v 2.3.6 .. this is super armor!!!

[Iluvalar]

Do you guys actually think that playing with no armour mechanic is fun?

By any chance, are you the same ones that posted 'MG is overpowered', 'Remove the Twin Assault Gun@!' or 'i hate ripple rockets !!'?

I miss Zarel....

I've been messing with the game mechanic a lot recently (I'll do a post soon) and what I realize is that all the research and design stuff give many interesting choices to the player no mater the exact balance (providing you stay in range of the balanced default). It affect how much you build, what you build and when. It change greatly the "feel" of the game but there is always many good strategies, so-so strategies and counter strategies. It just affect which are which.

So I guess, if you like simple RTS, you'll appreciate that the MG is in the top tier. You jump right into the action, the apparent tech tree is simplified and the game is played fast. Apparently this is approximatelly what turning the armor off is doing.

[theArmourer]

I have been working on some source-code modifications to the 3.0 branch in the trunk, mostly improvements to the damage mechanic, which includes removing the 1/3 damage minimum damage modifier, which would make the tanks invulnerable to a 7.62 mm or 12.7 mm machine gun.

This would be an excellant, and realistic, addition to the game. I have frequently thought of the ridiculousness of a machine gun defeating the armor of a heavy body. The heavy machine gun should remain effective against light or medium bodies though.

[Mats]

The game allows research of depleted uranium bullets though. These can certainly pierce an awful lot of armour!

[Jorzi]

Not an awful lot, only about 5-10cm at most

[Germanium]

I have to admit that i did not read all posts here in detail, but there is currently a unbalanced portion of the game. This is only since armor is included again (which is good).
Currently the flamer way of life ... earlier flamer units + late plasmite bombers... is the most attractive way of playing. You get no thermal armor early on (so you have to live with the basic armor given by the body without upgrades) which makes a flamer against tanks as effective as mini pod or light cannon. Second and to me more important is the plasmite bomber (of course the one used by experienced players... with scorpion or retribution body). You can have plasmite bombers at minute 29 approx. at that time you cannot have avenger or stormbringer, so normally the best way to go would be whirlwind since the rest is cost ineffective (and too short ranged in case of flak). Unfortunately it is rather hard (to my experience no possible) to defend against incoming plasmite bombers if they are used correctly (groups of 3-8 bombers). They attack some area of AA and loose all incoming bombers, but as well destroy a large field of AA. While you try to rebuild your AA they already have another group incoming. Basically you cannot rebuild as fast as they produce bombers. Of course you could/should also produce AA tanks but power wise they can then produce additional plasmite hovers or something like that.
What i am proposing is to make plasmite bombers 30 percent slower so that in the end - after all engine upgrades - you have plasmite bombers almost as fast as you have them now (at the beginning with scorp) and leave the rest intact.
I am also thinking it would be useful to have thermal armor researchable after the first kinetic armor upgrade. Not every map allows for HMG hardpoints against flamer units.
Just my two cents...

[Wisler]

I have to admit that i did not read all posts here in detail, but there is currently a unbalanced portion of the game. This is only since armor is included again (which is good).
Currently the flamer way of life ... earlier flamer units + late plasmite bombers... is the most attractive way of playing. You get no thermal armor early on (so you have to live with the basic armor given by the body without upgrades) which makes a flamer against tanks as effective as mini pod or light cannon. Second and to me more important is the plasmite bomber (of course the one used by experienced players... with scorpion or retribution body). You can have plasmite bombers at minute 29 approx. at that time you cannot have avenger or stormbringer, so normally the best way to go would be whirlwind since the rest is cost ineffective (and too short ranged in case of flak). Unfortunately it is rather hard (to my experience no possible) to defend against incoming plasmite bombers if they are used correctly (groups of 3-8 bombers). They attack some area of AA and loose all incoming bombers, but as well destroy a large field of AA. While you try to rebuild your AA they already have another group incoming. Basically you cannot rebuild as fast as they produce bombers. Of course you could/should also produce AA tanks but power wise they can then produce additional plasmite hovers or something like that.
What i am proposing is to make plasmite bombers 30 percent slower so that in the end - after all engine upgrades - you have plasmite bombers almost as fast as you have them now (at the beginning with scorp) and leave the rest intact.
I am also thinking it would be useful to have thermal armor researchable after the first kinetic armor upgrade. Not every map allows for HMG hardpoints against flamer units.
Just my two cents...

I would agree plasmite is way overpowered, usually in high oil games atleast, if you are vsing an experienced player and they get plasmite you are pretty screwed, for a few reasons.

1: Plasmite makes ground units pretty much obselete , except if they are AA units and spread out. You cant launch an effective attack on high oil without massing units ussually and a few well placed plasmite bombs can wipe out 100 tanks easily.

2: If you are playing on your own and not in a team you are forced almost to reseach MG for whirwind, if you dont and another experienced player does get plasmite you have a minute chance of surviving if any.

3: As already mentioned the only effective way in early game of fighting plasmite is with well placed WW sites, and even when you do place them well the plasmite can destroy them faster than you can build them.

In all I would say the plasmite bomber is the best offensive/defensive weapon in the game from the 30-40 min mark to much further ahead when you start to get advanced AA. Though it never seems to be a problem in low oil perhaps because it is harder to get to it without leaving out other things you need to spend your power on in order to survive, or mabye because tanks and structures are not as compacted together in low oil.

Either way I would say making it heavier so it is alot slower would solve this problem.

[Alpha93]

Flamers aren't that big of an issue atm, unlike plasmite bombers.
They are ALL-ROUNDER bombs, while other bomb bays are artillery, which makes them overpowered.
My rebalance proposal:

Increase AT to VTOL damage multiplier to 120~130.
Decrease damage of plasmite to 800 and make it artillery instead of all-rounder (which should solve a bit of the problem of them being so similar to thermites but way more powerful because of the all rounder attribute).
Decrease HP of Plasmite to 550, but decrease weight by 1000~1500 to make up for the HP - Damage loss and decrease the price from 225 to 200~195.
Slightly increase AA damage (90->100 for WW,110->120 for FlaK Cannon, Avenger and Vindicator might be tweaked a bit, but they've got a longer range than those mentioned above, perhaps change their behaviour so that they won't shoot to a VTOL that has already been shot by another SAM)as right now AA is made useless by these weapons (even a retribution can drop it's payload and still get away with it with the shitload more HP it's got than scorpion, not to mention it will gain experience and become even worse).

Eventually burn radius should be reduced to 3x3, but most of the above is needed as of now imo.

[Germanium]

well, i dont like drastic changes as Alpha proposes. And additionally - not in accordance with non-experienced players - i think plasmite bombers are fine as they are despite their speed/armor.

They were (easily) defendable in 2.3.5 if you researched WW early, which only takes 1 lab. Additionally you will get avengers a little later so from that time (unless you are playing on squared where you often dont have a LOS (line of sight)) you should be able to defend (in terms of power spent for WW and power spent for plasmite bombers).

The summary is, that the plasmite bomber has definitely 10 minutes (more likely 20 minutes) where you dont have sufficient AA. Therefore, another solution - instead or in addition to making it slower - would be to delay plasmite research after maybe stormbringer or something (more likely last research things mk3 opens plasmite bombs).

I dont like the idea to change the rest since everything was fine (balance wise) while playing with no armor.

[Alpha93]

I dont like the idea to change the rest since everything was fine (balance wise) while playing with no armor.

Then you might be happy to know that all that took,while the armor stuff wasn't fixed, to knock out a big army was a group of 10 or 20 plasmite flamers. Tbh, I like this game more since the armor is fixed and you can't easily get curbstomped by HMGs.
Also, I might argue about making the plasmite later. Stormbringer is still AT with thermal damage which makes it even more ineffective against scorps and, later on, retribution.
http://guide.wz2100.net/w/stormbringeraalaser
Which means you'd need to have a base full of these only to shoot down a few planes, which is still, imo, simply not viable as you can get plasmite way earlier and moving it up in the research tree won't help since you usually get storms of 20 or 30 planes, every single of them with 3k to 4k HP and move at 6xx speed with all engine upgrades, 54x~58x at most.
As I said, it's not the damage making it OPed, it's mostly the allrounder attribute on it AND the combination of splash + burn radius, damage would be just fine if it was antistruct only. And the low damage multiplier on AA weapons which are classified as AT now (hence AT to VTOL damage multiplier should increased to 100% at least, for full damage).

[TVR]

Do you guys ever use interceptors armed with Sunburst Air-to-Air rocket or Flak Cannon (Cyclone)?

[NoQ]

I tried sunburst interceptors against bombers once and i liked it (:

[meeso]

I tried sunburst interceptors against bombers once and i liked it (:

how do u get them to intercept; just by patrolling the area from which you expect enemy vtol to come?

That's a good idea actually, never tried air to air defense, but will certainly do next time.

[NoQ]

Patrol = alt+click.
You can do it very effectively in combat.
Much easier than targeting VTOLs (though i've heard it's effective to target flak cannons manually at the middle of the enemy vtol mass, i never tried it so far).