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SWR Productions Forum _ Rise of the Reds _ Discussion of the Week #3 We will show those tank hunters what the big gun is!

Posted by: (USA)Bruce 3 Mar 2019, 21:39

So something like a foreword before we start:

Rise of the Reds is my favorite mod closely followed by Shockwave, even if development is slow and there is not a lot of (public) progress I still have this game on my mind on how to perfect it.

Now as much as there's to praise, there's also a solid amount to criticize and look forward to changing/optimizing

There are some truths of the mod that we can't deny, like Rise of the Reds, in a nutshell, is about artillery and helicopters, the cat and mouse between the two with Tier Two (T2AA) coming in between to smack the helicopters back in place.


Now, In general, this is a symptom of many mechanics and not fundamentally caused my just artillery and helicopters.

With that out of the way lets begin:









This weeks discussion is about the games Heavy Weapons teams

Heavy Weapons on the field!


,



Now we all know what the heavy weapons teams are,
We have the US javelin team, the Chinese minigunner, and disruptor teams respectively, but why did I add the grenadier? Well we'll get to that in a second

Lets first get some quick info about them. Each unit in this group requires Tier 2 with a cost of 700-800, the only exception being the Minigunner team and the Grenadier himself
Each unit mentioned here has a speed of 20 (Disregarding the movement bonuses by the venom protocol)

The Minigunner team,


With the cheapest cost of 500 (450 with propaganda Center) and first that can be fielded among the others, only requiring Tier 0.5 (Requiring only a war factory)
This baby can dish more damage against land targets then the Gattling Tank and the Gattling Cannon. At least the other two can attack the air.
CODE
PackTime = 1980
    UnpackTime = 1980


With a comparatively average pack and unpack time

The Disruptor team,


With the highest cost of 700 higher than any unit from the Chinese barracks aside from volunteers and lotus.
This thing like its minigunner counterpart can only engage land targets, Its default EMP missile disables anything that it can hit that is not infantry.
Tanks? Yes, Defences? Yes, Aircraft? If you manage to target it before it's in the skies? Yes! However, at times the EMP'ed air unit can just crash/die rather than getting disabled and falling down on the ground.
CODE
PackTime = 3762
    UnpackTime = 3762

Due to this Its got the slowest method to pack unpack among them all and thank god that its that way. Unlike minigunners, Disruptors and Javelins share the curse/blessing of being unable to attack infantry.

Now for the American two-man squad,

The Javelin team,

Costing a nice chunk of 650, nothing special about this aside from it being a two-man team that cannot attack Infantry like the Disruptor and can't attack buildings either.

CODE
javelin
Behavior = DeployStyleAIUpdate ModuleTag_03
    PackTime = 1140
    UnpackTime = 1440

Like the Javelin says when you click on deploy, they literally "park their ass there" as they have the quickest deploy time among the four.

Last but not least:

The Grenadier Heavy Weapons Man


Unlike the other units mentioned before, Its a single man with the same speed of 20. Requiring tier two like most of its counterparts it costs 600. However, Its default weapon is decent vs everything and twice as effective against structures because of the AU_Bomb damage type. Its secondary mode is more effective against Infantry with around a 0.3 or 0.5-second delay before the projectile bursts around the target area. It costs 600 and needs Tier two to be fielded.

CODE
PackTime = 4620
    UnpackTime = 4620


But holy molly due to their generalized "Good vs everything on the ground" mentality and because its transportable unlike the previous counterparts there were mentioned it takes quite a long time for it to fire.


To Summarize them all:

Costs:
Minigunner: 500 (450 with propaganda Center)
Disruptor: 700 (630 with Propaganda Center)
Javelin: 650
Grenadier: 600
Their speed: 20
What about their health?
Minigunner team: 300, 100 per soldier
Disruptor team: 300, 100 per soldier
Javelin team: 220, 120 for launcher and 100 for the spotter
Grenadier: 200

I hope we're all on the same page now,
Because the next part is the actual discussion;

See right now heavy weapons are one of the reason the "META" or game flow revolves around Artillery and Gunships, as you may have guessed it both of these units counter said Heavy weapon teams. Either by being a flying unit or being way above the range they have.

One thing that seems that we have all missed is...There's no real counter to them...

Hear me out;
If you are facing a China player as a GLA, they would gladly build minigunners rather then gattling turrets.
The options you have to engage them; Quads, Technicals, Rebels are all hard countered by the minigunner teams.
When you upgrade a tier you either have buggies that'll miss or deal mediocre damage against them.
Toxin tractors are many things but armored is not one of them, they melt to such teams, especially because two of them automatically give horde bonus. Each one being three men each.
Your only "best" solution is to use a mixture of scorpions/armor, hope the foe's anti-armor weapons are not sufficient enough to thin your ranks and melt down your light units.
The only hope you have for reliably killing them aside from Jarmen kell are grads. Why I don't mention Jarmen is because you can have multiple teams from multiple barracks called in but you can only have one jarmen that is targetted by multiple flying threats.

So on the offense against a china your only reliable counter to heavy weapon teams, are grads...The same thing that you must use to destroy their ECM tanks/Towers so that your buggies or scorpion tanks can be effective.
On the offence your game revolves around expanding with a tunnel network and playing cat and mouse with your grads against migs as if your under attack from a Chinese force, aside from the ECM's its quite cheap, easy and fast to build front line barracks to have a pure "anything but tanks" melting production que of minigunner teams.At that point you can just spam battle masters and you hard counter anything a gla can throw at you. Because of the turn rate being relatively fast, you wont have the speed to flank them with technicals and even have the damage if they are full of rebels due to the rate of fire and high damage of the weapon.

You see how the grads usefulness overlaps for a multitude of "issues" that GLA has?

Well, let's look at other factions then;
As their prime counter should be snipers the mod currently has:

One Hero (Frank Jaeger) even if hes slow
One Hero (Jarmen Kell)
One mass producible unit (Heavy snipers)
One GP unlock for a mass producible unit (Pathfinders)
From the least common to the most.

The squad problem



"My partners dead! but nothing changed!"

reference didn't get the reference there but in CNC 3 GDI sniper teams had a shooter and spotter, when taken enough damage the spotter could die leading to new voice lines, but the performance of the unit never changed.
The biggest issues with snipers is that overkilling does not deal the extra damage to the parent squad, so jarmen or a heavy sniper will need three shots to kill such a team.So your weapons will always target the other members and your weapons will deal damage to the other members before the main one does.


So was it a good idea?
The thing is that minigunner teams, for example, are extremely hard to counter without artillery
Tanks don't do damage vs them unless toxin shells are involved,
Antigarrison units are generally outraged by them, aside from toxin tractors the most reliable counter to them are burantinos and they are a hard sell given that they would be a prime target from Chinese migs in the mid-game.
Mass smokes as a Russia is a built-in perk to distract such teams so that's nice.
So for the most part they stagnate and slow down the game until you have longer ranged weapons available.
For the US; None of its aircraft are good versus infantry, the nighthawk cant reliably kills a heavy weapons team and Hellfire bombers are the only one made for the job.

Also at times its a problem against China due to how fragile gattling tanks are, you can focus them on engagement and call in the gunships later. (We're back to the gunships or Artillery again if you can see)
We spoke about US and Russia has its perks, Microwave tank is the toughest anti garrison unit of all as it needs two migs to take out.
ECA lacks a proper dedicated anti-infantry unit that's armored (Fenris doesn't count) but pandeurs lack constant fire unless you add in grenadiers, but that's a staggering cost of 1600.You could say that Pioneers on foot or in pandurs counter this with canister mortars but thats alot of hoops to go through for just a single unit.The amount of checkboxes you need to click before getting to that point...Also heavy snipers in pandurs dont benefit from revolver upgrade so they are just as slow with the rate of fire.
So I'm not sure how to feel about it


Suggestions?


So while we were testing out the community patch for ROTR's previous version, Nicknamed LG patch.
We had the wise idea of removing the extra men and equalizing them with the ECA Grenadier,
The same 200 health, The same 20 speed, The same 3 slots in a transport to carry, so you could utilize humvee pops or troop crawler pops. (Disruptors took four spots)

On paper, this traded in the low speed or mobility of the teams as they were now transportable (Javelins couldn't enter Drone lifters or ospreys however due to balancing reasons)
While they were now much weaker and vulnerable to any sort of weapon, now a precise raptor could kill a heavy weapons "Guy" before he could unpack and get mobile again.

However, this did lead to assaults with mechanized infantry to be much more deadly which is good or bad depending on your views. Our testing space wasn't that big but most feedback was nice on at least using them.

I'm not going to say it was all sunshine and rainbows and this should be changed,





Conclusion



The issues that this mod has is the cat and mouse mentioned in the start, In order to untangle this mess and make things more fluid, we need to have more answers to the problems we have already.

If we had more effective snipers, more vulnerable teams (by maybe reducing range or gaining it after a few seconds or reducing its turn rate) or just changing heavy weapons teams to heavy weapon men, we could make the game a more fluid and more fun.

I'd love to hear what your thoughts on it is,

For this time there's no "Single perfect" solution to this problem that I could objectively think of or suggest.Perhaps maybe you guys, the community can think of one.

Personally, I'd want to say that with partisan buffs (More range and ROF On bikes) and one man Heavy weapons men should be tired out, but thats just me

Posted by: XoGamer 3 Mar 2019, 22:22

ez just revamp the entire game from start to finish

Posted by: GuardianTempest 3 Mar 2019, 23:58

Isn't a Javelin launcher completely man-portable? I can understand other teams requiring multiple men due to the weapons it has, but I think it would fit US' theme of compactness(?) by having one specialist with a potent AT weapon and not having a spotter buddy. Although I virtually never see the Javelin in play since there are easier means of punching tanks.

Also, couldn't the teams be run over? If they're immune to that, then it's a bit strange, it's not like they're Guardian GI's or anything.

Posted by: (USA)Bruce 4 Mar 2019, 7:06

QUOTE (GuardianTempest @ 4 Mar 2019, 1:58) *
Isn't a Javelin launcher completely man-portable? I can understand other teams requiring multiple men due to the weapons it has, but I think it would fit US' theme of compactness(?) by having one specialist with a potent AT weapon and not having a spotter buddy. Although I virtually never see the Javelin in play since there are easier means of punching tanks.

Also, couldn't the teams be run over? If they're immune to that, then it's a bit strange, it's not like they're Guardian GI's or anything.


Yes they are Immune to crushing, even when we tried one man heavy weapons

Posted by: Gameman112358 5 Mar 2019, 10:27

Hmm. Heavy weapon wise, the teams are pretty durable, won't lie. I don't PvP however, so I can't comment on that. From a PvE perspective though, they never really struck me as particularly frustrating; minigun teams for example don't do much against vehicles, so unless there's AT nearby, Anti-Personnel vehicles are good enough for dealing with them.

The teams don't seem particularly frustrating; IMO just give better snipers and options to the factions and the heavy weapon teams will be fine. Then again, I'm not an expert on this, and I haven't played the game in a long, long time.

EDIT: And as for the idea of making them one man teams, I think that might make them a bit too frustrating to use IMO. Easier to counter since they're alone, meaning you can just bumrush them or snipe em down, but I do feel it makes them too frustrating to use. Again, I'm not an expert on this subject, so take what I say with a lot of salt.

Posted by: Shiro 6 Mar 2019, 8:46

Didn't you forget the Nukaneer?

Posted by: Star_Abraham 9 Mar 2019, 18:03

They added the Nuclestar Submarine, hell-bent on annihilating all those dirty commies from corrupting our free world.

Posted by: Neutrino 10 Mar 2019, 23:43

Easier said than done, but, if GLA alone is having issues while dealing with heavy gun teams, shouldn't they get a new unit that deals with them better?

I guess the best motivation for adding a new unit is the need for it.

Also, is it possible to decrease the turn rate of minigunners to that they can be more easily flanked?

Posted by: jl319 11 Mar 2019, 12:47

I actually like the one-man heavy unit idea. I've always wanted to be able to transport heavy units.

Posted by: ZunZero97 3 Apr 2019, 5:15

minigunners should require Tier 1(propaganda center) and increase the armor of the toxin tractor to make them more resistant against gattling and bullets type damage

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