A suggestion for better balance of large vehicle battle

[Crusader0YN]

As a player who has experiences with all Renegade franchise games (Vanilla Renegade, A Path Beyond & Renegade-X), I understand it is quite challenge for any dev team to make a compromise between overall faction balance & to be faithful to vanilla game.

I think everyone will agree that the golden rule for team balance in FPS system is to keep the number of players in each team as close as possible. Such rule works fine for most multiplayer FPS game - when each team/faction has almost identical unit for their own (I.E. Battlefield franchise), or having a unique factional vehicle but having well balanced in design (each factional MBT in Planetside 2 has its outstanding performance in one aspect of mobility, firepower, or survivability but inferior on others, and all of factional vehicles has identical cost with their counterpart in different factions). 

However when there is significant quality gap of factional units, we have a problem here: The battle will always turn into a Siege & Camping mode which the faction with better, bigger vehicle units always able to domains the battlefield while the inferior side has to turn into camping mode. They understands very well its poor factional vehicles have no chance to withstand their opponents on the open field, thus their choice is obvious: Keeping enemy force checked at the base entrance, using the defense turrets as cover, and supported by multiple engineers to compromise their disadvantage. That's what I have witnessed in almost every Renegade type game when we have a significant amount of player in each team and the game somehow has be extend into mid playtime (which mean each of their team member has sufficient resource to purchase any expensive stuff they want). You see,  there is little issue for introducing units quality gap between factions in RTS system because such "imbalanced design"  can be simply counterbalanced by setting up different resource cost and building more units to compensate the quality disadvantage. However such mechanic is not gonna work when the first balance mechanic of FPS system require to keep the number of players as close as possible in each team.

From what I able to recall, there is only one game that using non-identical vehicle units for different factions but still keep the faction balance in check: Battlefront StarWar, and the dev team give a quite simple solution, setting up a maximum number of each type of unit allowed on the battlefield at any one time for each faction: https://battlefront.fandom.com/wiki/Supremacy

Such simple solution indeed help preventing Rebellion force from overwhelming by the powerful armor units of Imperial Troop, it also just eliminate the tactical flexibility of the game and such trade off is definitely not a thing I want to see in Renegade-X. So here is another solution: instead setting up a fix cap number for each vehicle unit, we can give the supply consumption value for each vehicle unit (similar to the concept of supply resource commonly used in Blizzard's RTS games).

I noticed that we already has total vehicle cap limit for each team in current system, but this unit cap is a pre-set value and can't reflect the real demand of the vehicle unit based on the number of players in server. My proposal offer a more flexible solution which is varies with number of player in the server but also preventing the side with better unit quality from dominating the battlefield too easily. Here is the detailed plan:

1.Each active player in their team contributes a fixed supply value to their team's total supply pool, let's assume this value is 3 for each player.

2.Each vehicle unit has its own supply value consumption based on not only the resource cost but also take in consideration of combat usage. In this case I prefer the MLRS has equal supply requirement as Medium Tank in GDI, same as for Mobile Artillery & Light Tank in NOD. Let us assume the supply cost for a MLRS & MT unit as 4 for each, and the supply cost of MA & LT as 3 for each. GDI Mammoth Tank should under harsher restriction from abuse so I think 8 supply cost is a proper value. Flame Tank is known for using as early base rush but the successful ratio is quite odd and this unit is not commonly appear in later phase thus I think give this unit's supply cost as 3.5 instead of 4.

3.Recon units such as Humvee & Buggy suppose have supply cost as 2 & 1.5 respectively. The supply cost of APC unit from both side should be same since there is minor difference from two factions. I prefer this value as 3 for each.

4. Hero unit should be restricted to have only one active of each character on battlefield at one time. 

Now evaluating the situation for a 8 vs 8 battle. Each team will having 24 total supply value based on the number of player it currently has (3x8) and for GDI team, they can have maximum of 6 MT & MLRS combination at one time while the NOD team able to controls 8 LT & MA & Flame Tank combination at most. Or GDI team may want 3 Mammoth Tanks to make a slow but decisive push and they can have more support from infantry in this unit combination. NOD team may also able to spawn total 7 Flame Tanks as soon as they got enough resource to make a base rush.

OF Course, all above is just a Hypothesis, and just like other theories that may sounds wonderful (or not), we will never know how it works unless someone put it into test with real players (or maybe test with bots first)

I really hope this post able to catches up more attention from community and everyone is welcome to provide his/her creative idea for improving game experience!

 

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by Crusader0YN

[DenWellingston]

I’ve been thinking about battles for a long time and very often noticed that they converge on the fact that some tanks with the support of engineers besiege another base with tanks with the support of engineers. Moreover, technical engineers are not very “easy” to destroy, especially if it consists of almost one artillery and a couple of light tanks, which can easily carry light-medium infantry. And if you destroy the equipment, then after another 30 seconds another one comes up. I've been thinking for a long time and decided to offer a couple of ideas what can be done about it.

1. The equipment must now have two types of strength: armor and health. Armor, as well as infantry, and armored vehicles can be repaired by engineers and technicians / Hotvay. Either the equipment pilot can restore health (however, for this he needs to take a safe place in order to begin to restore it, since this process does not allow the equipment to move and shoot) Either repair platforms can restore the equipment.

2.Also reduce the area of projectile damage by tanks and anti-tank missiles, since it turns out that with two or three shots you can easily end the simple infantry Exception is artillery, but for them it will be necessary to increase the blind zone by increasing the minimum level of lowering the gun down.

3. Missile and other firearms now do damage to armor first, and then to health. Railgun, a personal ion cannon, deals damage to both armor and equipment health.

4. Raveshaw / Sidney; Hawok / Sakura; Mobius / Mendoza translate into the status of heroes, which can be acquired one for each team.

4. Anti-tank mines can no longer simply be blown up by weapons. To do this, they need to be neutralized.

5.Sniper weapons do not damage equipment, including helicopters, but anti-tank weapons can pass through the equipment.

6.Can be purchased consumables. such as EMP and smoke grenades, but they will be quite expensive (for example, a regular EMP grenade will cost 500-600 credits)

So far these are all the ideas that I have for solving the “eternal siege” syndrome.

[Crusader0YN]

1 hour ago, DenWellingston said:

I’ve been thinking about battles for a long time and very often noticed that they converge on the fact that some tanks with the support of engineers besiege another base with tanks with the support of engineers. Moreover, technical engineers are not very “easy” to destroy, especially if it consists of almost one artillery and a couple of light tanks, which can easily carry light-medium infantry. And if you destroy the equipment, then after another 30 seconds another one comes up. I've been thinking for a long time and decided to offer a couple of ideas what can be done about it.

Such engineer abuse issue is not uncommon in vehicle FPS game system, the Battlefield franchise is well known for such issue as well. Maybe dev team able to draw the experience from their counterpart who developed another Renegade-type game based on Red Alert universe. Everyone who familiar with W3D must having heard about its famous project called A Path Beyond and I think they provided an excellent example to solve this particular issue. In APB, they also have free engineer but instead of allow these unit able to repair everything (Infantry Armor, Vehicles & Buildings), these units is very limited that only able to work with buildings, also the dev team give engineer a bit of offense power - each respawned unit carries a time C4 in default, may be dev don't  want to players to feel boring for only able to camping at base for maintaining duty. In another aspect, the Allies Faction do have a special vehicle repairing unit called Mechanics and it resemble the same unit in special Character Menu of Renegade-X, it is not free. (950 cost IIRC is the same price as Soviet Heavy Tank unit in APB!). Beside mobile repairing unit, both factions has Service Depot just like what we have in vanilla game. And those building was commonly deployed along with war factory in most of APB's map. To repairing the vehicle unit, players just need to simply drive & stay at the Depot then the system will do the job automatically - as long as you have resource in your pocket. I never did calculation what's exact cost to fully repaired a vehicle from its critical status but it definitely cheaper than purchase a brand new one from factory for sure.

Edited June 19, 2020 by Crusader0YN

[DenWellingston]

9 hours ago, Crusader0YN said:

uch engineer abuse issue is not uncommon in vehicle FPS game system, the Battlefield franchise is well known for such issue as well. Maybe dev team able to draw the experience from their counterpart who developed another Renegade-type game based on Red Alert universe. Everyone who familiar with W3D must having heard about its famous project called A Path Beyond and I think they provided an excellent example to solve this particular issue.

Yes. There are pretty well-developed armor mechanics, but it’s worth considering that all units in the APB are based on those that were in Red Alert and its Aftermath add-on.