to be fair, there have been more 9.X releases than every other release version put together

Research says otherwise it has a big impact on impressions, and it influences development, for the same reason it's a bad idea to have v0.99999 approaching but never reaching version 1.

Currently the versioning scheme is getting into smaller and smaller increments, which says "We've not changed much, we have only fixed bugs and changed some minor insignificant numbers", which is not the case at all.

It also indicates a loss of momentum. There's the small kernel of regular people who are oblivious to this ( e.g. most of the people in this thread ), but everyone else isn't.

Well, yes and no.

Certainly, to the untrained eye, you are correct. But on the other hand, what is important is not only impression, but also reputation. Do you think people view the progress as credible if it always shifts up 1 version number? And that each week! With no versions used for bugfixes at all.

I'm thinking mostly on the new policy of Firefox (and spring).

But you are correct, having the next version as 9.679 beta is kind of stupid. Still, I do not want us to go directly to 1.0. How about progressing to 9.68?

I'd rather it were X.XY where Y is a critical bug fix, and every other release increments by 0.1 regardless of significance.

So the next release would be 9.7, then 9.8 etc.

Also we already have V1, SJ/Fnordia released it a very very long time ago, and it ran on the OTA engine. XTAs Spring versions came in around the v5-7 mark, exactly which I'm unsure.

that's nice but it is your scheme. Xta can use whatever it wants..

gundam takes a year or more to do a 0.1 .. so yeah.. doesn't matter.

Oh yeah, sorry, I confused with the spring people's moivrephobia. XTA has already passed version 1.0, so there should be no fear of reaching version 10.0 then.

Just dropping by this thread to post my emphatic resistance to importing BA sea. I find it very shallow, to say the least.

Adding floating mex (ergo viable raiding) may help, removing the sub pen (and if I had my way the missile corvette too) would go a long way to opening up the early game- you can be way less conservative with scout boat wrecks than all the other units, but they can't raid if vettes defend.

I would say at the very least, if you make only one change, nerf/remove uw tidal.

Nice pun. I wrote ba sea and not ota sea, because I didn't want to be labelled a retro-fag. But my experience with ba sea is that it's not very different from ota sea.

What I like about that sea is how it incorporates layers: surface sea is one layer and subsurface sea is another layer. Then air is a third layer, and I also like how those layers interact. For example, in ba sea, a sub is actually a sub and not a ship that has been hacked to seem to be a sub. Or vice versa, like the despised corvette.

But to make xta sea that way is diffucult because of engine limitations. One of those is the fact that there is no under water line of sight, and instead sonar is made to automatically include line of sight. But as any 5 year old kid knows: there's a difference between looking at something and at measuring it with a sonic echo.

But if that limitation were fixed then I'd also like to restore the fibber to its default behaviour.

I agree with pintle

BA sea is pitiful, OTA sea was not as pitiful, but still, not very good.

Using either of them as a model for a working model of sea balance is utterly flawed.

The problem is that in sea, everything costs more, a lot more, takes longer, and flexibility is much lower than on land. So you cant just go sea without being vulnerable, and with a low economy for a significant portion of the vital early game, so instead you go land to build conbots and cap mexes.

But then this looses you time, and as soon as that happens, the person who got a ship out first comes and blows everything up, the counter being a heavy early investment in a defence of some sort.

Eitherway in 80% of cases, the water game is decided assuming any real effort is made to capture territory at the start and not as a going concern.

The main exceptions to this are when noobs are playing, or in massive XTA games of old, where extreme skill or extreme negligence has conspired to work around these issues with great effort (or stupidity).

My suggestions for sea (applicable to all *A games)

• Cheap sea units are too expensive
• Cheap sea units usually take too long to build
• t1 sea should cost generally as much as t1 land, take the same time to build, and have the same firepower
• t2 ships should cost and take the same time as their equivilant t2 units
• Long range ships at t1 should be extra and come at a tier 1.5 premium like hovercraft
• Long range ships at t2 should take as long and cost as much as roughly the sumos and fatboys of the *A world
• The top end ships are either way overpowered or overcosted, they tend not to be both unless they're the big custom ships you didn't get in OTA with 30 turrets, and they're never underpowered cheap things.

From that we can use a lot of the things learnt from land to model the sea game.

imo a big part of water=meh is the choice of maps.
I do not like these maps where basically a "one-dimensional water-lane" is put into a landmap, eg

On these maps it is often about being the faster scoutboat spammer (and getting shared metal by team to do so)

Something like this:

plays much better even with current balance.


Imo the layers are more "areas" and are as as following:
1) open sea (no land units involved)
2) coast lines (sea and land units fight each other but either side can retreat away from the coast)
3) rivers (sea and land units fight, but because of the narrow space ships can not avoid combat so easily)
example is the middle river of Isis Delta:

4) counterpart of rivers are narrow land bridges over water or small islands

Generally I think open water plays very boring. The interessting gameplay happens where sea and land meet, so this should be considered more.
For example I think making a land based depthcharge-thing should be the way to hold of early scout spam.

knorke, what about gunmetal, that map was meant to answer that sort of need with the long bridges and ramps..

Aren't there now like 5 threads where grts-maps vs TA mods is discussed?
aaah help help its everywhere.

Gods of war is a great map. There are clans that specialise in just playing that map. They can not be wrong for the same reason that 1 billion chinese cannot.

well pretty much everywhere I can discuss it I am trying. this is me, trying to get feedback to ensure good work. This is me giving a fuck.

Me and others commentated lots on it in various threads.
I do not feel like repeating myself or digging up threads (or chat logs from lobby) and neatly sorting them for you..

Uploaded a v1.02. Mainly a bugfix release. DT got tiny HP nerf and hammer got accuracy buff.
I have very little time for the other changes I have planned at the moment. This version should be stable at least.

Also nice to see people commenting about changes to sea balance, hopefully some slightly more experienced players will chime in too :)

I'm not experienced?

Ah just skim read it will check again :)

I think he was talking about myself and af jools.

http://www.smoth.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1948

I can always finish this...

uhm in this xta version all units in water (eg commander, amphi con vehicle) move at super slow speed. like really really really slow. not nice

widgets overlap:
http://h9.abload.de/img/bla5bzuo.png

enemy units can not be reclaimed