Jake48.2

Steam currently tracks it under "Unreal Development Kit", and is either saving statistics into steam cloud, or is pushing them onto a Renegade X server. That's how people's profiles show up on the leader boards tab of this website, because I didn't input any steam information anywhere within Renegade X itself.

I'm all for improvements, but you have to recognize that making ham omlettes should not require throwing away existing vegetable omlettes, so to speak. It requires cracking new eggs with some ham. 1 a) Hit boxes are definitely a factor on vehicle design. All of GDI's land vehicles are tall and imposing, so as to cover supporting engineers from being shot from an equal topographical height. Mammoth tanks take entire bridges. None of Nod's vehicles have a similar footprint, and the only vehicle that benefits from being cover to supporting engineers is the artillery cannon. It's also in the design that GDI vehicles inherently take more punches than similarly valued forces from Nod. 1 b) The point of asymmetrical balancing is that you don't have the same options as the other team. And on the flip side of the same coin, they don't have the same options as your team. GDI being unable to infiltrate is counter balanced by having superior capabilities in fighting equal sized forces. Nod's inability to beat equal forces is counter balanced by their ability to pick their battles in the sense of Fabian tactics and in guerilla warfare. GDI's base has more spots to hide beacons, where as nod has less cover from which to traverse their own base. 1 c) If you're about to argue that the lore is made for the game, then the only thing I have to point at is how Tiberium weapons were treated in the move from Renegade to Renegade X. In the original command and conquer, and in renegade's campaign, GDI was all about containing tiberium and reducing environmental damage. It did not make sense for the multiplayer to then give GDI 2 tiberium weapons, and Nod have only the chem sprayer. So to counter balance, Tiberium rifle Sydney was replaced with McFarland's flak cannon, and Patch's fletchette gun was replaced by a new assault rifle. It should be noted that both of these replacements took away anti infantry choices in favor of anti infantry, anti light armor weapons. 2&3) The key word was competent, not magically insta-killing. Barracks provides a great deal of support to vehicles, and most importantly, the base. The refinery might make you money. The vehicles might be made at a factory. The power plant controls prices and the AGT. But the barracks provides every proactive defense and support decision the team uses. If you want mines or an effective pocket medic, get a hotwire. If you need anti air that isn't a MRLS or Stank, get a rocket officer soldier. If you need anything not directly related to cracking the enemy base, the barracks is your point of purchase. If there were more effective anti tank infantry available as free purchases, you more easily create stalemates, regardless of your team's decisions. 4) It may be uncomfortable to target another structure without targeting the AGT or obelisk while it's still up, but your 800 credit investment being lost while spreading fire on the building not being focused with repairs is worth it. Having 5 vehicles to ignore obviously repairing buildings and defensive vehicles will net you whichever unmanned structure you can get. On field, that might mean ignoring hand of nod and obelisk in favor of shelling the refinery. Also, the defensive structures have a guaranteed blind spot immediately around the structure. If you manage to make it there, you can block engineers from being able to get into it while focusing fire on another structure. But you have to come to terms with the fact you can get things done while at the same time dieing. You may lose field immediately after taking their structure! But you respawn instantly and will be working on preparing your defense to weather out the storm that will be at your base in a minute. 5 a) The refinery going down is not the end of income. Defensive and supportive engineers are rolling in money, and anyone shelling the enemy base is also getting enough money to afford their own kit. Usually, in games where one side has only a barracks, and the other only an airstrip, the airstrip team will win because they have more opportunities to make money. There's also half of the maps including tiberium silos as a source of money. The ones that don't usually have refineries as the last easily targetable structures. 5 b) The thing is that there's already multiple built in mechanics in order to break stalemates. There's crate spawns. There's having a time limit not be infinite (Here's looking at you, Marathon servers). There's the fact that in order to have a stalemate, there has to exist two parties being complacent in their own strategies. If you want stalemates to happen less, you either need to change player behavior (Don't join Crate-less Marathon), or you need to add a mechanic untied to the core mechanics, because the core mechanics are what cause it. Perhaps have something like having a helicopter stop by every few minutes that temporarily gives back a missing buff, like a humvee, or 30 seconds of base power for purchases, or something similar. And in regards to your ending note: You don't stalemate from a singular action, but from a cascade of actions. Plenty of games have zero sum scenarios. The time tested solution is to go on to the next game once the conditions are met, not change the game. You have to make the decision to play stalemate, it is not forced upon you. There are those that play through stalemate because they refuse to lose. There are those who stay because they want to hear the story of the one pair of jerks that gets in with C4. Then there's the masochists who would have loved Normandy. You would be hard pressed to find those three people playing any other game, why should we deprive them when we can go on to the next game? And the fact of the matter is that Stalemates are already exceptionally rare to begin with. Perhaps two destruction related stalemates a day, among all of the marathon servers. If you want a comparison, go look at Dota. The game gets great appeal not just because of it's mechanical depth, but because of the struggles teams go through to beat seemingly unwinnable games. There are so few games available where exceedingly long stalemates or such massive comebacks are possible. And these comebacks and stalemates are what you compare baseline gameplay against, not other games.

1) Having both sides having the things the only one side ruins the asymmetrical balancing. Nod is built around small hitboxes, stealth, and nimbleness. GDI is built around large, hulking hitboxes, good health, and having troops being slow in reacting to new threats. It also ruins the existing lore of the CnC franchise to give GDI stealth capabilities. 2) Both teams have two competent anti tank measures among the free infantry classes: The Grenadier/Flamethrower, and the Engineer. The grenadier can pelt tanks from safety, the flamethrower can obscure vision and provide reliable DPS vs vehicles, and the engineers have remote C4s for instant burst damage. Additionally, every infantryman has timed C4 by default. 3) The barracks going down already has a few major downsides in that repairs are slower (no technician/hotwire), no mines, and the fact all free infantry are one hit kills for bodyshooting top tier snipers. 4) Any moment that an engineer is repairing one structure is three moments where they're unable to repair another. Take another structure if you see you're not beating the repairs. 5) They already provide massive benefits. Power plants affect prices and defense power. Vehicles are solely tied to the air strip or weapons factory. So on and so forth. Generally, when a stalemate occurs, it's not due to the mechanics. It's due to neither team taking initiative in changing their assault strategy. There's already a lot of force multipliers to break stalemates, between misdirection, super weapon beacons, and airstrikes. Organize a new plan of attack, whether it's by changing vehicle choices, or by coordinating pincer movements.

The thing is, if a person is rebuilding turret, they're probably the one that will man that turret. Giving the ability to have multiple people to chip in should already be handled by the donate system. Also, in my opinion, it should be linked to a combination of two buildings existing, either power plant + war factory/air strip, or power plant + barracks/hand of nod. If one building in those duos is down, rebuilding the turret emplacements should be off limits.

Distraction and misdirection is key to late game field. Tanks in conjunction with passengers or an APC in the mix is a sure fire way. Immediately either drive towards the defense, or drive towards Hand or Factory while the APC takes the other structure. Nod can't handle continued bombardment without technicians, and GDI going pure infantry is poorly equipped for dominating tunnels long enough to concentrate gunner fire onto the Air Strip's control tower. Taking the defense also gives you free roam of the enemy base from tunnels. It's also possible to pull AGT/Obelisk attention with tanks, and have engineers leg it from tunnels into the refinery. The alternative is organizing multiple APCs, stealth tanks, or medium tanks into an immediate rush as soon as money comes in. Harvesters don't get harassed as much as they should.

Typical counter argument for any "X has Y, why can't Z have Y" argument is "Z isn't X", and doesn't even answer the underlying question of "Why can't Z have Y". "Y would be overpowered" is at first seemingly a point, but has nothing to back it up on it's own. So let's deconstruct the medigun's mechanics to see why it would or would not make Renegade X a better game. There are multiple smaller mechanics that makes the medigun in TF2. You've got the 1 click to lock on to heal. There's the heal beam continuing to work for a second despite losing Line of Sight. There's being able to heal your friend while looking behind you, or at least while not being dead on accurate. There's the ubercharge mechanic of invulnerability. Let's pick apart which ones would be useful for Ren X, and which ones would break it. Once click to heal was brought in by Valve to combat a physical problem that has nothing to do with their game's balance: Repetitive Strain Injury. I think everyone here can agree not causing unneeded harm in order to play a game is pretty much good game design. This goes back to being able to turn screen shake or view bobbing off, brightness controls, and being able to turn down the volume before the loading screen flippin' kicks in at 200 decibels. However, it required at least one of the following two components on the list in order to work. Healing does not end within one second of Line of Sight lost with the TF2 medigun. This may be a deal breaker until you consider that this is effectively about 10 armor. There are very few instances where ten more hp in one second is an issue, and they're primarily DoT based. It's arguable this is bad for Renegade X, but this is splitting hairs man. There's far more pressing balancing issues like the lack of career-checking team scramble. Healing without being dead accurate is likely the main point of contention for players arguing against it. Specifically, they're giving grief because it changes infantry dynamics, and anti-tank C4. However, they never consider there's ways to counter balance it, like giving less heal per second (or none!) while the target infantry/C4 or shooter is moving. Additionally, it was possible in the original to be shooting in a different direction than your view, and that may or may not make a come back. Either way, it was possible to gain additional visual information while doing your repair job. If it's such a major point of contention, then bound the one click to repair to only work if within 45 degrees pitch and yaw between center view and shooting vectors. Then there's the ubercharge mechanic. I'm absolutely certain that nobody smart is actually considering that part of DeepSpaceBass's original suggestion, but just in case: that was not what he was suggesting. I hope. That would be ridiculously overpowered.

Let's have it out on the table that complaining about maps lacking in complexity is completely dodging the main thing causing the issues: Servers are overpopulated when maps like field are voted in. Field's complexity is comfortable in a 10 vs 10 situation. There are three entrances into the enemy base (one of which is only for vehicles), which means three vectors of fire to damage structures. The only structures not able to be shot by infantry without being seen by the obelisk/AGT are the refineries and the AGT itself. Additionally, both of the infantry routes are flankable either from the field, or from each other's route. The field itself is also not flat: there's hills that enable tanks to keep a larger silhouette to cover their infantry support. Assuming four people on each team are in charge of repairing (which is absurdly high), that leaves an average of 2 players per route of attack. If there's just one engineer in charge of repairs, that's an average of 3 players per route. To compare it with games of similar scale, like Team Fortress 2, that's roughly the player density on paths between control points. Additionally, the bases aren't just two points of contention: they're also the cover from which the team defends from. It isn't like you've got a hallway connecting from the exit of one building to the entrance of another, but rather you've got a hallway connected to a hallway Building A has, but is also connected to a different hallway that Building B has. But to reiterate: the map is fine for strategy in 10 vs 10. The issue is that you joined a server that's running it 20 vs 20. Don't blame maps for the lack of strategy, blame the fact you've got too many people to clog it. And to touch up on TheIronKielbasa's point: He's right in that we shouldn't blame the players. However, this isn't the game's fault as much as it is the server operators' faults. In the mean time, if you're on a heavily populated server, and see that field is about to be voted in, leave the server and hop onto a different one. Keep a clipboard of your favorite servers, and just paste it into console as soon as you see Field voted in. The primary thing is to not be complacent.