About balance。。。。

Your objections and opinions are welcome here, but I take offense to your remark that “balance is a joke“.  Seriously?

I believe the AI was tweaked about 6-9 months ago to give players a real challenge against the AI.  Since that “tweak”, Olhausen and Mongalong have been trying to reel the difficulty in bit by bit. Most notably, the difference in Airplane attacks from earlier versions of the mod is much easier to deal with now.  AI arty is currently being addressed and you should see some reduction in it’s frequency in the near future.

If your play style against AI is to sit back, build up defenses, and have the AI come at you with wave after wave, then this mod may not be for you.  Also, in my experience a lot of how the AI behaves is very dependent on the map you play.

In response to your balance discussion, if 2-3 Sherman 76’s shouldn’t be able to tackle a Panther or Tiger, how many would you suggest then?

I’m sure the other devs will be able to address your balance questions/issues with greater detail than I.

[quote quote=4388]I got something have to say,PVP is fine, PVE, blance is a joke,nomatter what doctrine AI choose，they can use all kind of weapons，armors，vehicles，artillerys，even attack ability of their nation。。。That meens AI can use bombardment to destory your air defense，use air support to destory your tank and infantry，then use their tank and infantry to occupy your territory。They are no weakness。。。。So every game vs AI become very difficult，this does not change with the difficulty of the AI。Everyday i spend more than one hour to restart the game， just want to find a game the AI doesn’t use air support to reduce difficulty。The air defense unit occupies a large population which should use to build tanks，spgs，infantry。。。。。 [/quote]

Hi Predator – welcome to the forum, thanks for joining on my recommendation – its much easier to respond to questions and queries in depth here.

I’ll try to give you as in depth an answer as I can, and I’ll also aim to give you as much perspective into what is involved with the modding tasks with these requests.

First up – PvP balance – thanks! that’s always been the main goal of Wikinger – PvP battles and balance is decided around this first and foremost.  We’ve done a lot of work here and we’re not finished yet, as we add the new doctrines etc we may need to keep addressing balance.

Secondly –  PvE balance – we know, it’s not ideal.  We’ve been working on it ever since we implemented the AI code to bring a level of aggressiveness to the game that isn’t found elsewhere, but also not too aggressive to the point where it isn’t fun anymore.

AI Difficulty – there’s two AI’s you’re talking about here, first is the CoH2 AI, this governs things like what resources and multipliers the AI gets.  There are global things like the AI not being able to see into the fog of war, and things that change between difficulties – reaction times, updating threat maps etc.

Then there’s the Wikinger AI, this is totally separate to the CoH2 AI, this was built out of a situation where the AI wasn’t using the abilities we had given it, so now it checks what abilities it can use, what resources it has at its disposal and then chooses from there.

We’re well aware that this AI is very aggressive, the number of people who can beat the US expert AI is pretty low, I know I certainly can’t in a 1v1.

Solutions

We’re already working on a patch to address many of your AI concerns, the issue is that the AI will switch between doctrines, which means that you’re constantly on your toes as to what you’re facing, this does however mean that your weaknesses are compounded.

Priority #1 plane and arty spam, we’ve already fixed the artillery spam for most factions, however we need to roll out the same fix for the remainder of the factions for artillery, and for all factions for planes.  This is coming in the next patch we release.

Priority #2 AI “exploits” because the AI can use abilities from more than one doctrine, we have a fix coming that will not allow the AI to call in more than one type of ability from multiple doctrines at once – eg: no Elefant and Jagdtiger on the field at the same time.

[quote quote=4388]About balance ，yes ，i think something shoud be have a discussion，1.USA Faction，M4 tank’s firing speed are terrifying，with the HVAP that penetrates almost everything，2 or 3 M4 a3-76w can destory a tiger or panther so easy ，maybe change their fire the HVAP’s ability to onlyfire one round HVAP ,like tiger fire the APCR 。2.German Faction，Panther needs APCR round，Sturmgeschütz III G needs HE round ，Panther and Tiger’s commander upgrade and AA machine gun upgrade should like Kingtiger’s ability，switch the button to use each ability, if it’s possible。Hull down，this ability shoud give to Tank hunter or Mechanized，because nomatter Jagdpanzer IV or Elephant ，they don’t have turret ，they can’t move if they use this ability it’s so easy to flank them by Enemy units，Panzer IV with it without it ，what’s the difference? aways kill by one round。。。。That‘s for now，other two nations ’s ability are not finish yet。Last for all nations，we need air defense units’s level buff，like tank and infantry。 [/quote]

This is part two, I wanted to break these two posts up as they would get quite long and confusing.

Switching ammunition is a complex mechanic in CoH2, it usually results in a double fire with no reload time, we are addressing this, but it means that every vehicle that has the ability to fire more than two types of ammunition needs to be redone.  As you can appreciate, while this is important we have other tasks that need to be dealt with first.

Adding ammunition types means adding a new weapon, which means that every new weapon needs to have penetration values against all vehicles in game, at near mid and far ranges.  Again, it’s on our list of things to do, but we cannot do it right now, we just do not have the man hours available to us at the present time.

I’m not going to address hull down as it is in a faction that isn’t reworked, and what we do with the ability will be determined when we come to do the Wehrmacht faction – so for now we will just leave that as a suggestion.

If you’re finding that your AA is under-performing, you may want to look at where you’re placing it etc.  If it has a clear line of sight (not hampered by buildings or trees) then it should have sufficient time to shoot down an enemy plane, in most games I find that the number of planes that deal damage is less than the ones that get shot down.  If we increase range or line of sight on AA weapons they will be exploited and used at long range against infantry or ground targets.  It would totally break the game.  There are some small tweaks we can do to make it buffed against planes only but we have to be careful not to break the game or the PvP balance either.

Some final thoughts…

Wikinger is designed around the physics and facts of WW2, in the past many mods have tried to make “historically accurate” versions and it just ends up being horrible, massive ranges and terrible balance etc.  We’re onto something good here and it has taken many months of research and hard work to get us to this point, and as you know – the PvP balance is really quite good, it’s a lot of fun to play.

This whole website is built as a resource for players, there’s community written doctrine guides, we have this forum and of course we have our discord channel (link at the bottom of the page) where you can play with and learn from a wide variety of players.

Remember we are all volunteers, we’re not game designers.  We’re here doing this because of a love for the game, you as the player gets to benefit from this.  We have lives, families and jobs, we mod Wikinger in the hours that are left after these things are dealt with, this means that things happen slowly, but they do happen.

Looking forward to your feedback as we progress forwards with development of Wikinger.

I remember one TV documentry about ww2 Normandy tank fights….

One of the US tank drivers told that you need at least 3 Shermans to kill a Jagdpanther or Tiger.

1st one opening fire and distracting it, 2nd one doing the same (those 2 ones would normally die), the 3rd one flanks it and shoots the German tank in the only weak spot it has, the rear.

If I compare this report to the ingame, it is exactly what works fine… unless the German tank is guarded by infantry or additional tanks or something. –> pretty historical accurate.

German tanks were good, but not invinvible. Americans could win by numbers – and luckily they did.