Glass Bowtie
Kirkinen Risk Control
Caldari State
44
   |
Posted - 2017.01.15 02:31:00 -
[1] - Quote
To OPs question, maybe. Obviously they work for the lore people, and at face value pretty much everyone else.
Unfortunately, just like everything else in Dust, balance is the issue. I'll go ahead and take another bunch of swings at the horse carcass.
To touch on what has been spoken about already, I would agree that mechs (or MTACs, whatever, I'm gonna keep saying mechs) would need to have a purpose. I would also agree that ISK is not a good tool for balance. It may help a bit with the general population but blue donuts, ISK farms, and any new forms of financial tomfoolery (of which there is guaranteed to be at least some) would throw this out of whack pretty quick, and in the favor of the games elites.
Now to the meat of the topic.
First off, something to consider. Let's say you have 2 HAVs, 1 ADS, 1 LAV, and 1 MTAC fielded by one side. At the minimum that's 5 players (obviously). At rough maximum (while still keeping the ADS on the low end at 2) you are talking about 11 people (that's 3 per HAV, 2 in the ADS, 2 in the LAV, and 1 in the MTAC). That's 11 players on one side tied up in vehicles. To make that number of people in vehicles not ridiculous I'd say you need at the very least another 11 people in an infantry role to avoid matches devolving into vehicle only. So that becomes a minimum of 22vs22 battles, and I think I'm well onto the light end in terms of what we want for vehicle numbers in battle. And if the idea was to keep vehicles severely limited per match to address this, I'd say don't bother with vehicles.
As we know, Nova will be small to start, and focused on not vehicles. I personally don't see Nova incorporating vehicles (not like a lot of us want) any time soon, if ever. But that's a topic for another time.
Ok, to the meat of the topic for real this time.
Balancing vehicles. How the f*ck do you achieve balance with vehicles. I think there are a few things to consider.
First, what kind of game will Nova be in regards to ability to lone wolf. This topic was rarely directly discussed, but should an online squad shooter require precision teamwork (headset and near regular squad mates) for everything to work as intended, or can you still maintain some kind of balance with people running solo against squads.
For most of Dusts time, it seemed the unspoken rule was it was a team game, and when opposing sides attempted to operate more or less as was intended, you got some really good matches. As team play degenerated so did balance, or so it felt. And as we know the standard operating procedure for Scotty was 1 side of nearly 1 Corp vs a side of solo randoms. A match making issue, sure, but it raises the question of over how much of the spectrum of solo/squad can balance be realistically expected to hold? In a 1v1 straight tank battle, will the tank with 3 familiar squad members always be victorious against the solo tanker, or will the balance be so that a lone wolf tanker can make up for the disadvantage in numbers with equipment?
Is Nova a team game or not? Obviously solo players can always have a go, but how much do you alter the balance of the game to cater to solo players? There were some great threads in 2013 dealing with the idea that tanks should REQUIRE more than 1 person to function (of which Godin was a part of, good to see you by the way Godin), and while I don't know if I'd go as far as agreeing with that, I'd say that if a HAV absolutely required 3 people to function (driver, gunner, EO or commander or something) it should be a f*cking monster, and said level of team play would provide for realistic and effective counters. If 1 dude can tank, everything needs to be watered down accordingly, and you start to have a lot less wiggle room when it comes time to balance what was a massive pile of vehicles and equipment. I'm not saying one way is better than the other, but CCP needs to know WHO THEY ARE MAKING THE GAME FOR when they attempt to balance.
Now, aside from conceptual sh*t, how do you balance vehicles. I've said this a few times before, not with straight damage, that simply doesn't work. A single vehicle health pool, and a vehicle that operates perfectly up until it explodes doesn't work. At least not with a game on the scale of what Dust was going for. Break vehicles down into something like Turret/Chassis/Propulsion (a la Front Mission 4). Split up overall vehicle HP how ever you want, it doesn't matter. This gives you some breathing room while balancing. Now, instead of having to make the threat be that one guy on foot will destroy your infinitely more expensive HAV, the threat can be that specialized AV may knock out your propulsion, or your turret making you extremely vulnerable to more powerful, harder to use AV, or other vehicles.
On top of the breakup of vehicle HP, I think the performance of damaged sections should degrade in relation to the sections health. For example, a heavily damaged propulsion section would result in reduced top speed, acceleration, turning, or any combination of factors like that (the thought of performing tree top gun runs in an armored Grims with a sputtering engine gets me hard). A damaged turret might lose accuracy, range, or turret rotation speed.
I feel this would address the AV/Vehicle dynamic, which was by far the most broken aspect of balance in Dust. It also allows for growth and diversity on the balance front, and I don't feel like it would be all that hard to incorporate.
Finally, I'd say maps need to be used to corral/direct vehicle use. I don't want to say there should be large sections of the map inaccessible to vehicles, but on the flip side are things working as intended when a HAV rolls through a street 1 inch wider than the HAV, deep into a fortification, sticks it's turret in a window and wipes out 2 or 3 guys? Is it OK that I can wiggle my dropship into an enclosed warehouse and open up on packs of people spawning at the last available letter held by their side? |