Profile of Lucas Troy

A thought I had: right now, you pay money to use extra content. The extra content is in your game either way, but if you want to load that new commander yourself, you have to pay for it.

What if everyone got all the content for free, but if you wanted to, you could pay to NOT have to play against it? Instead of paying for a new commander, you could pay for the option to veto it from your opponent's load out. Let's say for practical purposes you can only veto a max of two commanders.

Example - Relic releases the Tiger Ace. The Tiger Ace is horribly OP and dominates the game, cutting down on diversity and wrecking balance. You can't really avoid the Tiger Ace so you're stuck until a patch. Lots of people buy the new commander, but there's a negative effect on the game.

What if instead everyone got the Tiger Ace for free, but could pay to veto it? Relic would still make loads of money, but people would be spared from having to play against broken units. You can imagine the same solution for Advanced Emplacements.

You could do new maps this way too. Hate a map? Pay for the option to veto it.

Abandon vehicle is mostly RNG right now. I think it could be changed to be a more prominent game play mechanic, while also depending more on skill and planning.

• All vehicles abandon on destruction every time. But they're in a special state where they have almost no armor and only 80 HP.
  
• After 3 seconds, the engine catches fire, the vehicle self destructs, and it becomes a wreck.
  
• If an engineer squad reaches the vehicle within three seconds, they stop the auto destruct timer, and can "capture" the vehicle. This takes around 20 seconds. The vehicle then disappears from the map and can be called in as an off map by the player who captured it.
  

So this way, abandon is more like an ambush mechanic where you keep an engineer squad in waiting and then have them try to seize the vehicle. It doesn't net you the resources of the vehicle (so you can't abuse it on your own vehicles) but it let's you get a vehicle you wouldn't normally have. So think USF trying to get an Elefant, or Ost getting a Comet from the Brits.

I have updated the opening post with the results of the first round!

Note that if you suggested multiple changes in the same post, I only added the first you suggested.

Remember that posting both loudly and frequently is key to winning the balance brawl. The recommended level is at least 20 posts per game played.

Community Balance Brawl Patch Round 1.1

Results:

I'm gonna say that Ostheer lost this round. Grens are 3 men, the sniper and the Elefant were removed from the game, and the panther now gets engine destroyed criticals just from moving around. I'd say soviets won, since all that happened was that penals for their flamers back. OKW is also going to suffer from the panther criticals so I put them second last. UFK and USF were a little behind the soviets but did okay.

Here's my overall ranking of this round:

• Soviets
  
• UKF
  
• USF
  
• OKW
  
• Ostheer
  

Maps

Pripyat added back to automatch
Stalingrad added back to automatch
Sittard added back to automatch

General

Team Games

We found that resources inflation led to imbalances and problems with unit timing in team games, so we added resource modifiers to team games as follows:

3v3 15% less fuel, 4v4 25% less.

Vehicle Crews

Vehicle crews added to all factions SeemsGood


Mine Sweepers

We felt that mines had too little counter play against sweepers. For only 30 MU on a cheap, high utility engineer unit, a player could effectively one shot mines that cost up to 60 MU. Even worse, this could be done an effectively infinite number of times. This means that 30 MU sweepers could clear an infinite amount of MU invested in mines. Our spreadsheets tell us that kind of efficiency is not acceptable.

To fix the overperformamce of sweepers versus mines, we have added a small random chance that a sweeper unit will trigger the mine while sweeping.

Abandoned

We decided that the abandoned vehicle critical introduced too much RNG in the game, so we have removed it.

USF

We have adjusted the timing of the US forces mortar to limit its early impact. We have increased the squad size of I&R pathfinders to make them viable in combat.

Mortar moved to Lt. Tier

I and R pathfinders squad size from 3 to 4

Ostheer

S-Mines

We're changing S-mines into demo charges because ... well, when you read what we did to grens, it will probably seem justified. Just be glad we narrowly decided to keep them having warning signs.

Grenadiers

With the recent move of the USF mortar to the Lt tier we found that grenadiers were much less susceptible to squad wipes and were often attaining high levels of vet. This allowed Ostheer to fight allied infantry with a combination of grens and support weapons. In order to correct this and limit Ostheer to fringe strategies, we have reduced grenadiers to a 3 man squad. This should ensure frequent full health wipes and avoid overly promoting Ostheer infantry use.

Grenadier squad size from 4 to 3

Snipers

The sniper allowed Ostheer to kill allied infantry from long range, making counter play difficult. For this reason, we have reduced the sniper squad size by one, bringing it to 0. Building a sniper will now fail to spawn the unit but will still cost resources. This is an intended behavior to punish players who abused over promoted sniper play in the past.

Ostheer sniper squad size from 1 to 0.

Panthers

The Ostheer panther and OKW panther were both overperforming, often deflecting attacks from medium tanks such as the Cromwell. Rather than lowering their armor to a more reasonable 200, we decided to create a new mechanic that will give fast tanks such as the Cromwell more opportunity for counter play.

Panthers will now have a small chance of getting an engine destroyed critical when going up terrain elevations.

Elefant

Removed from the game since we were not sure how to balance it. We will look at it again in like two years probably.

OKW

Base Defenses

Flak base defenses replaced with bunkers.

Panthers


The Ostheer panther and OKW panther were both overperforming, often deflecting attacks from medium tanks such as the Cromwell. Rather than lowering their armor to a more reasonable 200, we decided to create a new mechanic that will give fast tanks such as the Cromwell more opportunity for counter play.

Panthers will now have a small chance of getting an engine destroyed critical when going up terrain elevations.

UKF

Comets

Comet fuel cost from 185 to 195.

25 Pounder

25 pounder fuel cost to 60

Soviets

Penals

Flamerthrowers added back.


The Rules

Show Spoiler

The shitrage is strong with this one.