New Build Walls Discussion – Good? Bad? Indifferent?

This is ubers game and unfortunately they can do whatever they like. Unfortunate for me that is. Someone that likes the idea of been attacked from 360 degrees and also attacking. This was a major selling point for me. Why don't we just play on 2d maps if you are goin to corner your base.

This gameplay only helps the exact type of game the devs like, know and play. A never expanding turtle. I would much rather use the terrain while pick location, not sayin ah sure I can just build a wall there.

After some more playing with it...

Taking out a couple sections thick of walling is perfect right now. Easy enough that any attack that would be able to penetrate your defenses still will, but it forces them to come through a gap they make.

This is awesome for several reasons.

It funnels units. Not to a point the defender chooses, but to the point where the ATTACKER chooses. An attacker gets an increasing number of punchable holes in the defenses of a base depending on how they go about it, but they are holes. They aren't "kite the defending army while potshotting perimeter defenses and preparing your second wave".

You have to dedicate an attacking force to an area now, and that makes both defense and offense way more fun.


My only gripe is that when you are building lines of walls sometimes your fabbers will hiccup and leave gaps. Those gaps are sometimes a pain in the *** to fill because they don't fit right and units can squeeze through some pretty darn thin areas if they're pushed with collision. That's bugs though and should be fixed.

There are effective ways to both attack and defend.

In other news, aren't missile turrets not attacking land anymore next patch? That hurts early defence since those were easy to hold off any early attack of any variety. Not saying thats good or bad yet. I will miss them though lol. Might be for the better.

Anyway, walls are annoying ish. They could, for what you build, be the health of a t2 structure currently. T2 structures are ample health, if it were that it basically gives the turret 3x more health. I am considering repair units as a real turtle would use turret wall and fabber together. I do once I contact enemy and post up.

And it is fairly easy, just keep some real fabbers with some units (not combat), and if run into enemy before you desired, backpedal fabbers and throw up rocket turret and then wall. Then just build against that while holding it's health up. If they don't attack for a while, consider putting up more turrets, walls, and reinforcing with gil-e and dox/slammer, so when they do amass you will still win.

I think defence is really solid, but as someone who plays that ****, it is still breakable. Especially against t2 air. Now, you can gather some anti air up, but their air will beat yours and then your base if you invest in artillery. Also, if they invest in artillery farther in their line, by time you creep on them they will have denial artillery.

I suck at this game, but I have experienced the above. I think it is pretty accurate.

I believe that walls stopping projectiles is viable, since we don't have shields + they don't stop artillery anyway. But 6k HP is crazy and way too much for 25 metal. I think they should either revert the cost or revert the HP.

I think walls will be fine once the inferno and vanguard are working correctly. Maybe reduce their HP a bit. I accidentally voted for "like they were before" though. How do you change your vote?

Sadly you cannot.

I remember in the first command and conquer, there was 3 different types of walls, which all acted differently.
Sandbags, which stopped or reduced small arms fire and infantry movement but which vehicles could blast through or simply drive over.
Chain link, which stopped movement of infantry and light vehicles, heavy vehicles could drive right over it and most things could shoot through it.
Concrete walls, blocked movement of everything and blocked shots of everything except i think artillery.

Was a lot of interesting ways of using the walls, depending on your goals and situation.

Not suggesting that PA gets that involved with walls, but it would be cool to have 2 types.
Short walls, like concrete bullards in real life, used for blocking movement but can be fired over, maybe with lower health.
High walls, block movement and shots both ways, more of the fortification type of placement.

This is what I came to say. If we implement some of the other suggestions that have been made for wrecks, specifically making them impassable and far tougher than the original unit we can make walls that have only moderate health and block bullets, but once destroyed they will leave an extremely durable wreck that blocks pathing only.

If you want to cut a path through recycle the wreck. It's low metal value means it will be consumed almost instantly.

I don't think walls should be "units" but instead should be neutral features, more like wrecks. A player can build a wall, but then it becomes an inert feature on the map that isn't "owned" by anyone.

What this means is that units will not actively target-fire walls. The wall might be in the way for a unit trying to shoot at an enemy unit, but the wall itself is not a target of interest. Units should not deliberately shoot at walls. Heck, you could even hollow out an enemy base and then build using their walls. You don't care who built the walls- they would work just as well for you.

If this same effect of not having units target-fire walls can be achieved using target priorities, that also works.

I like this idea. The only problem I see with it, is that if the earlier suggestion of auto-reclaiming walls gets added in, then how do your fabbers distinguish between walls that you created and ones your opponent created? It would be annoying to try and auto-reclaim outside your base after the enemy attack failed only to have your fabbers auto-reclaim your wall as well.

Silly bots shooting at walls while they are getting killed by the enemy is not fun..

edit: by enemy units who are not behind that wall..

Don't know what happens, but I would like to make then to halt my enemies

the walls in the current build looks good to me. but i think they need a little more balancing and maybe a redesign

Probably the same way TA did it, by specifically excluding wall wrecks from being automatically reclaimed.

Very much so agree with this.

That's what they said. We'll see if they change their minds.

Two types of walls would be a nice idea.

The short walls having a lot of HP and the tall walls having less HP.

Two types of walls could certainly work. Even TA had dragon's teeth and fortification walls, however they were mostly similar. Mods created the "bertha shelter" which was tall and tough enough to block some indirect fire, which was an interesting design.

Two types of walls could be cool. Short walls that don't block direct fire might be a very durable impediment to movement, more like tank traps than real walls. They could even be spaced apart to allow small units to pass through while still blocking large units. And tall walls would block both movement and direct fire weapons, but not indirect fire projectiles with a high arc.

The biggest issue being whether the tall wall should be short enough for towers to fire over, or tall enough to protect them from enemy fire.

Well most tanks and bots direct fire, so even a mid height wall should be sufficient.

Watch Meta's playtest from today: http://www.twitch.tv/metabolical/c/3626052

The Infernos are shown off quite a bit, and they look really effective with proper positioning. They have the health to drive up to a defended wall section, tank the damage from the turrets, burn through in seconds to let your army pass, then drive up to the laser towers and burn them down too, assuming you either have plenty of them or you have combat fabbers keeping them alive. They also seem to really even the playing field between bots and tanks, as long as you have them oriented properly between the enemy bots and your longer range units. The bots really need to have numbers well in their favor or take full advantage of their maneuverability to tackle a solid tank division. If walls stay the same, I think Infernos will be a staple unit for cracking any turtle base.

Waiting for brianpurkiss to post his standard playtest overview before I comment on the rest of it. Really loving how the game is shaping up in these vids, and I can't wait till Uber gets their new launcher working so we can try the experimental builds too.

I think the change was necessary because of the decreased unit cost - otherwise defenses wouldnt be worth their weight at all

Not that I build many anyway...

Whats wrong with having the ability to have walls? As much as I would like to be attacked in all directions, I would like to have some entrances into my base instead of being an open pallet to be attacked from any direction. Considering one of those directions is from space as well.