Im wondering how the overall game mechanic will be refined in further versions. (If that will happen)

So far it seems that AI spawn randomly at bases and run at the general direction of the base with the red arrow pointed at it.

So basically, when one AI dies, another is spawned a base? The reason I'm asking is that after 15 minutes this turns into a kind of a grind with little to no strategy involved.
I kind of feel like a superhero blasting through 50 enemies who simply run run into my field of fire. If the ai were more capable, and moved more tactically, and their death actually impacted the game, I feel like the game would be a little deeper.

An idea of how to implement this would be, the more players killed (AI or Humans), the less ai will respawn as a result, and at a slower pace. Holding more bases would also increase the number of AI spawning, and the speed at which they reinforce.

This way games wont go on forever and will have some suspense at the end when you have a real last stand.

I wish I could explain that better.. But if anyone cares I could break it down a bit.

I suggest this because it takes waaaay less coding than a ticket system like BF.

Try turning up the AI accuracy

Then you will know why we are completely boned if/when the ai decide to revolt against their fleshy creators hahaha.

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

in a base there a usually 3-4 respawn locations. A dead soldier respawns at one of them randomly, if there are no enemies around it, else the spawnpoint will be locked. Those little yellow diamonds on the map are the spawn locations.
If you want to push back the enemy you might try to get quite close to those spawnpoint (doesn't need to be right on top of it as the lock distance is fairly high (I don't know the distance anymore, pasik?)) to force the enemy to respawn at a base farther away.
Also as tip, if your team manages to kill a bunch of enemies in a battle you may think about trying to rush forward in the direction of the spawnpoints as long as you have the upper hand over the enemy in that base.
But ya, there will be some tweaks done in that regard sometimes, I am pretty sure. Those might be a longer respawn timer so that successful battles in an area would have more impact and let you some time to move forward to the center of the base an/or the spawn points. an other idea would indeed be something similar to the BF tickets. But well, let's wait how the engineer trucks, mobile radar, airdrop reinforcement, new weapon which ist totally different from those already existing, new vehicles will affect this.
In my opinion it is important that a game shouldn't be much longer than an hour before the map is won.

So.. the AI instantly respawns at the base nearest the enemy base? Im just not sure how it works.

I agree. It seems to be a tugowar that last quite a while with each side endlessly tossing men in like its WW1 or something.

Those sound nice.

Maybe the game can take the spawn system in a different direction. Instead of simply spawning from a designated spawn point, you plot out a reinforcements route from that spawn point to the front lines where you can take up a new body once you die. It'd take out the impact of having to run all the way out to the front lines again after you die. And there'd be a little strategy involved you can move the path of your reinforcements and mold the areas of contact.

The way it works is this, and it's not working as well as I would've wanted, meaning some tweaks are needed.

In the start, 80% of total capacity of soldiers are spawned near their bases, after that they start doing whatever the commander AI tells the squad leaders; certain percentage is put to defend bases with more power in the bases close to enemy, less in the back bases, some to strengthen borders between closest enemy and friendly bases, some are sent to the attack staging area to wait for others to start the attack wave towards the target.

Soldiers spawn every 3 seconds in random spawn points in the whole map, regardless of how much they get killed. The spawning stops when the soldier capacity is reached. It has turned out that these days the capacity is never reached, as the guys end up in hostile situations and get killed generally faster than they spawn.

The total soldier capacity for a faction is not constant throughout the game. The soldier count setting you choose at the start is basically divided between bases, with some balancing handled for the benefit of the losing faction. This means that once you get an upper hand in base counts, your capacity per base is starting to become smaller even though your total capacity gets higher, and vice versa for the enemy.

If I understood you right, this sounds exactly opposite to what you are suggesting, but there's a good reason this balancing exists. When RWR was in its early steps in public testing, might have been version 0.2 or 0.3, it was noted that usually once you won the first base, almost all the next bases were captured in sequence by the attack party by just running over all enemy opposition which was hitting the soldier capacity. The last base fight was just about racing there who would get even one kill before the game ends Now a lot of has changed since then, even bugs might've become corrected in various places regarding all things related to counts, capacities, strategies and balancing, so I it might very well be that removing this balancing effort would be the thing to do here -- having said that, I again remember that capacity is seldom reached these days, and this balancing affects capacity only, not count.

I know the current system isn't without flaws, and it's still mostly about the soldier counts and soldier capacities I believe. The respawn time isn't fast enough to fill the capacity, which means that after the start, where 80% of soldiers are there, the counts tend to be below that. In 0.75, it was slightly altered that the respawn time would be smaller, in order to keep the counts high closer to capacity, but it still doesn't feel right. Now the problem is that the forces are too equal, and a defensive force usually wins the offensive as unless the offensive gets to the center of the base to lock down the nearby spawns, the defensive forces have the chance to spawn nearby every 3 seconds, on top of the fact that the commander is sending reinforcements from the nearby bases all the time which tend to be closer than what the situation is on the offensive side.

What adds to the difficulty once you have more bases than the enemy is that the probability of your AI forces spawning near the fighting area is lower as you control a bigger area of the map. When you're fighting the last base it has turned out that this can be a serious issue.

I have to say though that I haven't studied 0.75 all that much because of my two-week time away, but that's the impression I had.

Ah okay. Well now I know how that works, thats good.

Yeah, I just thought of that on a whim. Just a way to tie up some loose ends maybe.

Well, it works for now so its fine for sure. Im sure youll come up with a better idea in the future, you're the developer after all!

Funny, to add to the previous, I was just now looking at Server1 status:



It appears the changes made for 0.75 have affected something at least, as the count does seem to reach the capacity finally, at least with some settings and maps It would mean that making the balancing logic affect the faction total capacity can have an impact on the faction's performance, which makes the balancer a viable tool. Recently, as the counts never reached the capacity, toying around with the capacity values on the fly wouldn't have had any effect in the actual performance. I hope it's not just a buggy situation

Just out of curiosity, what kind of AI bot count settings do you usually play with on each map?

I play with 100-200 people.

It just seemed like a grind, im not actually sure what the actual statistics were in that regard.

Good to know that the enemy may respawn in a far away base, which makes a kill actually matter.

* Edit

Heres a funny idea. What if when you were killed, you respawned by "becoming" a active AI; that is, taking its place? With no real respawns for AI this would be some sort of hardcore mode..

Games will turn into grinds if no side makes a huge push or a backdoor insertion (!)

Without one player actually forcing his way forward, the AI tend to balance out and are equal. Also, flanking with a squad can quickly capture bases if done correctly.

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it