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I'm glad I bought this game on sale but I'm not glad that I bought it at all, what happened to that magic of ALB? 
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Oct 13, 2014 03:33
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| # ? Jun 9, 2024 09:46 |
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I finally bought Red Dragon on sale as well. Is there no way to play the Air Land Battle maps in Red Dragon? Is there a way to do that, or is there some reason Eugen isn't porting the maps over?
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Oct 13, 2014 03:35
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They can't just copy the maps over for minimal work. They have to completely recreate them.
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Oct 13, 2014 03:36
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As a thing that humans that have two brain cells to rub together can't do better than them even with draft versions they should probably do that.
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Oct 13, 2014 04:20
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xthetenth posted:As a thing that humans that have two brain cells to rub together can't do better than them even with draft versions they should probably do that. Seeing as we were requesting it, frequently, in the beta, if only so we could have reasonable comparisons, i'm going to go with 'not happening.'
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Oct 13, 2014 04:52
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Yeah. It'd make too much sense. I miss me some ALB maps.
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Oct 13, 2014 04:55
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xthetenth posted:Yeah. It'd make too much sense. I still play ALB from time to time. Not all the maps are by any means perfect but have some fairly significant advantages over the RD ones, notably being much easier to guess elevation without zooming in.
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Oct 13, 2014 05:00
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Yeah, there's some definite ease of use design there that wasn't in RD, but even more than that there were some types of maps that just aren't in RD that were fun to play.
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Oct 13, 2014 05:09
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RIP Rammstein airbase map from EE.
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Oct 13, 2014 13:56
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Eugen has gotten worse and worse at making maps over each game.
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Oct 13, 2014 14:07
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Lions that prey on humans typically have problems with their teeth that make attacking their preferred prey animals difficult or painful.
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Oct 13, 2014 14:16
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xthetenth posted:Yeah, there's some definite ease of use design there that wasn't in RD, but even more than that there were some types of maps that just aren't in RD that were fun to play. Like maps that aren't the size of Grand Teton National Park.
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Oct 13, 2014 14:24
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My Kingdom for Rivers of Blood/Three Mile Island!Control Volume posted:I'm glad I bought this game on sale but I'm not glad that I bought it at all, what happened to that magic of ALB? tl;dr - they added too much stuff Coalitions/Deck Building changes were well-intended, but ended up removing a lot of the "flavor" of different nations. Combined with the added units (excepting the US, the NSWP/Scandis, and to a lesser degree the Russians) most major "holes" were filled so there wasn't nearly the same trade-off when picking a nation. Maps were too big, which I think was well-intentioned and might have worked out alright had it not been for the additional allergy to side spawns that kind of made that work in other iterations. I suspect there may have been a "MY REALISM" argument behind it. Naval units are kind of a joke gameplay-wise and generally best avoided, but they tied up so many design and art resources that it removed the ability to do more interesting things like infantry fortification, etc. Lately, a series of kind of ridiculous super-units (Cluster Rockets, Patriots, etc) that kind of just break the existing meta and lead to something that seems less fun. They also branched off an early version of ALB, so they didn't start with any of the balance changes that made ALB work towards the end and for some reason have decided to not integrate it.
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Oct 13, 2014 15:42
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I think somewhere along the lines between ALB and RD their "vision" got a little too grand and with that came a bunch of ideas that didn't really fit within the actual product they were making. Boats, dynamic terrain, etc; it's all cool in concept but mostly just awkward in practice.
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Oct 13, 2014 16:02
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I'm a fan of many of the changes in map design since ALB tbh, except for the ridiculous habit of dividing maps in half with rivers. The larger maps really do give you more room to maneuver and flank and push people back; in ALB, reinforcement zones were so close to the front that you couldn't really push people back unless you were vastly better than them; fighting took place along a single front line that pretty much never moved until the game was pretty much over. Many maps were very narrow, or looked wide but had such restricted movement corridors that in gameplay terms they were narrow. There were also side spawns where, if you lost the race to the side spawn, you lost the whole flank and basically had no opportunity to come back. The larger maps combined with the tank meta also increases the balance between unit types in that wheeled and helo vehicles can allow you to cover the large maps a lot more quickly but now tracked vehicles have vastly more combat power to make up for their slowness. Basically, you guys are remembering maps like Telemark and Three Mile Island and applying that to all ALB maps. The truth is, a lot of them were mediocre too and we only played them because they were all we had.
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Oct 13, 2014 16:16
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They want to have big naval battles and amphibious landings and serious land fights all on the same maps and it... doesn't really work as well as they wanted.
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Oct 13, 2014 16:20
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Mazz posted:I think somewhere along the lines between ALB and RD their "vision" got a little too grand and with that came a bunch of ideas that didn't really fit within the actual product they were making. Yeah. I think the "vagueness of cover" in RD is one of the biggest "minor complaints" I have -- while EE was probably a bit on the over-simplified side (especially looking back at it now) I don't think the gameplay/interface really gives you the level of authority to make those times of detail fun. It's basically impossible to judge the lines-of-sight for many of the hilly areas, and the lack of hedgerow-like "light cover" in a lot of places really makes the game less dynamic rather than more. I am fine with there not being dense woods everywhere, but the way they have it set up makes it feel really counter-intuitive and less polished rather than more. Really, I like Wargame best when it's kind of "Harpoon for Tanks" (and pretty graphics when you zoom in). Also, I don't think boats were a TOTAL failure -- the amphibious units definitely add some interesting aspects, and I think the river/coastal boats could be a lot more interesting if they'd focused on them more and forgot about the open ocean aspect altogether.
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Oct 13, 2014 16:20
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OctaMurk posted:I'm a fan of many of the changes in map design since ALB tbh, except for the ridiculous habit of dividing maps in half with rivers. The larger maps really do give you more room to maneuver and flank and push people back; in ALB, reinforcement zones were so close to the front that you couldn't really push people back unless you were vastly better than them; fighting took place along a single front line that pretty much never moved until the game was pretty much over. Many maps were very narrow, or looked wide but had such restricted movement corridors that in gameplay terms they were narrow. There were also side spawns where, if you lost the race to the side spawn, you lost the whole flank and basically had no opportunity to come back. The larger maps combined with the tank meta also increases the balance between unit types in that wheeled and helo vehicles can allow you to cover the large maps a lot more quickly but now tracked vehicles have vastly more combat power to make up for their slowness. I would agree with you for the most part actually. Where I dislike it mainly was the boost in artillery alongside the interest they have in forcing engagements over natural barriers like rivers or ridges, or the areas where they decide the only usable cover is a clump of trees not much larger then the corrected circle of a Smerch. Or their argument for asymmetric maps without really considering the consequences of how that effects team balance. Also, there's the aspect that they arbitrarily decide the proper number of players for a map. Why is this 2v2 effectively the same playing space as an older 4v4? Why do these 1v1 ranked maps force me to occupy 4-5 zones at start yet also be ready to counter some helo or cat c unit rush? Those types of questions were a large part of why I lost interest. Well that, and that they dictate that all maps need to be bigger without just providing some examples of both for people to pick themselves. @Hubis (phone posting) I should clarify too when I say awkward, I don't really mean badly, I just mean awkward. The terrain thing has its moments as do ships, the issue is more that they don't work as much as they do so you get a lot of negative along with the positives. For instance, like you said, brown water navy and the local amphib stuff is pretty solid, merging that into the same deck category as guided missile destroyers is not. Mazz fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Oct 13, 2014 |
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Oct 13, 2014 17:22
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Hubis posted:Also, I don't think boats were a TOTAL failure -- the amphibious units definitely add some interesting aspects, and I think the river/coastal boats could be a lot more interesting if they'd focused on them more and forgot about the open ocean aspect altogether. Wasn't that the plan initially? I swear early on one of the marshals or devs insinuated on the forums that they wouldn't be including any boats that couldn't fit under the bridges of the map.
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Oct 13, 2014 17:22
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Chantilly Say posted:They want to have big naval battles and amphibious landings and serious land fights all on the same maps and it... doesn't really work as well as they wanted. In the same sense they avoid going into detail with infantry heavy weapon teams like mortars, and strategic air assets like bombers, they shouldn't have included anything bigger than coaster ships in my opinion.
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Oct 13, 2014 17:51
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The worst way in which amphibious/naval units affected the map design was really the way they built the maps around the gimmicks. Especially the problem with rivers bisecting the map and creating a natural barrier right between the teams. In ALB, the rivers tended to run perpendicular to the line and therefore didn't impede advances, but instead split the battle up into discrete segments. Amphibious units would actually be really interesting in some of those cases, even though the maps weren't designed for them. Take for instance Oppdal from ALB. There's a river that runs north-south splitting off Alpha, Bravo, and Echo. If you secure the middle area on the map, you can use ATGMs to try to interdict supplies moving across the road. But actually assaulting across the bridges is hard, in either direction. Amphibious units have the potential to mix things up and make the situation more dynamic, instead of trading yards in a linear fight between bits of forest cover. Alternatively, look at Kristiansund, again from ALB. Attacking from one side of Golf into the other is really, really hard and I didn't see it happen that much. Amphibious units would have made it a lot harder to just block control of the middle zone.
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Oct 13, 2014 17:55
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Wasn't that the plan initially? I swear early on one of the marshals or devs insinuated on the forums that they wouldn't be including any boats that couldn't fit under the bridges of the map. http://devblog.wargame-ab.com/post/64959448295/devblog-10-set-sails RD Dev Diary 10 posted:First, let’s put us in the mood for some serious talk about ships. Kongo and Udaloy apparently were always there to begin with. Although when a single Udaloy with a Muna can tank a constant stream of harpoons from three-four Pegasuses there might be something off with balance. To be honest, they could probably chuck most of the deep sea (and some coastals)into naval-only maps and singleplayer and the game would be improved for it.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:03
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Just got the game on sale and decided to catch up with the thread, which I hadn't followed at all since the game game out. Building decks is fun as always, but it's unfortunate that the game is still being held back by retarded design decisions. The game could be so good if the design team could get their heads out of their asses, but they just seem to keep throwing in weird stuff that doesn't work instead of actually addressing the numerous balance issues that have existed in the game since EE. Especially since MadMatt seems to be such a huge influence on the game despite being such a complete and total shithead.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:18
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Just got the game on sale and decided to catch up with the thread, which I hadn't followed at all since the game game out. Building decks is fun as always, but it's unfortunate that the game is still being held back by retarded design decisions. The game could be so good if the design team could get their heads out of their asses, but they just seem to keep throwing in weird stuff that doesn't work instead of actually addressing the numerous balance issues that have existed in the game since EE. Especially since MadMatt seems to be such a huge influence on the game despite being such a complete and total shithead. I want a more competent company to make a thinly disguised copy of this game 
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Oct 13, 2014 18:25
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I had trouble handling WG:EE because there was just too much stuff happening at once and there was no pause button even in single player. Have any of these things been fixed? Because I'm having trouble imagining how I'm supposed to manage air + sea units on top of just driving my tanks around.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:35
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Danann posted:http://devblog.wargame-ab.com/post/64959448295/devblog-10-set-sails 3-4 Pegasuses will kill a Udaloy. Naval combat is largely fine IMO; I don't think many people are aware that you need to use "hold fire" to make sure all your missiles launch at the same time, and people don't really pay attention to positioning. Sea combat would be very much improved if they did add a side spawn (no income on it though) in the sea, so that the team which takes the sea has some at-will ability to amphibious assault along the coastline; large-scale amphibious assaults that turn the tide of the game in 4v4s and 10v10s are probably the most memorable things you get to do in this game and really make naval feel like it all comes together.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:41
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Cream_Filling posted:I had trouble handling WG:EE because there was just too much stuff happening at once and there was no pause button even in single player. Have any of these things been fixed? Because I'm having trouble imagining how I'm supposed to manage air + sea units on top of just driving my tanks around. It might be an unpopular opinion, but I like European Escalation the most. The campaign was decent (to a point), and the atmosphere was perfect. My only complaint is that you need to unlock units with command stars. Pain in the rear end.
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Oct 13, 2014 20:28
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I kind of agree, in EE I could plop down a fairly effective force and push most players back to their spawns. Come ALB and RD any push I make results in the rest of the enemy team panic bombing my entire push.
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Oct 13, 2014 22:07
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reagan posted:It might be an unpopular opinion, but I like European Escalation the most. The campaign was decent (to a point), and the atmosphere was perfect. Command stars were the poo poo, if for nothing else other than they meant that you'd see certain units actually get used that would otherwise never make it on the battlefield. And they weren't difficult to unlock; just playing the single player campaign got you enough for most of the good units on one side, and a few MP games would give you the same to round it out.
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Oct 13, 2014 22:10
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Cream_Filling posted:I had trouble handling WG:EE because there was just too much stuff happening at once and there was no pause button even in single player. Have any of these things been fixed? Because I'm having trouble imagining how I'm supposed to manage air + sea units on top of just driving my tanks around. I'd say it's much worse, and not so much because of air and sea but because armies are just flat out bigger than they used to be.
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Oct 13, 2014 22:10
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Do we have an ETA for DLC3?
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Oct 13, 2014 22:17
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Azran posted:Do we have an ETA for DLC3? None yet, Im afraid
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Oct 13, 2014 23:37
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Leif. posted:Command stars were the poo poo, if for nothing else other than they meant that you'd see certain units actually get used that would otherwise never make it on the battlefield. And they weren't difficult to unlock; just playing the single player campaign got you enough for most of the good units on one side, and a few MP games would give you the same to round it out. They just added more hassle to respeccing to a gimmick deck or worst case switching sides. For people who didn't know about free respeccing, it just cut down on variety among decent players.
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Oct 13, 2014 23:50
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Tulip posted:I'd say it's much worse, and not so much because of air and sea but because armies are just flat out bigger than they used to be. Huh so is the game just balanced for team games or do they expect you to be some sort of super-sperg who can keep a whole lot in their head at once?
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Oct 14, 2014 00:05
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I think most of the changes have been for the best actually. Even the naval stuff in large team games can be a lot of fun, and the maps are definitely better. More room for maneuver creates totally different games, especially if you drop the income rate a little or play on maps for the right number of players instead of crowding 6 into a 4 or 20 onto a 2.
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Oct 14, 2014 00:06
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Cream_Filling posted:Huh so is the game just balanced for team games or do they expect you to be some sort of super-sperg who can keep a whole lot in their head at once? The game is the most fun when played in groups. Multitasking is also a big part of it, yeah, but there's no actual micro to compensate.
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Oct 14, 2014 00:46
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Hubis posted:Coalitions/Deck Building changes were well-intended, but ended up removing a lot of the "flavor" of different nations. Combined with the added units (excepting the US, the NSWP/Scandis, and to a lesser degree the Russians) most major "holes" were filled so there wasn't nearly the same trade-off when picking a nation. In RD we've got US, Eurocorps, Commonwealth, possibly soon Scandnavia, maybe Blue Dragons, USSR, NSWP and maybe Red Dragons. It's a hell of a lot better for game diversity than ALB ever was. Control Volume posted:I'm glad I bought this game on sale but I'm not glad that I bought it at all, what happened to that magic of ALB? Elukka fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Oct 14, 2014 |
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Oct 14, 2014 01:38
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Elukka posted:Way I see it, in ALB there were 4 actually useful decks: US, USSR, and the mixed decks. Pact mixed was only really good because it had the Sokol and the game was very focused on the initial chopper rush for the middle. If they had fixed that (Which they did in RD!) there'd only have been 3 useful decks. It wasn't an interesting choice between multiple flawed decks, it was a choice between a deck full of holes and a deck with no holes. Unless you were doing a gimmick you'd just pick the better deck. I dunno. West German Mech was still pretty solid. Maybe not unassailably solid, but it did a thing and it did it pretty well. There were probably decks that were more "optimal", but only in that you didn't have to play to the strengths of the "class-B" decks. I agree on Pact the choices were pretty much USSR or bust.
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Oct 14, 2014 03:07
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Poland was quite viable as a deck for a good while in ALB.
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Oct 14, 2014 03:25
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I could seriously imagine ALB with some of the RD SPAAG buffs...
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Oct 14, 2014 04:22
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