Spring RTS Engine

Was anyone else able to reproduce the problem I had with doomsday machinese not firing? ( appropriate firestates and on/off states were selected.)

The Janus is fecking fantastic, there is no way it needs to buffed at all.

I like impulse as it is.

Slightly weaker AA units/structures sounds okay, but the main problem is the L2 AA kbots/vehicles.

Panthers DO need a nerf.

With mavericks the main problem is that they outrun lvl 1 units, the autoheal i can live with, theu just need to be a little but slower.

DT's should go back to how they were before.

MR.D wrote: Bombers seem to be quite remarkable, their damage is good, and the 1 thing that makes bombers as strong as they are is that by the time they get into range of Flak, or other Anti-Air units, they've already dropped their ordinance, so even if they die, their damage has already been dealt.

DO NOT NERF BOMBERS! They're perfect as they are.

We've been over the bombers, they don't need a nerf, they're difficult to use for cost at times, and they are indeed one-use.

Banshees freaking suck. They dont need to be the classic "uber 1337 pwnall gunship of dewm" but they need a buff to make them at least USEFUL.

Bombers suck terribly because of they way spring handles them, they just act mentally retarded no matter how much you buff em.

Being a long-term Banshee user, since 1.42... I really must agree with you on that point. They're almost useless at everything but raiding, which they aren't as good at as, well, any other raiding unit due to cost and movement form. Add the gunship chain explosion, the limited attack form, the fact that anti-air of any magnitude beyond one missile turret renders them obsolete...

I agree that gunships are absolutely useless. I was speccing a game where 5 Rapiers were attacking some solar collectors. Just killing one took about 5 seconds and is soon as they came in range of some Defenders, they did little to no damage and died horribly after about 10 seconds.

I've also never seen gunships chain explosion. They don't seem to have an explosion at all - they just disappear, which is confusing.

thats because so many people whined about gunship hordes defeating AA. people dont realise that FIGHTERS WERE THE COUNTER!! gunships are meant to be powerful and effective. the idea is that they are 3x more vunerble to fighters than normal aircraft as they are ultra slow compared to fighters.

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:thats because so many people whined about gunship hordes defeating AA. people dont realise that FIGHTERS WERE THE COUNTER!! gunships are meant to be powerful and effective. the idea is that they are 3x more vunerble to fighters than normal aircraft as they are ultra slow compared to fighters.

The thing about gunships is that they can actually be killed by ground defence if you have a lot of it because they're slower.

1v0ry_k1ng wrote:the idea is that they are 3x more vunerble to fighters than normal aircraft as they are ultra slow compared to fighters.

Fighters fly right past them and then have to turn around, whereas they can stay behind other aircraft and keep firing on them. I haven't built gunships, except in very specalized situations since I was a noob. With proper scouting, bombers are better at killing high value targets.

My feeling on gunships is that they are not strike aircraft, but rather close air support (CAS)--unsurprisingly, the role similar aircraft actually have in reality. They give an existing mobile ground force a very long arm of attack. Some artillery or vlaunch vehicles firing on your tank column? Well, it's good you have those gunships right there to kill them. Penetrators shooting at your vulnerable attack force? Take them out. Maybe you'll lose the gunships, but they just saved your whole assault force.

Using them to attack bases or try to overpower anti-air is not really what they're for.

I do think the engine needs better inherent fighter control though--fighters that intelligently match speed with their prey, or intelligently loop to get behind them again would be nice. The same intelligence could allow fighters to try to evade other fighters more realistically--and the results would simply look fantastic. Fighter activity has been much smarter than it was in OTA for quite a while--since the first public release of Spring perhaps? But since then it hasn't gotten much better, and it needs to. Bombers that try to evade fighters, yet still line up properly (and at the right altitude!) for their bombing run would make them more useful. As it is, they just don't think ahead, and end up stalling as they try to climb the hill their target is on. These aren't issues that can be properly addressed by the mod, though.

L2 fighters should be able to fight gunships a lot better. They loop around and everything, but their turning radius is much, much smaller.

Just played a game where I couldn't get the Core Heavy Amphi Transport to unload. Inside were some level 1 stuff and Reapers.
I tried area unload, normal unload, differents spots, nothing worked. Yes, the Transport was out of the water.
At least I could kill most defending rockos by bumping into them so that they self-killed

those aircraft repair buildings bugs... they starts moving when you build them. happened to me in speedmetal map...

Does anyone have the slightest idea why that happens?

Caydr wrote:L2 fighters should be able to fight gunships a lot better. They loop around and everything, but their turning radius is much, much smaller.

Could you increase the turn rate for lvl 1 as well? I had a fighter who, because of both terrain an possibly poor micro by me manage to not fire on a con air while it sucked 3-4 rocks. As soon as an mt was up, however, the conair was toast. In fact, it took another fighter many more shots to kill another conair than an mt did, is this by design?

One big question, and possibly the solution to fixing fighter and all Air behavior is this.

How does the Aircraft Pathfinding work?

Do aircraft use the sky as their altitude limit?
Do they use the ground heights to figure out a flight path?

Do they try to match their flight angles based on terrain Normals?
(similar to how spiders change their directions based on what kind of slant they are climbing on the terrain>)

Do they fly on sticks.
(think of it this way, you put a pair of rollerskates on the ground, put a stick on it that is ## tall, then attatch the fighter on top of the stick.

Does it use the basic properties of a ground vehicle, but the model is just shown at a higher altitude?

there is none.. aircraft do not have a pathing system, they dont locate paths, they dont orient to the ground, they also always stay at cruise alt unless attacking...

MR.D wrote:My thoughts about 2.23 and a few units that annoy me.
Mavericks Combat heal is too strong, if its going to heal itself as fast as it does, it needs to heal at a lower HP % per cycle, its nearly impossible to kill 1v1 with any single unit in sometimes cases of units at or above its metal costs.
As is, it can dominate even large groups of LVL-1 by running away, and after it survives it not only nearly instantly healed itself, but has added HP from experience as well.

While I agree that Mavericks seem to destory LVL-1 bots, its not entirely true. The fact is that a lot of people spam lvl1 rocket bots and hammers/thuds, and these are not very good against micro'ed mavs. However you still have to remember that resources for resources you can have over 14 rockos for 2 mavs. This may look like a massacre but it is in fact fair. On the other hand if you use warriors/levelers/flashes/instigators, they seem to outgun mavs easily (2 warriors vs 1 mav: both warriors still alive while flashes are able to rush the mavs & surround them ). Combine this with the fact that a mav can't break defences for shit (2 llts take a lone mav out) and it seems like it's a fair unit.
Btw people who complain the mav is too fast vs lvl1 units, talks shit. It's speed is 1.65 while a rockos/hammers speed is 1.54. What does this mean? It means that if you race a rocko with a mav starting from standing, it takes 9/10 of the width of altored divide (thats 16 units!) for the mav to outrun the range of the rocko! (the replay is not worth uploading; try it yourself) Now how is this too fast?

IMO Mavs are fine as they are.

Cabbage wrote:DT's should go back as they were before.

+1

DTs reverted then.

Something that might be a problem is to do with the varying heights that different types of aircraft fly at.

Gunships, for instance, fly rather low to the ground because this lets them have a longer range. Picture a circle with the gunship at the middle and the ground at the bottom. If the gunship is too high, the circle (its weapon range) touches less and less ground. Something similar is true of construction aircraft.

Bombers fly at a high altitude, this helps them avoid incoming missiles somewhat. Whether or not that's a good thing is for the courts to decide.

Fighters fly at a medium altitude so that they can attack low, medium, and high altitude targets with roughly the same efficiency.

The problem seems to be that fighters, when they spot gunships, have to dive a little to get a shot off. They fail to do so in time, but are now in "combat mode" and aren't locked to a specific terrain height anymore. So they come around for another pass (this time at the proper altitude) and are effective this time.

To fix this, I will try setting fighter missiles as "turret" weapons, and give them a small arc in which they can be fired So, rather than the target having to be directly in front, with little tolerance, they will be able to attack anything within a 10ish degree wide cone in front of them.

I'm not sure how the engine will take this though. I think it works fine on GEM fighters, if I remember right.