I started testing the camBalance mod. I like the new sound of the MG-Towers and the higher range of the Flamer towers. I agree that one damage upgrade is enough in Alpha 01. What I don't understand is why you added the new MG-Range artifact. You had to revert it for the Heavy MG and you will have to revert it for the Assault Gun. With that upgrade, the MG and the Twin MG have the same range as the Heavy MG. Makes no sense in my eyes.
I think this upgrade causes more problems than it solves. Like you had to add a Flamer-Range-Upgrade to prevent the Scavenger Flamer Towers gets outranged. I see no need for this new artifact so I'm of the opinion that we should remove it and split the ROF-Artifact and the Damage-Artifact in Alpha 01 between Base 3 and 4 instead of having both in Base 3.
The reason is quite simple, previously scav's machineguns out ranged the players machineguns and twin machineguns, however that makes no sense because both the players and the scav's are using the same weapons and therefore should have equal range, the fact they don’t is just a balancing quirk because before the players machineguns where more powerful due to getting 3 damage upgrades back to back and due to the higher weapon modifiers but this has been addressed so I seen no conflict in adjusting the range so that both player and scav mobile machineguns have the same range.
if you are going to remove the range upgrade then the scav's should have the range on there machine-guns reduced as well so that the range of the scav's machine-guns is the same as the players machine-guns.
the way i see it there are 2 ways to deal with this issue either give the player a range upgrade or reduce the range of the scav's machine-guns I'm fine with either because ultimately they both achieve the same result, equilibrium.
And it makes the Scavenger Flamer Tower less effective because you can attack them now from a higher distance.
Actually no because fixed emplacements should always have a bigger range than the mobile versions and if they don’t then that’s a bug and the range on the towers need a slight increase so that you can't out range them, with anything other then artillery.
so given that the max range on machine-guns is 7.5 then both flamer towers and machine-guns towers should probably have say 7.8 so that your mobile units can't out range them, because like you I'm of the opinion that turrets are useless if you can out range them, therefore turrets should always have a bigger range then mobile versions so that mobile units can't out range them, which forces the players to either take the incoming fire or use artillery, which is how it should be and how it is on other RTS games
The hold order is broken. It doesn't work even as a stop-moving-order. I gave units that are moving in a direction I didn't send them the order to hold their position and they moved on. Completely useless.
Both me and Berserk Cyborg have noticed this, and it is something that’s going to need looking at because its really irritating not being able to control your units properly
Berserk Cyborg decreased the weaponmodifier of Anti Personel Weapons for tracked units from 75 to 30. I was afraid that this is too low, but I just wanted to test it before commenting it. I suppose anything under 50 would make these weapons useless against tracked units. And it would make the Assault Gun also useless and that would be no good solution for the problem of the overpowered Assault Gun. He also decreased the damage upgrades for machine guns. I think that's too much at once. I have the feeling that we are changing too many things at once and are also moving too fast forward before we really tested these changes.
While I share your concerns this is why taking a systematic step by step approach is better for this, with specific regard to the assault gun this is something that can be addressed later, the best thing to do with the assault gun is to simply reduce the modifiers because you cant really reduce the rate of fire or damage because mini guns are supposed to be heavy weapons that put out a high volumes of heavy 50 cal rounds, and therefore should shred just about anything they come up against.
If you you want to see what a real minigun can do then have a look at this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC8jnSaCqxY
From a balancing point of view i get that this is problematic, but like i already said that's something that can be attended to later on once we get that far.
I think there is no argument for flamer being useless against hardcrete. As for the units, if we want to keep the flamer in its current form, we would need to increase the impact damage more significantly for the third damage upgrade. Yellow bodies are not the greatest test case to compare against. The other option is a new flamer weapon which is something to think about.
I think a first step in addressing this should be to give the player the 2nd and 3rd flamer damage upgrades on alpha 4 because currently we only get the second 2nd one and then we can take it from there to decide what to do next.
you could also improve burn damage and make the burn damage tick quicker unless both of those are hard coded, because flamers are not really impact weapons the way machine-guns are so the right way to make flamers more powerful is to make them burn hotter for longer and apply that burn damage faster.
I mean realistically there is no reason the burn for a flamer can't get up to like 4000 degrees we can do that to day just look at plasma cutters they use in factories when making ships those things can slice through sheets of steel several inches thick like a hot knife through butter it's not inconceivable that you could weaponise a plasma cutter, if you wanted to know what that might look like graphically them why not have a look at this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEFtUTt5l9g
those big blue beams the sisters of battle units are firing are plasma flamers there tanks look very smiler firing a super heated beam of plasma which burn holes in what ever they are fire at.
with regards to fire not being effective against concrete have you seen what 4000 degrees can do to steel reinforced concrete ? the concrete literally explodes part of the reason is because concrete is made using water and when super heated that water flashes to steam but being inside an incompressible block of concrete that force has got nowhere to go and therefore will cause the concrete to fail catastrophically at its weakest point and when it fails it basically explodes another part of the reason for this is that the steel reinforcement expends when it heats up again causing structural failure, another part of the reason is because concrete is only strong under compression it's weak under tension and under tension brakes easily, this is basic material science 101.
so given this I see no reason that flamers wouldn't be able to destroy concrete buildings, they would have to burn pretty hot to do so but its definitely possible.
don't believe me here is what it looks like when concrete is exposed to high temperatures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CixMjo5VtgA
This effect is why the world trade centre collapsed after being attacked, because the concrete was exposed to high enough temperatures to start this process fatally weakening the buildings strength at which point it was only a matter of time till the whole thing came crashing down.
with regard to new paradigm units not being the best of test cases while in the global sense that is true you have to keep in mind that we are balancing in context with the level and the opposition we face on that level while the balancing might be off when looked at from a global perspective that's largely irrelevant so long as its balance for the level in question, again its why a systematic approach is better yes its more labour intensive but in my opinion its the only way to really get good results when trying to do something like this.