A lot here, so mostly just directly responding to things that either I disagree with for a specific reason, or requires further clarification. Have read everything though:
We definitely agree on a lot of the points with the infantry, but them being individually selectable wasn't done for its own sake. If it were a question solely of individual vs squad, then I agree, squads are much better. The reason it's individual is because the infantry now fire while moving (which alone makes infantry hugely more useful) and this also requires the use of a specific locomotor type for the unit behaviour. This locomotor causes issues when garrisoning (among other things) which splits up the squad and causes problems when giving movement orders. It's possible to have units get stuck, and possible to have half the squad load into a bunker/transport while the other half gets stuck outside. Unless we're missing something big with the behaviour type, this is not soluble, and we think the benefits of soldiers that can fire while moving makes up for the drawbacks of units being separated into individuals (some of which
are likely soluble, which we'll get into in a moment), where they have to stop moving and setup for a few frames before they can actually fire, making them significantly less useful and making stats between infantry matter far less, since it's basically going to come down to whomever stops moving first.
So, for the drawbacks:
Infantry are incredibly slow to deploy now
There are ways to reduce this, but the way we were using to do it made the AI not want to use the infantry- for whatever reason, they didn't recognize them as valid units. We think we can make a workaround for this, but it'll require some work to make and test, which is why it's not in the demo. The workaround would also potentially solve the other issue which exists with squads but the individual units makes more obvious (as you mention), where the AI likes to send their infantry randomly around on the map (much like their fighters).
The fact you get only two soldiers from a barracks instead of two squads when defending is a huge nerf
This isn't really connected, it's more related to how we were spawning them to work around the deploy times; basically, we had commander units that spawned the other parts of the squad using the fighter code. When we reverted back to full squads to stop the AI problem, we neglected to go back and revert the garrisons for barracks.
I do feel like there's a slight framerate drop when there's many units of infantry down as well, but I'm not 100% certain.
This is a separate issue; the NR infantry in particular is way too high poly at the moment, so they can cause some frame drops.
When I played as GM or Zinsj, it happened to me many times that, after a few ingame weeks (Admiral difficulty), the NR attack fleets were just massively "overcrowded" with starfighters. I had to fight fleets of 156 E-Wing squadrons *and* 120 Y-Wing Squadrons, plus Frigates etc.
Suggestion - if that's even possible, give fleet "stacks" a limit of max. 30 units of a type, e.g. max 30 squads of e-wings, y-wings, a-wings or whatever per attack fleet. It's just no fun to sit there and spam corvettes for half an hour watching one squadron after the other disappear (actually it is once or max twice but not the whole time, and yes, I love to take my time for GCs).
Even if we were to be more specific in what they have to use to attack, they're also only able to use what they have made, so instead of making them attack with different stuff, they'd just end up attacking with nothing. Part of this is the result of access to shipyards, though this is mitigated by AI's magic unit drops. They're fairly limited, and the AI wants to have as many units as it can get. More importantly, they only have so much pop cap, and fighters tend to make that more of a problem. Even if they build fighters at the same rate as capital ships/frigates, the AI will almost always retreat once the "actual" ships are dead, which means in any given fleet, the fighters are the most likely thing to survive. Then, if they're replacing those now-empty slots in the same proportion, losing battles, etc, they'll end up slow maxing out on fighters. This happens a lot more when people play passively, since they're attacking more and therefore more likely to retreat a lot. If we tried to do something in the script to occasionally cull the fighter numbers, then we'd be causing the selection freeze several months earlier in the game. What we're more likely to do is give fighters a max buildable count at any given time, which the player probably wouldn't ever hit but would mitigate this effect on the AI (40-50). The AI has a tendency to ignore build limits, especially for its magic spawns, but it should help a bit. It would also mean it's still possible later on, too, since they could theoretically just build 40-50 of multiple types, but it would be much later.
3. Just something I saw, some planets (think there are two on the Hunt for Zinsj Map, I actually forogt which ones :/) do not *seem* have a direct hyperspace-route link to another but can in fact be accessed by that planet (which you can see by either being attacked from an unexpected direction or if you have a fleet on that planet and pull it to all the surrounding planets to see if there's a direct route). Think one of them was pretty much in the center of the map (close to roche asteroids or so)
Some of them seem to not want to render for whatever reason. We're looking into them.
-NR frigates are bad excluding normal dreadnaughts and quasars. Hapan Battledragon is also pretty okay. They just don't really do anything and theres no reason to build them when you have Mon Cal ships to tank, Dreadnaughts/Hapans to deal the damage and strip the shields of frigates/capital ships. Quasars + their starfighters screen enemy starfighters and take out shields of capital ships. Main problems being: lack of armament, split armament(lasers/turbo-lasers on the same ship) and no utility abilities.
Yeah, the NR's unit list already tends to fill those roles and once you get up into the twenties in your available units, there's not much differentiation that's even possible, especially when we're basing it on canon stats (which is why in Ascendancy, we're quite happy the engine only allows us a significantly pared down unit list, while also allowing abilities to vary a lot more than EaW really does). They're more available in this GC for story purposes. This is part of why we don't go along with the oft-suggested "everyone should be able to build [Star Destroyers/Battle Dragons/Mon Calamari Cruisers/Bothan Assault Cruisers/etc] if they capture [Kuat/Hapes/Mon Calamari/Bothawui/etc]." Once we do get into abilities, that will help a bit, although the basic roles will still obviously be the same or similar. The Battle Dragon, specifically, will be getting its interdiction mines, which should actually make it pretty unique (especially among the New Republic, in the few places where it's available to them).
-The infiltrator units seem to work a bit differently than they did in 2.1, and I'd like to see that come back. Previously you could move them and then attack-move and their shot would come out almost instantly and you could kite basic infantry around doing that. Now they seem to have picked up the bad habit of shooting at the same target that only takes 1 shot to kill.
Nothing has changed with them at all yet. They're still using the base game infantry logic, like they always have.
-Range on MPTL is obnoxious. SPMA range is kind of short. I think the SPMA damage seems a bit higher to compensate but it really doesn't feel much like artillery as a clunky long-range tank destroyer. You also have to be very careful with using MPTLs, because if you have one deployed and a scout trooper decides to drive into the middle of your blob of infantry you're going to have a bit of a problem on your hands. The projectiles will also collide with friendly AT-ATs if they are in the flight path.
-The sight ranges given to all artillery pieces make using other units as a spotter pointless. They're also good just to land for the basically free sensor array since it can see almost the whole map depending on where it's positioned.
Yeah, right now I'd agree the MPTL is simply MASSIVELY OP'd. Can fire 1/2 the map away, and has INSANE sight range compared to anything else.
As for sight range, that's just a typo. It was meant to be 400, but instead it got an extra 0 and it's 4000. Its max range is being reduce, and its min range is being increased. We want artillery to be actual artillery, ie function at long range, not at short. The big change there will actually be recharge rate.
As for any rockets or bombs killing stuff from your own side, all of the friendlyfire scripts were meant to have been removed; I thought they were all gone (they're not in my folders), so i'll have to doublecheck ingame if there were some weapons that had it as default functionality from the base game. If it was installed over 2.1, they'd still be there, so that could be it, but I'll check again to make sure.
AT-ATs also probably need a buff. When I see an AT-AT I should think I need to throw all of my anti-vehicle forces to overcome it. However a small blob of T4-B tanks(or pod walkers) can tear them to pieces quite easily.
This is more a problem with T3/T4-Bs being too expensive than a problem with AT-ATs not being good enough.
Zsinj should have AT-AAs. As it stands currently the only thing that can actually deal with enemy aircraft is just ground TIE fighters.
He'll be getting them. We were hoping to turn Hailfires into AA, but it seems like that won't be possible while keeping their missile movement, so we're going back on that.
Topic: 2.2 Demo Feedback (Read 37856 times)