Profile of Mr.Smith

I'd have to see a screenshot to verify what's wrong.

Just make sure that you don't nest your requirement action inside a change-target-action->self, otherwise, you're checking your own unit for the slot item etc.

You think there's a way if incorporating different unit types to the same action? I was originally just thinking of have several post_damage_actions, one for each unit type I want where I can simply copy the previous code in its entirety, and change unit_type to say, sniper, and then change the veterancy to 3,000,000.

You could. That would be very difficult to maintain in the long-run though (e.g., what if you want the sniper to be worth 2x the experience? You'd have to remodify every single weapon).

Instead, I suggest (ab)using the slot item system to streamline XP worth.

- Each slot item, e.g., will be worth 50XP
- Each squad will hold a specific amount of (blank) slot-items denoting their worth (e.g., pioneer entities will be worth 4 slot items, and grenadiers will be worth 6 slot items).

Then, in your nested requirement action, the victor will gain 50XP points per special slot items that the squad was carrying

Then, to award 50XP per slot item, you have two options:

1) Create a nested requirement action, as follows:

Requirement action_1:
  {
  Award 50 XP
  requirement action_2
    {
    50 XP
    requirement_action_3
    {
      ....
    }
    required_slot_item count min = 3, max = 100
  required_slot_item count min = 2, max = 100
required_slot_item count min = 1, max = 100

2) Flat list of requirement actions
- Same as above, but not nested

The benefit of using slot-items is that you can extend it later on so that, e.g., when units gain veterancy they are worth more XP.

The reason I gave you two options is to see which one causes the least amount of lag; if any.

For the examples above, 50 XP is your unit quantum, and you should pick it as the greatest common divisor of all veterancy values.

Otherwise, you can further extend the system as follows:
- If you are comfortable with binary math, you can create (e.g.) 10 slot item types, to represent XP values 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. That way you can represent all integer XP values from 0 to 1023, without having to check for slot item stacking (which means fewer checks to run)
- Otherwise, you can use different slot item denominators like how we use for money IRL (5-dollar bills, 500-dollar bills, etc).

This part was very interesting and got me thinking.

I am not able to test this until I'm home again on Monday, but I'll ask anyway, in case you know. If I go to say, the pioneer_mp entity and go to health -> criticals, and delete all the criticals that trigger at 0 health, would the entity then be invincible? Or put another way, is an entity without 0 health death criticals unable to die?

That's pretty much it, yep!

For instance, the OKW Breakthrough officer model has a bug in that it is immortal to flame damage, due to the absence of death critical from flame weapons.

This means that if you try to take the officer 1-on-1 with a flamethrower, you can knock his health down, but he will never die

If so, I was thinking I could merely just remove all the death criticals from German soldiers, and create them on the USA guns instead.

Yep! That's precisely what you should do.

Note that you need to do this for -every- weapon that can attack german soldiers, though.

This list should include:
- USA weapons
- Soviet/UKF weapons (since they can also attack germans)
- Grenades
- All tank MGs
- All tank cannons etc
- Offmap abilities (even though you don't care about veterancy, offmaps should still kill units!)
- Damage-over-time weapons (e.g., molotov-like abilities deal both direct damage and damage-over-time)
- German slot items (which can drop and be picked by americans)

Also, note that some weapons already have insta-death-critical actions (e.g., snipers, pathfinders, demos). For instance, Pathfinder slot items have a chance to kill infantry units below 50% HP. If you don't fix this, pathfinders that trigger the snipe will kill enemy units but not gain any HP for it. For those weapons, you should also award XP, but double-check that you are not awarding double-XP (one for the snipe and one for the 0-HP).

Since I suspect that you want CoH1-style veterancy for USF, and if you want only USF guys to gain veterancy from kills, you can add a requirement for the ownership of the enemy unit to be german on west_german.

Example, on the M1_Garand, I could do:

post_damage_action:

So 1 action checks health and unit type and rewards XP, and then the next does the same check but will kill the target. I could then just copy/paste this action to all infantry weapons, and in theory can do the same to AT weapons as well (just change the death crits and unit type check).

What do you think?

That could work. Personally, I would place both actions under the same requirement check, as follows:

requirement action:
{
change target -> self
change target -> squad
veterancy action -> award 1,000,000 XP (so 8 pioneer kills yields Vet1)
}
{
random action:
trigger critical: soldier killed
trigger critical: make casualty
}
requires all:
unit_type = infantry
(required ownership german or west_german)
requirement_health = max 0, min 0

To minimize resource consumption, I would also set the following two flags to True:
- No-retrigger
- Instant requirement check

I don't think there is anywhere a fundamental reason why a 12-point map would fail where a 10-point map would work (I've seen a lot of terrible 10-point maps, whereas crossroads is an objectively good 12-point map; right?). However, I know for a fact that a 12-point map would discourage call-in meta more efficiently than a 10-point map.

The reason why a high-resource map wouldn't work well are rooted in the poor state of balance. A 12-point map doesn't create imbalance. It takes core-game imbalances (e.g., unit pricing imbalances) and magnifies them to the point that you'd have to be blind to ignore them (or only play competitive 1v1 in tournament maps).

In effect, a 12-point map is the best leverage we (the unofficial maintenance crew) can have to ask for flushing out the last remaining shit-stains of late-game balance. e.g.,:
- Repair speed imbalances (those make a world of difference when you have a large amount of tanks)
- Poor unit pricing (e.g., OKW P4/P5 cost same amount of manpower as OST P4/P5, but are worlds apart)
- Ridiculous popcap values (especially after critical mass has been achieved)
- Ridiculous off-map abilities, which you will see more often (e.g., Arty-Cover of yesteryear and, now, JU-87)
- Factions that have no useful ways of burning excess munitions/fuel (e.g., for Soviets, except for demo-charge spam)

Those imbalances are there. And, while 12-point maps will exaggerate those imbalances, it's not the map that created them. It's pure balancing oversight (and a myopic scope, of course).

So. In my opinion, unless the map poses significant issues that make it unplayable in the forseeable future (e.g., after FBP hits), don't ask the map-maker to make it yet another copy-paste of the same map. A map with resource inflation means you have to provision for a higher frequency of vehicles and abilities. That's great; it makes it not feel like every other 1v1 map out there.

- - - -

I understand that over the years, there have been some mapping guidelines, do's and don'ts for mapmakers to follow in order for their maps to be considered successful.

Those guidelines, however, are not the Bible or anything. A good creative process is taking those guidelines and (after mastering them) start bending them to elicit a particular type of playstyle.

Moreover, those guidelines are not infallible either. They're an educated guess of what seems to be a good idea based on previous trials of those ideas. However, balance changes, and the same guidelines may no longer apply.

For instance:

Elevation
- Everybody knows that adding elevation on hotspot areas is bad, because tank projectiles tend to collide with the terrain, right?
- Well, wrong; we can fix projectiles by making them ignore said elevation, and it's all good. We can also select which units should have projectiles that should ignore elevation or not. With those changes, elevation makes it so that the specialists perform better than the generalists in their intended role.

Garrisons
- Everybody knows that you should avoid garrisons at chokepoints at all costs, right?
- Well, wrong. Garrisons have evolved to become cancerous over the years, and that status has only been solidified by adding the insta-hop-in/out system.

Map geometry
- Everybody knows that FRPs make long-maps imbalanced, right?
- Well, FRPs are changing

Long, narrow corridors
- Everybody knows that you should avoid long corridors like the plague, right?
- While this is mostly true, the primary reason for this is live-version walking stuka. However the stuka is getting fixed.

I tried the method you described above, however, when changing target to "self" on the post-damage actions, I'm pretty sure self is the gun, not the squad, and thus when I tried the veterancy_action, it had no effect.

Self is probably the entity that fired the shot. Try the following:

Change target -> self
Change target -> squad
veterancy

To make sure that your setup works until that point, try this:

change target -> self
make dead

The above should make it so that every time you damage something, the squad member that did it died.

Then, to make this action only trigger if the squad is at 0% health, you need a requirement action that checks the health of the target. I really don't remember what it's called, but I'm sure it exists. You just need to check that the health percentage is at 0%.

First do your check for squads that have 30% or lower HP. That's because 0% HP entities tend to die.

Then. To make it so that you only award XP when the entities die:
- Remove soldier_killed and make_casualty from the criticals
- Change your requirement threshold from 30% to 0%
- Add the two to the weapon file you are modifying (along with the veterancy action but, obviously, not wrapped inside change-target-self); to preserve randomness, add them as a random action with weights similar to what they had

The kill_action combined with the veterancy_action only applies veterancy to the squad when it causes soldier_killed critical, not make_casualty.

Removing make_casualty from the target critical table fixes this. However, this makes it so there are no casualties being produced, and abilities such as interrogate wont work anymore.

I'm thinking there's no other way to implement this, other than messing around with the weapon files. Even if you manage to get the kill-action method working, you will have no way to tell what died. Then, you will end up in a situation where you will have to award the same amount of XP for a conscript kill as for a King Tiger kill.

The best solution I could possibly think of would be to use the death_action on the entity, but I would have to somehow find a way to target the squad responsible for causing the death. If I could simply do that, I could make each entity reward a certain amount of experience to whatever killed it. This would be the best solution I think. Do you know if it's possible to target a squad who is attacking you, or has killed an entity?

I don't think that any such action exists. At best you can use a target action to pick a random squad close to the squad that died to award the veterancy. However, that's probably not what you need. To see how the 'Target' action is used check the medic-auto-heal ability on USF medics.