Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Open Beta Test => Topic started by: Randy1 on September 05, 2016, 05:57:57 AM
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Tank battle player numbers are way down in AH3 PR.
Too many trees?
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It won't stay this way forever.
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Too many trees?
Despite the current number problem due to having two versions up at the same time, I do think the new terrain will have a massive impact on places like the crater & ndisles TT areas.
Remember the great terrain update in late 2006 or early 2007 (would have to look up the exact date)? Suddenly hedges everywhere (and more distant spawns) and players simply walked away from it in large numbers.
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I like the trees at this point. May learn to hate them later but..... right now, they seem to give a bit of a chance to survive a bit longer. Just that little bit to be able to spot enemy tanks. Close up tree force you out into the open a bit more to take a shot, but trees hiding tanks don't seem any different. Have killed a few shooting in between trunks and under the foliage.
Spent a few hours Saturday playing and it was fun. Did some spotting in a jeep on a ridge with zoom calling out targets.
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The trees do make it hard to see enemy tanks but I will say the towns make the tank fight another game entirely, hills surrounding town and the bridges add a lot to the ground game.
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Yep, GVing has changed. You can get lost or distracted navigating to the enemy maproom and get snipped along the way. Stone cold killers like gyk and 715 have adapted and are deadly in anything I've seen them in.
Notice though that the driving distances to the maproom is 3 miles now instead of the 5 miles in AH2. I don't know if that will stay permanent, but that's what I'm seeing right now.
Also, some terrain sets are more open then others. In the Beta/PR I would judge ETO as the most dense, followed by PTO and MTO in that order.
If the people coming into the New AvA for our events are any indication, then the GV war is going to take off after people try it for awhile.
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I bet GVing will come back fine. The long range sniping will be reduced with the terrain foilage, but that just needs changing from a camping mode to cat-n-mouse hunting mode. Looking at old Normandy hedgerow pics with just a cannon poking out from the shrubbery can be reproduced easily in these forests. I would love to see a tweak on cannon shell detonations on foilage. Shooting 5 to 10 feet over a palm tree in plainly clear area free of foilage should not detonate your tank shell. NDISLES current map tank area is great, the hills and valleys and smaller more numerous building areas are great for GVing, really requires the DR7 shoot-n-scoot method. The last few maps are good too, but the lack of hilly terrain made the trees the only areas suitable for keeping a GV out of the open.
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I like the cat and mouse GV'ing in AH3. You need to get up close and personal in order engage and get a kill. I need a heck of lot more stop-and-listen's than I did in AH2, but it is great gaming. I can foresee the need for the GVers to communicate a lot more in AH3, do a lot more slow probing, and rely a lot less on the 4,500-yard kill shots. One thing you may never see again are 2,000 yard kill-shots while motoring full speed over terrain. Maybe on a beach, but not in the woods. In fact I haven't engaged another tank out beyond 1,800 yards, simply because I couldn't see any.
PS - This morning I was trying to shoot up a town with an M4, and AKAK was defending in a panther. He got me the first sortie before I entered town, and I never saw or heard him. Just, wham, I'm in the tower. Second sortie I went wide and entered town on the side without the bridges. I had plenty of good cover, and rolled around town leveling it. I heard him trying to find me, but I still got the town down. At the bitter end, I saw him cross a bridge into town, and nailed his tread to successfully track him. But slewed his turret around to find me and got a kill shot off before I could get moving. My guess is that if I had kept my engine on and stayed mobile, I could have kept myself hidden and still tracked him. So my lessons learned are: 1) cover is king, 2) stop and listen but don't leave yourself exposed, and 3) the bridges are choke points / kill zones for both sides.
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This is why I've been adding more static tanks to my gunnery training terrain to help a player learn to anticipate ambushes or see hidden tanks in the trees. I even got lost testing it trying to get to the town through farmland I updated. It was demoralizing how close I had to get to the tanks I hid in ambush spots before I was aware of them. Putting tanks down in the terrain editor after flying through the trees with the keyboard to setup ambushes is not like spawning into that same area offline and trying to find the ambushes in a tank.
After getting shot at a few times delivering troops online, I'm updating static tanks to create as many logical ambush spot as I can after getting whacked online. The new tree and terrain clutter is a GV ambusher's heaven. And the town itself is one big GV ambush. So I've hidden tanks in my town in ever logical ambush spot.
When stampf first drove his panther into the tank town trees during the closed alpha and refused to do anything but GV. It was obvious what would happen when the game went live. Other testers complained that they had driven within 600yds of his tank and never saw it. That is why I ended up using a lancaster with 1000lb bombs as a spotting plane to find him.
If you are in commander mode and not slightly zoomed, you will not see some tanks 600 and closer sitting under trees because of the shadows. My gunnery terrain is good for training your eye since the static tanks have no icon or engine sound.
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What caught my attention most was the Crater map. In ah2 the crater tank play would just about suck air combat dry. Canon fire just about constant during prime time. In ah3, tank battles in the crater are nearly zero.
I agree with Redcatcher, the M18 is well suited for all the trees with its speed.
One point though, graphics setting have a big effect on the trees. Too much effect. The perfect setting as it is now, would be slide the sliders to the left to find the red tank then back to the right to shoot to avoid hitting hidden trees in the low graphics settings.
Time will tell. Who knows, ah3 might lead to some of the best tank battles ever.
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Who knows, ah3 might lead to some of the best tank battles ever.
already has in the AVA!
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The M8 likes AH3
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Last "night" I was able to navigate my M3 to the town using the stars. :D
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What is going to aggravate tankers is getting stuck in trees and not being able to back out, Happened to me last night, you drive for 10 minutes and think you can make it through 2 trees and wammo your stuck with no damage to GV buy unable to turn right or left or back up. :furious
Also BEWARE of the CABBAGE! Instead of making the Rocks strewn across the ground obstacles there is a cabbage little plant that stopped me dead in my tracks so an aircraft could pick me off while I was 1000 ft from resupping a town. :rolleyes:
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AH3 is a different ball game for GV'ing and for the positive. I am looking forward to the challenge when everyone is in there.
:salute
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Loving the new GV game. No more wide open spaces. Cant wait till everyone is in here. Do have to be careful with the trees ,have gotten stuck couple times myself, but I can say I have not had my tank flipped by a bush yet.
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Remember if you get stuck in trees and can not get out after trying for awhile or hit a plant that stops your tank report it to the bug thread using the dot command .psave filename
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Bustr. I appreciate all the work you put into this and your many helpful posts. Is your gunnery training terrain a available and,if so, how do we access it? I checked offline but didn't see it. Thanks
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I'm waiting for AHIII live so that there is the smallest chance I don't hand players left over bugs. Each time a new patch is released I run a build on the terrain. Hey I also keep updating it. You now have a large fleshed out farm land area with a spawn to work your way back to the town through ambushes. And I've updated more tanks into other areas around that town.
All the white rings are tank spawns. The upper left one on the mesa is for wirbel\osti to get 500yds under the drones. The long grassy feild is a 4 mile range to learn your sights against tanks out on it. There are several hundred tanks on this terrain to learn your sights and to learn how to spot in ambush positions.
Lots of ambush spots, and don't forget all the tanks in the town.
(https://s20.postimg.org/8abhgk1hp/tanks01.jpg)
See tank town, more ambush spots.
(https://s20.postimg.org/lsidsudn1/tanks02.jpg)
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Whoops! I remember now that you said in an earlier post you were waiting for AH to go live. This should be a great help. Thanks.
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I'm not that big into GVs but I had fun the other night defending one of our bases in a Panther. I managed to ambush 8thJinx (the engagement he mentioned in his post) just outside of town and a panzer that was crossing the bridge into town. Ended up getting 3 more kills before 8thJinx returned in another tank and managed to track my Panther, ending my fun but got the most kills (6) in a tank in a very, very long time.
Another time I spawned a Tiger at P14 on the NDisles map and busted up a spawn camp the Rookies had and made TED whine. Very fun. Now I just got to save my perks so I can up a Tiger II and have some real fun.
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The only thing I don't like about ah3 is my m3 sounds like panzer... Etc
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The only thing I don't like about ah3 is my m3 sounds like panzer... Etc
I can guarantee that will not last forever.
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I can guarantee that will not last forever.
:banana: :aok :joystick: in waiting patiently
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The only thing I don't like about ah3 is my m3 sounds like panzer... Etc
I don't know if it's just me but all GVS sound exactly the same in AH3. Can't tell an M3 from a tiger.
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I bet you all were using a custom sound pack of one flavor or another in AH2.
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Yes I use twinbooms
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I can guarantee that will not last forever.
Not after it's hit :banana:
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Last night we had brief episodes of great tank fights. When ah2 is closed, we might be looking at some epic tank fights in ah3.
And the art work. WOW! The GV world in AH3 is super. I got killed twice last night driving around looking at the buildings.
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I had so much fun last night in ah3 I may never go back to ah2! Even tho they're a few red guys I'll miss over in ah2! Hey mano tell tyfoo to get his butt over to ah3
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Changed out the farmland south of tank town for three villages and open agriculture land. Tank town has about 100 tanks hidden in it, so I can put about that many into the new south land. You can see in the second screen capture two gunnery ranges, 4 mile, 4000yd. All the white rings with arrow are GV spawns.
Don't worry, the distance from the far south spawn to the center of tank town is only three miles, about average for GVing in the game. At least the tanks in here won't shoot back while you are trying to see them. Oh!! just because it's a small airfield, you can air spawn fully loaded B29's at 15k to practice level bombing against the level bombing target at the end of the 4 mile range, the CV's or anything on the island.
(https://s20.postimg.org/zd95rytfx/tanks02.jpg)
(https://s20.postimg.org/vsda8qowd/tanks04.jpg)
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Scotty!!! Tyfoo is deadly in AH3, all I get is the scraps left over when there was one he did not see LOL. :D :D :D
It is a totally new ball game for GV'ing. I like all the trees, dips in the terrain, bridges, and houses. Camping a spawn will be more difficult unless you really have good numbers in your favor. The trees do provide lots of cover. I thought they forgot to put berms for the gv's, but the terrain has so many areas for gv's to get the hull down or areas to hide, berms are no longer necessary. Also, you have to take a bridge when there is water......no two ways about it. The chokes points create tank fights. :neener: The trees also provide cover from the a/c. They can find your gv, but it takes more effort.
I am with you. After spending time in AH3.....I kinda don't feel like going back into AH2. Last night there were over 100 people in AH3.
:salute
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I had so much fun last night in ah3 I may never go back to ah2! Even tho they're a few red guys I'll miss over in ah2! Hey mano tell tyfoo to get his butt over to ah3
Oh, Tyfoo has been in AH3, trust me. He and I had an awesome time in one of the valleys outside the ring of V bases on tank island.
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I'm not that big into GVs but I had fun the other night defending one of our bases in a Panther. I managed to ambush 8thJinx (the engagement he mentioned in his post) just outside of town and a panzer that was crossing the bridge into town. Ended up getting 3 more kills before 8thJinx returned in another tank and managed to track my Panther, ending my fun but got the most kills (6) in a tank in a very, very long time.
That was my first foray into an AH3 town with a rocket M-4. The graphics of that encounter were spectacular, although I was surprised I knocked a tread off in one shot.
Tactics will have to dramatically change in town missions, since sight lines are so much better in the AH3 towns than AH2. Literally like going from fighting across a dome to fighting in a bowl. Have to start bringing AP along.
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You are more then welcome to try AvA Thursday Night Tank Fights if you like intense tank on tank action.
We're drawing more people for every episode now.
Also, next Saturday Night, the GV aspect is critical to AvA War The Invasion of France ! 1940. It's frame 2.
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So I thought I just finished placing 200 tanks into the new villages and farmland. Spawned in on that south spawn of tank town from my screen shot, and drove up the road all the way to tank town. I don't have near enough tanks just off the sides of the main roads so you have a chance of spotting something. And all the ambushes I setup, if the sun wasn't in the right position to put light on some part of the tanks under the trees, I drove right past tanks within 600 of me. I stopped at one spot I knew I had tanks ambushing the main road, while I was looking for them with zoom, the sun moved a few degrees. Suddenly I was sitting in the center of the ambush.
Hitech knew what he was doing introducing the storch, and I think M8 jocks are going to become hero's of scouting for the tanks. And here I used to take out a lanc with 1000lbers to mark GVs in tank town when it was first being tested because I couldn't see them.
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Spawn camps are alive and well. Ran into two so far. Both were not quite as effective or you might say, complete coverage, as some in ah2 like v85.
I really like the new towns, and the surrounding hills, and ways to get in town both from an attacking standpoint and defending.
The rising and falling land too makes it more real life like than ah2.
Had an M3 stall on a hill then slide back down. Neat!
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Well, I did check out TT tonight. Just over 100 players in CraterMa. 1 friendly, 2 enemy players in tank in TT (Did a recon run with film running). All were just sitting there most of the time, papparently listening for enemy movements. Indeed that reminds me somewhat about the "hedges" TT redesign of 2006. Perhaps all that cover and the short range ambush terrain made them afraid to move?