Caltrops - Postal II - Re: I dont get desert combat

Forum Overview :: Postal II

by McMoo the anti-drug cow 08/01/2003, 12:13pm PDT

FABIO wrote:

BB told me how wonderful this is so I gave it a try. After 10 minutes I quit and went back to regular BF.

I'm curious to know what version of Desert Combat you tried.

FABIO wrote:

The regular BF was balanced: the classes, the vehicles, etc. Desert combat, it hardly matters what class you choose, because if you're not in a vehicle then you're dead, those things are so much more powerful than their BF counterparts without infantry being that much more so. Also, air power is way too dominant. In BF: you got a plane that could drop one bomb per pass. In DC, between Spectra Gunships, Apaches, A-10's and the insane amount of ordinance they can drop, coupled with the flat, open nature of desert maps, means ground forces don't stand a chance.

I agree - BF is very well balanced, and the nature of it's game mechanics, (slow rates of fire, one bomb per pass) rewards skilled players accordingly. DC has had and still does have some balance issues, but the balancing has really improved with each release. DC also seem to narrow the gap between the weaker and elite players somewhat, but never to the point where I felt it wasn't worth playing smart.

As far as the relative strength of infantry goes; the more open the map, the more important vehicles become and I'm assuming you've only played on one of the larger maps. There are some new maps in DC now that focus on house-to-house fighting with some heli transport and are pretty popular.

Your comment on air power illustrates an omission. Where are the air superiority fighters? They are there, but in my experience there aren't effective enough at countering ground attack aircraft. Thankfully, due to balancing, the insane amount of ordinance has been limited from previous releases.

FABIO wrote:

It'd be a different story if there were only one vehicle per 5-10 people, and one aircraft per 3 or more vehicles, but the ratio is more like one vehicle per 1.25 people with an aircraft for every vehicle. What does it matter what class I pick? Just hop into the plentiful tanks, which will immediately get destroyed from the air, so skip that and grab one of the plentiful aircraft.

As I said earlier, on a large open map infantry are less effective, hence more vehicles. With the current version, it's a bit safer for armour. Also, now infantry has access to Stinger missiles, which hopefully will gain some limited homing capability in future releases.

FABIO wrote:

The above opinion was formed after only 10-15 minutes of playing, but the regular BF game never hit me with the same "this is fucked up" feeling right away. I much prefer the simple, balanced BF to all the complicated crap in DC, most of which seems to have been thrown in just because the designers thought it would be cool. Comparing the two games reminds me of that RenegadeZ mod back in the original Tribes game that added all sorts of stuff like base force fields and a million more classes like cyborg, commando, etc. 10 minutes with those and I was all "what the shit is this shit?" and went back to the unmodded version. I think it was Erik talking about Planetside that said he'd be interested in a FPS multiplayer game that had one consistent version rather than a ton of different (mostly crappy) mods everywhere. I agree.

In the earlier revisions I got the exact same feeling, however as the project has progressed, there has been less fucked up and more fun. Let's keep in mind that this is a mod, it's in beta, and they told you that balancing is still an issue. BF1942 is a commercial project that was, most importantly, released in actual finished condition. My point is you should give it a try again when it goes full release.

Never had any luck with the Tribes mods, for the exact reasons you mentioned. Plain Tribes was much more fun than having the spinfusor shoot out 100 disks in a second. DC adds a little more good stuff and offers a little different experience, not overwhelming players with ultimately useless choices.

As for Eriks comment, how does not having mods strengthen the player base for your game? Mods will be created for games if they are popular enough and if the technology behind the games is powerful enough. Plenty of people will still be playing the original game if it is good enough. I can never imagine anybody not playing or buying a game because of crappy mods.

One thing I would like to see, however is better server browsing software so I could more easily filter out or for specific versions of the game. I stopped playing Tribes because it was too much of a pain to find a vanilla Tribes server.