Spring: 1944 "Operation Luettich" (v1.01) Released!

[SpikedHelmet]

My (belated) two cents.

Last version, artillery was really too... important. I wouldn't particularly say overpowered, but overused. While there are plenty of instances of artillery barrages of immense magnitude throwing military assaults into complete disarray, the fact that the artillery defense line became an almost staple of every single game of every size kind of points that it's a little overbearing.

What would be nice is if there were a little side differentiation. What I mean is, the Soviets and British during the war were reknowned for their artillery overkill. Particularly the Brits, the tactic of creating a line of barrage artillery, then slowly moving it forward as it pummels everything inch by inch until it reaches the main enemy concentration and annihilates it, was pretty much standard practice. The Soviets too enjoyed using enormous amounts of guns to eviscerate a target area before moving in with a final big thrust.

The difference is, though, is that in the real world, artillery doesn't win battles. It can go a long way to injuring the enemy but not as a universal win stick.

Not sure what could be done. Focusing on counter-artillery is a pretty good tactic I've always had success with. Particularly self-propelled artillery and long-range guns which are able to scoot into range and begin firing quickly to silence enemy guns. Or simply using your longest-ranged deployed artillery and keeping it hidden from the enemy.

Another factor is the popularity of the small ammo trucks which can be built in the hundreds. I've seen countless times players spread their artillery out very widely, each gun with its own little stockpile of ammunition. What this does is make it harder to counter numerous artillery guns, as you basically have to focus on one at a time, while his other guns firing unimpeded. Perhaps it'd be better if artillery were some how able to be "forced" closer together to make subduing enemy artillery easier.

[yuritch]

Maybe remove engineer's ability to build trucks? If players had to devote factory time to trucks, we might be seeing a lot less of them.

[Tobi]

That would dramatically change the begin of the game tho - unless, of course, you'd include 2-3 trucks with the units you get for free with your headquarters.

[[Krogoth86]]

At the same time it would wipe out that standard hurry of having your units getting into a truck and drive like hell. I always found this load/unload strategy at the beginning of every game a bit annoying and boring. It also would give Russia a bit of an advantage as they easily can spread out comissars which can conquer lots of flags in a short time...

[Evil4Zerggin]

I'm not sure that would help; back in the day when deployed trucks had OP storage I'd build trucks in the gunyard 3:1 with arty pieces.

[Nemo]

Spawning 2 trucks at start, removing engineer ability to build trucks, spawning an extra commissar (so they have 2 + commander), removing self-replication of commissars.

[IllvilJa]

Do like the Battlefield 2 mod Forgotten Hope 2: create separate trucks for supplies and for transport.

The truck the engineers can create is suitable for transport but cannot be deployed into a supply storage.

The supply truck which may be deployed into a supply shed, that one cannot transport any units, and it has to be build in some factory. Vehicle/ordnance yard for instance, or if we are really sadistic, we only allow them to be built in that large supply depot. You know, as a US player you have to do this to build the supply trucks....

HQ engineer and then...
Barracks and then...
Advanced engineer and then...
Vehicle/Ordnance Yard and then...
Construction vehicle and then...
Big honkin supply depot and then...
*AT LAST* BUILD THOSE BELOVED SUPPLY TRUCKS!

Talk about making the big honking supply depot a truly strategic asset .

[FLOZi]

We were previously set up like that. Then nemo added supply to the transport trucks too and they ended up redundant.

[yuritch]

The setup with supply trucks makes them, as noted above, pretty rare (you'll need to make all those buildings first). This means that for a considerable part of the game you'll be porcing in your base since that's the only place your units can get ammo (or you'll be storming a porced enemy base with little more than inf since guns need supplies). Not good, so we changed that.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

tbh no need for supply truck + transport truck

have the l1 depo from the basic truck
and the l2 depo from the halftrack

[[Krogoth86]]

Well currently the supply crate for your guns really is nothing of importance in terms of relevance imo. It actually is more of a bit annoying and "superfluous" micro...

The reason for this would be that you can spam trucks which deploy into depots in no time either by the yard or by your engis. Plus if the enemy really comes close enough to kill your crate(s) he in most cases will be in range of the guns too and as you should have put your crate behind the guns it's not about constantly checking if you still have a support crate as in most situations a dead supply crate means your guns have been wiped out too / will be in a matter of seconds as the enemy has passed them...

Doing sort of a dedicated supply truck might make this entire thing about supply crates a bit more important as it won't be so easy to simply replace them...

[1v0ry_k1ng]

I reckon it works pretty well, it means units requiring ammo like mortars etc are limited to where you have supplies deployed- stops them being too flexible

I agree it'd work better ifs supply trucks were less spammable though

[Nemo]

Already done - engineers no longer build them.

[[Krogoth86]]

When speccing a game today I was reminded of something I wanted to ask:

Russia has strange red bars for me - what is that?







I only have this for Russian troops - didn't notice it for the other factions...

[imbaczek]

guess it's the ranks.

[[Krogoth86]]

Afaik ranks show fine for Russians and e.g. the last one shows soldiers with rank plus that red bar (this time up down)...

[Nemo]

Those red bars are part of the rank insignia. Partisans rank upwards very quickly I imagine, because they're such cheap units.

[hoijui]

i like this game
of course, i only play against the AI
as i always do thta, i am a quite slow player.. therefore, i setup the game to be slower/less spammy: 7.5 minutes supply gap, and command points income on very low.
this makes the game just as i like it. though, i would like to be able to set even higher supply gap times.
This way, i usually win against a hard CRAIG in 1vs1, on the right map
with right map i mean village crossing with fixed positions.
on this map, with my settings for S44 as described above, CRAIG builds only infantry for a long time, and sends them squad by squad into the middle of the map. as soon as i managed to have about two squads wait there, the incomming troops just get raided as they come in, and i can take my time to deploy up an MG and at this point, the game is won.

i have played a few games with default settings aswell (though also agaisnt AI only), and... well i can not really say anythign about balance, but.. i like the game! and nice job with CRAIG tobi!
BrainDamage and me made sure that Lua AIs work with spring master and SL, as it was broken. so in case you did not test it there yet, you should be able to do that now.

[1v0ry_k1ng]

hey whered those healthbars come from? Im still packing the spring default

[[Krogoth86]]

A comment about the L2 V02 test version:

New starting unit set:
Just one flak, a heavy machine gunner, some trucks & the usual stuff. It's actually excellent! No more panicing while pushing your flaks forward asap and building a truck with the first engineer - plays way more smooth now without lacking anything...

Trucks no longer buildable by engies:
Wohoo!

CRAIG:
Seriously - tune it down! At least there has something to be done about CRAIG and tanks. When doing some 2v1 matches it was impossible to win when he reached tanks and you got no good frontline next to his base. We actually only won once when we managed to fortify the "exits" of his base (luckily he just had two). Good thing he won't target your 5 anti-tank guns / tank-destroyers first when rushing his 20 tanks out...

As an AI in most cases is about training / learning the game it currently is overkill. Oh and when can we expect a version that works for Russia too?

GBR no longer having scouts in HQ squad:
Yeah! No wait - that's my favorite faction. Well it was a bit too much to give the strongest infantry faction sort of a sniper immunity...

Rax squads:
Didn't fully test things here but anything to make e.g. SMG squads more usefull is good...

So in the end I'm very happy with it...
Maybe some additional remarks:

1.)
Include that standard customformations widget. You now have this metakey stuff or whatever it was but I don't see why you shouldn't integrated the standard version. It's extremely useful and players rarely check the widget list...

2.)
I noticed that my deployable GBR heavy machine gunner couldn't slip through the vehicle blockades. Intentional?