GV time trials to town.

[bustr]

On my bowlma terrain I'm using the village tiles as GV spawn points. A big complaint for GVers has been the trees swallowing them in their denseness and slowing them to a blind crawl. I've been taking part in GV assaults on CreaterMA to look at this first hand. Making players get lost in trees two to three miles away from the town just to get at a fight has no meaning or purpose in that dense of a clutter, unless you want to slow GVers to a crawl and hang them out for bombing. The village tiles are a logical real world place tanks would drive to take advantage of the hard roads and effective transition lanes. It's a logical place to setup ambushes while not being able to spawn camp out right.

I have about 90 of 153 bases laid down in my terrain. While doing this I've been offline testing on the terrain for GV accessibility to objectives to give them more open view ability for shooting and transit. While trying to balance this for the defenders to not loose a town in minutes while they are transiting to the town to fight for it.

I've standardized at 1.7 miles from the town center for GV spawns to a field "for now". This places them in a village tile instead of most of the time with their face stuck up some group of trees hind end. It may make it better for tank busters, still there is the obligatory wirbel. My testing so far has been with a panther, and stop watch timing it's run from the spawn to the map room and the GV hanger on the field to the map room. The average from both locations is 4 minutes. If I move the GV spawn out any farther obviously the airfield panther will win the race. But, I'm trying to get GVers to the fight with other GVs and not with trees like happens on CraterMA right now.

For now that big open grass space is how much I detest T34's blowing my brains out from the trees in your arm pits everyone has painted all the way up into the airfield object tile. I also paint grass for a mile past the end of runways to help jabo and over laden bombers get in the air. And for some the possibility of rolling the last 50ft onto the runway with a dead engine. Looking at European airfields from ww2 you see many with grass buffer zones around them.

The two screen captures from the terrain editor shows how I've related the village tiles to the town and the GV spawns. Along with the 1.7mile radius ring for setting the spacing. I should probably stick part of a village in the big open grass space to the town. It creates a shooting gallery for an enemy GV up on one of the town hills forcing the defenders to crawl through the trees and farm fields.

So GV spawn at 1.7 miles and a 4 minute 1.7 mile run to the map room both attacker and defender. Is this a good compromise to get GVers into the fight and get rid of the trees as contestants in the map room race?

[bustr]

Did some more testing with the panther getting from the spawn to town or base to town. GV's are not much fun to drive around on some of the tiles because of the trees. Others have very few trees but, will make a GV trying to get to the town a sitting duck for 1.7 miles if the town is a few feet higher than the airfield or the enemy tank gets up on one of the town hills to be a sniper. One of the best all around tiles to give a GV speed of transit, quick hiding spots, and long range firing lanes are the 4x4 village tiles.

Trying to cobble something together by blending several tile types creates a confusing mess that cannot be easily driven on. Other than using only the grass tile or one of the high elevation tiles above the alpine pine tree solid grove tile. Then you start having no real places to hide from that hill sniper at the town.

The 4x4 village tile is a work of genius for GV combat whether you use a single tile, several end to end, or even half a single 1x1 part of it. Wonder how long Waffle played with it to get the mixture of spacing between trees and buildings along with long open lanes for long range firing solutions just right......

 

[ghostdancer]

Well if you played with laying down a grass texture and then repainting ares of it with a 25% forest texture or another texture and that didn't product a workable results. The only other thing I can think of is to turn on all shapes and start to place individual trees and stuff. Its doable but very tedious. Once done you can select them all and save them to a group so that you can lose the layout again somewhere else by just selecting the group and placing it. I have place individual items before but nothing on that scale though so while hypothetically feasible not sure practical it would be.

The other option would be to create a new tileset and a specific new texture to replace one of the existings one with what you want. Of course then you have to learn the object editor and build it all. Which again not something that you can do fast. I don't actually have any experience with the object editor, MrMidi and 68falcon did all that work back in AH2.

[bustr]

After getting the screen shots for this post, it became obvious I just need to move the GV spawns back to about 2 miles or another village tile or some portion of it. Inside the editor, yes the village tiles don't look as neat against most of the other clutter. In the actual arena offline, they blend right in and make quite a bit of sense out of the town and airfield transition reality. And they are obviously purpose created for GV combat.

You can see my solution in this post's screen captures. I'm just using the erector set Waffle gave us which makes the terrain editor a no brainer. Trying to micro custom blend the new clutter just ends up with GVers screwed. I wasted a lot of time custom blend testing around an a airfield\town for time trials.

http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,383281.0.html

[ghostdancer]

I know how you feel and believe me I tried to micro manage a few things to only to realize I should of have just stayed with the default to.

[bustr]

OK it's 2 miles on the spawn due to the openness of the villages, and the open crop land with only roads boarding all four villages, you need to drop a 1\8 mile hedge row farm land line into it if two village tiles are in a row to be fair to the GVs coming from the spawn at a diagonal out from the town. Having a village fill the open grass area between the field and town saves the GVs trying to get there from a sniper on one of those town hills. It's about 2800yds from the foremost hills to the GV hanger. The village masks the GVs from being slaughtered.

I've got the panther now to 5 minutes on average from the new spawn point to the town map room on a stop watch. That is about the most time your average GVer will put up with getting somewhere if he is not a 49er.

Now I have to revisit all the other spawns....waaaaaaaa!!!!!!!. At least the GVers will feel better about the new clutter tiles and the eyecandy with this terrain. It wont all be the south bound hairy kestered end of a north bound spruce clump kind of complaints lunatic is making.

[bustr]

Correction, GV spawns out to 2.5 miles, can't read the forums and test spawns at the same time I guess.....