MajesticSausage

I'm not a huge fan I have to be totally honest. There is a lot to like in the map, I want to make that clear, but it's hampered by a lot of other things imo. I'm going to borrow (completely steal) Svett's points as they frame the conversation very well. General thoughts: The snowy desert motif is weird, but i like it. The map is too large. In some places it uses this distance very well but for the most part it feels pointlessly so and often it becomes a slog going from point A to point B. Infantry and Vehicle combat are almost entirely isolated from each other, that makes for very lopsided games. Base layout is a little uninspired. 1. A central vehicle chokepoint What I like: I really like the choke being at the bottom of the hill, I think that's a really clever choice. Any team that tries to break the choke will have to fight uphill on the far side of it and that make for an interesting risk/reward dynamic. I like that the choke is relatively wide compared to other chokes in other maps, it means there is some room to maneuver inside it and trying to sneak stanks through is fun. I still think it could be wider. What I Dislike: I dislike having a single chokepoint with very few options around it and I strongly disagree that it makes for good vehicle combat. There is nothing dynamic about this. You're just parking your tanks on either side and hoping to brute force your way through, it's especially problematic as there is very little cover to play around at the choke which I will touch on some more later. Chokes are definitely important for map design, They control the flow of a battle having one in the middle rather than two at the entrance of each base is a really interesting choice. But the lack of cover and small(maybe 1.5 vehicles wide)/infantry side routes makes it a slog. "But sausage," I hear you cry "there is infantry access to the choke!" Yes, but it's not very useful. The secondary infantry path that joins the caves to the choke is rarely used in my experience. The Caves are very large and easily covered by snipers, so running infantry up there and then diverting to the choke isn't always an obvious choice. It just doesn't naturally flow in that direction. It's also really flipping long to walk your arse from(through) your base, through the caves and to the choke. Then when you get there, there is a single hole to poke your head out of at the bottom of the hill with limited cover. As such the infantry path here, really doesn't offer many strategic options. Suggestions: Widen the choke a little, at the side opposite the silo there are some rocks against the wall which could offer some cover, I'd move the walls back a little there to make more room for vehicles to play around the geometry. The infantry and vehicle combat feels totally isolated from each other at the moment, I'd reduce the over-all size of the map a little and either shrink or totally remove the 'Vestibule' area between the caves and the choke. I'd then offer more egress points leading into the choke to give infantry more options. It would be interesting to play around with some bunkers built into the rocks similar to the ones in volcano, offering infantry some cover and elevated positions to help with the stalemates. Add some more cover at the tops of the choke on either side, give vehicles and potentially infantry something to fight around. 2. Large, open fields outside the bases What I like: I actually really like the entrances to the bases, I completely agree with what Svett said about this making base sieging a more interesting experience. I also think the design of the side routes into the tib fields on both sides are brilliant. There is potential for seriously great combat both infantry and vehicle here and the ability to fire into the more open areas makes for a really nice flow. I had the most fun of the map in these areas. What I Dislike: The open areas are marginally too big and barren. I wouldn't reduce them too much but as it stands they are pointlessly large, trying to traverse any of it on foot sucks (remember there are vehicle limits in this game and RenX is all about options) I'm not a big fan of having large open areas where snipers and artillery can fire unchallenged into a wide open area with little cover, beyond the range of any response apart from other snipers and artillery. Suggestions: As mentioned, reduce the size of the map. Get rid of or seriously rework and reduce the secondary infantry area and reign in the huge expanses outside of each base. Bigger doesn't always mean better. 3. Quick infantry access to everything I really profoundly disagree with this this statement. I'm puzzled as to how it came about. What I like: I think the infantry cave is actually a really great arena. I have my issues with ingress and egress as mentioned above, but inside the actual cave it makes for brilliant fire fights. What I dislike: The bases are sprawling, any routes that aren't the infantry path take an absolute age to traverse and the infantry path itself is still pretty large, especially when taking into account the choke access. Suggestions: I mentioned how I might reduce the map size, remove and rework some areas above. I'd completely start over with the base layout, Replace the blocky grid placement with something more fluid and compact. 4. Playing to the strengths and weaknesses of both factions I actually agree with this. the map designer clearly thought about this and all of my gripes are more general. When the map works it works very well and does play to each teams strengths and weaknesses.

So when is the battle royale mode coming anyway?

Snowballing isn't a de facto "bad" thing, it is actually important to the flow of the game. OldRen's biggest problem was hours and hours of stalemates just slogging on and on. It still happens on certain maps now (Oh hi Under) Allowing the winning team to definitively gain the upper hand at the right point is important to end the game and get the next one going. It's really tough to balance though, you have to make sure the ramp of the snowball is not so steep that one team is instantly roflstomping and not so shallow that the stalemates last for days. It's a design job I do not envy the Devs having. That said, I think the veterancy system is an incredibly useful tool for this (Someone was talking about how a Heroic Mammoth is essentially there to end the game and I think that is spot on) It's also good to encourage the aggressive play-style (like Sarah said) as in general this will quicken the pace of a game and makes for a more interesting game. If defensive actions were weighted on par with offensive actions this would go out the window. Defence is important, but it shouldn't be encouraged as a teams main strategy or the game would get boring really quickly. I hear what you're saying about penalising people who like to play defensively, but consider what they would actually be gaining from hitting heroic for spending the whole game repairing in base, is it really that important to that play style? How much will it help the team win? I agree it is not perfect and could probably do with some tweaking of values, but I think veterency does a great job of making RenX a more dynamic interesting game and it shouldn't be thrown out wholesale.

Just making things more expensive isn't a clear solution, It's hard to balance across games as cash flow is not always linear. It would also seem to me that a hugely powerful and massively expensive item would disproportionately favour the winning side, at the very least it would need to have a strong counter. Sneaky strategic play is often a chance for a losing team to pull themselves back, but if such a massively OP power is only available to a wealthy team that is most likely winning already, then it's just a big ol' squash button.

Canon dictates that Orcas are the most advanced aircraft ever created by humans and outclass everything in the air, and yet they regularly get dunked on by a bunch of second hand apaches Kane nicked off the back of a van. I don't think Canon is important :P

The repair tool is pretty limited. It's not a full fat engineer tool at all. So keeping that in mind, the idea of a chem resistance upgrade actually sounds pretty cool. It's not full immunity to tiberium but reduces its effects well enough to open up a new route for an infantry rush. That said, off the top of my head i can't think of many maps where traversing the tiberium field as infantry offers that big of a bonus. Volcano, Complex, Mesa maybe? The problem is that often the tib fields are vehicle hotspots and you'd just get squished.

I dunno man. I get where you are coming from, if there was someone genuinely capable who wanted to help the team out who was blocked out by a selfish com then yeah I agree. But in public games it can very often hard to get anyone to go comm at all. I'd rather have a selfish comm who is at least using the CP rather than no comm at all. That said, I think changing the language around voting for yourself very much falls into the nice to have column, I'd see this a polish rather than a meaningful change.

It is quite frustrating being the tanker who recognises it's time to push and then having to sacrifice yourself by leading the charge because every other tanker on your team is a coward who won't dare move 60 tonnes of metal unless the enemy is shooting someone else. "Oh look, I instigated a game winning rush and got no points for it because I own a pair"

Mobi has a hitscan weapon with a HS multiplier. Get even semi good at landing headshots and you well devastate as a mobi in tunnels.

If Saturday's PUG taught us anything, apparently we now how the stealth apaches that nobody can hear.

Last night, was...I haven't laughed that hard playing a video game in a long time. Thanks for the fun folks. Mammoth Sandwiches.

I'm an old school Ren player. Used to play endless rounds of Under on skirmish until my dad got us a fast enough connection to play online. GameSpy for days. I loved that game. But: RenX, is so much better than Renegade that I'm slightly baffled that so many oldies hate it (I mean sure, prefer the old one, but really, hate RenX? Those or some mightily rose tinted glasses you have on friend.) The biggest change that makes a vast improvement imo is the pacing of games. Whilst it's still not exactly uncommon in RenX, old Ren was much more of camp fest. 90% of rounds were simply resolved by one team winning the field and then camping outside the enemy base until some of the enemy engineers got distracted enough and let a building die. The other 10% was either early suicide APC engie rushes into the HoN. YOLO. Or mass Flamers/Meds, also YOLO Like I say these are still common in RenX (maybe less so the APC rush) but there is a lot more space for variation. Building armour means that it's possible to have partially successful attacks that are still worth while. In oldRen it was binary, either your attack succeeded or it didn't, in RenX it's always worth a try, so that encourages lots of smaller coordinated attacks. Commanders help two fold. Having a designated leader helps bring together coordinated attacks helping move the game beyond the uncoordinated camping phase and commander powers are very useful for helping break a deadlock. Using defence boost to push out of a besieged base is a wholly underrated tactic imo. Finally, the map design has moved on. I've talked before about how (somewhat bizarrely) you can see some of the early DNA of MOBAs in Renegade. Lanes, Heroes and Bases with very linear push and pull game-play. That is not a criticism, it's still very much how RenX plays out now, but oldRen was much more narrow in its map design, most of the time it was 1 infantry path and 1 open field area. And thus the camping of the chokepoints was assured. Compare that to RenX map design. Most of the ported maps have had extra routes added to them, tech buildings mean that one team can build momentum with map control (although this can cause its own problems) and new maps, generally, are a lot more open. Case in point: I personally feel that Whiteout is a better version of Hourglass. The main improvement imo is that the central area is far more accessible, making firefights a lot more fluid. Flanking routes are possible for infantry even when enemy tanks have the hill locked down and the side routes are no longer entirely isolated from each other. It's a dynamic, fast map that rarely turns into an hours long slug fest, it always feels like you can make a contribution to the fight, even if you blew all your cash on an SBH, Stank, Nuke combo that you accidentally drove into a minefield and now all you can afford is a shotgunner with a repair tool. None of this is to say that the pacing is perfect, and stalemates and deadlocks are a solved problem, but they are lightyears ahead of oldRen. I can see more merit in people disliking the gun-play, it takes quite a bit of getting used to and it's very much a subjective game-feel thing. But empirically I think it is hard to argue that oldRen is a better game. That said, on the actual topic of this thread, how can we make the game more inviting to others? My feelings are, do more of the above. Forget about stodgy oldRen players who won't be happy with anything new and pursue the direction the design has been heading in with gusto. As a thought experiment, I consider why I don't invite my friends to play RenX with me. They know I play it a shit load and have asked me what it is in the past, but I have straight up said to them "I doubt you would enjoy it." The main issue is that the difference between a good round of RenX and a bad one is incredibly stark. I rarely have an OK game on RenX, it's either brilliant or dreadful. If my friends joined a game and it happened to be well coordinated, lots of push and pull and people executing raids, rushes and infiltrations there is a good chance they'd become as hooked as I am. But it is more likely they will hit an hour long stalemate on Under, have no idea what they are doing, get headshot by pyonjpn 50 times and then bounce from the game forever. P.S. If someone wrote a README for the launcher repo that would help potential contributors a lot.

I will not rest until my ranking is ASSSS

Age of Empires II because lan nights were always a blast. CnC Red Alert 2 is, imo, the best command and conquer game but personally my favourite is Tiberian Sun, I find the bleak slow apocalypse setting enthralling. Supreme Commander (and forged alliance) is also brilliant. That's a great game to get a handful of people on Discord together on.

I wasn't here for the last set of PUGs so I missed whatever went down, the couple I have attended before never felt toxic to me (but again, I've not played that many so I may be an anomaly) For my two pennies worth: I'd be sad if comms were limited only to commanders, one of the reasons I like playing a PUG is because of the flow of communication, the ability to contribute and strategise on the fly with my team and the odd bit of cheeky bants between matches. I think removing this would make the experience much drier. That said though, I agree with Quincy, if toxicity really is an issue, I think it is at least worth a trial run, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.