Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[3]

Disputed is less camptastic than Secure. If you think it's "horrifically unbalanced" you may as well elaborate.

[Volatar]

Dear gog no Disputed, please. Horrifically unbalanced + camptastic objective. Honestly, I'd also probably want to veto hostages, just because of how easy I've found it to be to use my units as a distraction while the hosties sprint behind cover in round 2 and get away scott free. Hell, I've had matches where my units never fired a shot, because the map layout let me get the hostages out without the defender being able to block every route.

Disputed is balanced just fine. What the heck are you talking about?

Sorry I didn't mention it earlier, but Hostage has been out of the question since the beginning. The hostage rescuer has a 2/3rds win rate across all Hostage games.

[Pandarsenic]

Yeah, I don't terribly enjoy Disputed but it's far from imbalanced.

[Flying Dice]

Dear gog no Disputed, please. Horrifically unbalanced + camptastic objective. Honestly, I'd also probably want to veto hostages, just because of how easy I've found it to be to use my units as a distraction while the hosties sprint behind cover in round 2 and get away scott free. Hell, I've had matches where my units never fired a shot, because the map layout let me get the hostages out without the defender being able to block every route.

Disputed is balanced just fine. What the heck are you talking about?

Sorry I didn't mention it earlier, but Hostage has been out of the question since the beginning. The hostage rescuer has a 2/3rds win rate across all Hostage games.

LATE EDIT: Yeah, I meant Secure, not Disputed! Sorry for the confusion, but that was posted really late/early (I don't recall which. It might have been midafternoon, but that part of the day is hazy due to boredom and the Punic Wars.) and my brain was working about as well as a two hundred year old unlubricated hinge.

For the record, I prefer Extermination and Disputed, am okay with Hostage, dislike Charge and hate Secure. I don't always play Hostages, but when I do, I prefer dark.



  YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

[Volatar]

How would everyone feel about customized maps with a greater number of units than normal? (thinking 6-8 each side) Symmetrical of course. This would allow for a lot of unit variety and possibly very exciting matches.

[3]

I think it'd result in some weird situations. With map generation as it is it you're likely to only have two - maybe three - approaches to any one structure, and it can be hard enough running a couple of guys out of entrenchment with small numbers (the extra men are going to help the defender out more than the attacker). It'd definitely do strange things to Disputed, as it might end up impossible to shoot everyone running for the boxes. I think it'd be worth trying out, just not something to rely on.

On the subject, it might be a good idea to assemble a standard of sorts when it comes to squad composition. That way we can have a setup to fall back on if it's high stakes or whatever. To open I'll suggest 4-man; 2x machinegun, 1x shotgun, 1x rocket. Grenades are fun but being able to remove cover is much more vital (and practical).

[Flying Dice]

To be perfectly honest, I'd like to avoid rockets if at all possible, as strategy and tactics in rockets games usually turn into "have all your machinegunners/snipers sit in a clump in an open space aimed at good lines of fire, spam rockets to wipe out all cover, have shotgunners suicide rush through buildings to try and get a lucky kill", because doing anything else means losing half your guys to rocket spam whenever they get near buildings. With grenades, you at least have the chance to get your people away, and you don't have to worry about units dying because a rocket hit the other side of the wall on the other side of the room.

Plus grenade physics are fun.


Practical reason: I've had matches end in draws because the only surviving units on either side were rocket launcher dudes sitting in open spaces. Not fun, and not good for semicompetitive gameplay.

[3]

Note that grenades always have a 3-second fuse. This means that if the shot's fired fairly near the start of the turn and the target's not running right then, they'll die without a doubt.

The point of using rockets is that they're also a utility: It's quite possible to end up in a situation you can't expand from simply because the map generation - or your own mistakes, or your opponent's lack of mistakes - has screwed you over. Rockets, being the only means of destroying terrain in the game, can let you get around that. Excepting the situation mentioned above, grenades are purely a zone-control thing - the target can either get away or run right at you past the grenade before it detonates, and then you're buggered. They're based on mindgames and therefore encourage spam to an extent. As far as I see it it's either a rocket or both teams get a sniper, which poses as many issues as it solves.

[Flying Dice]

I'll concede that grenades are spammy, but rockets aren't? I've yet to see a match with even one rocket on each side that didn't end with nothing beyond a few broken walls left standing. I don't see rockets being used to clear paths and lines of fire, I see them being spammed at every standing structure on the map in the futile hope that someone will get tagged. Futile against me, at least, because I never position anyone less than the diameter of a rocket explosion away from any sort of cover if I can at all help it, because I know for a fact that half of the walls on the map will have been exploded by the time the first shots are exchanged. At that point, it just becomes a matter of who guessed which directions to have their machinegunners aim at the best.

Maybe if rockets were limited ammo they would actually be used tactically, or if they were replaced by, say, C4 charges, but as it is they're spammed just as much as grenades, and worse, don't stop with pasting anyone inside a room; they also wreck the room. Now multiply that by every rocket fired and within a few turns you're (depending on the map layout) down to either almost nothing or a few intact rooms at the corners away from the spawns. Gog help you if you've got random spawns, because then first-round rockets will kill half the units before anyone gets a chance to go for positioning.

Also, what about the issue I mentioned with games ending in unwinnable rocket v rocket duels? That can't happen with grenades, because they don't need to hit a wall or light cover to detonate. Also, grenades are somewhat less spammable for the simple reason that they have limited range; rockets are LOS firing: If you can see it, you can blow the shit out of it. If you can't see it, blow shit up until you can. Practical, but inelegant, and IMO not in keeping with actual tactics, if you don't count "Explode everything that isn't you" as a tactic.  To be perfectly honest, I view explosive-heavy matches (rockets or grenades)more as joke rounds that let me dick around and bum-rush people. I can see a single grenade launcher having a viable place on a larger team of 4+ units; it fills a similar area-denial role as the sniper, exchanging range and accuracy for AOE damage, while even a single rocket launcher per team makes the match into a round of "Everybody huddle together in a wide open space hoping that we'll get the first hit on the enemies with actual rifles", while my rocket guy goes around blasting out lines of fire to wherever I think they're hiding at. As in, clearing corridors of open space through thickly packed rooms that stretch across the map by applying explosives repeatedly. Tactical?

Again, just my opinion. 

[Volatar]

I love hearing everyones vibrant opinions on this game. I am reading every word.

[Pandarsenic]

Grenades are tactically deep.

Rockets are stupid.

[3]

Oh, I wasn't trying to suggest that rockets aren't spammy. They certainly can be used that way, but I would be very surprised if high-level play involving rockets wasn't very different from low-level play.

Once you start firing rockets, two things occur: Firstly, you're giving your opponent an insight into your thought processes, as fired rockets can be seen regardless of whether the firer is seen or not. Better yet, if your opponent already has a bead on some of your other units, he'll be able to judge whether you're making a serious push or just trying to fake you out/spamming. This is true for grenades as well, but the major difference is that rocket guys are a lot slower and much harder to get out of trouble if you mess up with them. A grenade guy can easily jump out of cover, fire, and slip back in again before anyone can do anything significant (obviously the bounce helps too).

Secondly, by destroying cover you aren't just creating opportunities for yourself; you're also making them for your opponent. If you don't know exactly where he is, aiming towards the relative back of the map is potentially a waste of time while aiming for the center could be unexpectedly disastrous.

But I'll put it to you this way: All the unit types in the game, except rockets, are some form of zone control. Would you prefer something that's a moderately different type of zone control, or something that allows you to think differently and use entirely different tactics?

[Pandarsenic]

Would you prefer something that's a moderately different type of zone control, or something that allows you to think differently and use entirely different tactics?

I agree. Grenades > Rockets, since rockets just make you do zone control while standing back from walls.

:3

[Orb]

Two notes I'd like to say to you all in this argument.


Grenade Launchers can fire over cover ducked.

If a rocket launcher is ducked, if he fires a rocket, it will destroy cover.


Honestly, if the entire map is being destroyed, you're playing too slowly. In disputed, I've usually killed the opponent before the boxes appear. Then its simply devote some of my forces to getting them off map, while I try to pick off the last 1-2 enemies lurking around. Or its the opposite way around.

The more cover destroyed by a rocket launcher, the less cover he has himself, as somewhat mentioned before.

[Flying Dice]

Two notes I'd like to say to you all in this argument.


Grenade Launchers can fire over cover ducked.

If a rocket launcher is ducked, if he fires a rocket, it will destroy cover.


Honestly, if the entire map is being destroyed, you're playing too slowly. In disputed, I've usually killed the opponent before the boxes appear. Then its simply devote some of my forces to getting them off map, while I try to pick off the last 1-2 enemies lurking around. Or its the opposite way around.

The more cover destroyed by a rocket launcher, the less cover he has himself, as somewhat mentioned before.

Thing is, games I've played with rockets are usually either over or decided within 3-4 rounds, either because one of us has been completely wiped out, or one/both of us are down to rockets only. That is still, minimum, 6-8 rockets, which is more than enough to completely trash smaller maps, and enough to do a lot of damage to larger maps.

2 round game, one rocket per team on a small map. Two rockets fired, only one room and a few walls (to be fair, there were only 2 rooms to begin with, and a few random walls. You see the point, though. Two more rockets would have completely opened the map, and there is no way either of us would have refrained from using them.

Why I prefer grenades If those had been rockets, the building he was defending and the wall along the corridor I took (as well as my only spawn building) would have been gone by the end of the game. And yes, those two were a bit of shameless self-promotion, but they were handy examples. 

I love hearing everyones vibrant opinions on this game. I am reading every word.

I completely agree; it is nice to care enough about a game to debate the merits of different aspects!