XTA 664 beta

[Wombat]

so, i had few (somehow) pretty good xta games lately. feels like good old xta. in the bad way.

when Deadnight Warrior dev'd one of the previous version of xta i was like, woooaaah, nice, pretty stump buff, its no longer babbXta (op coms). i felt like DW tried (succesfully) to remove aa spam in xta.

but now, what the heck with these fighters ? seriously this is probably the worse thing i have ever seen in xta, probably even worse than core com being able to dgun arm one.

how does regular game looks like - dude goes straight fighter spam. that means :

- rushing enemy base with freaker, pw/ak or whatever else fails horribly.
- anything which is not aa gets eaten by fighters.

now... com cannot make aa, player cannot keep xta com in base coz its simply a waste. cons at front die easly. so player needs to spam jethros/samsons again. was that what u wanted ? hrm, i dont think so...

another thing that suprised me a lot is lack of aa in t2 kbot labs (no, pelican is not any aa at all)

sea looks also pretty terrible, but ill need to play few more sea games (t1 sea doesnt have any decent aa either)

so, basicly - cool, dynamic, enjoyable, less ridiculous xta got changed into old, ridiculous, 1-3 unit dtXta.

i like new coms especially, which were one man army before, but that doesnt change fact that new xta is simply annoying ;_;

[Deadnight Warrior]

It's been like that for several releases. Since 9.64 IIRC.
Ever since I changed the way fighters target (in order to reduce the chance of fighters decloaking commanders). Instead of needing to aim at target with their nose they cam just fire away when their target is insinde 120┬░ forward arc. Same goes for T2 gunships but it's a 150┬░ arc.

This aiming change results in aircraft firing more often than they did before, that's why they seem so powerfull. I could reduce the firing arc a bit to make fighters need to aim more precisley than they do now.

XTA always lacked AA in Adv. Kbot labs, it was always like that, I have nothing to do with it. IIRC it was so even in TA.

The thing about fighters is, someone noticed that they are better against ground targets than they used to be, and a new strategy was born. Something that happens all the time. Just because you haven't found a good counterstrategy, it doesn't mean the game is suddenly unbalanced. It can never be balanced. As long as there are players with different playing skills and more than 1 faction. So if you see a player did an airstart, just close in with your ground AA units, it's a GG.

And if you claim that Pelican is not AA, it has exactly the same AA missile as does Jethro. It's just not as spammable and it has 3x the health.

And the "new" coms you're talking about can easily get into a one man army if they get enough combat XP (0.6, especially at 1.2 for ARM or 1.4 for CORE)

I haven't changed any sea balance so far, I planed to increase torpedo/depthcharge damage to big (most T2) ships so that torpedo bombers/submarines don't need to shoot shitload of torpedos to kill a cruiser.

[Wombat]

Just because you haven't found a good counterstrategy, it doesn't mean the game is suddenly unbalanced.

ive found counterstrategy. i make aa. i didnt say its unbalanced, i say spamming aa is damn boring.

i didnt say u got something to do with lack of aa in adv labs, but now, with such fighters its obligatory, no ?

So if you see a player did an airstart, just close in with your ground AA units, it's a GG.

easy to say, harder to do in teamgame. also ITS BORING.

u know, all these points are irrelevant if u want xta to be aa spam again.

[Jools]

To me the new airspam made me feel like playing ota again, because air was op there. Not saying it's a good thing or not, just that it remnded me of ota. And Xta has never had kbot t2 AA, that's why you need to go veh if you plan on making aa, it's a aprt of strategy (in OTA you needed to plan ahead and go t1 veh, because unit's couldn't cross-tech).

I think everyone agrees that sea is unbalanced. My personal pet peeve is that scouts and patrol boats have sonar, so you can just spam more patrol botas than enemy and then kill the commander if he's hiding in water. I think we should simply remove these sonars, but that might make underwater things too strong. So we need to test.

[babbles]

> make dt in a ^ shape
> make a llt
> sit your commander there and blow d guns into the sky
> tech
> make a maverick/flak/morty
> laugh at AA spammer

[Wombat]

ye i know.

such a interesting game.

[knorke]

in 1v1 jeffy kills slasher

[Jools]

Would it be possible to include my announce kills gadget in next beta. I really like it.

It's the one that makes the following announcement:
"xxx has taken the lead with yy kills".

I included a "ding" sound here too in a zip.