Silv

Regarding taxi in general, it's not quite as useful as one may think. A taxi has use when there's infantry in base that needs to get to the front lines and waiting for the taxi takes significantly less time than just walking or is significantly safer. Infantry inside a taxi is useless (slight exception: chinook where two passengers can control guns) so walking / running to the destination has the benefit of possibly doing something useful. As a rep it's often the case that I can repair tanks I pass by bit, offensive infantry can often attack enemies while getting to the front line. As for safety it's not common for the walk to the frontline to be dangerous as enemies tend to focus on the reps at the front. Often a taxi isn't even needed, if there are frequent enough tanks going to the front it's easy enough to hitch a ride with those. Even on walls jumping into an orca/apache is a decent alternative. In contrast a vehicle standing around in base is actually less likely to receive passengers as it's not clear that it's a taxi waiting. People buy fast tanks for a lot of reasons and some like to stand around in base shooting at enemies. Getting people to recognize a vehicle as a taxi actually requires a fair bit of advertising or a strong convention (chinook in middle of base on walls, probably a taxi). In some situations a taxi is actually even harmful. It's one less vehicle slot that can be filled with useful tanks. Now, granted, most vehicle slots are not filled with very useful tanks (mammoth tanks, artillery/mrls and stealth tanks are not good general purpose choices but are popular) but still, it's one less vehicle slot that could be used to assault an enemy base. Looking at Walls, why taxi's work so well there it's a combination of these and other factors: A chinook takes something like 10 seconds at most to get to plateau from base whereas the long way around takes probably about 30 seconds. The infantry path to plateau is pretty dangerous due to having to cross field and the center of the stairs. Plateau is a key area, anything that helps take and hold plateau helps greatly to win the game. Because of all this the presence of taxi's on Walls is standard so people wanting to go to plateau are more likely to look for a taxi. Minor bonus: a chinook can be somewhat effective at suppressing infantry before landing, helping with taking plateau more directly.

I think you're overestimating the value of a few VP and the cost of an advanced engineer here. Reps ("meds" means medium tanks in game lingo) tend to be flush with cash due to repairing being very profitable so having to rebuy after a base breach is not very important. A few VP (rep kills give on average guesstimated 4.3 VP, light tank kills 8.3, medium tank kills 10.5, mammoth tank kills about 17) isn't going to change the match. Meanwhile if I'm there having no real purpose and someone shoots at me at least they're not shooting anyone who can stop the rush. In case of base breach the survival of an engineer is of least importance. That said you're driving an APC past reps in an active situation. Our instincts in that case are not self preservation but protecting something else, be it buildings or sydneys or that APC that's taking fire and can take out enemy infantry. Btw, you're missing the worst part of a rep getting shot: the time it takes for the rep to get back to their position and the resulting vulnerability of tanks. Much less of an issue when the fight is inside the base but it's really the major reason reps try to avoid getting shot in the field.

Here's to hoping that Firestorm has better menu support. (And that they then force all the super snipers to play with controllers. 😈)

Neat. That looks like it plays better than I'd have expected for a mouse+keyboard game.

Plot twist: the office is in GDI base.

In a slightly less cross-genre direction: adding Dystopia, half the team is in cyberspace trying to hack defenses and siphon credits. (Even disregarding all of cyberspace just being able to temporarily hack / disable a building from the outside, Black Lotus style, would make for some sweet plays.)

Ooh, nice direction. I'd add in Factorio/Fortresscraft. Engineers become builders who automate and tier up the base in a race to get the most powerful defenses and classes.

In an anything is possible world with reckless disregard to balance, consistency and sanity what would you mix RenX with and what would it look like?

Yeah, I can understand you folks not wanting to do anything about RenX beside urgent bugfixing with a major new game almost ready. Hopefully Firestorm won't have these problems as much because the gameplay (from what little I understand about it) is much less static.

Sorry to hear you're leaving this game over the behavior of some people, though I kind of understand why. Still I think this is a good topic to discuss so I'll continue posting as long as there are people that keep responding. I've been thinking more about this and I'm no longer sure the power plant (in the absence of advanced defenses) is actually more important than the refinery. Not only can the passive income from the refinery easily make up about half the income of a player, the bonus from a working harvester adds quite a bit more. A harvester that produces 300 in a 5 minute cycle (which is fairly slow I think) adds 1 credit/second. If the cycle is 2:30 it's 2 credits/second, as much as the refinery passive income. Assuming a player makes 2 credits/second from active income, the harvester is on a 2:30 cycle and there's no other sources of income active income all three main categories (active, harvester, refinery passive) account for a third of the total income each. So if the harv needs to be stopped or (worse) gets shot down repeatedly that's 1/3 less, if the refinery gets destroyed that's an additional 1/3 less plus that first 1/3 of the becomes is permanent. Power plant being active can be seen as a 1/3 cost reduction on all purchases, equivalent to 1/3 more income. The remaining passive income from the ref makes it slightly less harmful to be destroyed but only slightly. I'd say that in the absence of advanced defenses losing refinery hurts much much harder than losing the power plant if the harvester was running (e.g. because of a rush or sneak) and only slightly harder if the harvester had to be stopped with no real chance of it restarting soon. All that said maybe we're looking at the problem wrong. Reducing passive income is about making a losing team lose quicker. But the real problem with long matches is that the winning team doesn't actually finish winning. I suspect that's because it's doable to score some objectives without teamwork but once the other team starts heavily defending / repairing buildings it will take a concerted effort to break through the blockade. This mostly happens when the losing team is down a single building relative to the other team, once you're behind two buildings it's very hard to still hang on, both for practical gameplay reasons and due to morale. The winning team, once it has a baselock, can afford to just play "shoot tanks, shoot infantry" without much regard for objectives. If the other team has a better chance of fighting back the winning team is more incentivized to actually complete their push. Of course that's about baselock and doesn't apply to plain rushes. Unfortunately base lock is pretty hard to detect programmatically and doing something that aids a losing team in order to break base lock or force the winning time to push through is likely to backfire if a building is destroyed due to rushes (forcing the game back into a stalemate). The devs already have implemented some mechanism for this in that losing buildings increases the rate of CP generation which in turn aids counterattacks. I'm not sure if this is not working as intended or the effect isn't strong enough to break the gridlock.

These are questions where metrics would be good to have because right now we're mostly guestimating how much income a player has and where it comes from. Automatic team donations upon quit likely have an impact only if A) the player quits before the game ends, B) the player has significant cash and C) the player didn't manually team donate. Quits during the game do happen but most people stay around, I know because everybody and their dog seems to have a compulsive need to write "rq" after someone quits so it's quite noticeable. I doubt they actually matter all that much in the larger scheme, even if they work. A quick guestimation: A tech earns 4/second repairing vehicles and that's probably the highest rate of average income in the game but is unlikely to spend the whole time doing that (it's boring and you need to walk to the tanks). A single refinery that's working is 2/second. A silo adds 1/second (from observation in game, ignoring wiki). I'd say a tech, which is a big earner, might very well earn about half their income from passives. However if silo is lost and ref is down it's much less, depending on how you look at it between 1/4 and 1/6 of normal. If passive is half income of a big active earner then getting cut down to only a quarter reduces income by approximately 3/8 to 5/12. But for classes with less active income it likely hurts even more. Removing the passive 0.5/second makes it plain approximately 1/2 loss compared to normal. But those numbers are really about how you count silo and thus differ between games. I honestly doubt removing the passive income is going to have a major effect.

I wonder if people really want to play on massive (with regard to player count) servers or if they want to play on sufficiently large servers but end up only playing on massive servers because only the fullest server attracts players. The observation that more than 50 players is bad for RenX gameplay is fair. I wouldn't call it an intrinsically bad match but it becomes harder to have a fun match. What I've noticed is that player count massively changes the nature of the game. Low pop count games are swingy. A single sneaker can often kill a building and a single good player can dominate the match. Medium pop count games are tactical. Single sneakers are unlikely to score but a small team of good players has a good chance of winning an objective. Both skill and teamwork are required to win. Large pop count games are blunt force tugs of war. Victory usually involves a large group of players doing the same thing, whether it's tanking or shooting rockets. Skill becomes less of a defining factor due to regression to the mean and a single player (even the likes of poi) being only able to do so much. Teamwork increases in importance but decreases in quality, that is it's all about mass something and it's difficult to pull off even a slightly complex strategy like "single shot at the obi first then fire at the hon". Part of the problem with large pop counts is that some maps start to clog. The field side often gets traffic jams near a base both because of available space and because of bad tankers (the number of people who know how to tank well and are available to tank is usually less far than the vehicle cap). Tunnels become a standoff with two sides of advanced infantry supported by engineers. The game then becomes a stalemate that can last for hours. Under in particular is vulnerable to this, made worse by the bases being fairly easy to defend (agt/obi present, enough mines for tunnels). I doubt adding more vehicles in the mix will help. Vehicles are still likely to clog up and the more vehicles you add to that the worse the effect is, even if there's a lot of space elsewhere on the map. That clogging also makes repairing vehicles rather a pain as most vehicle drivers will not look whether they are displacing infantry. More vehicles would also make commanders even more likely to double down on the "push meds/ltanks" basic strategy at the expense of anything else. Excluding maps like Under when the pop count is high is not necessarily a bad idea but Under might still be selected on a low player count and then end up a 3 hour slog fest when more people join. Rather, I think, it would be good to counteract the downsides of large games when on a map that doesn't support them well. Things like income decreases help as it likely accelerates the death spiral of a losing team but it's easy to overdo it and make a fairly common situation like being pushed to the tank field corner just outside base on Under an automatic loss. Increasing building damage based on player count above map expectations might work better, as long as the team has a fighting chance on the field (no full base lock yet) the game works as normal but any attack that reaches the base becomes much more lethal. This allows losing teams to turn the tide by rushing and winning teams to finish a wounded enemy. Of course there are some problems with this, such as sbhs becoming more powerful but that could be fixed by not applying the (full) buff to c4. Another part of the solution may be to support better team coordination. On large player counts the team naturally divides itself into groups with particular targets (field, tunnels, base defense), with players frequently switching between them. However there's only at most a single commander for team coordination and unless the commander is really good that tends to lead to a single target getting all the focus at the expense of the other ones until there's an immediate crisis (i.e. "defend the wf"). In the military I doubt a single commander would lead 63 people directly, there will be at the very least a few sergeants in there to organize smaller groupings. The problem of course here is that even the freshest batch of conscripts on their first week of training camp will have more discipline than the average pub player. Still, having some kind of way to divide the team and share the burden of leadership might improve things.

We're in agreement about slow stalemate matches not being desirable. And I do think you're correct that losing the refinery feels like it has little impact on the game. I just don't think passive income makes all that much difference. Then again the passive income is the same as a silo and people do fight over that. If you think about it the refinery is really two things: the refinery itself and the harvester. Losing the harvester hurts as it gives the entire enemy team VPs AND at least delays the bunch of credits from unloading. Having to park the harvester hurts as you can't get unloading credits that way. Losing the refinery hurts because it's like being forced to park the harvester without turning it back on, it gives a bunch of VPs to the enemy team (armor break + destruction) and it reduces passive income to a quarter of what it was. I think all things considered it may actually be worse for a team to repeatedly lose the harvester than it is to lose the refinery. The constant "harvester has been destroyed" is terrible for morale and a nice boost to enemy VPs, which translate to a bigger advantage in the long run. When comparing the refinery to the power plant I think the power plant is much more important. Assuming no advanced defense present (in which case it's not even close) the power plant "only" raises costs by 50%. For a light tank that's 300 credits more, 900 in total. A functioning refinery on purely passive income takes 450 seconds (7.5 minutes) to supply the money for this. If the power plant is up but the refinery is down it takes 1200 seconds (20 minutes) to get the 600 credits in passive income. However this ignores that for all but the most incompetent players most income is active rather than passive (except at the beginning of the map or if the harvester has a really short loop). Add in active income and losing the power plant hurts a lot more whereas the ref is sometimes "oh good, now the harvester can't get shot up anymore". There's another effect that actually may make your suggestion, assuming it has a significant impact, counterproductive to your goals. When I'm low on money I'll play conservatively, I'll defend and stay close to spawns for refuels. When I'm high on money I'll likely play more aggressively. My personal idea for the refinery would be to make destruction of it degrade it instead, counterintuitively making it more harmful by making it better. Keep the harvester but have each haul only bring in half the credits. And most importantly make the harvester run fully automatically without the commander being able to stop it. Scrap passive income, make the harvester the only thing that can provide money for the ref. On maps where the tib patch is outside the base this results in a steady income stream for the enemy if the team doesn't protect the harvester or a still important trickle of money if the team protect it. Problem is mainly that if the map design makes the harvester well protected this change would actually worsen the problem. Furthermore I think map designs that rewards map control are important. The maps I enjoy most are those that reward being out there. Silos are the classic map design trick but I think those provide too small benefit, it's usually more of a target of opportunity (i.e. "if we have field anyway let's make sure to get it") and less of an objective ("let's take field to get the silo"). Comm centers are vital (because they spoil rushes) but can sometimes backfire because they limit the possibilities for counter-attacks, thereby making a team with strong field control very hard to beat leading to more defense. The emp cannon or equivalent on some maps is my favorite here, it rewards aggression, makes for a target that can swing the game, doesn't hurt other tactics if you don't have it and only matters part of the time (making gameplay more dynamic).

0.5 credits per second is 150 credits per 5 minutes. That means more than 10 minutes to rebuy a hottie / tech, more than 25 minutes to rebuy a medium tank. That's way too slow to prevent a death spiral for a team. What you're seeing is likely active income from actions. Repairing tanks for example gives quite a bit of income and VPs while the tech class doesn't cost all that much to rebuy (only 350). Shooting enemies also gives credits and for decent players that's likely to be enough to rebuy their class/vehicle. Add in a few failed rushes of the opposing team (which lead to killed enemies and thus money) and it's entirely credible for a game to drag out. Furthermore in this game defense is often easier than offense. When defending you're closer to your spawns so if you get killed you spend less time getting back to your position while the further the enemy gets towards your base the harder it is for them to sustain their offense. Logistics matter on the battlefield. And, while present not on Islands, defensive structures further make defense easier. A death spiral certainly is possible and is in fact quite common but if the team that lost the ref has even a little bit more combined skill / teamwork than the other team it's far from guaranteed. And that's good because if the ref would be a reliable killer of matches the entire game would devolve into ref killing. Killing the ref, like killing the power plant, gives the enemy team an edge but no more than that. EDIT: Re-reading the above post I think I'm arguing a few things the same (rep income, defense vs offense) to support a different conclusion. I really should have written my arguments better, it's a bit confusing this way.

I personally wouldn't describe that as feeding. But then as a dedicated engi my K/D ratio tends to veer spectacularly towards the D side so I'm biased. Maybe the poll needs a few extra options for the more negative roles: Feeder - The other team needs VPs too. Pollster - The first important thing in any match is to change the map. Backseat Driver - Other people are just playing the game wrong. Tongue Whip - Motivating people by telling them how much they suck. Roadblock - Nobody gets in or out of here, what do you mean "how about us"? Pusher - You're in my way, and now in the line of fire. Creative Miner - My mining patterns frequently win me votes. Politician - Let's talk about some nice non-controversial issues like real world conflicts. Cheater - I just won the game, why is my team mad at me? Soloist - Teamplay? I don't do that. Probably too long a list. 😜

See poll.

Thanks for the info. Good to hear these kinds of issues are getting swift attention.

On multiple occasions a public game has been messed up by a cheater who somehow manages to do kill buildings in very rapid succession. From what I've heard that cheater attacks buildings from the outside with a normal weapon and they instantly go down. I don't know exactly how that works but I suspect it's either a way to increase damage or firing rate. Unfortunately I don't have specific examples or replays demonstrating the cheat. A cheater who instantly kills infantry or vehicles is annoying but ultimately a problem local to a section of the battlefield and it's well possible to recover from having a large part of the team wiped out on the battlefield. A cheater who destroys buildings however messes up the long term balance of a match, losing just 2 buildings (particularly if one of them is the barracks/hand) is a very major blow that usually sends a team into a spiral towards defeat. Matches in which this happens due to cheating are usually vote restarted or map changed. Assuming the buildings are killed due to excessive but otherwise normal damage done to them a fairly simple and resource friendly addition to the game logic should be able to reduce the effectiveness of this kind of cheat to a point where a halfway competent (by pub standards) team can easily defend against it. There is an upper bound to how much damage per second a single player can do to a building using normal weapons. If the server would keep track per player of how much damage to buildings has been done in the last second and would reject it when more damage is attempted this hack would be neutered. Of course some damage types shouldn't count because they are legitimately able to rapidly destroy buildings: C4 and superweapons. The MCT can sometimes amplify damage significantly, but as it's unlikely a cheater can reliably get into a building to take potshots at the MCT having the anti-cheat not cover MCT damage likely doesn't reduce it's effectiveness much. One downside of this approach is that it adds special case logic for a rather specific form of cheating, it would plug an active problem but doesn't do anything against cheating in general. I'm also not sure, not being used to game development, whether this approach is viable in the face of things like replication and network lag. Another major downside is that it's quite possible that my layman's understanding of how the cheat works is off and this might not do anything at all. I'm mainly posting this based on what I've heard from others and some uninformed assumptions about how the game engine could be tricked. The suggested approach is fairly conservative, it doesn't really prevent the cheating but reduces the impact. This is a tradeoff to allow for a simple and efficient implementation. But by limiting damage to a maximum regardless of (non-super/C4) weapon it would still be possible for a cheater to have a much more effective weapon than is intended. P.S. I don't know if it's ok to post this in the open. I figured that as the source is available and this post doesn't contain any useful info about how the cheat actually works it shouldn't help anyone intending to cheat.