Big Thread no 12345: map control, spam and infantry/atgs

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[Smokaz]

So, just to gauge the response, who thinks that EIRR has become a little too MUCH about map control? A lot of "finicky" and more interesting combined arms strategies, heavily suffer against builds have these three things in common:

1) No concern for the survival of a vast majority of the company
2) an excessive amount of infantry
3) an excessive amount of ATGs
+ usually some trickster extra unit type or ability to make it come together better, examples could be a lot of snipers or smoke use

Very often these builds are perceived as spam. Though personally I've played a fair amount of companies which easily fall under this description in my more mature days I've come to appreciate EIRR fights which aren't always about the above descrived type of company duking it out with a similar one, with the game's entire dynamic being about backcapping and bringing the bigger amount of ATG's and infantry in one area.

COMPANIES that fit under the above description cannot be dealt with effectively with the aim of winning if you do not to some degree, conform to the same strategy. If you do not deploy a sometimes disproportionate amount of atgs and infantry to your intended overall force to fight these type of companies, you lose out on map control farily easy thus dooming you to a lose or at the very least being a vital part of it.

A lot of axis infantry in particular use the cloak mechanic. While cloaked, infantry do not hold sectors. Why it would be overpowered for a cloaked infantry to cap, sometimes I wonder whether or not a small amount of builds wouldn't be more fairly represented in the game if more of the cloaked units were allowed to "hold" territory.

While this is just a thought the main criticism must be directed towards the whole system. Generally, its too easy to cap. You send 1 infantry man and he suddendly gives you control of the entire sector. In many ways the capping mechanic does very often not reward the players in correct relation to the risk and effort they made to do something. It makes sense for two riflesquads, or two grens with 1 shrek and 1 lmg to realisticly and within the CONFINES of looking the game as it's own "world" to cap and hold territory. A half-dead one man volk taking over the "world" himself? Much less so.

Me personally,  getting tired of it. If you're using some niche build that does a job very well, let's say you're playing with wirbelwinds or something, you always have the thought in the back of your head that you are vulnerable to infantry spam backed by ATGs. Often it plays out like this: One guy has a locked down scout car, a vampire ht etc. Then comes BrutalPlayerMan17 with his 25 pop of atgs and rifles and just displaces it without breaking a sweat.

Especially for allies I feel the infantry spam backed by ATGs is too easy to run. Two components make this simple,  button and sticky. These abilities more or less negate any close combat for axis vehicles and tanks to the same degree allied stuff circle and destroy paks. Handheld AT squads have their own deficiencies and thus they are not to blame. The multirole AI/AT infantry however support ATG spam too well, and they have plenty of room for mistakes because of the easy availability of 4-5 ATG's in a company. When you comine companies like these, it just becomes obnoxious.

There are a few changes to the game, that would improve it a lot.

- Slowing down the capping, or requiring people to use more than a single man to cap.
- Looking at the cost of allied vehicle disablers. These represent such a powerful utility function that they should either be increased in price by proxy, or given something similar to axis to make their own infantry + atg spam more viable. It should be a very happy moment when you get to use these because of how powerful they are, not something you deploy en masse because its convenient.
- Looking at ATGs. Could these stand to go somewhat up in price across the board, considering how great they are for pop. Could perhaps it be a good idea to increase ATG pop by 1?

Generally, infantry is too powerful in EIRR. Not combat-wise, but how they are able to enjoy the following:
- A much faster HP bar to replenish
- The whole recrewing mechanic
- The superior amount of infantry buffs/leadership
- The fact that a single infantry man can cap
- The counter-fact that tanks are slow to repair
- The counter-fact that tanks cannot cap.
- ATG's negating much larger populations of "armored" pop and being generally too cheap.
- The "drop weapons" mechanic allowing you to scavenge squads that die to buff others

If medium tanks could HOLD territory (not cap) EIRR would be a slightly better game. If ATG's went up in price players would have to rely more on their tanks for AT. Right now its almost always tank + atg vs tank + atg because of how pop-efficient atgs are at their role.

I'd like to see EIRR move some steps away from catering so much to mass infantry and ATGs and the capping game, because it punishes a large amount of vulnerable, original and enjoyable strategies.

I've been thinking about this for some time now. The fact that any type of heavy utility company falls so short in map control against the "spam" companies are in my eyes problematic and less than EIRR deserves to be. I envision EIRR games where attrition and the actual exchange of planned and determined companies go up against each other. The game has become too vulnerable to companies which dont care about how many infantry squads they lose and just keep calling on ATG's and sucide units. Generally sucide play should be punished in EIRR. Right now there's no punishment for playing like a Tyrant and just suciding all your guys for map control.

Finally, the lack of care for losing units need to be struck down on. The aim of winning should not be rewarded by sucidal play. Perhaps call-in times are too short for infantry specificly, or perhaps callin in the same type of units over and over again (rifle rifle rifle rifle) isn't ideal. At the end of the day a lot of players find the "I'm going to sucide 100 population of basic infantry" in waves of zerg aiming purely to gain map control detrimental to good play. So something needs to be done to stop sucide companies from being too powerful at winning games through map control.

[Katusha]

+99999999999999999999999999999......99999999999999999999999.....999999999999999.. to be continued

[TheWindCriesMary]

+1 to this post.
 
Well said Smokaz... you old windbag.

 -Wind

[WildZontar]

+1 

[AmPM]

+1

[seanconnery]

tbh, this is a post that you made because you lost a game against a level 6 company.   rifles are so terribly weak.  if you guys had a nebel or a hummel, you wouldn't have made a post about how running mass rifles and atgs is op. plus, i wasn't suiciding inf for the sake of suiciding.  watch the replay, my rifles go in to kill crap not to die in vain. and plus, what else are we suppose to do besides out cap you when you have 3 tigers on the field?  bring on some inf to counter, tbh. 

[Smokaz]

Whatever, soi. Of course some people look to make sure their sucide units do some damage, but don't you come here and tell that 1 game out of a thousand I have played alone has anything relevant to do with my overall views of eirr or that a lot of these companies doesn't play with a total disregard for the survival of a majority of their force.

[8thRifleRegiment]

seanconnery. Please... please... play a game vs an ATG+rifle spammer. its ridiculous becuase the atgs with ap rounds insta gib almost anything while all the rifles run map control and run over any of yer inf with bar supression and whatnot. it is ridiculous and OP dont bitch, everyone has lost against it before and even allies themseflves admit it to being stupid. The reason its soo common is becuase its soo easy. its hard to build a company that works with itself, and supports and has an actually strategy incorperated into it. not simply throwing whatever you go at the enemy beuase "Hey ive got 46 more rifles left anyways".

Well said Smokaz
-8th

[Groundfire]

Well put smokaz, a better constructed version of the problems I was trying to articulate in the internal fourms. (with my random balance suggestions)

However, I feel as if you place too much emphasis on map control as being a cause of this conceptual crisis, and not the result of the spam.

Yes, I totally agree that hiding one man squads should not prevent territory capture and other such statements regarding territory, but in reality, lose the spam, slow the game down and the emphasis on map control in the metagame will decrease, and increase the viability of utility builds.  

This is not a post on balance as much as it is how we conceptualize what EIRR game play is supposed to be like. People who run these kind of companies are not going to be especially receptive that this spammy, disposable and unsensual playstyle is bad for our image in the way we present ourselves as a polished mod.

Hopefully, the warmap, vet rework, pool rework and some pricing reworks (incremental price hikes for oversupply maybe?) can fix this.

[Smokaz]

I place emphasis on map control because its what allows you to win. You could in theory throw a million bazooka rifles at a IST, it would kill a horrific amount of rifles before it went down. You would have used those rifles extremely poorly allowing him to waste the same amount of units doing actual damage to your company.

 But there's a leading belief and a strong adherence to the fact that you can win with cost-ineffective builds through overwhelming builds that rely more on combined arms using utility units, damage-over-time weapons or too many high pop tanks with repair downtime.

There's also plenty of games where a force that objectively has LOST through losing integral units and resources and they just cap their way out of a normatively clear loss, which certainly does not promote our mod very well.

You can't take this issue out of the scope of map control, because just mindlessily blobbing ATG's and infantry is easily countered through a combination of the same and OTHER units, but it cannot in any way disperse-bakcap, overwhelm and blob together in comparable way to compete for map control.

Basically gameplay has to be moved more towards attrition at the cost of the map control. When attrition becomes more powerful than map control - playing correctly and perhaps even more "carefully" becomes more important instead of the current ease of just throwing out a mass force.

[Groundfire]

Yeah, Im not disagreeing with you. No doubt that we might need some refining of the territory capture system, im just stating that spam is the bigger of the two issues because it results in infantry map domination and will be fixed when we reduce it.

Maybe we should brainstorm a type of moral system that can function in game. Lose too many squads in a time frame, all subsequent call in timers are upped 5 seconds.

(just thinking out loud)

[brn4meplz]

Well there is an alternative Territory capture system we could pilot with a Launcher option probably but we'd need to tweak it to our needs a bit because with the way it functions Infantry spam would be more effective. if we changed it around some though it would work(in theory)

[8thRifleRegiment]

Or. just a suggestion. A unit cap for specific units. like... atgs... and vanilla rifles... like for example, only 2 atgs in a company and maybe. 25 rifles.

[Groundfire]

Hardcaps are just lazy. We can do the job with a better constructed soft cap availability system in the form of our current pool system and incremental price increases for oversupplied units

[Smokaz]

Another idea is to implement a timer that goes UP and down with time.

For example:

I play for 2 minutes, call out 3 callins I gain a lot of callin time.

But, if I play well with what I have between the 3rd and 4th callin and thus are able to make do with what I have for some time, the call-in time of my 4th is depending on the length of time between 3rd and 4th callin. The amount of time between 3rd and 4th could REDUCE my callin time. The linear system right now while giving you increasing penalities for calling in units (time) doesn't consider the results of your call-ins at all. It also doesn't reward good play other than delaying your penalty.

At any rate this is a secondary issue to anything else, this with the timer.

[Groundfire]

Another idea is to implement a timer that goes UP and down with time.

For example:

I play for 2 minutes, call out 3 callins I gain a lot of callin time.

But, if I play well with what I have between the 3rd and 4th callin and thus are able to make do with what I have for some time, the call-in time of my 4th is depending on the length of time between 3rd and 4th callin. The amount of time between 3rd and 4th could REDUCE my callin time. The linear system right now while giving you increasing penalities for calling in units (time) doesn't consider the results of your call-ins at all. It also doesn't reward good play other than delaying your penalty.

Tieing call in times to how effective your previous call ins functioned (survived?) could be potentially damning for new players or bad palyers and would just benefit seasoned vets anyways.

Its a very slippery slope to tie call in timers to unit performance.

[brn4meplz]

It also defeats the purpose of High intensity companies like Lightning war and most AB / Commando companies. They function alot on intense and relentless aggression to secure a winning position which they can slowly bleed their enemies with when they try and take it back

[Evilnrg]

i my game style is map control :/
on axis or allied side dont nerf me

[jackmccrack]

I think it is lame that a company can get by, and even dominate, without using any Fuel at all, and I do not know how we can prevent it from happening.

[Artekas]

I don't know about this actually, personally my experiences have been quite a bit different. I find that map control is actually more or less irrelevant until the ending stages of the game, and is a rather small advantage to fight for in the early game. I currently really like the current system as it is, even the unrealistic one man holding territory from a corner.

Making cloaked units hold territory but one man squads not would be a bit contradictory. Both result in you having to hunt something that's not even fighting for control of a sector down, in order to capture that sector. I don't think making cloaked squads hold territory in itself is too bad of an idea though.

I'm okay with the callin timers as they are.

Allied disablers and ATG combo is probably something that need to be looked at.

Hardcaps don't do anything but screw certain factions or doctrines over. For example, as Defensive, I have the advantage of a unit unlock that's very similar to a unit I already have, so I would basically be surpassing the hardcap in that way. Another thing is that Wehrmacht have two types of infantry that can be used mainline and a third elite infantry in all doctrines. Any hardcaps on US troops are going to rape Armour because they don't get elite infantry like the other two doctrines.

Just my two cents, feel free to disregard this.