Balancing changes, Guided missiles, Weapon balance tests

[merlijn]

Let me pick up this old thread again, recently LordHavoc has revised the havoc mode and made some very nice improvements.

Especially the rocket launcher with guided rockets works much nicer than in stock nexuiz. I would love to see the havoc RL taken over for the default mode, mainly because it allows for a faster gameplay.

Guiding rockets at their current speed (850) is very time consuming, and you are forced to stand still for quite a while to do proper aiming. This makes you an easy target, and does not encourage faster gameplay. Also you're not going to catch a flagcarrier with it when he's laserjumping away quickly.

Havoc RL is much faster (2200), but also harder to control due to it's speed. This makes it more useful in many situations, but very hard to control (you will rarily get direct hits if your target is moving). Also it is much nicer to twist rockets around curves.

[divVerent]

LordHavoc also wants havoc mode to become default. I plan to not take over ALL the changes in havoc mode, but most (especially most weapon changes and the health system). As for player physics I am unsure, but it's not THAT much different. And visually, it'll stay as is. havoc rocket launcher may be overpowered though...

You can test this mode by deleting default25.cfg from a fresh svn checkout of trunk.

but we'll do some weapon balance stats recording before 2.6 to get this straight again.

[Flying Steel]

LordHavoc also wants havoc mode to become default. I plan to not take over ALL the changes in havoc mode, but most (especially most weapon changes and the health system).

Isn't that kind of extreme? I mean weapon balance is currently near perfect in default, while at least up to 2.5.1 Havoc weapons were a total mess. IMHO, only the health system and shotgun were solid improvements.

You've all spent so much time and energy on making the weapon balance so solid as it is now, I don't understand why you would what to throw that away and start more or less from scratch.

You can test this mode by deleting default25.cfg from a fresh svn checkout of trunk.

Will the most recent Havoc balancing be available in 2.6.2 for testing?

[merlijn]

In the beta (at least the latest 9998), havoc mode is updated and you can test the new settings. These changes will be in 2.5.2 as well.

And some things in havoc do not make much sense to me, but indeed the health system and the new rocket launcher are better than normal nexuiz imho. I also like the laser having 2 modes, one with lots of push and the other with lots damage.

If the good sides of havoc can be merged into the defaults it would be great, but switching to havoc altogether in a new release would be very bad.

[Flying Steel]

I also like the laser having 2 modes, one with lots of push and the other with lots damage.

I like this basic idea as well, but not the implementation.

The primary fire mode in default already offers plenty of push and enough damage, and the combination of the two keeps speed players from laser jumping indefinitely.

So what I'd much rather see is just a "melee" high-damage secondary that has only limited range:

Code: Select all

set g_balance_laser_secondary 1 // when 1, a secondary laser mode exists
set g_balance_laser_secondary_damage 100
set g_balance_laser_secondary_edgedamage 1
set g_balance_laser_secondary_force 10
set g_balance_laser_secondary_radius 0.1
set g_balance_laser_secondary_speed 2000
set g_balance_laser_secondary_refire 0.2
set g_balance_laser_secondary_animtime 0.2
set g_balance_laser_secondary_lifetime 0.15

If the good sides of havoc can be merged into the defaults it would be great, but switching to havoc altogether in a new release would be very bad.

What I was reacting to was the idea of "most" of the Havoc weapon changes being moved over. Because it seems to me like most of those changes are either imbalancing, unfun, or both. But maybe they are better in 2.5.2, I'll give them a clean slate for that.

[divVerent]

First of all, 2.5.2 is not getting the havoc settings.

Secondly, we'll run big balancing sessions for the havoc weapon settings, as we KNOW they'll need some balancing first. To me, some weapons look clearly overpowered, and this will get fixed.

[FraNcoTirAdoR]

I really really dont understand it, we were trying to perfect the weapon balance throught years, now its getting pretty good and suddenly throw out everything on the window for a system thats not tested enough (and uses extreme weapon settings)? o.O
I couldnt test the new HP system, I hope finally its against stacking, so for example 1on1s will be finally interesting and not the fight of a 400/400 guy against a 125/0 player because anyone can say anything but thats not fun to keep control THIS way (especially due the pickup circles possible to make in this game)

[divVerent]

Guess why we'll need lots of balancing sessions... I also made a mutator that spawns everyone with a random weapon, to gather weapon balance stats fast.

[ai]

I couldnt test the new HP system, I hope finally its against stacking

Yes it is, 200/200 is max.

[FraNcoTirAdoR]

divVerent, I have an idea if its not possible to avoid these havoc-style of weapons to get into Nexuiz later: there should be a havoc server up with the actual snapshot of the weapon settings that are planned to be implemented in Nexuiz 2.6, so until then we would have TONS of time to experiment with it, also a forum thread where everyone could post their thoughts about the actual state, tweak it, etc. It would be important to make this server reachable not from havoc mode only, but from the normal Nexuiz serverlist, these are mostly just weapons differences with different cvars, so it should work, shouldnt it? This could be the only way to introduce these changes without half of the frequent players leaving the community...