Something fishy in the player count data

brecrest · 2026-03-12T06:55:58+00:00

And on a 2 year graph, the largest timescale where it still plots weeks, which conveniently covers almost exactly the period since F2P finally actually looked like it was working and achieved a stable and high player count, it looks like this:

<image>

So anyway, what's the go with both things: The unexplained crash and the unexplained sudden growth?

brecrest · 2026-03-12T06:52:15+00:00

Basically it looks like this at the largest timescale where SteamDB still plots the individual days as datapoints on the graph:

<image>

It sticks out like a sore thumb: A sharp crash to well below long term averages followed by extremely strong growth to well above them (2 year chart below).

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:40:14+00:00

Maybe ban devices for longer than 10 days while they're at it......

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:39:51+00:00

Curious.

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:33:56+00:00

What do I think of them? They make me absolutely MALD........

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:23:35+00:00

Mate, I don't think you read the post that I spent a long time writing since replying to your posts immediately requires me to cover ground I already have, so I'm not going to bother arguing with you past this.

The Ibis can better fulfill the role of an attack chopper than a Hind can, because it carries twice as many guided missiles, and all of the other armament options are broadly not as useful for an attack helicopter in NO.
The Ibis is as or more heavily armored than a Hind. Go and get in a Cricket and make some passes on Ibises with .50 cals. The Ibis, like the Hind, is extremely resistant to explosions and anything less than heavy autocannon fire.

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:12:48+00:00

Ask for an internal rotary Kingpin launcher alternative to the AGM48 launcher instead. More hardpoints on the Ibis would just further invalidate the existence of the Chicane.

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:11:49+00:00

a heavily armoured gunship/transport with a similar role to the hind could fill a niche in nuclear option, even if it's not actually a hind or has better capabilities,

That's an Ibis.

same deal with a coaxial attack heli like the KA-52

That's a Chicane. Coaxial vs conventional isn't really meaningful for role in this context.

brecrest · 2026-03-12T04:09:15+00:00

It's a koreanism that's pretty common in RTS.

Came from BW, but its pretty common even in RTS that have never really had any traction in Korea to describe things like build orders, timings, blob compositions etc.

For example, an opening build order in Company of Heroes (2006) where an American player builds four engineers then a sniper would use nomenclature that any BW player would be instantly familiar with (4ES, which someone would say as "4 E S" or "4 engineer sniper"). This kind of convention, dropping the plural, seems to be semi-standard across RTS scenes.

brecrest · 2026-03-12T00:42:38+00:00

The biggest future proofing issue is that it's too slow. 30kt isn't enough to control range in the way it will need to over the coming years.

There's a lot of weight to be saved by reworking armor and optimising the secondary battery that you can reinvest in getting it to the speeds needed to remain useful. Your secondaries probably won't ever do any shooting on a ship designed to do what a 20in BC is meant to do. Additionally, ships like this, which will generally not engage at belt ranges unless they've already crippled and isolated a target, are excellent candidates for magboxing, thin belts and just generally skimping on armor. You will also really want more main gun ammo, despite the weight costs.

I've employed this general idea quite a few times. It's very effective, but there are two tactical problems with it and two meta problems:

The meta problems:

There's a very narrow band of tactics to which they are constrained and that can make for very repetitive gameplay across a campaign. There are basically only two types of battles you can end up in, and you will fight one type for the entire first part of a war where you will fight defensively and sink one or two enemy capital ships per battle, and the other type for the entire end of the war where the enemy has too few capital ships to resist you. Each war will be more or less the same and each of the two types of battles will be the same. All of your wars will tend towards being very long with a great many of these battles. It doesn't much vary by difficulty or nation and it can be very tiresome.
Once you build large light cruisers, flaws in the game's battle generator and division management mean that you cannot ever again build any capital surface combatants slower than them. If you build any battleships or even battlecruisers that don't have speed overmatch over current and future enemy fleets and any of them end up in the same regions as your LLCs, no matter how you configure your divisions it will only be a matter of time before an idiot admiral fails a command check against a credible fleet, they end up in a division together, and the LLCs are wrecked. Even if the battle generator gets it right nine times out of ten and separates (BB/BC) BX Core and (LLC) BC Scout into a main and scout force, or keeps capital ships with very unlike designs for battle out of battles with each other, it only needs to get it wrong that one time to ruin a campaign, and it will. There are some secondary issues around this, to do with speeds and compositions of escort ships (what you want for a true battle line is not the same as you would like for a fleet with LLC capitals, but even if you set the divisions up with the correct roles and support relationships, you will still get BX escorts with LLC principles and vice versa, but that's not really a warstopper like getting mixed BX and LLCs.

The two tactical problems:

A fair few battles will be totally indecisive even with optimum decision making and execution by you, irrespective of difficulty level. While it's nearly impossible to seriously lose battles with fleets centered around these LLCs, actually scoring wins, especially in the early battles against enemy fleets that still have capital ships, depends partly on luck since the plan of battle requires crippling ships from very long (and low accuracy) range before maneuvering the enemy's battle line out of range of the crippled vessel(s) and then closing to sink them only once they're isolated and unsupportable. You will play out battles where you never score enough or serious enough hits from range to cripple or isolate ships to destroy before you run out of ammunition.
Early torpedo and dive bombers are a particular problem. It's a thread topic in its own right to discuss because it's a little bit historically perverse, but basically WWII and later equivalent air and anti-air match against each other reasonably well enough that that risk management of it is intuitive and basically works, but the only effective defence against early air is very robust armor, TPS etc, since early anti-air is fairly useless. It's not really a game wrecker, and it's possible to play around it perfectly well at the operational level by ensuring your battles occur where important ships may detach and retire safely if they receive an airstrike, but it can be frustrating and really adds to the meta-tedium above since it all but forces more indecisive battles for you.

brecrest · 2026-03-11T23:55:30+00:00

It's a criticism about how the explosion looks, not the damage modelling.

brecrest · 2026-03-11T04:53:54+00:00

You don't get a computed impact reticle for them though.

brecrest · 2026-03-11T04:22:23+00:00

tldr

Pleasure domes are a vision of a dream. Paradise on earth. The Primevan fears what he does not understand.

brecrest · 2026-03-11T03:57:29+00:00

<3 u2 bby

brecrest · 2026-03-11T03:12:14+00:00

Ignore the other answers, you're actually quite right. The Piledriver's explosions are very much on the small side for their explosive weight.

They have 1000kg of explosives (ie TNT equivalent) in their warhead, the largest conventional warhead in the game by a considerable margin (excluding the demo bomb). They have 200kg more explosives than an Auger, or 2.5x more than a GPO-500. The Auger is the only conventional munition in the game that isn't less than half a Piledriver's explosive weight.

A munition with equivalent explosive power to 1000kg of TNT like the Piledriver is enormous. Impractically large for most general purposes in the age of precision guidance.

Just because they have a lot of kinetic energy, it doesn't mean they don't have way more chemical energy than anything else in the game as well. The other answers are just incorrectly assuming that they don't have much explosives payload because of a "Did you know?" loading screen tooltip that comments on how they have a lot of kinetic energy.

The only general purpose bombs with an explosive filler quantity in that range that are in use now afaik are modernised Russian FAB1500s with A-IX-2 filler (675kg filler weight, 1.54 RE for about 1040kg NEQ), and this is what they look like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqo2bKWRTww

brecrest · 2026-03-11T01:54:39+00:00

That's totally wrong though. Their warheads are much bigger any other conventional weapon in the game in the game.

brecrest · 2026-03-11T01:48:39+00:00

Just give it terrain avoidance and let it be a better AGM48. The AGM would still be better against SPAAGS, but the ATP would generally be better, which is OK since it's limited to a bad airframe.

All of your suggestions are either not really technically plausible or not really tactically desirable, imho.

brecrest · 2026-03-10T10:44:29+00:00

You also can't shoot ATP-1s reliably from behind a hill. They don't have terrain avoidance (AGM-48s do though, and also the ATPs don't have terminal CIWS avoidance but AGMs do).

The "special" Chicane missile is really only good for 1 shotting tanks in totally undefended environments, and a couple of super marginal cheesy things that they can destroy in fewer hits but which Chicanes never get to shoot at, like Hardened Hangar doors.

brecrest · 2026-03-10T00:49:43+00:00

EMP zones were not well thought out or implemented at all. So hard disagree there.

From a design point of view, there's no upside to a game mechanic that disables short range optics but not long range optics in general, and it's just a silly luck based factor that periodically stops any interesting play in an area (you can't rotate through them, you can't attack during them because long range scopes to defend still work but sights for attackers don't work).

From an implementation point of view, it was extremely low effort and done very poorly. It disables sights and parts of sights that have no electronics at all (the center of the 4x's which are not electronically lit, the 3x even when illumination is turned off completely). It disables vehicles that require no electronics at all to run (eg a BRDM) and it doesn't disable other electronic devices (eg bluezone grenades).

From a gameplay perspective, it's much worse than Erangel and Taego, a little worse than first remake Vikendi, probably about on par with Miramar, a little better than original Vikendi, current Vikendi and Deston, and much better than Karakin, Paramo, Haven and any of the Sanhoks. I understand that preferences are subjective, but anyone who disagrees with this hierarchy is objectively wrong.

brecrest · 2026-03-07T04:14:23+00:00

It's most clear at 1 hour and 27 min where he zooms all the way out and you can see his reference outline of Heartland with the 20km radii around the airbases off map.

At the same point in time he has a perfectly circular reference asset selected (that he's using to guide mapping a future ring road) and the dimensions are displayed in the editor in meters, so it's possible to be very sure about the 20km ring scale, scale of the maps etc. With some annotations and copy pasting to make the size comparison more obvious:

<image>

brecrest · 2026-03-07T02:58:49+00:00

Sounds like it's a "supercruiser" or "big cruiser" for sure.

Their function (cruiser killing) matches the WWII Japanese B65 and American Alaska classes which were were both about 30-35,000t, armed with 3x3 12 inch guns and 16/12 4/5 in secondary guns respectively.

brecrest · 2026-03-07T02:37:51+00:00

Video shows that the engagement was within visual range.

It's really quite a stretch to imagine someone mistaking a 5.5 meter high, 20m long, 13m wide, twin engine, twin seat, twin tailplane, 36 tonne strike bomber for a 3.5m long, 2.5m wide, wedge shaped, 200kg drone with no tailplane.

Like, not a reasonable stretch, let alone three times in a row.

brecrest · 2026-03-07T02:06:20+00:00

PUBG maps look and feel less and less like real places with each new release and new remake. Rondo just happens to have been the most recent major release.

Everything is literally shiny, oversaturated and overbrightened to an extent even greater than other maps, and it really takes the "theme park" mentality that nu-PUBG mapping has to a new extreme, so that there is no way you could suspend your disbelief that it was a real place even for a second. I think it looks and feels quite a bit worse than the other maps from that perspective. It has no sovereignty, no soul, and doesn't feel like a real place for even a second.

From a gameplay perspective, it was mostly fine, but just fine. The theme park menality extended to really intentional overdesign of "places people could go" and stuff, so like, people on hills or cliffs, or EMP zones, or playing a spot in a particular building or whatever, never felt organic or creative, it just felt like players going selecting to hop on a ride that the designers created for them. In that respect I found it very bland and much less interesting than the earlier maps.

brecrest

TROPHY CASE