The lack of strategy features in PR

[Tartantyco]

-I think you're just trying to make two wrongs a right here. The issues brought up in this thread are due to the focus on flags themselves and adding more importance to the flags simply exacerbates the issues, it doesn't deal with them. Additionally, it also slants the advantage decidedly in favor of the offensive team, possibly making it practically impossible for a team that's been pushed back to regain control. By giving people more of a reason to attack these small, singular objectives with no intrinsic value you will simply have more of the zerg rushing and lacking strategic and tactical gameplay that currently exists.

-As I have already stated, I believe this proposed game mode should actually produce the outcome you desire without starting to pile on a lot of carrots to what I think the participants of this discussion would agree is a somewhat limited game mode.

[job86]

I think fuzzheads point is very important since it is because the successful efforts from the devs to make PR a more slow-paced, realistic and diversified game, that most of us play it. Sure I also think that there should be incentives (game mechanics-wise) to achieve the objectives of these military conflicts but it ought to be approached very carefully and with much thought so we dont end up with Project Reality - Quake Edition.

[wuschel]

I fully support the post of the first Farks.

Strategy is about making choices between several alternative scenarios, and unfortunatly, this is what PR lacks in the AAS game mode. After having played a map a couple of times, the optimal approach towards capturing objectives becomes more or less clear on the strategic level: This reduces the commanders position to a coordinating job. Even the randomized AAS mode did not help here very much. On certain maps, there is even a repeating element in tactical situations, but this is unavoidable and not the topic of the discussion here.

Not beeing a soldier, I am wondering what the usual layout of warfare operations is. I can only guess, but I would say that a conflict is usually initiated by one side playing an active part, while the other side is more or less on the reactive side. As mentioned before, I find this aspect of war not beeing represented well in the classical AAS mode, which gives both sides equality in assets and strategic positions. On the other side, with both factions having different type of objectives and assets, the Insurgency game mode simulates the asymetric conflict quite well. Here, the BLUEFOR commander can do magic in organization and battle planning, for the map storyline is not mandatory to follow. The insurgents do not need an commander, for they play a more or less reactive part and are much easier to organize. However, they can negate their weaknesses very effectively on a strategic level once they adapt to certain asymetric war tactics.

Command and Conquer modified plus Counterattack

Another very creative approach towards a new game mode I remember was Counterattack: One factions attacks in AAS type capping order, while the other can only defend and wait for reinforcements, which enables it to strike back. While the predefined capping order was not the best in my opinion, I find the idea of making distinct attacker and defender roles a very simple approach towards the representation of an initial assault. In my opinion the removal of the predefined capping order here and introduction of several attack options would be the way to go here. Starting from a fraction of a map, the attacking team has to use its local superiority to reach its objectives at all cost. Some rough ideas for map objectives could be:

- destructable supply depots linked to spawning of certain assets
- destrucable static defending team spawn points
- captureable strategic locations (flags) give attacking team access to advanced assets
- the attacking team needs to capture a certain number of objectives in order not to loose the game once the round time has elapsed.
- give the attacking commander a choice (!) on asset spawn i.e tank and supply truck or APC and AA
- only the defending side can build firebases

To introduce this, one would not only require to balance defending and attacking assets on a map, but also mark out the realistic key strategic and tactical locations and transform them into objectives. These could be the Temple objective in Qwai River, or a small base on top of the mountains surrounding south village of Kashan.

Gibbon-6

[Farks]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]fuzzhead

Good discussion.

Heres a counterpoint to this old argument about objectives/strategy.

Right now we have in PR that the MOST IMPORTANT objective personally, is to stay alive. I think this is a key thing to note, and is absent in most every other multiplayer FPS that has respawn.

It does affect a players mentality I think, and I think encourages player to play more realistically (sometimes but not always). When your players life/vehicle is precious and a big factor in overall victory, I think you see players behavior to be a bit more slower paced/cautious, and a bit more realistic. If the objective is MORE important than your own life, then you will often rush to it, and try at all costs to get this objective, sacrificing your own life if need be in order to do it, because you know if the objective is yours, victory will be too, regardless of if you died in the process a couple dozen times or not

Although this is very noble of you to sacrifice yourself for "the greater good" lol, its also not creating a very good behavior in players, when they care more about taking objective than saving their own life they willing to take more risks and do some pretty stupid stuff all in the name of "capping teh flag!!!!".

I think to me, some of my most memorable rounds were when I had 0 deaths or close to it, and I think alot of other players can agree with that as well. Not saying that is the only way to enjoy PR, but certainly a slower paced game is a goal of PR's development, where rushing to objectives does not give successful results, but careful planning, tactics and strategy is key to victory.

I think vast majority of FPS players (this includes PR players) have a natural tendency to attack no matter what, there needs to be very little if any incentives built into the game in order to get players to attack. Majority if not all players will simply do this naturally, its usually the other way around, you have to BEG and PLEAD with them to stay and defend, as soon as an area is clear they are itching to move on and attack the next objective, regardless of whether its walking into a slaughter or not they often are heading to the next objective before they even capture the current one. It's just a natural instinct of most FPS gamers and I think that needs to be acknowledged in this discussion because you have to acknowledge natural player behaviors when developing gameplay with your "carrots and sticks".

Encouraging players to have even MORE aggressive behavior I don't think is going to help things in PR. We have tried our best to slow the pacing of the game down as much as possible, and reward defense and smart positioning as much as we can over just sheer aggressiveness and player "skill". However PR is still a game about rushing to places as fast as possible, moving out to attack as quickly as possible and generally doing things very aggressively, sometimes it works sometimes it don't but key point is, this behavior is deeply imbeded into the psyche of the FPS player, we dont need to tell players "hey, go attack", they will do it on their own, even if there is no objective to attack and ZERO strategic bonus to doing so!

Now talking about ticket bleed, the classic problem of ticket bleed I think is that once the enemy have started a ticket bleed, strategically there is little to no incentive to move forward (even though players will do this anyways). Whats worse though, is that once your team HAS a bleed, there is virtually NO incentive to defend, as its a losing battle. So essentially ticket bleed enforces an extremely aggressive strategy to be used most of the battle, with very little thought to defense. We hope that by introducing a ton of things in PR that defense would be more fun/interesting/useful, by adding all the deployables, the logistics system, etc. Adding a bleed negates most of that I think, and turns maps into slugfests between the 2 flags that induce the bleed, and the rest of the map/CP's are of little to no concern since by the time you get there, the ticket bleed will be heavy and one team will clearly be close to victory anyways.

Anyways that's a counterpoint to some of the arguments here, but I think the idea of adding ticket loss when enemy fully captures one of your CPs in AAS is a good one. Lets say for example 20 tickets lost each time the enemy fully captures one of your CPs. Adding ticket gain I think might drag on the battles for a long time, and I dont think the loss/gain should be large, as it does take away from what I mentioned earlier, the fact that STAYING ALIVE in PR right now is your #1 priority. That enables player behavior to be more realistic, player take less chances and dont act with a sort of suicide bombers mentality as much

Either way, I think its clear that AAS is very constricted because of the flags, and doesnt really offer a large strategy. I think youll see with newer versions we try to get away from AAS as much as possible and further develop the CNC mode, as thats what can offer true "strategy" to teams that are disciplined enough to follow a chain of command.

As for PRT etc.... I think it would be wise to adopt CNC as its main game mode as soon as the game mode reaches a point of maturity enough so that exploits are not as big an issue. AAS for competitive play I think is severely limiting and will always have that limit because of the nature of "flag capping". Other than the fact that currently there is not many CNC maps avaliable, I see no reason in the future that PRT should not drop AAS completely, in favour of the game modes that involve more deep strategy, planning and organization. As far as I see it, AAS is PR's "noob game mode", and hopefully when the more advanced game modes reach maturity we will see them played equally if not MORE than AAS.

As for mongol, I think your points brought up is a different discussion entirely, fitting the topic of strategy on maps but not really in the same way as the OP's point. Your gripe bout random AAS and what flags is relevant and what not also ties into making CNC and open style game modes more widely accepted and used instead of the "on-the-rails" AAS system that's been a mainstay at PR since beginning. The main objective for random AAS was to mix up maps and not have the action of each map focus on the same areas each time, thus keeping new/old maps fresh for much longer as you cant approach it the same way each time. It's not a perfect system but I think it has its merits, although yes a true open ended game mode would obviously be more desired than the AAS flag system.

I think alot of effort has been made to make insurgency both fun and strategically viable, and its been for the most part, hugely successful and popular. The game mode has nothing to do with flags yet it still remains strategic and tactically enjoyable. Hopefully in the future we can develop some more open ended game modes that involve conventional forces and don't involve "flag capping", for the more advanced players who are ready to evolve the gameplay further and organize entire teams with platoon wide tactics and strategy.

You have a good point and I agree. But, right now it's too unbalanced between surviving and completing objectives. I'd rather die 20 times and play with a good strat that pays off than dying 0 times but playing with a boring strat and camping in one spot for hours. We must remember that PR is a game. And with the limits the BF2-engine have, the best must be done with what's avialable. We don't have any proper cover or leaning system (at the moment) that would increase survivability in firefights, or the ranges most real life combat takes place in, or the numbers (PR have really pushed the 32-man limit far).

So, try and keep the survival instinct, but do something about the lack of strategy value.

[Liquid_Cow]

Rhino, try this on for an idea, you have two CP's basically placed on top of one another. In a city map you could have a general CP for holding a neighborhood with a wide radius. Within that CP is another, say a tall building a la the TV station that would be a strategic point to control. You could not hold the TV station until the city was under control. In an insurgent type map the red force would hold the TV and the city block around it, blue force would have to take over the block first, then clear and hold the building... once the building was held for "X" minutes red force would loose their area attack abilities.

You could launch an attack directly against the TV station w/o securing the neighborhood, not sure if you could make it so that the TV station could be held and not the neighborhood, but surround the high value cap point with spawn points that the red force could use only while they hold the neighborhood. Once blue force holds the neighborhood red force would have to move through the city block to reinforce the high value CP.

Make a map like EJOD where there were 2-3 building CP's and 4-5 neighborhood CP's. The only problem is, w/o a reward or bleed system there is no incentive to attack, as staying alive is more important.


Fuzzhead, you make many excellent points, some of which have caused me to reconsider my many positions on this issue, but if you really want to make people try harder to stay alive just get rid of the medics. As long as the uber AED is part of the medic kit allowing you to nearly instantly rejoin the fight, staying alive (from a point of realism anyway) is moot. I've rushed in and died dozens of times in a battle, yet my deaths counted as zero since the medics were waiting and part of the plan. As a sniper I once sent 3 of my squad mates to their "deaths" trying to flush an enemy sniper (in fact, the squad mates were pretending to be medics rushing to the fallen, enemy took it hook line and sinker), once he was neutralized our real medics revived all of them. IRL you get a serious injury you're removed from the battlefield, end of subject.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want PR to turn into AA where everyone waits and nobody dies for fear of having to wait 20 minutes until the next round (ironically if everyone rushed the normal match would only last 3). I just think there's a better mousetrap to keep players motivated to stay alive than removing the incentive/motivation to take risks:

1) Medics cannot revive, they can heal, but once you're down to say 90% injured you're gonna die and your team pays a penalty.
1a) Maybe a revive could me made if you were say loaded into an ambulance and taken back to the main base's "hospital" requiring a significant investment in time to accomplish
1b) You pay a ticket penalty to revive, so it only gets used when there is an urgent need for reinforcements, not every death merits a revive.

2) You cannot spawn back anywhere until there is at least 6 people dead and they must all spawn together at the supply point... IRL reinforcements don't come in ones and twos, they come by the platoon. One of the greatest disorganizers in game is when one player dies and has to solo from the main to catch up with the squad, it leads to solo vehicles too.
2a) You cannot respawn until 4 members of your own squad respawn with you. Talk about enforcing team cohesion and trying to stay alive.

BTW, remember in most FPS's the guy who doesn't die is known as a camper, and its not a respected role. vBF2 got rid of campers with the UAV and Scanner, its actually a pretty ingenious way about it if completely unrealistic.

[Liquid_Cow]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]fuzzhead

Now talking about ticket bleed, the classic problem of ticket bleed I think is that once the enemy have started a ticket bleed, strategically there is little to no incentive to move forward (even though players will do this anyways).

So what if both teams had bleed, and the only way to stop it completely was to control the entire map? The more CP's you have the slower the bleed, but there still is a bleed. In effect you turn the bleed into the countdown timer, successful attacks on CPs slow your timer while increasing the enemy's. It would be tricky to find the balance to where the bleed does not become more important than staying alive... but I think it could be done. It would have the side effect of ending one sided battles more quickly, no more waiting for the timer or the last guy to die after the last rally point falls.

The bleed could be balanced by making some of the middle CP's not affect the bleed rate, so an even match would not be swung by having just one more CP than the other guy.

[Zi8]

Originally Posted by Liquid_Cow

1) Medics cannot revive, they can heal, but once you're down to say 90% injured you're gonna die and your team pays a penalty.
1a) Maybe a revive could me made if you were say loaded into an ambulance and taken back to the main base's "hospital" requiring a significant investment in time to accomplish
1b) You pay a ticket penalty to revive, so it only gets used when there is an urgent need for reinforcements, not every death merits a revive.

I agree with this. Currently, medics just hit you with Epipen, heal you with the Magic Bag and you are back in the game in less than 30 seconds.

Maybe it could be changed that the Medics need more time with the "patient", e.g using more cpr and the actual healing process is much slower and maybe the bag couldn't give health infinitely. Also revived guys couldn't reach 100% health since they are still injured and not "normal" anymore.

I don't know if it's possible to make such changes since BF2 has it's limitations, but it's nice to see experimenting and changing things like the 1-medic-per-squad in the upcoming patch.

[Bringerof_D]

i like this idea, actually now that i think i about it it would be better if bleed was completely removed and tickets loss and or gain directly involved with capturing and or losing objectives, and of course k/d.

[freeway]

if u make vehicles spawn only when we capture flags then what is the fun of armor sq , heli sq and tanks , supply .... ? in battle we need all , not just supply trucks . ppl r gonna kill each other to get in vehicles because we dont know when we have that flag so no1 would create a sq for whatever they best in then noobs and some random guys will take those tanks choppers . It is always best when we have sq and ppl know what they r gonna do and be ... and we ll not see a nice battle with good tastics . assets are fine the way they r now dont make changes pls .

[SocketMan]

So you'll have (if # 3 is used) 2 teams defending whatever CP's they started with/got
to 1st -if CP's were neutral at the start.
There is a simple,single solution imo to this:

GET RID OF ALL NON-CAPS
(including carriers)