Rise of the Reds Blog Update 21 Options

[The_Hunter]

This week, we've got one more GLA vehicle variant as well as some visual variety for the Chinese Gattling Tank:









We would also like to use this opportunity to provide an official statement on the future of the navy in ROTR. As some of you may have picked up from a premature comment by one of our beta testers, we have indeed decided to scrap the navy, effective with the release of 1.85. It was a decision that we didn't make easily, but in the end, we had to accept that there is a multitude of factors that speak against this feature. For one, the game was never designed to properly handle naval units and the system that is in place utilises a lot of tricks and workarounds, which come with a number of side effects, most prominently the fact that the AI cannot naturally use the navy unless the map is specifically scripted, top to bottom, to make this possible. Second, we are also very much aware that the navy and even the maps that have it are being actively avoided in competitive play, due to the natural imbalance between naval gameplay and conventional gameplay, which will remain a problem unless we would invest a great deal of time and resources to adapt the land-based gameplay to work better off the naval aspect, which would be an excessive effort for something that was only meant to be a special map type and little beyond that. Third, our brainstorming attempts on diversifying the navy to be faction-specific at a later time have proven exceptionally difficult, as the balance between naval units also affects their relation with the conventional ones, thus creating a system that is very fragile and delicate to balance out within the limitations of the game engine. We have therefore decided to remove the navy, but to release the existing naval maps, along with the coded ships and assets, as an officially endorsed optional addon to the mod, which will be made available on ModDB at some point after the release of 1.85. We hope that you can accept this decision, as it will also allow us to focus our efforts on the much more relevant and meaningful aspects of the mod.

As always, we would like to remind all of you out there that there will be another stream on this Sunday:


Countdown until the stream starts

Also, in case you missed last week's stream, you can check it out on our Youtube channel here