Yeah. I think there might be something seriously wrong with Sainte-Anne.



I've been trying (and failing) to play the "Sainte-Anne"-map for quite a while after having just downloaded the newest version. Although initially finding the new inventory system a bit fiddly and counter-intuitive, I eventually managed to work my way around it all right.

However, one thing I have not been able to get to grips with, is starting on the East portion of Sainte-Anne.

At the time I started writing this post, it would be about eleven times that I'd re-played Sainte-Anne. Each and every time, the Greens had been quite inevitably defeated, leading to an an absolutely awful gameplay experience for the Green player throughout. Playing with default settings and starting at the lowest rank, It's been more or less the same story every time. Both factions start with equal territory, the Greys on the West side and Greens on the East side. Before long, the Greens start losing ground. First the border-areas are taken one at a time, and then, gradually but quite efficiently, the Greys dig themselves all the way in. Every single damn time.

At one point, I was making a vain, hopeless attempt at holding Bridge from the batshit insane amount of enemies who were pouring in, without seeing a single fucking soul on my side for minutes on end as always. Then, suddenly, I saw a large group of enemies spawn directly in front of me, right at the foot of the bridge on their end. "Well, that's fucking spectacular!", I thought. "Whenever I die, the game makes sure to spawn me approximately fifty million miles from the battlefield so that I get to run straight forward for a full minute before I can rejoin the fight. Because, y'know, that makes for fun gameplay! But the enemy gets to spawn full-strength right at the foot of the contested area? How the balls is that allowed to happen?!".

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Eventually, it occurred to me that each time, the Greys and Greens had retained the same starting positions. So I consequently tried playing as the Greys, thus starting on the West. What a euphoric feeling to actually be winning for a damn change! It was all very text-book. We took control of Village and Aqualand, swept across Bridge and overran Frontier. At this point, the Greens were down to Dunes, Fortress and Old Port. After seizing Dunes, I quit. The enemy Greens had little realistic chance of winning.

I think we can quite safely dare to conclude from this that Sainte-Anne may be severely imbalanced, in that whoever start at the West portion of the map somehow gains a very considerable advantage. I'm not entirely sure what causes this - is there some quirk in the coding that causes the Western locations to generate more troops? Or is there something in the map layout, perhaps? I tried re-starting the map about fifty thousand times until it was the Greens who randomly started in control of the West - same thing. We swept away all opposition. (Up until this point I hadn't been sure if it was simply the Greens who were inferior human beings. But it indeed turned out that it's all about starting West.)

I don't remember having this issue pre-0.86, though I confess I may be wrong. I may have been starting West all that time, and assumed it was just due to my immense and inhuman skill that we were always sort-of winning. (Somehow, you don't tend to think about these issues until you're on the receiving end. Such is the detestable selfishness of the human psyche. )

i can tell you one thing. youre not only player with this issue

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co-owner of NEWA

To me it seems whoever holds the bridge wins. This would seem to be partly contributed by commander AI's odd choices where to attack to.

I'd also add that playing with 100 bots your attack force is easily less than 10 guys in this map, 150 feels better to me.

yeah, if you start in the east in the base with the towers you lose unless you luck out and have a few other non-ai players with you.

Such a shame this map is currently so imbalanced/bugged, because it is by far the prettiest one.

Also, it may just be me being unlucky, but I'm noticing some similar tendencies with "Aeolian Coast". West side always wins.

Just thought I might add my opinion in here too. It definitely is unbalanced. I cant count how many times I simply quit playing because of how infuriatingly aggressive the enemy attack force is, while I have a total of 5 ai soldiers helping me. Shame is, I really love the layout of the map. I think if the ai were to be balanced, it would be by far my favorite location. Alas, it is not so, and most of the time i find myself cooped up and alone in one of the bridge towers, sniping away for hours while the occasional green runs in view of my screen, only to get shot a whole 3 seconds later.

That picture may be relevant to the East-starting players, but for the Western ones, there should be a picture of fifty zillion quasi-Wehrmacht-looking fuckjobs laughing merrily whilst effortlessly swarming an outpost defended by seven people busy doing absolutely nothing even remotely productive.

Again, I really love the look of the map. Just such a shame it doesn't actually work in practice.



God; that's such a perfect reproduction of my last experience playing the map, I actually feel myself getting frustrated just reading it.

Not to go entirely off-topic, but does anyone have any experiences to add from Aeolian Coast? I find the same thing happening there, more often than not - the East-starting side has enough trouble holding the Western forces at bay, let alone making an attempt at attacking them back.

I've had both good and bad attempts from mostly any of the bases actually. Some places "feel" a bit luckier than others, but many times you just get swamped with huge waves of enemy ai that are impossible to hold back no matter the position.
Some times the quick defeats in invasion can be partly blamed on lack of teamplay. A lot of times we've had newly captured bases retaken by the enemy counterattack because people move out too fast.
I think this is a problem with bot numbers and spawning mechanics more than anything else, because this map works pretty good in pvp.
Also a lot of the bots end up just floating around in the water on this map, which probably has a lot to do with the problems. I took upon myself the brave task of mopping up the enemy ais floating in the enclosed bay the other day, and with that unleashed the biggest attack wave I've ever seen there. I think the AI would benefit from shunning the water a bit more.


My main tactic in Aoeolian Coast is usually to backdoor either the Villa or East Farm (or both) because of the APCs and trucks there. After you have those the rest of the battle is kinda set, hehe. We always seem to blaze trough this one like nothing every time we are more than 3 people in inva.
I think stalemate is more similar in this respect, when considering how many failed invasion attempts we have there. I kinda like the brutal difficulty most of the time though, but I'll agree that sometimes it gets a bit tedious.
A few ways to fix these "troublesome" maps would be to either make the server skip the map after x amount of turns, or perhaps adjust the AI numbers after a failed attempt.