Let's get to the essential!

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

• This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Sun1praxis.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Sun1praxis.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Sun1praxis.
• This topic was modified 5 years, 3 months ago by Sun1praxis.