Everyone get a drink and a bathroom break if you need it, this is going to be a long read. It took about 4-5 hours to write and I burned through a bunch of CDs so I'm assuming it'll take that long to read. At the end of it I've got a sort of summation where I just give basic answers to the individual suggestions.
for a hero, Renegade Squadron. Now listen Renegade squadron was around at the time, although briefly.
They disbanded right after the Battle of Endor. Renegade Squadron never existed during the mod's timeline.
maybe let them garrison more stuff like towers andd walls?
As for towers, what's the utility in that? With Bunkers, you're still doing something that's infantry-centric; you're adding to their defense and giving them something to shoot out of, but with turbolaser towers, it's really just going to keep them safe but you're effectively removing their offensive capabilities. It's the turret that's going to be doing all of the offensive work there because of its range. If those disparities were removed there might be some significant balance issues. Engaging against infantry in a bunker is pretty hard already, and Turbolaser towers are also pretty beastly on their own. Combine them and even with just one or two squads garrisoned in a turbo tower you're dealing with some seriously frustrating assaults, and it's not even really a "well learn how to counter it" kind of problem, the damage output compared with the sheer number of forces you'd need to take it out is pretty ridiculous. Garrisoning in towers isn't really a buff to infantry, it's a buff to the towers, and the towers are the last thing in ground combat that need a buff.
For walls, what type of wall are you talking about specifically?
and you could give them better abilities too
What ability are you thinking of? There really aren't any abilities in FoC that would be suitable to give to infantry squads that I can think of. We've already had to remove the take cover ability because of animation issues, and there's really nothing else that would work well on infantry.
especially since in TR you can drop 10 units in right off the bat.
This is no longer true in 2.0
No I'm almost positive it was the empire as it was at the beginning of Art of War on Yavin and there are no EotH planets even remotely close to that.
It's far more likely that the Empire of the Hand managed to spread through the northern half of the galaxy rather quickly than the Empire having access to stormtrooper commando minor heroes considering no coding for such a unit exists. As it is, no faction has access to any minor heroes of any kind. As far as major heroes go, the Empire has exactly one stormtrooper hero, that being Grodin Tierce in era 5 who isn't part of a squad and who also commands a Star Destroyer in space. The Empire of the Hand has two major hero squads made up of 4-5 stormtroopers, however; Aurek Seven and the Hand of Judgement. They're the only units in the mod that match what you're describing. Either way, the point that the New Republic should have access to these minor hero commandos if the Empire has them doesn't stand considering no such Imperial unit exists even if we
did want to have completely mirrored factions (something I'll touch on more later in this post).
The alternative here is that another Imperial unit has become sentient and started coding in other units, in which case we should be more worried about the real world's ability to combat this new threat than the New Republic.
ArcHeavyGunner: B) the Infiltrators should get a squad of slightly weaker Commandos that are armed with fully automatic blasters. Does anyone agree with me or is my point completely ridiculous and stupid?
WillHelm: could one unit per squadron say have a grenade launcher to say simulate throwing grenades?
There's some technical issues with the individual infiltrators coming with additional squads of repeater commandos that Arc suggested which would only be soluble with really weird/limited numbers of units per company and by taking advantage of the company's cutoff per squad, meaning one squad of x and one squad of one (the overflow). I would like to increase the number of infiltrators/Phalanx Commandos per squad to 3, and maybe have each one use different weapons at some point. Yutpaeksi's right about the tactical choices involved in choosing when a commando should get sent, however as it is they're not
quite worth the pop cap they take up for their limited map presence. They're primarily meant to be anti-infantry or even anti-building but the infantry inflation has sort of set them back.
As for Grenades in infantry squads, that sort of depends. For a grenade launcher specifically, the answer would be no. You already have plex squads to handle that (since RPGs are more for use against vehicles), it would be kind of pointless to put what is essentially just a plex soldier into the usual infantry squads unless we were just to do away with plex as their own squads entirely and integrate them. The problem with this has more to do with firing ranges and the fact that you can't prioritize different targets for single squad members. The alternative there is adding a secondary weapon being a thrown grenade to the regular soldiers, which I think could work. Or rather, just to the sergeant or another individual soldier on a lower cooldown in the squad so it's not a periodic grenade spam with 10 guys throwing grenades at onceand nuking things. You can't have different types of animations for different types of weapons, however, so there wouldn't be a grenade throwing animation. I do like the general idea of just adding a few grenades to the infantry even if I suspect the effect would be more of a graphical/atmospheric one than one that has a real impact on gameplay. I'm not talking about the sticky thermal detornator throwing ability, either.
I wanted to land some infantry I would but I would be knowing all to well that they will be instantly killed if I ask 5 squads of Infantry and 3 squads of Plex troopers to take out an AT-ST or 2 that happen to be flanking
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Personally I think infantry should be buffed so that on AT-ST can wipe out an entire company, which we know from the movies and the books is rare If Ewoks can take out several AT-STs shouldn't infantry be able to.
Honestly I think there's either some mismanagement or exaggeration going on here. As long as you're managing them properly you shouldn't even need half of that to take out an AT-ST. You can pretty effectively counter T2-B's with stormtroopers and the Stormtrooper versions of plex troopers, depending on how you catch them, and the NR's infantry are better than stormtroopers, with T2-B's generally being a bit weaker than AT-STs.
Using that kind of anecdote is pointless when deciding how to handle a mod or a game, and it doesn't really even have anything to do with "just balance reasons". They make a terrible jumping off point to base any kind of game design on, or even inferring the norm in the Star Wars universe. The point isn't to infer stats from shown events in books and movies, its to infer capabilities from given stats and known information. The basic logic behind this, if you want to rationalize it in-universe is that what we're being shown in the books and movies are the notable events, and that George Lucas isn't great at creating consistent universes.
For example, should we infer from the number of times Han put the Mon Remonda up against Iron Fist and came out on top that the MC80B should be better than an Executor when every single stat we have shows that's not true? Of course not. A lot of the X-Wing books are like this as well. The same thing gets applied to why the stormtroopers don't miss every shot they take and why AT-STs, an armoured anti-infantry crowd control mechanism doesn't fall to pieces every time it sees one or two untrained indigenous critters with excessive body hair and insecurities about their height.
I think the best examples we can use here are the Rogue Squadron games. If we used the events you play through in those games as the basis for capabilities, all you'd need is a single fighter and if not for the fact that it can't be at more than one planet at once you'd be laughing your way to the victory screen every time.
Also, if there was better body armor and Blasters would the Super powers invest in them, similar to how, at the birth of assault rifles, all the super powers dropped their bolt action rifle and picked up assault rifles? So I think the Nebulon to Corona analogy works fine for the reason I just mentioned.
No, the analogy still doesn't work for several reasons. You're inventing some revolution in technology halfway through the timelone that doesn't happen in-universe as a means to fix a problem, and then if that was chosen as the solution it wouldn't actually fix the problem because it would have literally no effect on the infantry before that point. If you think the mod is underpowering infantry compared to what they should be able to do, why would this only be true for half of the mod? You mentioned "dealing with the introduction of troop transports and new vehicles" and that kind of thing but that's also not true. Troop transports exist through the entirety of the mod, and the heaviest and most common vehicles (AT-AT being the prime example) had already existed for around 20, maybe even 30 years by that point. Even before then you had things like Juggernauts, AT-TE, etc.
It's fine to say "but if there was a revolution in x obviously the superpowers would invest in x", but in this case you're just inventing x. It's also entirely true that if there were a revolution in fighter armour in 11 ABY all the major powers would probably invest in it, but just because if there had been they would have invested in it doesn't mean we should invent a situation in which that happens.
With the Corona, it's not an out-universe way to address the strength of the Nebulon-B, it's representing an actual change that occured in the lore. If we were doing a real tech system, as in you level up your tech to get new types of ships instead of using the eras as both a storytelling and faction diversification method, as well as some basic form of tech progression, then we wouldn't have both the Nebulon-B and Corona in the mod. I can't get into much detail here, but it's something we discussed with the development of Ascendancy, and the Neulon-B won out.
The main point here is if there actually is a problem with infantry effectiveness, that has to be addressed universally with the gameplay changes. When we're making a change to fix a problem, we have a few steps we have to go through. We don't literally go through the steps (nobody says "let's do step 1 now", but it's the easiest and clearest way to communicate the general development process:
1. Identify the gameplay problem:In this case, you're saying the infantry is either underpowered or useless.
2. Suggest a solution:In this case, you're essentially saying to lock out the old infantry and create a whole new set for everyone at era 3.
3. Determine the logistics: (What needs to be done to implement this)Design all new sets of infantry of every type for every faction (multiple new infantry designs, models, skins, animations, recode it all
4. Determine if the solution fits with canon: (Doesn't have to be a 1-1 correlation, but it has to match the universe and make sense)Effectively, this solution fails in this part. There's no reason to believe all the infantry changed at this point, and it really can't be done for all the factions. For Stormtroopers we know they didn't have any significant weapon or armour changes. The only change there was that it was apparently more common for a Stormtrooper commander to be given one of those flachette weapons. Basically the whole situation is invented and goes directly against canon, though that's another thing I want to address more directly later.
5. Does it solve the gameplay problem:This is the most important factor, and I think the answer here is no. These changes don't apply to two whole eras, which means the problem still exists in over half the GCs. It's not even a problem with infantry not keeping up with other military advances, in which case it might not be a problem at all, but that kind of advance just plain isn't happening. It just creates an era disparity in which the exact same problem exists and then creates a whole bunch of extra work (a year's worth of it, maybe more) to half-solve it.
Look at the alternative, now:1. Identify the gameplay problem:In this case, you're saying the infantry is either underpowered or useless.
2. Suggest a solution:Change the stats and functions of infantry as they are.
3. Determine the logistics:Just figure out the new numbers needed, change the code and maybe create a few new projectiles.
4. Determine if the solution fits with canon:The canon is essentially irrelevant here, nothing in those numbers can be said to go for or against infantry, this is entirely the realm of gameplay mechanics and infantry kit.
5. Does it solve the gameplay problem:A universal change with no disparities between eras, if the new numbers are successful then it is a complete solution to the problem.
And I know the IR used too be an awesome Empire, but we need to look at this from a game play and balance standpoint, not canon. Because if this Mod is completely, 100% canon, wouldn't the NR lose essentially all its ground units after Era 3?
From what I know the military restructuring they did wasn't quite as extensive as Xizer implied, though. It certainly wasn't abolished, it was actually just a change with more importance placed on SecForce vs Specforce (which also goes against what you said about the restructuring should mean more focus on elite SpecForce soldiers). The best analogy I can make to the real world is basically if the United States had each state with its own military (equivalent to Alliance SecForces) which was also somewhat accessible to the federal government (Alliance SecCom), and then the federal government had its own smaller core of directly controlled military forces (this is SpecForce, attached to Alliance High Command). After a certain point around Palpatine's Operation Shadow Hand, greater importance was placed on the SecForces at the expense of SpecForce. It would have been SpecForce that saw a decline there, and SecForce that actually saw the increase in prominance. From what I can tell the New Republic soldiers in the mod are actually already part of SpecForce as well, and SpecForce was actually just the NR/Alliance's version of Stormtroopers. The soldiers on Hoth and Endor were, to my understanding, part of SpecForce.
And didn't the Rebel Alliance and then the New Republic have a very good and prominent Specials forces unit called SpecForce. They did and it saddens me that sucha major assest(Raids on Endor and taking over Couresant) is not represented in this mod.
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I just realized, the IR is getting Nova COMMANDOS. COMMANDOS. Why does the IR get all the cool stuff. Spread the love and give all the factions commandos, please with ice cream on top.
I meant to represent the Marines, Pathfinders, Rangers, Gunners, and Urban Combat Specialist too! Besides, anyone can pick up a sniper rifle, some thermaldetonatros, and move inhumanly fast. =P ( I still don't consider the Infiltrators commandos, only snipers)
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This is what I want except for the New Republic! Why can't we have it! =( There is probably a good reason, maybe, no, there is no reason that I know of why we cant have an equivalent.
Like Slornie said and I've covered, Infiltrators are part of SpecForce just like the regular infantry. The basic structure of the NR army is taken from the Alliance military, since very little information is available on any reorganizations made by the NR to the Alliance military system, and everything we do know says there was if anything an increase in SecForce prominance. The Nova Commandos weren't added to the mod as something the NR/EotH didn't get, they were added specifically because the Infiltrators and Phalanx Commandos exist. Just because the Nova Commandos are called Commandos and the Infiltrators aren't don't mean they're not Commandos, a commando is any unit specially trained to operate quickly and aggressively, and the Infiltrators fit that description, probably better than the Nova Commandos do. They're each side's version of elite infantry. The NR's basic infantry were already better than Stormtroopers, and the NR had Infiltrators on top of that, which is why the IR got them in the form they did.
As far as doing different infantry to fill the roles Marines and all these other types of people do in the real world, there really isn't space for that in a game like EaW. There's no reason to have most of it and no room to make them actually different. This engine doesn't have the same subleties and depth for ground combat that something like, say, Company of Heroes does.
Well that's good, and surprising, news. And I do hope you have another infantry unit or two or 8 up your sleeve for the New Republic. Besides, I think the IR is already powerful enough, almost bordering OP, and the NR and EotH seem really weak compared to them (well, not REALLY weak, but quite a bit weaker). And I know the IR used too be an awesome Empire, but we need to look at this from a game play and balance standpoint, not canon. Because if this Mod is completely, 100% canon, wouldn't the NR lose essentially all its ground units after Era 3? and that wouldn't be fun for the(apparently few) NR commanders as the IR would steamroll us the the EotH and Penstar and win almost every time. and I just went on a rant but now it's out there =P
Actually, the stuff about the Remnant being overpowered is objectively not true, both in previous versions and in 2.0. Saying anything about how it used to be a big superpower means nothing for balance, because we've never considered faction size for anything like that, except for planet distribution in some GCs and occaisionally starting forces as well. Unless you can give specific reasons why you think the IR is overpowered, then I can just as easily point out 5 people who think the NR is overpowered, the IR is underpowered, or the EotH is over/underpowered.
ArcHeavyGunner: I still think that A) Every faction should get an E-Web equivalent
Lord Xizer: I agree each should get some sort of E Web equiv
As Yutpaeksi said, the goal here isn't to give every faction all the same kinds of units. The Nova Troopers were added because they had a specific hole and the performance was decidely suffering from it, but "Empire had x so New Republic should get x as well" isn't really a reason to do things, or else there's a lot of other things we'd be doing as well.
1. New Republic has V-Wings and Snowspeeders, EotH has AirStraeker. Therefore, Remnant and PA should get an Airspeeder.
2. New Republic has Gallofree HTT, therefore every faction should get a flying transport with a lot of unit slots.
3. Remnant and PA have the IDT and LAAT, therefore every faction should get a gunship.
4. Remnant, NR, PA all have superships/heroes in superships, therefore EotH should get superships.
5. EotH has MMT and IR has AT-AT, therefore the NR should get an individual powerhouse unit instead of T4's.
There are situations where a faction
is suffering from a unit or class not being there, such as the EotH not having the A-Rack, or missing some space defense platforms, but this is more because things take time to do/lacking designs than because we don't want to do them.
I could go on, but again, this post is taking five hours and I'm almost out of music.
That being said about factional differences, an NR/EotH E-Web like the thing on Hoth for the NR is something I'd like, but it's really not feasible for us to make. Kitbashes/new weapon models and the occaisonal animation tweak to accomodate those are things I'm capable of doing, but entirely new infantry models and animation sets and that kind of thing are beyond my ability; the majority of the new infantry units in the mod were done by Dr. Knickers, and he's too busy with other things to work on that kind of major undertaking, not to mention that he's really out of practice with it. Character/organic modeling and skinning is totally different from vehicle/ship/prop/hard surface modelling and skinning, and there's the added skillset of animation needed. The character models and animations for the hologram things are the limit of my abilities, and even at his best the complexity of the E-Web wasn't something even Knickers was able to do. I made a model for one years ago, we only got it in this year because we decided to use Bailknight's. It's the difference between giving the existing infiltrator model a repeater and completely changing all its movements, deployment animation, etc.
This would be most enjoyable, also if walls could offer SOME protection instead of missiles and Turbos most of the time firing through them.
There are ways to make objects give their surrounding areas give certain bonuses to infantry, like the sandbag circles in vanilla, however the thing about that if you did that on a single object facing multiple directions, aka walls, is that you'd get it regardless of which side you were on or facing. So you could be standing on the same side of the wall as your enemy and you'd get the bonus, which makes no sense.
So, in summation (and screw everyone who just jumps here, I spent a long time writing this post, also screw anyone who reads the above and not this):
1. Renegade Squadron:No, disbanded.
2. Add SpecForce:SpecForce refers to just the nationally-controlled branch of the Army. The infantry in the mod are
already SpecForce. So already done.
3. Katarn Commandos:Possible, but I don't see the point.
4. Grenades:I'm all for making the Sergeants throw a grenade every once in a while, but not RPGs since that would be stepping on the toes of the Plex soldiers too much.
5. Switch all infantry out at era 3 for better ones:Definitely not; if changes are necessary to make infantry better, they shouldn't just be randomly applied to one timeframe.
6. Sniper Infiltrators come with repeater infiltrator squad, or more per squad:I'd definitely be willing to attempt to put different weapon types on them and making 3 per company with different weapons, but not for 2.0. If we delay it any longer I'm probably gonna get more hatemail. I also wouldn't want to go past 3 per squad for the reasons Yutpaeksi mentioned. For technical reasons can't make a squad come with the individual things though.
7. Garrison troopers in turrets:I guess I'm open to it if the rest of the team wanted it, but I think it would draw battles on even longer and is more of a buff to the already-OP turbolasers, not to infantry.
8. Garrison troopers in walls:Still not sure what walls this refers to, so our thoughts on the matter probably depend on that. The other thing about garrisoning is the infantry wouldn't show up so they'd be literally inside the wall, and the wall would be shooting.
9. E-Webs for EotH/NR:Not opposed to this, but also not capable of doing most forms of it that I can think of. If people have specific suggestions for what they could be, feel free to post them but we're somewhat limited in this field. Xizer made some but I'm not sure it was the kind of thing the rest of you were referring to.
10. Faction X is OP:I can easily find 5 other people saying the other two factions are OP, unless you're able to give actual reasons why you think they're OP.
11. The Empire has Commando Stormtrooper minor heroes:Except not really.
12. Corey, nobody's reading this anymore.Yeah, I know.
All of that being said, thanks for the suggestions and keep the discussion going. I'll try to be shorter/reply earlier next time. Even if we disagree with a suggestion sometimes it can make us think of other ways to do something or a different idea.
Topic: Better Infantry units for the New Republic (Read 37170 times)