xanthar4242

Definitely agree with that. I think one of the best things about how vehicles work now is how hard it is to do much by oneself. The biggest problem with any major vehicle change, such as the one I brought up, is risking breaking that mechanic. I've seen a few threads about med vs arty and the general impression of stanks and lights as underpowered. Perhaps the slowing of the artillery shell will give med drivers a better opportunity to close the gap without taking maximum damage. That leaves stanks and lights. Perhaps lights and stanks could be a touch faster to help get them out of trouble. But, I'm not totally convinced that is the correct answer to a possible non problem. Edit: punctuation.

A minor change that might make all the difference in the balance of meds and lights specifically, is directional armor. If meds and lights could take reduced damage from the front and increased damage from behind, I could see that resolving some balance issues. It would make the maneuverability of the light tank a greater asset versus the med. It would increase the survivability of the med heads up against arty. It would have the knock on effect of making stanks more effective against meds and in ambush situations. Most importantly, it would reward good driving and positioning. However, I just don't know how or even if such a change could be implemented. Edit: spelling

I ran into this today. Got accused of hacking and so on. I noticed it started happening only after I got in a mammoth tank. I hadn't switched teams or reconnected.

Yeah, this is a big one I'd like to see something done about. Something I've thought about for Field specifically, is a tech building in the infantry tunnels to help break seiges in one direction or the other. It also plays into the new EMP mechanics. Once captured, this tech building would grant the purchase of EMP strike beacons. They could be thrown like a grenade, but have a brief period before an EMP strike to allow retreat. The EMP strike would be like the EMP grenade, except with the ability to disrupt repairs and buildings. Hitting a base defense structure with the strike would decrease its rate of fire. Hitting any other structure with it would turn off the power to that structure alone. So, EMP striking the power plant wouldn't do anything. Vehicles caught in the area of effect wouldn't be able to move, similar to the grenade. However, withinethe area of effect, repair guns would not function. After an EMP strike, there would be a global cool down of a significant duration (30 seconds - 1 minute). Don't know how practical any of this is, but might be worth considering as it might lead to some interesting ideas.

In regards to Field specifically, I had been nursing an idea for a tech building. I had thought there could be a tech building to help break a seige. The basic idea is an EMP cannon. How would it work? On Field, for example, there would be two small consoles. One in the underground tunnels, and one on the field. The one in the tunnel charges the EMP, the one on the field fires it. Once the one in the tunnels is captured there would be a "charge up" time for the console on the field. For the sake of argument, let's say 30 seconds. Once fully charged, there would be a window of time the EMP could be targeted via the console on the field. Let's say 45 seconds. At the end of that time period, if not targeted, the EMP would simply target the field. The targeting console would allow the EMP to be targeted at any place on the map. After targeting there would be 15 second delay. After firing, the EMP cannon would go on a 2 minute cool down. During cool down, neither console can be captured. What would the EMP effect be? It would disable vehicle movement (they could still shoot) and shut down power to a single structure for 15 seconds. The problem I see with this is that it would make the whole map just about controlling the EMP. Secondly, I fear it would marginalize vehicle play too much.

I think, with SBH, people get caught up trying to figure out how to prevent SBH planting beacons in the first place. If GDI control the field, generally speaking, it's quite difficult for a single SBH to defend a beacon - as long as there are a few people actively defending and patrolling the base. In my experience one or two Hotties, a Mobius and maybe a humvee are more than enough to defend. And GDI controlling the field makes it that much harder to get enough SBH together to guarantee a nuke success. If the buildings are mined, a few people patrolling the base, and a team communicates well it's hard to lose to SBH alone. Granted, that's a lot of ifs, but I don't think SBH are inherently OP. Edited for spelling

In regards to directional armor, I've been giving it a lot of thought over the past couple days. This is more or less the conclusion I've reached: if implemented properly, it would go along way to balancing the vehicle play. First, damage done to the front plates would be reduced in the range of 5-7%. Damage to the top (or turret in general) would be reduced 3-5%. Damage to the sides of the vehicle would be unchanged. Damage to the rear of the vehicle would be increased by 6-8%. These modifiers would apply to all damage to the vehicle. The only exception being Sydney and Raveshaw, whose weapons would ignore the directional modifiers. Second, what vehicles would have this armor? The medium tank, mammoth tank, light tank, flame tank and the respective APCs. The effect of this change, I think, would be to allow correctly driven tanks to close the distance on siege units more effectively and place more emphasis on protecting the squishy siege units. I think it would be more of a buff to GDI in general, but skilled light tanks would become more valuable to a Nod team. I do not necessarily think any of this is perfect or indeed achievable in the UDK, but I would like to hear any feedback or changes anyone has in regards to directional armor.

I am a long time Renegade player, but still fairly new to Renegade X. Since the original, I've often thought about GDI and NOD balance. Even after thinking about it for years, really, I still am not completely sure how to address perceived balance issues. First off, I think that there are some pretty good ideas in this post, especially in regards to vehicle balance. However, I wanted to share some general thoughts on the matter. It seems to me that this ends up being about hard counters and soft counters as well as specific roles. First, the specific roles. Most NOD vehicles have a really specific role that they fill and is immediately obvious what that role is. For example, mobile artillery is for sieges, stanks are for hit and run and so on. The same is not true for GDI. The medium tank is exactly that, not particularly exceptional at anything, but it also not exceptionally weak in any way either. Aside from being huge, the mammoth doesn't have a clear role either. The difference, to me, is that it's harder to do the wrong thing with the NOD vehicles (not that it doesn't happen). This leads to people wanting hard counters. If NOD gets X, we get Y, problem solved. I personally don't like this because it (to exaggerate greatly) turns balance into rock, scissors, paper. It's less interesting than soft counters in my opinion. That being said, I think there could be some tweaking done to make vehicles more balanced. I don't know how feasible this suggestion this is in the UDK, but if there was a way to incorporate the armor of the vehicle. Not just the health, but the physical armor. As in, tanks generally have more armor on the front than the back. So if there were a slight damage reduction to shots to the front of a tank and increased damage to shots to the back , I think that would help a lot. Maybe this could vary by tank too. For example, mammoth tanks would take little damage from frontal damage but a lot from rear damage. Again, I'm not sure how feasible this would be (or if it's already in place, but if it is I haven't noticed) but I think it would be worth at least considering.

Not sure this is complete right place to put this, but couldn't anywhere else that fit the description perfectly. I play using a standard Japanese input keyboard, which is virtually identical to a qwerty keyboard with the exception of some keys to switch to and from the various Japanese character sets and how those character sets behave on input. Sometimes, if I am typing in the in-game chat, if one of these buttons is hit accidentally (specifically the key to switch between hiragana, katakana and Roman characters), it completely cuts off keyboard input to the game. I can still look and shoot just fine, but no movement or chat or anything. I can alt-tab out and disable Japanese input which has the curious effect of restoring keyboard functionality but disabling mouse input. The only solution that I can seem to find is to restart the game, which isn't such a huge deal. I know that this is not a high priority issue, but thought I would bring it here regardless.