Disclaimer: These are my own personal thoughts and you devs can feel free to ignore them or take them onboard as you wish .
I’d like to make some comments about ROTR balance. While I can appreciate the fact that the full score of units and abilities is yet to be included in the game, certainly there should be some standards of damage and armor ratings common to all units, as well as a ‘corresponding balance of key units’.
In playing the 1.5 Version something that struck me particularly was the inefficiencies of machineguns mounted on vehicles, and the large damage infantry did to all forms of structure and many vehicles. This I believe is not indicative to good gameplay. If you want an example use 6 or 7 Redguard in rifle mode against a Sentinel. You should find that the Sentinel dies far too easily.
As a rule in real life there are three (general) types of machinegun; an automatic rifle, a fully automatic machinegun and chainguns. In ROTR, we have all three types.
At the lowest form we have the bog standard infantry, infantry machineguns are almost ineffective against any type of structure, or armored vehicle. This should be correspondingly integrated into this mod. Perhaps small arms fire should only do like 20% damage to light vehicles (truck, humvee, (unarmored AAvehicle)), and 10% to base structure, 8% to tough base structures, and 5% to actual base defenses (well, perhaps just the bunker/tower forms. That would include the Kashtan and US missile defense system, but not the Chinese Gatling turret, as to get infantry that close to do damage is quite amazing). Against other infantry 100% damage should be the norm, with perhaps the Chinese Redguard getting a little less ‘bang for there buck’ on each shot.
The second type of machinegun I believe I would need to separate out again into primary AP (Anti-personel) MGs and secondary MGs. Where, the Primary AP MG is a weapons system like the Humvee turret, or the BDM armored transport, these in general have alright balance across the board at the current time, however they should be more effective against infantry units who still can damage these specialist Anti-infantry units rather too effectively. Perhaps an infantry amour downgrade by 80% against these weapons needs to be in order? This would include the US helicopters in this.
Then there are the secondary systems. These currently are far too weak on the Russian tanks. But almost perfect on the US tanks. The little machiguns here should have all the capacities of a standard infantry automatic rifle, just the fact that it doesn’t have to reload (and perhaps just a little 2%-3% bonus to damage for effect).
In this way, once a tank armor is upgraded against small arms, then one tank should be capable to deal with a large horde of basic infantry (say 12 in a one on one *shooting* contest).
Likewise something that irks me a tad is that tanks still fire their shells at infantry. Mindyou, it’s not a major problem. Furthermore I wonder if China’s battle master tanks would get a machinegun upgrade…Having said that, infantry and Gatling tanks far make up from any lack in that department.
Finally we have the chaingun section of machineguns. Gatling weapons, Beruik aircraft Gatling gun, Tunguska, Littlebirds, and Hokum. All of these weapons I believe need there own separate niche in the weapons game. Let’s start with the big guns;
The Hokum
Essentially this is an AT autocannon. Slow ROF (rate of fire), but high damage, as it stands, it’s just a very poor AP weapon, it should be more effective against infantry. Perhaps an increasing of whatever damage type it is against infantry is in order of about 10%-15%. At the end of the day, the Russians have got the Hind for AP helicopter gunships.
Gatling guns
It appears that all damage has been already adjusted by ROF for one or two barreled versions of the weapon, am I correct? However it is my opinion that universally the damage against light armored vehicles should be upped, perhaps by as much as 40%, but certainly by about 20%. At the end of the day it is a ‘cannon’ and the model has big beefy barrels, hence it should be capable of more damage, against infantry. Spot on already. Kudos.
Tunguska and Littlebirds
The Tunguska in particular needs an upping of damage against infantry, but not by too much, perhaps just another 5%, as for an AA vehicle those bullets are going to be packing some punch. For both, they need to do much less damage against buildings, currently they can raise buildings to the ground far too quickly. Perhaps 5%-10% adjustment here?
The Russian Jet Fighter
I think that it’s MG quality is awesome, but I’d like to see it applied to the Chinese Jet fighter (not the bomber variant), too. This is because infantry are far too effective at tying up aircraft on strike missions that don’t actually kill anything. However this isn’t that important at the end of the day, just need to apply some micro at some point.
Right that’s the first lot of little comments I’d like to make about balance of units, there are more on both tank damage vs other tanks. However I’m sure that the mod team have their own ideas about how much damage each vehicle should do against each other. Hence my comments will be more orientated at my personal thoughts that they might or might not want to take on board. Then finally artillery (China and Russia, on range of guns and AI, and finally in particular the nuke cannon being…well…weak, for a nuclear explosion. ) and buildings armor against certain weapon types.
Gen