you managed to implement it and my suggestion is not made to make HAPPY happy. It's just the conclusion of my own playtest (before the official playtest) on the subject.
  
  That's what I wanted to suggest you here, implement the change because the game needs it, but as an option not as a mandatory feature. I would prefere to see people adopting it because of players like Orb and myself starting to use it by choice and demonstrating it's value with time to other players than having people using it because they have no choice and whatever the evolution in the game, will alwais think it was a mistake with all the negative opinions toward the dev and the people liking/using it.
  
  I truly beleive that with a solution similar as I proposed allowing a maximum of flexibility in behaviour, the game would only comes out richer and more user friendly without speaking of no creating avoidable conflict of opinions.
  
  As for the rest, if I think my sugestions can help a majority, I make them. I don't want to push any selfish idea for the simple fact I don't even know how long I will be playing this game.
  
  For the argument "top scene not liky" and a possible death of the game because top players might leave out of displease ... I'm pretty sure there will be soon enought a wave of players to step up and take the spot if that would ever happen.

I hope that explains my motivation and I'm looking forward (the next playtest and) the release to see what you will come up with.

WhoCares

Phew, this has been a hot topic. I've been trying to stay out of the kitchen, but now that things have cooled off a bit I'd like to talk more about my thoughts, about the playtest and the discussions surrounding it.

Happy isn't great at communicating his ideas, so I sat down with him on Discord and ironed some things out. I think this discussion is too one way or another. There are some good things about the stance system, and some bad, and we should talk about those aspects separately.

Right at the start I want to clear up this "stop micro" business. Stop micro will work regardless of the stance you're in. It was useful in the release, and it will be useful when this playtest is merged as well. There are two uses for stop micro, which have to do with targeting. If a tank goes in for crushes, you'll want your rocket infantry to retarget to the closet enemy, which would be the tank, rather than wasting shots on infantry. If an aircraft goes for an attack, there's an attack priority on aircraft, so rockets will retarget to the aircraft. This behavior will not be changed by the playtest at all so I don't know why it's part of the discussion.

Now, Aggressive Stance. Attaching the old behavior to aggressive stance is a great idea to keep old players happy who don't want to adapt. However, and I believe this is the core issue Happy has and I agree, units should not chase in aggressive stance. There is no advantage to using aggressive stance. Attacking only the enemies that fire back is an advantage in any situation, and once that is done it is fairly easy to then remove the enemy infrastructure. It's a matter of convenience, and players should not be additionally punished for using the less optimal stance. There is also no advantage to units chasing. I have never seen anyone use an aggressive stance in any RTS, and most professional players go a step further and change their stances to hold position. Your armies will always be less effective chasing unless you have an APM of 5.

Now, the actual issue I thought we would be discussing which we've been dancing around but not actually talking about is what the default stance should be. Defense stance gives you an advantage. If the default stance is aggressive and you're new, it's unlikely you'll be practicing with defense stance, which increases the barrier of entry to the competitive scene. There's also the problem of how tedious it will be to switch stances. If defensive stance gives you an advantage, you have to make sure every one of your units has the stance. However, on the other hand, if we make defense stance the default there's going to be a lot of confused casual players, and more importantly it makes the game more difficult for them (While a competitive player is perfectly ok expending some APM to destroy enemy infrastructure, this makes the game less "casual").

I think being able to choose the stance for each production tab is a fine solution to part of the problem, but we still have to decide which is default. As long as the UI for it is good I'm leaning on defense, since ultimately it resembles the original game play.

Now that that's out of the way, I want to talk about two things that were changed that haven't been talked about.

1. Civilian Vision Change
You may be unaware, but there's been a meta developing recently involving using the civilians you get from selling the 2nd refinery to scout. You force fire them and get them into panic mode, which makes them really fast scouts. Now, personally I don't like this meta because it looks dumb, and this change will make it a lot more popular.

2. Camo pillbox cost reduction
Given the ghost bug with Camos I disagree with this change. You can't target camo ghosts with artillery which means I expect once people catch on, at this price, people will start making only camo pillboxes. You grab camos for the damage output and stealth potential anyway, not their HP values.

And finally, a suggestion. To help bridge this whole "disconnect" issue I believe pchote should be making these playtest discussion threads. This gives a nod to the players that, hey, the devs will be looking at this thread, and it gives the devs an opportunity to hone in their focus on the forums.

Phew, that was a lot. For anyone who actually read the whole thing, thanks!

testify.

I also stayed out of the discussion here because I am actually fed up with OpenRA development direction by now and the constant bias against me I'm receiving from pchote (I decided that I will never submit/review a PR ever again because this already) nor I ever was an active player, but there are a lot of statements Red Alert 2 outright proves wrong.

Orb wrote:I have never seen anyone use an aggressive stance in any RTS

Considering the relatively simple implementation of stances in RA2 - default stance is basically defense, with guard being an option and neither stance allowed you to autoattack unarmed buildings - guard is quite useful there. Chasing is actually part of the game and is only annoying with jets-vs-AA units following them. The "aggressive stance" is also required for dogs to pick up spies.

Happy's general statements of "it nerfs my playstyle" - I don't see where that comes from. While i never seen that playstyle, it's how you should play the RA2 mod Mental Omega, where everything which have caused a fuss here are part of the gameplay and noone bats the eye. (Do note, that I am comparing OpenRA playerbase with a RA2 mod's which has a constant flow of 200 players at the moment, look up the C&CNet statistics).

The issues I see with the concerns of Happy et al. are IMO related to the fact that as far as I've heard, they omitted the classic C&Cs and their experience and base their assumptions only on their OpenRA experiences alone which is inaccurate.

And finally, a suggestion. To help bridge this whole "disconnect" issue I believe pchote should be making these playtest discussion threads. This gives a nod to the players that, hey, the devs will be looking at this thread, and it gives the devs an opportunity to hone in their focus on the forums.

Pchote is not required to make these. As I've suggested in discord already, anyone (though dedicated) can make playtest/release discussion threads on the "Announcements" forums, with corresponding changelog from the github duplicated there. As Murto is now a mod on the forums, I'll remind him to make such a thread when the next playtest comes.
It will also be helpful for devs to know where to look for response on their releases as they will be in a dedicated place with a dedicated name, not dropped randomly here.

Orb wrote:
And finally, a suggestion. To help bridge this whole "disconnect" issue I believe pchote should be making these playtest discussion threads. This gives a nod to the players that, hey, the devs will be looking at this thread, and it gives the devs an opportunity to hone in their focus on the forums.

Seconded. I feel like these forums should be common ground for players and developers to meet and dicuss; Imo, Discord, IRC, and Github are platforms that are only convenient for one side, but not the other.

Sleipnir wrote: One of the founding principles of the RA mod was to fix the "q-move" tank spam that was the only viable strategy in the original, and so it has been distressing to see a very similar play style start to take over the top-level OpenRA matches. If this change disrupts that, and gives us a chance to refocus gameplay on tactics and unit command, then good.

A lot of your posts are valid and understandable, but I would like to address this particular paragraph here in regards to features versus balance changes and as to what your guys' opinion is on balance.

As far as features go, I 100% approve of the stance changes, and I think it'll be a great addition for modders and for newcomers to use. I don't know if newcomers will like the attack-move ignoring buildings automatically because I am not a new player, but I think they'd welcome it. As far as balance goes, I'm part of that weird middle group who believe that these stance changes do absolutely nothing, which I guess puts me alongside the naysayers.

I understand that as a open-source/volunteer driven project, the developer's main goals are to add more features and to fix any unintended bugs. For the most part, I believe that most of the new features have done a very good job of staying clear of any major balance issues that would completely break the game.

However, that being said, I think it's safe to say that the players often time disagree with what the developers are focusing on, especially if they ask for changes pertaining to game balance rather than game features. This leads me to my main question: how much control do the players have on the RA balance? In other words, what aspects of RA can be adjusted, and what aspects of RA are untouchable?

For example, I know that Smitty has been dying to add Snipers into the game, but you have denied that for your own reasons. Would moving Tesla tanks to T2 fall under this same category? What category would lowering the cost of the War Factory fall into? What guidelines can you give us, the player community, so that we can make reasonable balance suggestions?

Orb wrote:
And finally, a suggestion. To help bridge this whole "disconnect" issue I believe pchote should be making these playtest discussion threads. This gives a nod to the players that, hey, the devs will be looking at this thread, and it gives the devs an opportunity to hone in their focus on the forums.

Im sorry but I completely disagree with this point. All players have to do is not be lazy and go look for themselves. Let me repeat just to make sure you get the mesage: GET OFF YOUR FUCKING ARSE. By the time a thread will be made on here, the additions have already been discussed. This particular topic has existed, it seems, since 2013.
https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/3337 this was the original issue. Dated 2013.
Here is the issue reverting that change because the AI couldn't deal with it: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/3467 dated 2013
and here is the currect issue: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/13520
Dated back to June.

All of these were made before the playtest was released. In fact, they were discussed 4 years ago and had to be removed due to a bug.

Graion Dilach wrote: I also stayed out of the discussion here because I am actually fed up with OpenRA development direction by now and the constant bias against me I'm receiving from pchote (I decided that I will never submit/review a PR ever again because this already) nor I ever was an active player, but there are a lot of statements Red Alert 2 outright proves wrong.

We never got a long but it will be sad to see you move on.You always contributed to the projects and usually in positive aspects.

Happy wrote: Fortunately R0b0v has said on the discord he will communicate the changes which I am thankful for and if it is successful will end the the gap between the dev and player communication.

I don't remember I said it exactly like this. :-). I tried to understand your issues, wanted to communicate them, do something to improve it.
Sadly what you mentioned is too ambitious for me. I don't have the OpenRA knowledge, skills... nor am I able to manage the negativity from you or others in discord or here after posting something and I don't say it isn't my fault.

@Orb: IMO best summary so far but further demonstrates why this topic still after 7 pages (!) over 3 weeks still hasn't clearly outlined what the unit stance does well vs the pitfalls. Every post turning into a wall dealing with meta.

My best guess is the main criticism after the feature goes live will be with game design, not balance. Non-competitive players will likely not appreciate being forced to flip stances back and forth to kill off buildings when standing around in bases.
Right-click/force firing groups of units on one building at a time looks silly as all unit types fires in synchronicity. This is really a shame as the new HitShapes, as I hoped to see it, is supposed to specifically make the game look and feel better on targeting.
Most of all big-team games with massive bases will bear the brunt of this feature and big team games being the pillar of the online community needs to be considered first in this context. Alienating the broader player community you're inevitably pulling the rug out of the competetive community.

Speaking of alienation, the suggested compromise of allowing players to set buildings with their own unit stances only compounds on the broader issue. Although a useful feature in and off itself it doesn't really address the impact of this issue outside the competitive community. Players not bothering for the optimal refinery placement sure as hell won't give a second though micro managing production facility unit stances and will likely regard it as a superfluous feature.

I'm not a coder by any means but this urgent attempt to patch and compromise the unit stance feature with the competitive playerbase is the greatest hack solution I've ever seen in my time with OpenRA.

A quick count on the participants on this thread: https://pastebin.com/apCkaS5d

The thread started off inflammatory which made it harder to analyse the problem or come out against the feature without being looked upon as a troll supporter. This feedback thread has been way more split than alleged earlier on - regardless of the fact that 50% have been Happy/JuiceBox posts.