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Thread: Some Melee Improvement thoughts

  1. #1

    Some Melee Improvement thoughts

    I'd like to see a melee system that is good but isn't so good that it's used constantly in gameplay. This is an important balancing act. If the system was made better in much-needed ways then it would get used way more than it is.

    I'd really like to see more than one way of stabbing. The full bayonet lunge is sort of excessive as a sole melee option. A faster jab that causes less damage but recovers faster would be a more sensible alternative and better prolong melee coupled with any future parrying addition. Also please get rid of the black & white from the first stab or hit. Any benefit from that as a punishment for getting hit is negated when people can't tell friend from foe.

    Any serious examination of Civil War combat reveals how little hand-to-hand combat there was compared to what you'd expect. People arguing otherwise cannot be taken seriously because no serious historian today argues otherwise. Soldiers who fight in formations (of any type) cannot physically exist in hand-to-hand combat with an opposing formation for very long. One side wins and one loses (runs away or surrenders). This is a complicated relationship. The bayonet can both be a critical role but not really be used. As I called it before, a 'charge' is more of a game of 'chicken' than anything else.

    This fact that hand-to-hand is brief holds true in WoR gameplay but only because the teams wipe each other to a silly extent and vast parts of the teams are sent back to spawn, usually one without its flags. It's a tit-for-tat bloodfest and the true victor is more easily measured by who can race their guys back from the main spawn quicker. This sucks and busts up the continuation of gameplay for the players - all for a relatively crappy hand-to-hand mess with guaranteed TKing.

    In order to fix this, players and teams need to be better conditioned to avoid senseless and disruptive hand-to-hand fights and when to call them off and when to run away from an enemy one. You'd do this by giving a serious buff to higher and more concentrated numbers. If you build up local superiority in numbers and form a wall of men or bayonets you should not have to go tit-for-tat to small groups of players - let alone lone wolves. This could take the form of autosurrender but I also think out of line players should be 100% frozen from using melee against formation soldiers or at least frozen out of full power melee attacks. Getting a wall of bayonets to an enemy is more of a challenge than the chaotic and messy charges we have now where spreading out is a key component to avoid defensive fire.

    One of the most effective tactics I know of is to sprint in among a close formation of enemy resulting in a lot of collateral damage in them trying to get at me. If done just preceding a charge or within the technical confines of 'skirmishing' or even 'in formation,' it's very effective. This is the polar opposite of real life where you would try to concentrate as many bodies as possible to drive an enemy away. There is virtually no reason to do this in WoR in fact special orders are given to the do the opposite - spread out - come in at angles. Melee right now represents more of a aerial dog fight than soldiers on a battlefield taking and holding territory.


    Gameplay has everything to benefit from a more nontraditional approach to melee.


    Here... here's some sources to read or watch if anyone is lacking in the understanding of what the melee "should look like."


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    From Military History Visualized 12 minutes 15 seconds
    Napoleonic Infantry Tactics - Charges - Not what you see in Hollywood but no less compelling

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw3wlU3eYsc&t=12m15s


    ------------------------------------------------
    From Military History Visualized 6 minutes 32 seconds - Cavalry Charge
    Note that two evenly matched and motivated forces of cavalry charging each other might find each other stopped and staring awkwardly at each other because their horses won't charge. These differences in the dynamic in actual combat vs what Hollywood portrays are immense and the real thing is no less compelling. It helps you understand the casualty rates for cavalry battles being so low despite charge and counter-charge. He calls a compact formation a 'moving wall' which is probably the best description.


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4itcJ8Ur2c&t=6m32s

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    Page 24 Scott Hartwig - Hand-to-hand. Free National Park Service Article

    http://npshistory.com/series/symposi.../11/essay2.pdf

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    Also my own suggestion video from a ways back on Autosurrender at 4 minutes and 2 seconds
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjUuaVXTJsY&t=420s

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    Come on in to Team Realism for the big win.
    Last edited by Poorlaggedman; 05-18-2020 at 08:57 PM.
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  2. #2

    CSA Captain

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    So complicated, it's really much simpler than that. In reality charges were usually made when one side was deemed to be close to breaking, all the Devs really had to do was to tie melee' to morale. If they'd have disabled melee until one team reached 'breaking', then WoR would be a far better game.
    ''I'm here to play an American Civil War era combat game, not Call of Duty with muskets.''.

  3. #3
    I would support that. I'm sure it would never happen. I really don't care for melee. It'd be great as an occasional flavor but it's a constant presence. At any given moment you have a mathematical equation ticking based on the distance between opposing sides and how many selfish or drunk jerks you have in your team.

    People dart off as solitary hunters trying to close in for a stab and the rest of the team just gets to deal with this constant bleed with no real penalty for the people actually doing it. Madness
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  4. #4
    If the only way to prevent games to be about charging and countercharging over and over again is designing a melee system that is bad enough so players are discouraged from using it, I think that speaks volumes of how sad the state of the game is and how disappointing its gameplay turned out to be in terms of "realism", considering "realism" is one of the main feats that attracted many of us.

    The melee combat is crap. It may sound rough, but really, I don't think you need to go into the details when this simple description is totally accurate: it is absolute crap. And it'd be ok if, as one would expect from a "realistic" civil war team based fps, melee was an exceptional thing that you'd only see now and then, under exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, the gameplay encourages it up to a point where charges will be decisive in 100% of the games, and will be present almost from beginning to end in most games, and you'll even have games where the only thing you'll basically do is charge, die, respawn, fix bayonet, charge again, rinse and repeat.

    So, being the awful, terrible mess of a system it is, the funny thing is the real problem isn't that, it's that the game revolves around charging basically. Please, don't mention house rules, their existence only proves my point.

  5. #5

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    Quote Originally Posted by rbsmith7 View Post
    I wish there was some way to incentivize historical and period behavior.
    Agreed here.

    I do like the morale idea but of course, this should be a customizable option given to server owners to set at which stage it is open for melee combat.

  6. #6

    USA General of the Army

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    I'd rather "mortality" be enforced.
    You're in game, you do something stupid, (i.e. Rambo, excessive charging, hand to hand, ... ) you die. You're done for the game. You sit it out and wait for the round to end.

    You don't want to sit around waiting, then you stay in formation, do as you're instructed, and possibly survive the conflict.

    Without a fear of "mortality," these excessive bayonet charges will continue.

    <Edit>Let's be clear, if you are doing as you are supposed to, things continue as they do now, you get hit you can re-spawn. Limit "mortality" to those not playing by intended preference.</edit>

  7. #7
    I fully expected when the team morale system was introduced that there would eventually be rewards and penalties for the player, not just the team. A middle ground between instantly going back into the spawn queue the same as every other soldier and never spawning again would be great. /\

    The way I see it, in the times of the Civil War, soldiers were not expected by anyone on either side to fight out of formation. I'm not talking crowded together or slightly dispersed. I mean alone and isolated or something close to it. I'd find it real fascinating if anyone could find a story of lone soldiers operating as such in hand-to-hand when any sane individual that's caught alone runs or surrenders if the enemy can get close enough to touch you. The idea that someone would fully choose 'other' and start slashing away is kind of ridiculous. It'd be one thing if it was ineffective in game, but it really isn't. It's disruptive and that can count for a lot.

    I like the idea of autosurrender and also preventing out of lines from scoring full melee hits on players in formation because it best resembles reality and I think it would be the best tool to elicit a more realistic response in those types of situations. I always favored some randomness myself unbeknownst to the player who spawned. You may spawn as a Mel Gibson who will never surrender and not even know it but the odds are you won't.
    Last edited by Poorlaggedman; 05-27-2020 at 06:36 PM.
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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by rbsmith7 View Post
    Hess cited a field surgeon who claimed for the entire duration of the war, he never saw a single bayonet wound.

    I don't know what could be done that wasn't gamey, to prevent groups from volleying one time and then charging a ridiculous distance with charged bayonets. I personally don't like to put a bunch of restrictions on how people choose the play the game, but at the same time I wish there was some way to incentivize historical and period behavior.
    I mean, what is there more gamey than the current counter-attack system, that makes people not to attack and take the point depending on purely strategic reasons, but to wait until the clock is at certain point where it's convenient because the enemy won't have enough time to counter-attack, or because you want to get the morale rise?

    This is not the thread to talk about it, but this counter-attack system is atrocious, one of the main reasons I'm so disappointed with the game.

    Edit: anyway, as a developer you have the right, even the duty, to do whatever necessary in order to make players to play it the way it's meant to be played. If your design encourages an unrealistic play style, you should make whatever changes needed so people have to play differently. We are supposed to be here because we looked for a "realistic" cw fps, why would we want to play War of Charges? We do simply because it's the best and easiest way to win.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L8vAGGitr8
    Last edited by A. Bravo; 05-28-2020 at 12:00 PM.

  9. #9

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    Penalties are not the way to go, nor is forcing a player into a surrender. One would hope for a more 'natural' progression involving Civil War gameplay, traditionally one of the most hated states in gameplay is being 'frozen' in place i.e. something a player can not affect a solution to......forcing players into a state of surrender would be hugely unpopular.

    As most people have pointed out, one of the things that they enjoy most about WoR is it's historical accuracy. Another thing that they've been keen to point out is the lack of bayonet combat in the war, the fact that melee combat was usually only enacted when one side was ready to break is exactly that....a fact. It makes perfect sense to tie melee comabt to morale in some way, because that's actually how it was in the war, and that's what WoR players like the most.

    I've not met a single player who likes melee in this game, it's over used and it never offers a solution because both sides always end up wiped out. If one side is breaking, and can't afford the ticket loss, then it would make sense for an officer to call a retreat. It leaves it in the hands of the players, so that they stand of fall by their own decisions, & not because they get frozen into a surrender, which would just leave them feeling frustrated.
    Last edited by Sox; 05-28-2020 at 04:31 PM.
    ''I'm here to play an American Civil War era combat game, not Call of Duty with muskets.''.

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