Is HTC trying to reduce GV play?

[hitech]

All of the whining about gvs you mention ia purely how supplies hinder gameplay... not gv's.  You are the 15th person trying to twist the words of others for whatever reason.  Gv supps effect your tank battles too.. the guys that might be defending their town in a tank are just scampering around dropping cartoon supply boxes.

Dont make this something it isnt.

I am really not trying to twist your words. Nor am I making any comment on its value or content. I am simply pointing out how you rather liberally use the word we.

HiTech

[hitech]

I am really not trying to twist your words. Nor am I making any comment on its value or content. I am simply pointing out how you rather liberally use the word we.

After re reading if your "WE" only referred to you and flipz, then I stand corrected.

HiTech

[ACE]

So mr HiTech how has the m3 numbers fluctuated since the troop removal?

[Randy1]

When I first started ah, I hated the Crater map coming up because it would suck thee air war dry.  Then after joining ET on GV and bomber missions,  i found I enjoyed the game much more if played the many venues AH offered.

The ah2 Crater was something I very much looked forward to in the map rotation.  Got killed a lot, but man it was a blast.  On vox one night, someone asked me how often I landed my tank kills in the Crater.  I said, "Man, you don't land kills in there.  You just look for another kill until somebody kills you."

[bustr]

Eliminating m3 troops is the latest change but it really began when we switched to ah3 and the map changes.

Greebo's Crater map would such the air war dry with the huge tank battles in AH2.  Now in  ah3, nothing.

Then the changes in tank island eliminating  the GV bases.  Now it is common to enter prime time with one country controlling the island.  Tank battles happen but are rare during prime time.

The distance on average for a GV to travel in ah3 to a red base has increased.

1. - M3 troops is Hitech testing something, we all have to wait for his results. He probably has no other way to get the exact data he is gathering contrary to a popular conspiracy theory about Hitech's master programmer sneakiness. Does the game have a monthly score category for the most supplies delivered to screw base captures?

2. - I copied the CraterMA TT crater to my terrain BowlMA as best I could, for the first few rotations GVers used it for nice battles. Now because I also set the GV spawns to follow the air combat front across that terrain, GVers follow the fronts instead. That is their choice not Hitech doing something to them. Or blame me for how I setup the spawn paths for GVers. I guess now I need to force all spawns to drop them at TT on my new terrain........  

3. - Copied the NDisles center island to my new terrain and added canals so I could add bridges. Hitech took time from his swamped debugging time to make the bridges work for the game so I could use them. He is always thinking about his customers. I made it harder to capture the feilds on that island but, Hitech will not  allow uncaptureable feilds away from the HQ\City area. If you can convince him, I will happily tag the three airfields in the center of my new terrain as uncapturable. No one can do anything about cheesy childish game play which is why those airfields on NDisles get captured when not enough players are on to defend them. I've tried to defend them against the kiddy hoard when there was only three of us, it's impossible, and they like it that way. A simple way to put a monkey wrench in that is one spawn from the next airfield back between the small airfield and it's GV spawns out to tank town. I'm still considering a spawn from the next island back into the TT area for each country. And that opens another potential can of worms for abuse and complaints in the forums.

4. - As far as I can see the AH2-AH3 terrain conversion function in the terrain editor kept all spawns exactly where they were relative to the targets they were dropping GV's off to go to. What changed was the clutter and trees being poorly implemented increasing your time spent navigating tight confined places. On my first terrain I addressed that and standardized all spawns at three miles from target center. It takes a tank 7 minutes from the spawn to the flag in town. Any faster and you are handing the town to attacking GVs or now, to M3 delivery trucks ending the capture fight prematurely. It took me 6 months to build that first terrain and 30 days of it were all driving GV's experimenting with trees and clutter while using a stop watch to understand these issues.

The best terrain tiles without tweaking them once you paint an area for GV's are in the Mediterranean tile set which is desert and Savannah, with some village and agriculture tiles just like the other tile sets. The Summer Europe and Pacific sets have farmland and village tiles which you can paint in place and not tweak. But, I found with the Europe set you had to exclusively use the farm village tile all the way to the spawn's attack target or start touching up with a grass tile and a lot of driving the ground with each touch up to open the space for navigation and seeing other tanks. The Pacific tile set I'm using on the current terrain you can paint in the agriculture tiles and leave it at that. You can drive full speed through bushes and bamboo but, visually it's claustrophobic because there are so many of them with few really long open vistas. You cannot see the ambushes waiting for you. So I've had to thin them with grass to come up with a GV combat friendly solution at almost every spawn. And there are a few unique places I've had to add trees to be fair to the tanks spawning in.

Most of the GV problems in AH3 is the lack of space to navigate, see where you are going, and see other tanks before you blindly crawl through the trees into their ambush spot. Other wise, the tree tiles and clutter tiles are very realistic if you want to bush whack and not drive down roads. No one uses roads if they are there to avoid being out in the open, so it's on whom ever is working on the terrain to make things AH GV combat friendly. I'm not sure if everything I've described is commonly known so far.     

[flippz]

Strange how you know what all players want.
i am not saying i know what all players want,but i know what i see.  fighter town on the ndislands map, full of planes.  maps with close spawns points, epic battles.  the other night the map with spawns for the v bases there were gv battles for hours.  look at buzzsaw, the airfields that are close there are super battles now that the flak is gone.  and again for some that's not there thing but i will say for a lot it seems to be.  close up front battles.

HiTech

[lunatic1]

Back in beta, I felt that there should have been terrain tiles with turf mounds for gvs to hide behind and maybe a tile with fewer trees.  The existing tiles are awesome, but I think that would add to gv experience.  As to the center of the island bases on ndsiles map, I wish they were uncapturable.  When they are captured by another country, it takes some players who want to participate in a gv battle out of the picture in the center of the map tank town.

one-eye

+1000

[lunatic1]

Please put the gv spawns in the center of crater back like they were in AH2. Respectfully requesting sir.

 

+1000

here is a person like I'm talking about--Mano doesn't fly he gv's in all the years that I have known him I have never ever seen him fly, even going way back to AH2.

[Mano]

On the original version of CraterMA I created the clear areas in TT by exploiting a limitation of the AH2 terrain system. I found that if I placed even the tiniest dot of water on any quarter mile square of terrain then all the clutter on that square would vanish. So by placing tiny dots of water on the tops of mountains I was able to clear large areas of terrain of trees and bushes etc. Now when the time came to rebuild the terrain for AH3 I found that this limitation of AH2 had not been carried over, the presence of water no longer affects nearby land clutter. Also unlike AH2 water has to be at 0 feet in AH3 so I couldn't place water on mountain tops. The different vertex spacing AH3 uses also screwed up my carefully designed TT cliffs.

So for all these reasons TT had to be redesigned for AH3 anyway. In early beta the only really clutter-free tiles were the snow and sand textures, so I wasn't able to create those clutter-free areas with green terrain. Later in the AH3 beta HTC made one of the grass textures clutter-free, but I wasn't about to redo all that work at that point. Besides I didn't much like AH2 CraterMA being a TT-only map so I wasn't too bothered about leaving it cluttered.

That is a really good explanation. Thank you for taking the time to let us know how the center of crater was made in AH2. That was the best map of all time.  <S> ....and I always wondered why there were tiny lakes up on top.  Now I know.

The center of Crater in AH3 is fine. There are lots of trees for cover, ridges to peak over, and other areas for a gv to hide.
It is an excellent area for GV'ing but the overlapping spawns do not create instant action like the old map.

But, my question is: Is is possible to put the three spawns going into crater from the three V bases in crater as they were in AH2?  That was what was unique to Crater in AH2 and why it was so much fun. GV's do not go to the center of Crater anymore.

Thank you.

 

[lunatic1]

Strange how you know what all players want.


HiTech

errr I did sound like Nugetx didn't I?
 just going by what I'm reading here.

[lunatic1]

All of the whining about gvs you mention ia purely how supplies hinder gameplay... not gv's.  You are the 15th person trying to twist the words of others for whatever reason.  Gv supps effect your tank battles too.. the guys that might be defending their town in a tank are just scampering around dropping cartoon supply boxes.

Dont make this something it isnt.

I didn't say anything about supplies hingering gameplay, I don'y think it does, its the horde that want to end M3 resupply not me.

[Lazerr]

You have me confused...

[bustr]

But, my question is: Is is possible to put the three spawns going into crater from the three V bases in crater as they were in AH2?  That was what was unique to Crater in AH2 and why it was so much fun. GV's do not go to the center of Crater anymore.

Thank you.

 

He had a gallery and a pit structure that was about 3miles across arranged in a triangle defined by mesas standing 2000ft over the pit. The TT object in the center of the AH3 crater is as big as the AH2 gallery and pit structure it's self at over 4miles across. In AH2 we all hid in trees on each gallery sniping each other across the pit with two of the three spawns down into the pit where the factory complex sat. I duplicated that in the center of BowlMA for the most part, it was used for awhile and then everyone started following the air combat fronts in their GVs. I suspect because on BowlMA it does not take very long to get to the town through the villages and pastures.

On CraterMA AH2 and AH3 the towns are still a long way from the fields and the GV spawns are in the same places a long way from the airfields. Hitech's rules for terrains do not include forcing the terrain builder to not favor air combat over GV combat. Just a general guideline about distance from the town or base for the GV spawn. GV spawns average between 3-5 miles out, and I set all of mine to 3 to ensure fighting time versus transit and getting lost in trees time.

And if you as a terrain builder do not pay close attention to how you setup GV spawns and how you setup your towns, you may bias against GVs without realizing it. Or worry that GV combat will contribute to making the rest of your terrain a ghost town during prime time. I balanced it on BowlMA and the whole community is not hiding in GVs like had been worried where this game was headed. The AH2 tank crater created a lazyboy recliner style easy shooting arcade with a little side action for the more inclined to take risks. It was never that the rest of the terrain wasn't an excellent air combat and capture bases terrain. It was that accidental genius of a crater was too easy to get kills in with little risk if you were not inclined to do anything but press a button.

So it looks like there are some wish list items here about the over all GV game from the responses to this and other recent posts that are very grumpy.

Wishes:

1. - Make Greebo blow out the crater TT on CraterMA and put it back exactly like it was in AH2. <--That would be very unkind to Greebo, and how would you force him to do it?

2. - Make the new AH3 tree and clutter tiles exactly like the AH2 tree and clutter tiles so tank combat in AH3 will be back to like AH2.<-- Not sure how this is even possible considering AH2 and AH3 are not the same programs.

3. - Have Waffle make a berm dotted clutter tile or berm objects, and make someone modify all terrains with them.<--If Hitech does not make them a requirment for terrain acceptance, they probably will get forgotten by terrain builders. How many remembered the bridge objects included in the terrain editor?

4. - Put the troops back in the M3 and tell the air guys to stop making Hitech screw with the GV game. <-- I've gotten the sense from reading the forums and text\Vox in the arena. There is an ongoing background feeling by dedicated GVers that Hitech looks at the GV game as a side show when he changes things in the game. Testing the M3 by removing the troops over a perceived air combat side of the community's demand, is not making them feel good including all the rest of their gripes that has helped them dredge back up.
 
5. - Put the vBase objects back on NDisles that were swapped for three too easy to capture small airfields with map rooms on them. <--Gotta admit that place is hopping during prime time now days. Could have always enabled a few fighters from the hanger, I tested that runway during the alpha/beta with all the fighters in the game. 50% fuel made getting off the ground easy with no ordnance for many. Another 100ft or so would be gold for takeoffs, landings would be interesting. I think absolutely no combat aircraft launched is what this wish really wants back in those locations. There is not an extensive network of GV spawns across water between islands on NDisles for GV combat, there are few and all localized. This could be solved with a network of cross water spawns ringing the terrain, the field layouts have an obvious capture path by shortest distance between feilds.

[The Fugitive]

Strange how you know what all players want.


HiTech

I understand what your saying, and he cant possibly speak for everyone, however, you COULD add a poll for players as they log in asking if players would like the "old" style crater Tank Town back. Then you would know for sure what the players think.

[bustr]

Depending on many factors there are a number of scenarios Greebo might have to go through to change the AH3 crater back to the AH2 crater.

I can see some, Greebo might have to do it by hand and probably from memory or at best if he still has a copy of AH2 and it's terrain editor, do a 1:1 scale mapping long hand into a sketch pad looking at it inside of the AH2 terrain editor. Then long hand re-sculpt the center of that AH3 crater using the sketch pad drawing and primary coordinates used as corner key points. Or, he might be able to export an elevation file from the AH2 version if the files even exist anymore from AH2 and prep it in L3DT for AH3 as an import. The new import "might not" require him to re-visit every square mile of the whole terrain after tweaking and repainting the change that he prepped in L3DT. That is a long shot "might not".

A consciousness person would visit every square mile just in case the elevation file being re-imported just to change the crater is no longer exactly like the AH3 terrain. It probably won't be, I suspect Greebo used the opportunity to tweak the landscape in other places.

Another really horrible thing would be, once he exported the height file from the AH2 version, he exports a height file from the AH3 version. Both will be 4096x4096 work spaces, I've done this by the way and it's work. He maps what the coordinates of the area of the crater will be as a square in the exact center of the height file. Copies that area from the AH2 file and pastes into the AH3 file. What matters is being able to edit that RAW file format in an art editor that recognizes it. Allows you to do a copy and paste, then the saved RAW file is in a format either L3DT recognizes so you can file format prep with an export for AH3, or the AH3 terrain editor recognizes and imports the file format of the merged height files. there is still no garuntee this will be exactly the same as that area of landscape from the AH2 crater. And he will have to remember before saving the thing to rotate it 90 degrees I think to the left. Otherwise, all of his bases and spawns will not line up on the land because the terrain will be 1\4 turn out of place.   

Or you convince him to once again convert the AH2 terrain to AH3 and repaint and retweak all the things he did over about 6 months to get the AH3 CraterMA to where it is today but, he keeps the AH2 tank crater structure in place.

Remember this from the list of GVer terrain wishes?

<--That would be very unkind to Greebo, and how would you force him to do it?