Siege

A major update comes to siege with the new overrun mechanic. What this means is the game will no longer end when the base is lost. Here's how it works:

The game plays as normal to begin with, the enemy tries to take the base as you try to keep it. However, you now have access to a version of the patrol base system previously seen on insurgency. With the siege version you need to have the kit at least 0.5km from base and you do not need the medical truck, only the radio and generator to be closer than 200m from each other. Once you set this up it acts as a second spawn point like with insurgency.

If you're unfortunate you'll lose the base. Provided you have the patrol base set up you can spawn there, but if not then that's where it gets really tricky. You'll need to clear out the base and get at least 2 people inside it for a minute to switch it back, the same conditions the enemy has. If you can't do that, you'll need to grab the pb kit and hightail out, while under fire and without any respawn. If you can do that and set it up then everyone can spawn there again.

If the base has fallen and everyone is at the pb then the game switches around. The enemy will change from attacking the base to running in and setting up a garrison of their own, which can potentially consist of up to 40-50 people in some cases. Now they become the ones that are dug in and it’s your job to get them out. Don't forget: you can't take the ammo spawner with you and none of the vehicles respawn, so a messy escape will mean a shoddy chance at getting the base back. The standard victory conditions apply however, grind down the enemy enough from outside and you might not even need to take the base back completely. You can even go full guerilla and attack the satellite towns instead to target their supply routes. Reinforcements will keep coming for as long as the enemy can send them, and they'll split between moving to base as a garrison and hunting you down directly. You will need to actually own the base to complete the mission, but they’ll stop sending help once their reinforcements run out.

The patrol base can fall too, this requires enemies to be within 100m of base for 30 seconds and then it will take it down. The ai won’t attack the patrol base directly because it’s of no use to them, but if they’re hunting you and you happen to be there then bad luck. If it goes down, you can just reactivate it as usual when you’re the section leader. It’s very much there to be a point to attack from, you won’t need to defend it that much.

The mission fails when there are no available respawn areas and all players are dead. New connects add 5 respawn tickets and it’s very generous to begin with, tickets won’t be an issue as long as you look after each other.

Other Stuff

A minor change to the siege mode on takistan mountains (the one in the compound, not the base). I added some custom spawn locations for enemy so that there’s a chance they’ll come down the roads more instead of always trying to fire down from the mountains.

I made a new backend system that allows me to define how each map multiplies the enemy spawn amount by the player count, since I noticed that some maps were not challenging enough at certain player counts. Chernarus modern+90’s and zargabad 90’s have been made more difficult with higher playercounts, and takistan mountains (again the one in the compound) has been made less difficult with higher playercounts, but more difficult overall.

I removed Kunduz siege modern and 90’s. The 90’s one had ai walking through walls on the first test and the base is too big to defend on modern.

Finally, I fixed sahrani insurgency. It couldn’t be selected for a while because it gave itself a dependency it shouldn’t have, so it’s fixed now.

I’ve been working on bringing millennial into public. The year I’m aiming for is 2008, with leeway for earlier kit too. This puts us with DPM, SUSAT L85’s with grenadiers, minimi’s and GPMG’s at section level, and a choice of snatch, WMIK or mastiff to drive. The US Army also makes a return in UCP camo (the grey one), with a choice of humvees and a vehicle crew for a CROWS M2 Stryker. Research into the infantry showed a transitional period into ACOG, so team leaders, the marksman and the squad leader get ACOG’s whereas the regular infantry get CCO red dot sights. Like the 90’s US Army units, the flipside is that they have a huge amount of ammo/storage without being overweight. Yesterday’s test went really well with a new zargabad siege and a new reshmaan insurgency going near-perfectly. Zargabad siege is set in the center of zargabad city and is based on the siege of Musa Qala, and Reshmaan insurgency is based in a vehicle checkpoint near the center of the map.

I made some variants of jahra domination. One was all wmiks and one is all Abrams, but the tanks balancing is naff at the moment between cup and rhs (and even rhs and rhs, an rhs BMP can take at least 5 AP rounds from an RHS M1A2) so a quick testing session showed that armoured isn’t viable with the current selection. 

The wmik mission is similar to the Abrams mission in that it's a test of teamwork with smaller team sizes, since I've noticed no one wants to be the 9th/10th man when there's already a full section. The rolesheet is in fireteams of 4, and each commander has a long range radio at the moment. If the tests are successful this will be developed further. Taking on 10-20 t-55’s, bmp’s, brdm’s and btr’s with wmiks should be enough to encourage teamwork, so I'm hopeful. Our recent test worked well apart from some overzealous artillery which has since been removed.

I also implemented a fix for the vehicle respawn system spawning vehicles inside their own wrecks. The issue was first that there wasn’t a check in place for objects inside the spawn spot (previous to me there was no need for it since there was nothing that could commonly cause vehicles to explode) and then, once I had created the check, it was searching a spot in the sky for vehicles instead of on the ground. I eventually realised that, instead of trying to divide or implement some sort of weird contextual checking that created a cylinder or a fake vehicle to look around, I just needed to zero out the height value for the spawn location’s positional array. Piece of cake, the vehicles will now respawn as soon as their spot is empty.