Hello everyone.
First off, my sincerest apologies for not posting a January update. With school beginning once more and my cat Alfred having a stroke I didn't have much time to think about the more "Housekeeping" oriented tasks of modding. He is recovering just fine and school is setting itself in as regular as that can be, filled with all the issues which I'm sure most people can understand from learning history about a period in their spare time and then having someone rattle off the basics from a textbook.
But I digress, that is a completely different matter entirely, onto the mod's progress!
First off, I have essentially completed the infantry for the modification. This involved massive tweaking here and there and internal testing, and I even had to go off and redo population cost, pricing and reinforcement and the experience tables.
I would release the modification as is now, but I'll give everyone an example of why I need to hold off on doing this in order to fix the glaring issues that the default relic experience tables have.
As an example, we have Partisans with SVTs. At the closest range bracket, they hit 60% of the time (0.6).
Now this unit, like every other unit gets an instant additional modifier on being built of 1.15 for their accuracy. So take 0.6, times that by 1.15. By the time this unit acquires Vet level 3, their percentage to hit on that same number which used to be 0.6 in the engine is literally 1.15. That means they theoretically hit 115% of the time, which is absurd.
This makes sense when you factor in received accuracy as a counter balance, which essentially reduces enemy chances to hit your unit. But as I am removing this from play for the most part in order to facilitate a more consistent release candidate (AKA: Battles will make more sense and the chances of your unit simply doing little/no damage to another whatsoever because of some magical value is gone) breaks the other half of this balancing scale.
I have finished the infantry tables, but all crewed weapons and vehicles are still left to be finished. Currently they do not have realistic statistics either, but simply higher damage to keep the combat pace up.
At the end of the day as we do not have a logical "rear" armour value, it was decided internally to model frontal and side accurately. Rear hits (As in on the rear of the vehicle itself, not the back half) do more criticals and have penetration modifiers on them regardless, so there is still a difference between "Side" and "Rear".
I also aim to remove vehicles running over infantry, as this has proven to be incredibly unfair because the player cannot dodge the vehicle himself and the infantry AI often runs itself into a corner. This isn't Red Alert 2, and it really doesn't have much place here. For now, main weapons on vehicles (Unless specified as HE such as the Brummbaer or Sherman HE round) will have massively reduced splash damage to prevent entire squad wipes on one hit.
In the future, all vehicles will have every critical that exists in the game engine so far (Crew based ones, driver/loader blinded and things of that nature) as well as different types of ammunition to swap to on the fly like the Sherman. Crews will also be included eventually also.
I can see the criticals, vet tables, splash damage all being ready for the first release candidate. The different types of ammunition and realistic armour values will most likely not be however, and will use vanilla values for the moment.
I hope this has been informative and I apologize for the lack of updating. I'm not dead, and a release candidate is not that far off. I won't give a date because it isn't fair to anyone to do so, it presses me unnecessarily to shove something out and it gets everyone's hopes up for something that might not happen.
But rest assured a release is coming, it'll be as balanced as I can make it and my goal is to ensure that the experience isn't plagued with bugs/broken content and anything of that sort. So far there isn't any of that in game, so I think you'll be pleasantly surprised this time around.
Thanks for reading!
Awesome!
I only disagree at one point: You don't really have to remove vehicles running over infantry. While it still exists, you should make sure that player feels that this isn't a viable tactic, provide an incentive to him to keep his tanks back. You wouldn't go crush pesky Riflemen knowing that your Tiger won't survive that encounter.
If you want I can share some of the stuff I used to exchange realistic armor values to in-game values, and I really want to know more about how you did side armor.
Keep it up!
Thanks! good to hear! I've even gone so far as to buy CoH2 for this!
Are you planning to use fewer models so as to keep the size of the game like you were planning to do with Normandy1944?
I would say that it really depends on my skinner and modeler. The issues with Ken's system were:
A) It was disorganized and needlessly clustered.
B) He began working when "Upgrade" methods were not fully realized and implemented, and never adapted to these changes in workarounds.
Basically every soldier that had a different skin or weapon had his/her own file. Skins will be heavily varied in our mod as they have always been, but for the most part divisional markings will not be implemented to keep me sane.
The "Upgrade" workaround lets me put whomever I want in whatever type of squad, and as soon as said unit is "built" and enters the battlefield they are automatically applied with an upgrade which changes their loadout.
I could give them whatever default weapons I want and use that same entity in all types of units and they could have many different weapons because of this. When Ken first started, this wasn't really understood and he simply never got around to changing it.
I have conversed the number of skins per division/unit with my Skinner many times, and I will point out that most of my references are based on the Osprey collection of books. My skinner has been given free reign to do his own if he finds something to his liking however.
Case and point, there will be all the variation you need. Don't expect it anytime soon as we need the modding tools to even fiddle with things of that nature. But it is most certainly going to be a feature!
very cool to hear. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't heard of the Osprey books...
What can we expect in terms of squad sizes?
Less than 10 at the moment. 10+ breaks the UI and it looks awful, and unit AI cannot firmly grasp/understand cover.
7 seems to be the current highest as I haven't gotten custom formations working. Perhaps 9 in the future, but I'm trying to stray away from large numbers and simply improve the amount of squads on the field rather than the men per squad.
At the moment squad sizes are all larger, but the Germans still are at the bottom with five men in almost every case. Soviets are at 7, and most American units are at 6.
This is just for the sake of maintaining balance at the moment, and will of course change in the future.