PEW wrote:With all the parameters given, the assault is perfect in being so average. To make it more competitive, we should not change one parameter to make it more powerful, because it would destroy the nice balance. This game is designed to start with Assaults, built you AI for Assaults, then unlocking new bots and specialize them. That's good.
I really can't agree with you on this one. At the very least, assaults are perfectly average, and that alone is a significant nerf to the bot class, or assaults are not average, but below average.
If we compared assaults to shotguns, assault gain more power in long range (which doesn't say much besides the fact that assaults can actually keep a shield down by itself) and in medium range (which is often negated by shotgun's speed), but they lose so much more. Shotgun has the same speed carrying resources, shotgun has a
much faster move speed, shotgun's health+shield is the exact same as assaults health+shield when both bots a have no damage on it (and since more of shotgun's armor is in the shield, it is overall better), and shotgun does
much more damage in short range (even more than machine gun's, which I'll get to).
If we compared assaults to machine guns, assaults gains in movement speed (which is definitely machine gun's biggest weakness), it has better accuracy in short range (unlike all other ranges where the accuracy is equal), and it shoots it's first bullets earlier (which rarely makes a difference). However, despite the accuracy bonus in short range, machine gun still does a good deal more damage in
all ranges, and to top it off, machine gun has 2000 more shield to waste and 2000 more hp to waste which definitely helps overcome a good portion of it's slow speed
If we compared assaults to snipers, assaults have 2000 more hp and has the ability to gain damage just by moving forwards, but sniper's damage is comparable to any other bot class in medium range, so while it is slacking in short range (as it should be), it is ridiculous in long range (which is the range with the largest gap anyways and probably the most important range).
So, we could argue all we want about how shotgun loses to assaults in long range (as it should), it is still by far the weakest class with the most and largest of weaknesses compared to other bot types, which is why I say that assaults are highly underpowered and only makes since if there are a lot of them
Castlevania wrote:As far as I know, diversified strategies is boosted by diversified configuration.
In my suggestion, the total kind of special classes will decrease in very small maps, but could you please illustrate a "strategy" that requires coordination between different special classes? At least I don't have one. What I see is just that you cannot use "dancing shotgun" and "shooting at the edge" snipers at the same time in Mind Game. Ironically, Mind Game is the most notorious rock-paper-scissor in current rule.
First off, Mind game is and has always been a map where the rock-paper-scissors of bot classes happens the least. In fact, the only times it had a rock-paper-scissors between bot classes was from 5.3 to 6.1, where most players was still trying to adapt new strategies for that map, either because we was adapting to not having the free ability of bot class like in 5.2 or because was adapting to playing with tags only. Even during 5.2, double machine gun pretty much became the standard, and the rock-paper-scissors became more between the strategies you chose or if you was willing to try to gamble on the enemy's AI and put a sniper in the back.
As far as other dynamics go, like pier said, 5.2 almost always came down to either full sniper teams (which keep a lot of power and was at least somewhat versatile) or full shotgun rushes (which was only not as good because people kept looking for ways for snipers to beat them and machine guns easily beat shotguns (although more machine gun AIs wasn't as developed at the time as they are now, so shotguns still could win)). I've done several tests back then to see if there was any diversity that was useful, and besides pushbot (which had to many weaknesses in my opinion to be viable and had (and still has) even less nodes to support it), there wasn't much luck. Machine guns are too slow to use well with shotguns or assaults (if you want to notice machine guns working with assaults, check out Kingmaker with sniper-assault-assault compared to sniper-machine gun-assault), and assaults have paper armor for their not so great movement speed (or even just in general), and sniper shotgun is just a gimmick that only works on abusing both the opponent's AI and the shotgun's speed. In general, most of the diversified teams in 5.2 was to avoid being hit by a rock-paper-scissors (which often times lead to what I complain as an "unbalanced layout" where one player might only win because of a gamble of the starting bot placement rather than just the strategy, which could be argued to happen all the time these days).
So, getting back to the original question (which I honestly forgot when I typed that paragraph), no, there are no diverse strategies that could be gained by having different bot types