[Suggestion] The Ultimate Thread Dedicated to Refurbishment of Infantry

Indeed, it is because of the current ballistics that most battles take place at close range. SOE needs to understand that some of the most fun battles in PS2 take place over long range, and that the only way to increase the effective range is to enhance the ballistics.

I may be incorrect, because I do not use assault rifles often, but assault rifles actually have more damage potential at close range. The reason they cannot compete against smgs in close range is because they have wider hipfire cofs, due to the longer barrel.

I was more referring to their effectiveness vs SMG's. As a general rule both weapon types do roughly the same damage at 10m or less, but smg's generally fire about 200rpm faster than AR's. Which makes them utterly destroy AR's at close ranges. If anything AR damage at close range should be significantly higher than an SMG - I mean - assuming any sort of real world ballistics.

Also COF for a weapon with a longer barrel shouldn't be more, it should be less if anything. The recoil might be greater for a larger cartridge - but a longer barrel only gives greater velocity and greater accuracy not less. COF is a silly mechanic anyway, as long as there is already recoil. Bullets trajectories only start to wildly vary when a barrel warps or overheats. Not during regular firing.

You think bullet velocity is bad... try tank shell velocities:

Prowler 120mm HEAT- 225 m/s
M1A1/Leopard 2 120mm M256- 1,750 m/s

So small arms only experience about a 33% reduction... tank shells have been nerfed by over 85%. That's how bad tanks have it.

I always assumed this was because suppressors "came with" subsonic ammunition. While a suppressor will work slightly with supersonic ammunition, it should be paired with subsonic ammunition for maximum effect. Unfortunately subsonic ammunition travels much more slowly (not being able to break the sound barrier) and is much weaker (subsonic 5.56 has the muzzle energy of 9x19 if I remember that right).

So that reduction in muzzle velocity always made sense to me.

Yeah I think of that too. Real life tank shells are faster than bullets. I wonder how the gameplay would be if they had at least equal speed. Hm, pilots would have a harder time around. But we wouldn't feel sorry for ESF pilots anyway. Magrider strafing would be less useful.

I mean that's not even getting into the ways tank shells have been nerfed in other ways:
1) Lack of destructible terrain (no use hiding behind walls if that tank shell will take out the wall and anything behind it)
2) Explosive radii that are less than proximity mines (tank shells taking out 10 infantry per shot were not unusual in recent combat reports)
3) Inability to carry more than one shell type (tanks can carry around 40 rounds of a mix of AP, HE, canister, and CE rounds)

And tank armor... isn't even that. It's like WWI level stuff. Maybe WWII if we're being generous. With today's tanks most infantry dumbfires would fail to penetrate (except things like the RPG-29 if it hit at the right angle), only advanced ATGMs would work (and that's not taking into account APSs that MBTs are getting), and C4 would do nothing but give the crew a headache (only extremely large EFP IEDs are effective against MBTs).

Tanks are ridiculously underpowered in PS2... mostly for gameplay balance reasons because infantry feel entitled to go mano-a-mano against a 60+ ton metal behemoth.

Isn't ww2 warfare what video games in general resemble? Dogfighting, hordes of tanks shooting each other, no super long range super accurate missiles, no airburst kill-everyone-in-the-room greandes, carped bombing and what not.

What are you talking about?

• CQC Assault Rifles are fantastic at short range.
• Assault rifle bullets don't become less effective at short range. They do more damage, actually.

Yeah, it's really inconvenient how gamers demand gameplay, depth, and fun. These things should be forsaken for realism.

PS2 would clearly be better if it pursued realism aggressively to the point where players don't even participate in battles, which are fought purely by robotic drones. None of that pesky fun intruding upon our realism.

Please explain how slow bullet velocities contribute anything to gameplay, depth, or fun.

With infinite projectile velocity, only one skill applies (the same skill you use to navigate Windows): move mouse, click on target.

With slower projectile velocity, you have to predict where the right location to aim at is (and then also use aiming skill to quickly aim there and pull the trigger). This location varies based on their direction, speed, and distance. Which I usually lump together and call "trajectory skill" (the skill of knowing where to shoot so that your projectile will reach the target's eventual position, in the time it takes the projectile to travel there.) Slower projectiles also creates significantly more evasion skill, where it's now valuable to vary your direction and speed in order to make yourself harder to hit.

By having more skills matter (and skills with a ton of nuance that varies by combat situation), that's basically what creates game depth, which is essentially a measure of how long it takes to master a game (Sirlin, 2001), and the longer a game takes to master, the longer it remains fun since pattern mastery is the core of what makes games fun (Koster, 2004).

Very fast projectiles (real-world projectile velocity) are a tiny step away from insta-hit weapons. So they do have a tiny bit more depth, but less depth than a game with PS2's projectile speed. If you slowed projectile velocity even more, the game would continue getting deeper up to a point and eventually would start becoming shallower again as dodging projectiles became too easy at very slow projectile speeds. Although depending on the weapon's damage delivery system, even very slow weapons can still be quite deep (Quake's Rocket Launcher is one of the deepest weapons to master in FPS gaming, and it was apparently around 38m/s; it worked because it had an explosion on impact, which is also why the 100m/s Lasher is good at its suppression role despite the very slow projectile speed.)

I'm almost thinking warfare from the pre-gunpowder age, or at least the mid to late 1800s. At least that's the last time I can remember when battle would revolve around sieging an indestructible fortification. Maybe WWI and trench warfare? But definitely WWII high-mobility tactics are far beyond the gameplay in PS2.

I dunno, I mean the ARMA series has terrific gameplay, probably the most depth out of any FPS I know of (more than PS2 for sure), and many would consider it to be incredibly fun. Yet ARMA also manages to be significantly more realistic than PS2 is.

As with all things, realism isn't "good" or "bad"... it's all in the implementation.

Dude don't go black and white here. You know well people aren't suggesting that. A certain amount of realism in certain aspects can make a game more fun, or it's absence makes it less fun. I find it annoying if an fps game doesn't have fall damage for example, but the exact amount I don't mind much.

I think though what's not being mentioned is that while increased projectile velocity might reduce the reliance on certain skills (leading the target), it would at the same time increase reliance on other skills (maneuvering and making use of cover and concealment). In other words if it becomes "easier" for someone to hit you, then you'll do your best to try to flank and avoid being seen. This is simply a different skill, not less skill.

Right now in PS2, if an enemy has covered an open area I can chance running across open ground. This is because I can count on the fact that the enemy might miss a good portion of their shots due to slower bullet velocity (more so if I zig-zag like a maniac). But if I knew that the enemy would be much more likely to nail me, I would take an alternate route, weaving between buildings until I could flank the enemy position.

So which requires more skill? Running in a straight line across open ground, or moving to flank the enemy?

It is less skill in an absolute sense, because those factors still exist in a game with slower projectiles. We have slower projectiles than instant-hit right now in PS2, and both cover and position are significant factors in player skill.

Or to express it mathematically, these are the factors (and a loose, absolute value) to winning a fight:

• 10pts - Initiative skill (leveraging lag compensation)
• 10pts - Aiming skill
• 10pts - Trajectory skill (really just a subset of aiming skill)
• 10pts - Maneuver skill (which includes cover skill)

In this setup maneuvers (including cover usage) are 25% of winning a fight.

Whereas PS2 with instant-hit weapons would be:

• 10pts - Initiative
• 10pts - Aiming
• 10pts - Maneuver

The absolute value of Maneuver hasn't changed, but now it's 33% of winning a fight. So while it does increase the relative reliance on maneuver skill, the absolute amount of skill being rewarded is reduced.

I'm not convinced that ARMA is actually deeper, since I imagine it has fast TTKs with realistic weaponry, which fundamentally tends to create shallower gameplay (or at least it has in every other realistic shooter I've tried over the years.) Having obtuse controls does create a certain type of depth, but it's definitely the less fun sort of depth (not all game depth is automatically fun.)

Yes, not all realism is shallower gameplay. Falling damage is a great example of a mechanic which is both realistic and adds some depth. But in terms of bullet velocity, due to what I've described in the posts above, depth is simply lost by increasing bullet speed. Doesn't mean you couldn't make up for it in a holistic sense by increasing the depth of other systems, but we can say for sure that you definitely would lose the depth that trajectory skill adds to the game, and that's going to be a fairly tough thing to make up for.

I'm just gonna mention that, realistically, NC weapons would be lower recoil than TR ones for the simple fact that they're bulkier.
Heavier guns, by nature, have more inertia, and thus take more to push back before the guy using it feels it.

And while they seem "Kewl" chainsaw gripped guns are essentially fired from the knee, giving them terrible accuracy, and TBH, I quite like the "Doom" Feel of having it in ADS mode.

Furthermore, giving any weapon a 60 degree firing arc is completely improbable even for a shotgun. If you're going for realism. All Shotguns are fairly deadly in close range, and what makes the Jackhammer comparable to the Mini-chaingun or Lasher X2, is it's range.

Now, Infiltrators is where you're stomping on thin ice. Infs are bad enough as is. Currently I think the only way to realistically balance sniping is to add a "Spotting" system similar to say, world of tanks. I'm not talking about anything even remotely as complicated, but simply lowering the "Un-spotted draw distance" and increasing how long spotted targets are spotted, should add to the "Recon" roles of the Light Assault and Infiltrator, while at the same time requiring actual teamwork for snipers to work. Adding instant-kill backstabs, once again, is a big kick in the balls to teamwork, as an infiltrator could get up behind someone completely invisible, stab them, and run away, still invisible. Giving them mines and stealthing their Flashes was already enough to push this class far beyond what it should be capable of. Not only that, but the ability to kill maxes with a single shot also makes them far less of a threat, and makes tanks all but unviable given the render edge of infantry, to give them an AT weapon like that.

Light assaults, once again, is where I have to put a stop to this.

Sking in tribes, even the slower ascend version, is insane. Even Harassers don't go that fast. Seriously, search for a Tribes Pathfinder video (Pathfinder being the Light Assault Equivalent in terms of emphasis on speed). Do we have the counters to speed that a Tribes Doombringer's shield, the massive health disparity between the Path and slower classes (I'm talking about literally 800/900 vs. 1200/1300 and 2400/2600. Oh and the Brute, the guy with 2600 health, also gets an overshield).

And the Pathfinder barely even comes close to a C4 fairy's damage.

So yeah, adding something that crazy is a big no-no.

While diversifying is good, adding Assault rifles must be looked at carefully. Assault rifles, as they stand now, are flat-out better than Carbines. Adding that kind of range to the hit-and-run class without lowering it's CQC is practically begging to ruin the game.

Grappling hook might be good. Hell no on the netgun and crap though.

Now, as for the Medic, once again you seem to be a fan of removing teamplay in favor of lone wolf hit-and-run as the main fighting style. This is a bad thing, a very bad thing. Besides that, the Medic is arguably the single most support-oriented class, with support based heal-grenades. The Medic already has an AR, either remove that, or keep him as is.

The Engineer, I see you're not a fan of, with an entire emphasis, just like with the medic, on strangling what features he has, by massively limiting his role to keep squads pressing forwards, forcing people to either make one big breakthrough, or to not do so altogether. Limiting mortar ammunition, given that a mortar is a bombardment weapon, much like tank shelling, used to force the defenders back and out of certain areas, is counter-intuitive, especially as we already have plenty of ways to shell things by dropping a ammo box next to a max with AV guns.

Building a bunker, as cool as it would seem, practicality would go against that being used as commonly, although a small "Shelter" building could be valuable. And again, we don't want LA being more C4-spam than it already is.

While larger buildings that cost nanites could be interesting, one would have to be careful how they're balanced, not to turn them into complete deadweight.

MAX and HA I agree on, except for uneeded nerfs to the shield, given it already recharges sluggishly lowering LMG performance further despite their non-clip stats being ****e, adding armor to lockdown, as it's already the best MAX ability of the 3 (Not all maxes are meant to barge into buildings). Making ZOE move too fast, once again, threatens balance given how MAX counters rely on their slow speed, perhaps make ZOE maxes even more vulnerable to small arms on top of their increased damage intake so that they still have to fear something?

As for appearances, the current ones are almost fine, the NC looks heroic-ish and heavily armored GDI-esque. The TR could use a bit more black and less gray, sinister, instead of some "Feel-good". They're oppressors and should dress to intimidate the civilian populace into obedience.

Best if you stick to what you know Axehilt, because any even remotely avid ArmA player is going to know you are talking out of your *** here.

What woulf you say about rifle velocity put on tank cannons? 500 or whatever most have unless NS.

I'm certainly open to watching a video which shows its depth. Everything I experienced myself was trash, and everything I've watched seems to reinforce my opinions that the game is largely about fast TTKs and obtuse controls. Certainly I can believe that ARMA enthusiasts have been tricked that its messy, overcomplicated interface makes it a deep game and that they would strongly disagree with my opinions about it. But that doesn't make them right.