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After having read most of the posts related to wikinger balance and agreeing with most of them, i felt the essential was completely left behind; like chess, Wikinger should be about getting to the king or, more contextualy, to the enemy’s base. I’ve rarely had this chess feeling in fact playing a game. Chess is cutthroat and most of the time unforgiving, making you weight every move you make. I think simply wikinger can be much more exciting than it already is. Let me get to the concrete.
I win an early confrontation against my opponent. What do i do after? I wait to get to tier 4 to produce armor capable of sustaining the starting position Mgs and destroying the base. To me this is very relevant. It feels to much like vanilla still. I think players should be incited for the sake of realism and tactics to care more about their own units and production buidings. Thats why i loved Spearhead in the first place. I could devise a very specific plan aiming for the artery at each turn. While for Wikinger, patience is a virtue in most cases. Since we all know that the game needs to reward coordinated aggressions (flanking with the right units, infiltrating where your opponent expect it the least, timed artillery for example) and punish the clumsy and obvious ones (rushing in front of enemy’s defences, pushing, a single tank to the base, spamming flamethrowers, etc…), Wikinger could easily make the player feel on their toes being conscious he needs some defence for it’s own base and to think of a plan to win.
I just want to underline that all of what I’m proposing could work for all victory conditions but most importantly, would revamp annihilation alltogether, it being the superior way to play the game. I don’t think highly of victory points honestly. Attrition has all my attention if just played really. Indeed, if you want to play Wikinger in a richer way, you don’t want to push infantry into the constantly shelled center victory point zone… You want to find a way to counter, to crush the enemy’s army in a convincing way. Now, after having played 50 games or more of this mod, i’m tired of seeing players quitting so fast or loosing everything and waiting to have a Tiger. I think every player should be able to inflict crushing damages at ALL TIMES using any victory conditions.
The solution is simple: make production buidings reachable and vulnerable. If no players are using light vehicules to mounts early inventive and daring attacks, maybe it’s because once they reach the base, the starting Mgs destroy them plus the infantry regardless of the player. To add to this, only heavy guns can damage convincingly the buildings and what…. mortars??! This involves experienced players just waiting for tier 4 regurlarly having not other possible to mean to acheive victory. Balancing the units WON’T MAKE A DIFFERENCE regarding to macro-strategies. I like chess again because the best player always has to secure everything else in order to attack the king. Loosing in chess I remind all of you reading this post is simply MISSING A TACTIC. Therefore, I take out ALL of the Starting Mgs (if Relic allows the modding that is) and give each player a free one they can put where they want inside the starting zone. After this is done, the player would be incited to put some defenses and leave some the machinist and boring Vanilla CoH2 reflex of producing, reinforcing, capturing points and hoping for the process to be economical. For the buildings, they become vulnerable to 222 coaxial cannons, to 50 cal MGs, to AA guns and more, all of these weapons scaling in buidling damages depending the tier, you get the idea…. I’m no realistic freak. All i care about is that these light vehicules will have an effect on the buidings so this tier 4 madness stops. I also add the necesary extra armor to the 222, the halftracks and light tanks so it is harder to take them down with the lighter Mgs. You would have to invest in Heavy Mgs, which sadly I never did in 50 games. The game all of a sudden would become much more deeper, much more richer, making the players feel they could loose all in what they invested in if the miss their opponents move towards their dugged in position or directly to their base. Whole doctrines already implemented in this wonderful mod would be given the meaning they finally needed to be used instead of being discarded for fearing a King tiger arriving after 30 minutes of efforts. 2V2s would become much more strategicaly oriented and 1v1 would be played… FINALLY.
This is something that already exist very quietly in the Spearhead mod by the way. It’s just theese Mgs that ruin everything, forcing the players to stalemate somewhere on the map and shoot artillerie at each other for 30 minutes. There needs to be EARLY INVESTMENT IN DEFENSES, not early trying-to-cap-the-whole-map-while-my-opponent-is-somewhere-else!!! This kind of attitude makes me think of why the game Stellaris was so bad when it first came out. Expanding for no reasons and waiting that it pays off won’t make any games interesting. In fact, the exact opposite will happen! Wikinger needs to make players think: Do I want to dig in closer to my base or farther at this very moment? Do I try a risky winning strategy or do I play solid waiting for a mistake? Do I push while this flank might be exposed? It needs to be a little bit more black or white while sometimes Wikinger is in the Vanilla grey zone without the commander system.
Bringing such a simple idea to the mod is the solution for longer tier 2-3 gametime, for impossible german endgames and for quicker, more explosive, more rewarding games. Beginners actually this way would stand a chance. More players would join the mod I’m sure only for knowing they might catch a veteran player off guard. Tier 2 and 3 would be as dangerous as tier 4 with them able to take down the production buidlings. It is really that obvious where the problem is: tier 4 only can destroy the buildings! Not mobile or fixed artillery (except mortars but not convincing), not abilities, not infantry, not light vehicules, just your tier 4 heavily armored can… A grenade in the soviet foxholes or a AA gun on a OKW truck should be both possible and impactful.
I would like to mention I enjoyed some of the unit balancing i’ve read in this forum especially olhausen’s elite units limitation and the more realistic flamethrowers by Nuxes while i trust the new doctrines are going to be as creative as the last ones were. </span>
Sun1praxis
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Well wikinger is not really for annihilation I think 🙂
Conquest is the way it is best played, so all points are equal. It doesnt suffer from what you wrote, that there is 1 VP or 1 fuel that all sides try to takeAlso you can annihilate the enemy on conquest if you want 🙂 And you can set high resources btw so early game can be skipped a bit.
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Hi Sun1praxis:
Thanks a lot for the complete feedback first. About your ideas, yes I must admit, right now the anihilation mod takes too much time specially for PvP games with experience players. 3v3 could take more than 1:30 hours some times and this is too much.
Lets me explain a few things around the mod:
a. In the past, one way to finish the endless war was to aim the main base with artillery from a long range and hammer it to finish the game. Problem is the game finish most of the time in an arty fest. That why we rework the artillery system using a most historical accurate with observers
b. I will think about the idea of no MG in bases. Maybe it could be an option for a game mode.
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to be honest i am no big fan of this rushing playstyle. it always depends who is at the VP or the fuel first and american riflemen are just a little to strong for balanced early game fights at close ranges. But i think as a player that plays OKW most of the times its hard enough to fight royal armour for example, your forward headquarters are just to vulnerable to a rush by 2-3 cromwells in early mid game. if the base buildings become even more vulnerable i could imagine that the game just becomes a try to rush from all sides to destroy base buildings. No one would play late game docs, everyone would play armor docs where you get the cheap medium tanks as fast as possible. but i think you brought up some good points so you could think about what to make out of these ideas!
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I just played a game as US infantry where i was able to bog down the germans in the early game up to the base. And still, while the game is obviously over while no gas was available to the other team. All they could do was fortify in base with Paks and whatnots. I had to wait for tier 4 shermans while i was at tier 2 only because if i stepped in the base i would get suppressed by the mgs… This is so wrong! I even told them to resign because it was taking too long to get mobile artillery in the action. There needs to be more defensive thinking for both sides in the early game. A line drawn by all players making fortifications to a certain degree and then thinking about agression and if you don’t do such a thing, you’re exposing yourself. Tier 4 is always a good choice in this manner. You will put more energy protecting your gas and then have the late game advange all for yourself. I myself in this game would not have rushed so much is i had to take care of 222s or flamming half-tracks incursions. I would spend munitions putting a minimum of mines, i would produce an AT gun and place it strategically on the map, and so on.
The big idea I have can be described like this: the early game is cat and mouse gameplay being blind (no access to recon plances or flares, mostly just to spotting infantry) trying to figure out where the enemys forces and setting up your own defensive mesures. then tier 2-3 is fast and total warfare especially in the buffer zone. Tier 4 has in mind to attack directly the fortified positions if no other means were found to acheive a win. If a player goes for all out agression, the base is reachable for having no defensive strutures or units.
For balancing, in my opinion all whats been posted previously is on spot. A little reworking and this mod will take most of my gaming time.
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Hallo Sun1praxis,
It’s nice to have new guy who like the mod and care about its details 😀I agree with you somehow the mod should be lengthened tier 2-3 in order to avoid rush for Tier 4 and 5, in the past, I think the solution is to make the light vehicles much more useful in the late game like give them more special abilities or functions after tier 4-5 is openned which help them not to be obsoleted in the late game, so we can see more light vehicle all the time (mid and late games, not just tanks in the late game)
About the Base HMG Emplacement, if you are winning in the mid game with your light vehicles, try to use smoke (smoke grenade, mortar smoke and smoke rifle to block the line of sigh of the HMG) then use assault function troops which must have a charge or flamethrower to quickly destroy the initial HMG-emplacement in 3-4s while the smoke haven’t faded yet. That’s how i usually do- it’s really effective imo, and explainning why I always ask for more smoke weapons.
About the digging in stategy, yeah, there is some doctrines which can allow you do like Iron Will, US Arty and Infantry, OKW Arty, they have a lot of tools to build their own fortress, in the future there will be more such as Wehrmacht deffensive doctrine.
I somehow agree that light vehicle must get a buff in HP, longthening their survival time when being taken damages.
So, what do you think?!
Cheers. -
I’m very interested in the smoke! I understand I’m would be trying to drop a smoke in the base, get my infantry with flamethrowers in it and then using G button to destroy them and similar tactics. What I think it might do is clear one side of the base for infantry and then i could do some damage with maybe a light tank from far away. That looks to be the best i’ve heard for now with the version of the mod. I’ll definetely try that out.
Still, i would prefer to have them all out if not again give just one for free.
One idea I had was that instead of having more vulnerable buidlings, production could be halted when taking some damage. That would be interesting. It would be very realistic needless to say that when you get shot in any of your buildings, you’re going to stop whatever you were doing.
I’m actually very interested to hear what you guys have in mind regarding how can we incite early, mid-game base attacks.
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I remember an ability called liquid fire from an unit in Warcraft 3. When a building was under attack from it, all activity from this building was halted. Very cool when you were playing with but it was very frustrating to play against.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>If something like this is to be implemented, I think it should be very limited in a special ability.</p>
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