Thx. I'll try this out when I am back (in a week or so).
From what I remembered from when I was reading about the parameter, wouldn't this change have the side-effect of making the sniper prioritise targets that it can't penetrate reliably? i.e., not the soft targets.
(not that it matters, though, anyway, since snipers are getting baby-sat).
I think that it's possible to get the Raketenwerfer to prioritise vehicles in garrisons, even as it is right now:
- Cycle activate/deactivate prioritise vehicle a few times
- Enter garrison with prioritise vehicle on
- Make sure you use forced facing direction
At least, when I tried this on the live version, it worked for me 99% of the times.
I have no idea what's causing the raketenwerfer to hic-up like that. However, that may as well be the reason why the unit is sometimes unresponsive in combat.
Aim time fix fur rakket and ptrs
Sweeper and sherck to SP
Too please
I will try to work something out about the Raketen aim-time. However, before I do this, people need to trial this mod, and see if the mod makes the Raketen situation with respect to the aim time better, equal or worse.
Note that I don't intend this to be a balance mod. This is more like "Fixing everyone's pet-peeves"-mod, with the hope of refining the solutions and dumping them to Miragefla mod and, then, (hopefully) to the live version.
Other stuff high in the agenda:
- Fixing Brit sniper garrison targeting (no idea how to do this yet)
To my knowledge the features (fixes) advertised address the described bugs correctly. However, it is likely that my fixes introduce negative side-effects (i.e., does fixing bug A introduce bug B)
For instance, consider the Raketenwerfer:
- Multiple players have reported that the gun will occasionally bug and not fire at enemy tanks sitting in the arc of fire (I haven't done anything to fix this issue yet)
Now, consider Soviet AT gun ambush:
- As advertised, the gun crew will no longer open fire at enemy targets
- However, it is possible that my fix to Zis ambush causes the Zis gun to become unresponsive (like the Raketenwerfer) - As a user of this mod, you are encouraged to seek out and report any such side-effects, should they occur
Quality-of-life feedback
For instance, consider the medic healing changes.
Previously, medics would chase away slightly-injured combat engineers (for which you don't care), whereas they could be healing your shock troops, instead (for which you greatly care). The medic healing changes in this mod will give you a way to order your medics around.
However, I expect that the changes will also cause discomfort to some players:
- The moment you issue a (slight) move command to your troops, the medic will go chasing after other squads
- (after you have taken the time to grow accustomed to these changes), do you consider the changes beneficial, or would you prefer the older version?
Wishlist
Due to limitations in the modding tools, I am not able to implement everything the way I envisioned them.
If it was possible to ask Relic to change some things in their code, I would ask for the following:
1. Allow for weapons to be changed instantly
- This would affect the responsiveness of my troop transport "retain facing" ability. Currently there's a 4-second delay 2. Actually create a native hold position command for transports.
- The retain facing command I implemented is just a hack to get around that issue 3. Allow for attack ground commands to be accessible in garrisons when the building is selected
- currently, attack ground command is only accessible if the unit within the garrison is selected 4. Make garrisoned troops autofire behave identical to ungarrisoned infantry.
- Garrisoned infantry, for example, will ignore attack ground options, will attack neutral targets, etc. Something looks very wrong! 5. Create an action that allows abilities/etc to change the "receives_attack_commands" flag of entity hardponts
- The Churchill Crocodile implementation would look a LOT less cumbersome, and easier to use if that was available 6. Make infantry rotation not count as movement
- This would automatically fix some bugs related to Ostheer Ambush Camouflage 7. Give Commandos a parachuting animation
- It would be fking awesome to have Commandos reinforce by air near cut-off gliders. 8. Give squads better spacing when behind yellow cover
- No matter how hard I tried, clumping up behind fences/etc seems to be hardcoded somewhere.
Acknowledgements
Putting this mod together would have not been possible without the help and feedback of the following people:
- Miragefla
- Cruzz
- Planet Smasher
- The Machine
The Raketenwerfer seems to be one of those units that is both extremely annoying to use, and extremely annoying to counter. Any further buffs to the Raketenwerfer, and the Vet1 needs to go bye-bye. Otherwise, this unit is going to become complete cancer to counter.
For those of you not in-the-know, the Vet1 bonus allows the Raketenwerfer to move at full speed, even when stealthed. This means that there is no longer any cost associated with the opportunity of using stealth.
Having just compared the raketenwerfer to the pak40:
- The Raketenwerfer has a pretty big setup time, at 0.75 (vs 0). Thus, if you want to make the Raketenwerfer responsive, always set up manually.
The setup time will pretty much guarantee that you will never be able to reface your raketen and fire in-time.
Otherwise, I don't know what's killing Raketenwerfer's responsiveness:
- The Raketenwerfer has slightly bigger ready aim-time (variable between 0.125 - 0.25). This only affects the first shot
- ... but has lower wind-up time, by 0.25 (constant)
The two add up and, in theory, the Raketenwerfer should have an advantage there. So, there must be some other value that's messing things up (definitely setup time, but not the aim time).
Finally, note that the Raketenwerfer has:
- Smaller range (50 vs 60)
- Bigger arc of fire (70 vs 60)
- Is a better AT gun than Zis / USF at guns (higher penetration than both at all ranges, and faster reload cycle than the zis)
- Is the cheapest AT gun in the game.
2.The Camouflage ability adds a target priority modifier (Crew Members Hold Fire). Vehicle Priority adds a target priority modifier as well (vs vehicles). When both abilities are active it causes the priority skills to cycle every second or so. The result of that is sometimes the Raketenwerfer does not fire while or takes too long to fire while in Camouflage. To fix that they should remove the target priority from the Camouflage ability and remove the weapons from the crew or make the range extremely short so that they dont fire on anything from far while in a camo state.
Are you positively sure about that stacking priority skills will cause the unit to lag? I am genuinely curious to know.
I was implementing a prioritize vehicle function that would allow vehicle MGs to function normally, and I had to literally stack about 10-15 priority commands; I didn't notice a drop in performance.
Stealth (both pupchen and Soviet stealth), prioritise vehicles and crew firing preferences are all related somewhat.
1. When using soviet AT ambush, the crew will use whatever target prioritisation is active. This means that you can never ever prevent the crew of soviet AT guns from firing at vehicles (thus, giving away the ambush).
2. The raketenwerfer has a funny workaround to that: it disables Volksgrenadier rifles from firing (at anything). If you recrew the weapon with anything that doesn't have Volksgrenadier rifles, the crew will behave exactly like soviet AT gun crew.
3. (I don't remember right now). However, if you do the following in this order:
- Activate stealth
- Activate vehicle prioritisation
I think that the raketen crew will open fire on tanks. However, I don't remember anymore.
4. To make matters worse, when reinforcing squads with weapon prioritsation (e.g., hold fire), the new squad members don't receive this command.
I have implemented the following QoL changes in a small mod:
- Prioritise vehicles now only affects the main gun. That way tank MGs/crews can keep firing at enemy infantry, regardless
- Soviet/Pupchen stealth guarantee that the crew will no longer open fire to any enemy target (vehicle or infantry), thus allowing the main gun to fire the first shot
- Pupchen prioritise vehicles preference now carries over when the unit is garrisoned (i.e., crew fires at everything, AT gun fires only at vehicles)
- (I haven't manage to make the toggle ability of the pupchen work while it's garrisoned though)
Sadly, there is not enough space in the margin of this post to detail the solution to these bugs in this post.
1) In my opinion Trenches should be capturable by the enemy.
If you don't want your enemy to use trenches against you, make sure to place them in a way that trenches can't can't be used against you. This is similar to sandbags; you don't just plop them anywhere you go. There needs to be some forethought.
2) Cost can go down/removed if trenches become capturable,
3) If cost goes down, make sure that all factions (including Brits) have a reasonably accessible way to /delete trenches.
Trenches block vehicle pathing even better than tanktraps do. Do I really need to say more?
All engineer units could be given an explosive charge ability that demolishes trenches if the trenches are unoccupied. That way you also avoid the mindless /delete rushing of CoH1 trenches (which gets us back to point 1)
It looks really nice and clean. You also get extra style points for managing to cram all this into a free hosting service.
Since you are already computing this:
- Would it be possible to show DPS-on-the-move for each weapon alongside DPS when stationary (e.g., with a dashed line)
- Is it possible to activate links for DPS of various squads at Vet3?
Regarding slot weapons:
- As you mention, it would be nice to be able to compare non-default weapons across squads
- Bren guns: Commandos/Airlanding officer get access to this gun
- Bars: missing Paras, Barfinders
Regarding AoE damage:
- A clean way to show it is show a secondary graph that compares AoE damage for distances
- Alternatively, if you want to cram everything on the same graph, a heatmap representation would be more accurate
EDIT: You could probably approximate a heatmap's gradient colours by overlapping different-color circles on top of one another.
For instance, if the weapon deals any damage up until range 10, you put a light-green circle with radius 10. Then, if you calculate that the weapon deals 40 or more damage up until radius 5, you plot a concentric dark-green cycle on top of the previous one. So on and so forth.
there is OP and then there is ridiculous. The M20 mine falls to the latter.
The M20 costs 340 manpower and 20 fuel to replace; and that's your only way of laying mines as USF. Good luck finding that amount of manpower to replace the m20 for the late-game.
I've recently noticed the effect of the ReceiveAttackCommands flag under entity hardpoints (in the ebps files):
- Seting this flag to True for a particular hardpoint means that the gun will pick up the attack command. If the enemy is outside the arc of fire, the unit will rotate accordingly, first
- Setting this flag to False means that the weapon will ignore right-click commands. However, it will still acquire targets automatically within its arc of fire.
My question is:
- Is there a way to design a an ability that toggles the ReceiveAttackCommands flag for a particular hardpoint?
Now, let me motivate why I want this, with an example.
The reason I want to have an ability like this is to fix the Churchill Crocodile for a mod I am making. I want to allow the Crocodile cannon and the flamethrower to be controlled individually:
- You click the ability and right click on a tank; the cannon now aims at the tank
- You toggle the ability back and now you only control the flamethrower. You right click on an AT gun
- The end result is that the flamethrower is firing at the AT gun while the cannon is firing at the tank.
- (if possible, I would also like to have a 3rd toggle state that makes the user able to control both the cannon and the flamethrower at the same time)
So far, I have used a dummy weapon hack (like the OST half-track) for hardpoint1:
- While I am controlling the cannon, I set the hardpoint_01 to a dummy weapon with 360 cone of fire.
- While I am controlling the flamethrower, I set the dummy weapon to a 10-degree fire arc.
That way, attack-moving with the flamethrower means that the tank will continue to auto-rotate.
However, I have issues when it comes to ceding and gaining control of a gun (say the flamethrower). Since I can't find an action that lets me swap the ReceiveAttackCommands flag, I am using the following hack:
- I use 2 possible hardpoints for the flamethrower. One of them has the flag set to true, the other has the flag set to false
- Depending on the state of the toggle ability, one hardpoint has the flamethrower weapon, while the other gets a 360-dummy weapon.
However, this hack is problematic:
- The weapon does not retain its target when it "jumps" between hardpoints.
- An abusive user can completely skip the reload cycle by swapping their flamethrower weapons at the right moment. The counter-hack is to force a weapon reload every time the user swaps hardpoints. However, that will probably be annoying/unfair for the Crocodile user.
Romeo
Mr Smith
Luciano
Mr Smith
Relic Entertainment
