Festival of Explosives

Suggestions
1

Hello, pretty new player here. I play Axis on Normandy if that matters at all to the following whine.

The gameplay is severely hurting from all the explosives, and that’s pretty much the long and short of it. It’s on a level of absurdity I don’t think I’ve ever experienced in a combined arms game before, probably because this game has proper explosive power (a good thing, IMO). It doesn’t seem to matter one whit where I am actually positioned, indoors, outdoors, lying down, crouching in a trench - airborne explosives will kill me. Since the main game mode gathers everyone around a small area by design, it doesn’t take a phenomenally intelligent pilot/radioman to know where to spam his stuff for endless easy kills.

There are a lot of options to address this, but something absolutely MUST be done or this game is just going to keep sucking when by rights it really ought to be quite good considering the fundamentals it has.

Potent explosive weapons plus no teamkilling/points loss is pretty much guaranteed to mean they get spammed thoughtlessly and cheaply. I’m not in favor of pathetic explosives with a 14mm kill radius like many shooters do, so that leaves adding team kills with point reductions associated. This would prevent the cheap tactics that are destroying the Invasion game mode, where the capture point is essentially under non-stop barrage from artillery, rockets and bombs. Since these are so deadly, in my experience it is bordering on literally impossible to defend the point; as soon as you are close enough to do so, you’re dead.

I have no complaints about balance on anything in this game except from this. No other issue even compares to this, currently, as far as impacting fun and gameplay.

The issue with explosives is there is nothing to learn from and nothing to do about it. Artificial limitations suck and in principle I like that these options exist, so the only thing I can think that would rein the situation in is team damage to make using this stuff a situational judgement call, rather than a defacto choice the moment its available.

I feel like my first few days/games did not suffer this as much, but the last few days have been absolutely disgustingly unfun; I keep wanting to like it and then quitting to do something more fun, like work, after yet another experience like this. I know it’s beta, and I don’t want the solution to be something gimmicky or for it to be turning explosives into pillow bombs. But something has to happen, the gameplay is hurting really badly and it feels like every match is a foregone conclusion that plays out the exact same frustrating way.

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normandy is by far the worst campaign in terms of everything exploding. from my experience this isnt as big of a problem in berlin and moscow

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3

Some of the Moscow maps are rather explodey as well. A few of them, notably, have very little cover on some capture points (no roofs etc), and some predictable tank spawns here and there.

I would like some kind of limit to available planes, making it possible to shoot them all down and win air superiority. I like the team damage suggestion, as the “bomb a friendly squad as it assaults” tactic is so supremely effective. I’m not sure what the “best way” to deal with it is, all ideas seem to have drawbacks.

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And then you have the mortars along with the planes and nowhere to hide or go. With 3 planes in the air good luck

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I haven’t played any other campaigns but I can easily see it being similar there as well, because the issue is one of fundamental design in this area. Some maps and modes exacerbate it, but as far as I can see it will end up more prevalent than it should be everywhere simply because the as currently set up, you know your explosives are lethal as hell, you know where the enemy will be without actually having seen them, and you know your own side won’t suffer.

The effects are concentrated when it’s a single point being contested like Invasion, but the same issue is true in Conquest albeit slightly toned down.

Playing a little more last night, and I had an experience on the last hangar defensive point of Airfield (the giant hangar with chest high “lanes” of fire) that was worth mentioning. I got bombed to death several times, but because that capture point offers sight lines to the point outside it’s capture radius, we successfully defended it; the enemy team were unable to clear us all out just with bombs, because we could lurk outside the capture radius but still be effective. This got me to thinking about the generalities again, and perhaps part of the solution could be enlarging the capture radius to something significantly larger than explosive damage radius. I don’t know how practical that would be across the board, but it really made a difference in that match at that specific point.

In contrast I had a Conquest game on the swamp map, and defending/capturing the railway gun point B was a mortar/artillery fest because of the particular sight lines, and the fact that the capture radius places you in a perfect bowl with little cover. Somebody was sitting a ways off shelling the crap out of that bowl, and racking up cheap kills while their own guys captured.

On a final note, this game is really cool when this situation is less extreme. Finding the right balance without destroying the combined arms aspect and keeping all the variation in viable play styles and the unique destructive power of certain weapons that should be unpleasant, will be a challenge but I hope the devs can find it because there’s a really fun game in here somewhere when that happy middle ground is found.

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You should’ve seen it before, artillerymen used to have less than a minute cooldown on the bombardments… It’s still not great, but I do think they’re working on improving it.
I do have some gameplay suggestions to increase fun in explodey games, if you care to try;

One is grabbing your highest crew count tank available, equipping the crew with SMG’s, grenades and medkits, and using it as an APC to storm an enemy position. You can bombard the enemy with HE shells as you approach, and the empty tank draws explosive attention after your guys abandon it, the perfect distraction.

Another I like to do is to move a squad, preferably with an engineer, out on a far flank - Almost the edge of the map, and then slowly making my way around. Most times you’ll be alone there, and you can find a nice place to build a rally point. This tends to give your team at least a couple good spawns before the enemy figures out where to bomb.

Then there’s sandbags. You’d be surprised how many explosions I’ve survived just by building a mess of them. Multiple layers seem to cushion larger explosions. Build speed perk (if you can get it) makes you able to put up loads of sandbags quickly. I will often do this when trying to capture a point I know is about to be shelled, half the time I get a couple survivors and capture it anyway.

Last one, pull out your grenade when you’re being shelled. You might not be able to aim a rifle while the screen is a blur, but you can still give enemy attackers a bad day. Hope some of this adds some fun!

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