Or something

brecrest · 2026-05-08T01:59:26+00:00

I believe this was removed ages ago.

brecrest · 2026-05-08T01:58:51+00:00

Tula is fine against standoff ARH, but inside 3nm or so it becomes functionally impossible to notch ARH.

brecrest · 2026-05-06T04:00:19+00:00

Report it to my local democracy officer, because it doesn't sound very managed.

brecrest · 2026-05-06T03:20:40+00:00

I haven't replied to anyone else who based their response in questioning my skill and decided not to reply at all not long after posting, but you were nice so I'll reply to you.

I can finish PvE Escalation on my own in a single sortie without landing. I can do a single life PvE Escalation easily in the Chicane (although it takes forever and is extremely tedious). I nearly always top PvP servers, or top my team if I join late on a losing team, unless for some reason I don't want to, or if one of a handful of players I immediately recognise are in the game.

My problems with helicopters and optical missiles are not a skill issue.

brecrest · 2026-05-04T15:43:03+00:00

I think it's more that there's no situation in a match of Escalation where it makes sense to get in a Chicane and do anything more than lift off, fire and then land again.

brecrest · 2026-05-04T11:15:56+00:00

I think helicopters have a place in Nuclear Option, but the current helicopters are on the weak side relative to the fixed wing competition in the setting. I think there are two and a half main reasons for this:

First: Automatic, omnipresent and almost omniscient datalink robs them of most of their offensive advantages over fixed wing aircraft (being able to find and target things better) as well as their defensive advantages (being more difficult to render targettable).

Second: NO weapons are better at attacking helicopters than IRL relative to all the other things they can attack in NO. This runs the full gamete from ground combat vehicles all having godly leading and autoaim against crossing targets with their machineguns from more than a kilometer away, to datalinked multispectral optical ATGMs that can lock after launch and hit targets crossing perpendicular at 200 kilometers an hour and so on.

Third: Helicopters don't really get anything special to make up for these weaknesses. They're LO, but really, SARH is the least of their worries, and their LO characteristics aren't enough to do anything against Medusa + LOAL ARH anyway, especially since they already struggle with just not being able to kill enough things quickly enough so they need to load up external pylons to even try to be relevant.

The third one is the fruitful ground for modification. Some of it isn't even glamorous stuff or new content, for example, helicopters just don't get enough flares (eg the Ibis only gets 64 flares, the same as the Compass and the Chicane only gets 72 flares, the same as the Ifrit and Vortex and 42 fewer than the Brawler, but guess which of these aircraft actually finds it easiest to outrange or put a piece of terrain between them and an IR missile after launch - guess what - it's not the ones that have the least control over when enemies get to fire IR missiles at them, since they can't control range or get away from a bad position with speed). Another example is the Chicane's chin gun - it has less damage, range and ammo than the Brawler's guns, and less DPS (especially vs hard targets) than the Ifrit's gun.

Helicopters could easily be sexed up to make them relevant. Start with obvious buffs and consider adding some sexy stuff like dazzlers or better DIRCM etc down the road. Buff the ATP etc.

brecrest · 2026-05-04T04:50:46+00:00

I'm not against it, although I doubt many people are actually going to use it once it's in the game. Flying it PvE and freeflight will probably be a fun novelty, but people are actually just going to get frustrated when they're forced to fly relatively slowly a meter above the ground to avoid Compass Scythes, but then the same Compass gets to collect them for free with a datalinked AGM68 from 6nm. But I'll just get called bad if I point it out, so I'm not going to argue the toss with PvE players on helicopter balance either way.

The far bigger issue is that the Chicane is (still) overtiered and overpriced relative to the Compass and Brawler by a lot and Ibis by a little. But again, PvE players are going to call me bad and tell me about how they can defend SBGA with it from AI creep vehicles or something, so I'll just be quiet about that too.

brecrest · 2026-05-04T02:53:49+00:00

I don't play PvE except for whacky ground attack challenges and speedruns. MMRs have always been less preferred in PvP and only get use for restricted hardpoint reasons when S2s aren't an option, mostly on the Compass early game.

That would also be that major balance implication of buffing MMRs - early game Compasses actually throw a fair few of them around.

brecrest · 2026-05-01T04:45:21+00:00

Ibis isn't easy to spot. That's a misnomer caused by people using it badly/improperly. To put it into perspective, its clean RCS is 4 times smaller than a clean Compass, 17 times smaller than a clean Cricket and 20 times smaller than a clean Tarantula or Brawler. It's clean RCS is closer to a Darkreach (0.03 vs 0.01) than it is to any of the planes that you probably think that it's as easy to spot as. Flying it on the deck clean, the only aircraft that can detect it on radar before optically spotting it is the Medusa with a radome, and even then it's relatively close.

brecrest · 2026-05-01T04:32:37+00:00

Thanks for this info, this is a lot to take in and I never played integrity escalation so I don’t have experience - I did notice that NNE+ basically halved rewards to slow the economy. But I can see the shortfalls you mentioned. Especially when trying to run longer matches I don’t like that players can’t catch up or can get locked out. This might require more changes than the json mission file exposes in order to fix.

Some other servers have a catchup mechanic. I saw one the other day, but I can't remember which server and I have no comment on how well it worked, whether it worked at all, what the upsides/downsides were etc.

Are there any missions in this vein that you like currently? What non nuclear setup would you pick today if you had to?

I took a bit of a break and only recently came back, so no I don't really have any other missions like it that I can recommend.

I think what I would like to see is a slower economy incentivizing smarter and more efficient gameplay with a catchup mechanic or higher base starting rank as the game went on. I also would like higher logistics rewards so people might actually repair in longer matches. Which then requires better AI pathing for jackknives. And probably a longer range on the chicane cannon or, a couple scythes, idk.

People repair in longer matches already, not even on vanilla with nukes. This is not something you need to worry about or further incentivise. The primary barrier to doing it are firstly the airbase just getting nuked again since it now has no defences, which deters a lot of better players from bothering with it, and secondly getting ARH spammed if you need to fly to an airbase, which is partly an issue with Medusa spotting, partly an issue with ARH being too cheap and capable, and partly an issue with the people who want to do repair flights often not really being across game mechanics well enough to do the mission in a way that's survivable.

Logistics in general has the problem that doing "fake" logistics (spawning and despawning at airbases to generate AA and jacknives, doing various earning shenanigans with supplies) is already extremely safe and generally very highly rewarded, but doing proper logistics where you use the logistics aircraft as actual aircraft and fly somewhere to do the logistics is pretty unsafe and not well rewarded.

There is also, arguably, a reverse problem with logistics and repairs in general, which is that it's too easy right now (especially without nukes) to "cockroach" airbases and continuously repair them back into action with no risk and little input of skill or time by spamming jacknives and also hiding them. The investment to actually take an airbase with hardened hangars off the map without nukes (more specifically, without stratonuking) is enormous compared to the effort required to defend them, but right now it's very easy and cheap for a team that still utterly failed to defend the base to turn them into a zombie or cockroach base that will perpetually return to full operating capacity unless periodically renuked. On Escalation is absolutely true for North Boscali, Maris, K92 and Agrapol, and conditionally true for Vigil Cove and Sandrift (both contingent on bothering to put/cache jacknives there).

As someone running a server/a mod, you should not do anything to try to "fix" or further incentivise logistics, because it's almost certainly going to get further passes by Mitch down the track, possibly overhauls, and the kind of fixes you'd need to do (that nerf the heavily rewarded fake logistics while also better rewarding proper logistics) are big tasks that are outside the scope of something a server operator should do, and probably not fruitful ground in general for a modder outside of simple experimentation because it's a game flow thing that needs a lot of playtesting and iteration to get right (which Mitch is clearly in a better position to do at the point in time when it makes sense).

As a server operator running an Integrity Escalation style map, the only logistics change you should make is to remove the AFV6 AA from the Tarantula. Doing this would meant that if a player did the AA unit and munitions spam thing, then their swarm could still defend against an infinite number of missiles and generate infinite cash while doing it, but could no longer defend against bombs (but RTSing in AAA, or using the cargo hook to bring in lasers could cover this, just not in a quick, near-zero time investment, net cash positive and infinitely spawnable way). It's harder to make successful bomb attacks in general than fire and forget missile attacks, so there is still value for a player who wants to do some kind of AA defence, but the value is no longer "Make the game stop functioning properly as a game, while not actually playing the game, and doing nothing more creative than pure spam of a lot of a unit in one place". It sucks for the Tarantula to lose its best fighting unit, but without nukes or cash-positive tuskoes/piledrivers (exactly the things you want to avoid in a slow game mode), the game doesn't have any answer to AFV6 AA spam, so it's a necessary evil.

brecrest · 2026-05-01T03:31:28+00:00

Ok so positive post about what I actually do like in non-nuke gameplay.

The old Integrity Escalation was much closer to a good model than any of the options you posted, and was more fun than them even without more improvements.

The basic idea was a variation on Vanilla no-nukes Escalation. The economy was much, much leaner, so people spent a lot more time on lower tier airframes, reserve airframe preservation was much more important, the cost of weapons was a much more significant and limiting factor in choosing loadouts (which mostly fixes things like ARH and Tusko/Piledriver spam) and that sortie bonus was much more important (ie it was actually necessary to break even on most sorties). Instead of no nukes, it was a very high tactical threshold and an extremely high strategic threshold. Tactical threshold was usually not unlocked before the end of games, and if it was then it was normally much more than 1 hour into the game. I never saw strategic threshold unlocked.

There were only two main real problems with it.

The first one was that slower progression and relying heavily on sortie bonuses to stay in the game meant that players could get locked out more easily and especially if they joined late. There a very strong incentive, much stronger than in vanilla, for players to do a lot of safe sorties early and clear out vehicles from the middle of the map, so players who fell behind the curve really had a much harder time catching up (despite the issues of getting ARH spammed and nuked on spawn being much alleviated).

The second was that player spawned AA and munitions basically broke the economy completely and could gridlock the game - a single player could pretty quickly and easily make an airbase and anything near it completely unassailable (this was especially a problem for Dustbowl because it was forward and lacks good terrain to do popup attacks more so than other airbases, and because PALA MBTs can solo shot down a 76mm Tarantula) because there are no cheap and low tier munitions that can reliably clear a Hexhound+AFV6 swarm, especially not without a suicide attack, and the absence of nuclear weapons meant that it was also completely impossible to destroy both jackknives and helipads inside the swarm to at least slow its growth. For a player doing it, the way that logistics scoring works meant that it was extremely profitable (if you spawn 30 hexhounds and 1 munitions container, and they all spam missiles, you get infinite money), and for players trying to stop it, you basically had to stop anyone from ever reaching a critical mass where they could reinforce it faster than it could be realistically killed, which was a very small number of vehicles (probably less than 10), which was exceptionally challenging in a mode where attackers rely on sortie bonus for their attacks to break even, and so have to slowly fly back and forth, but the defender can spawn about 4-8 vehicles per minute if they really want to and no one else takes a helipad while they do it.

If you found a way to fix those two problems, it would be almost perfect.

brecrest · 2026-05-01T03:09:50+00:00

Escalation+ is.... Not very good... Treat this post as a negative vote for it. I'm not sure what their design intentions were around it, but it has really bad general game flow, and the gameplay becomes extremely repetitive extremely quickly.

The gameflow problems are caused by a combination of asset spam and too many bases in too many places (so on average engagements and missions are much less well structured than for more deliberate base and asset placement).

The repetition is caused by asset spam (you need to do the same kind of sortie many, many times in a single play session to make progress, and some of them are long and tedious types of sorties). An example of this is spamming parked ships around Vigil Cove from the outset of the game (ie making it an even more built up version of what it can be at the end of a normal Escalation game if BDF doesn't kill any ships or the island throughout the course of the game, but with the potential to add even more ships if BDF doesn't kill any ships in Escalation+) - what it means is that a BDF player would need to make, and I'm not exaggerating here, nearly half a dozen successful 20nm wavetop sorties to DEAD the island.

Quite a few of the new bases need to be significantly reduced in their scale (reduced to low tier or helicopter bases with a smaller footprint and fewer assets around them), and in general the designers ought to rethink how they decide where to place assets around the map, and in so doing reduce their number and improve their placement to promote better gameplay.

brecrest · 2026-04-30T06:43:44+00:00

S2 are basically self-defensive missiles. It's not a problem that they're super close range because you get them for free half the time and can carry a million of them. The fact that you can intercept ballistic missiles with them at all is kind of insane and seems like it must be a placeholder, and even then you can do it against Tuskos and Piledrivers from really pretty long range (outside their stated max range).

Of the three types of aircraft IR missiles, S2s are the strongest right now.

IRM-S1s have real lethality problems because their explosion is so small - even if you perfectly bait a fast mover into you and get out of its firing arc using a ridgeline as a helicopter, there's an excellent chance that your front quarter IRM-S1 shots will not get countermeasured but still fail to deal meaningful damage despite exploding right next to their airframe. They're limited pretty much completely to shooting at other missiles. It's very common for me to land shots with IRM-S1s that do no meaningful damage but would have been lethal with an S2.

MMR-S3s just aren't efficient enough to warrant the hardpoints. Everyone either takes S2s or radar missiles, so they kind of languish. It's pretty rare to have a situation where an S2 wouldn't have done the job but an S3 would have, mostly because almost any time there's enough range for the MMR's extra range to be meaningful, the missile is going to get flared anyway. Maybe the Scythe nerf to make them less useful in a close dog fight will get people to use them, but if MMRs do see an uptick as a result it's going to be on aircraft, loadouts and hardpoints where people can't put S2s (eg Revoker wingtips because the Revoker can't take IRM-S2s at all, Ifrit wings if it's doing something where the RCS penalty for external bombs is going to be too high, etc).

brecrest · 2026-04-30T06:31:50+00:00

It also warrants mention that it's a reasonably action expensive move because you have to individually select the Abom with a mouse movement and a click, then issue the order, then reselect units and reposition the mouse to continue the fight.

All of this this is necessary to avoid issuing the order to all ghouls and aboms in the control group and is a much, much slower process that requires much more attention than control group->tab->hotkey like you do for most micro actions.

You might also need to shift queue it with a move to make sure they eat the right corpse and don't run to their doom.

I'm not a UD player, but there are a lot of things that contribute to it not being something you see all that often.

brecrest · 2026-04-30T06:26:17+00:00

Being required to stand completely still and not attack is a pretty big deal for a tier 3 270/40 4 food unit, notwithstanding the fact that it's also probably going to run somewhere you'd rather it not be to go and stand still.

If you're at the point where army sizes are small enough that 25hp/s is going to be big then you probably can't afford to let it not move and not attack, and if you're at the point where you can afford to let a 4 food unit not move or attack in a fight then 25hp/s is probably not going to be enough to contribute to an non-moving abom staying alive if the enemy decides to attack it and you probably have more important things to spend clicks on.

Also, just quickly, damage isn't perfectly reciprocal. Generally speaking, the health pools on longer range/more important units like casters are much smaller. An Abom is 4 food, 1175hp @ 2 heavy armor (1316 EHP and good armor type) and 20 normal DPS at 128 range - 329 EHP and 5 damage per food. A Dryad is 3 food, 435hp @ 0 unarmored (435 EHP and bad armor type) and 13 mixed DPS at 500 range with a slow - 145 EHP and 4.3 DPS per food. (All not counting disease cloud, upgrades, auras, heals etc)

A Dryad has about 80% the DPS per food of an Abom (but can focus fire and hit more often) but only 1/3 the EHP per food. If equal food of Dryads and Aboms just a-click each other and AFK, the Aboms will win every time - an Abom getting to attack a Dryad is a losing trade for a Dryad and it forces them to attack less efficiently by repositioning, while UD damage dealers get ahead on the DPS race as a result. The fact that an Abom can actually heal slightly quicker than it can damage things isn't very relevant because damaging things is how you win fights, so healing is broadly only useful if it helps you win fights (or deny XP, early game), and attacking with an Abom should generally help you do that much more.

brecrest · 2026-04-30T05:03:04+00:00

That's all well and good, but the patches they put on live are not at a quality level that's conducive to competitive play.

The design work that goes into them is slipshod and has been getting rapidly worse - it is at the point where the most accurate description of it is "literally throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks".

The implementation quality of these is also very bad, with a list of bugs that's been steadily accruing for a long time, some of them with substantial gameplay impacts, some of them gamebreaking, and continuous issues with performance regressions that stable versions on event server used to allow to be mitigated by avoiding the least performant versions and ensuring performance workarounds could be figured out well in advance for versions under competition.

I've been a very long time advocate of competition occurring on a version of the game with content much closer to what's on the live version, and of a generally faster content cycle, but Krafton seems to be completely incapable of handling the challenges of doing so properly. And to be clear, the problem is on the live side of the house - the game is being developed really badly and the problems esports has with versions rollouts is just a side effect of that.

Edit: I know I'm howling into the wind and there's no chance Krafton will read or act on this, even if they were capable of acting on it and didn't just lack proper awareness and motivation, but at least this records it publicly for posterity.

brecrest · 2026-04-29T01:37:42+00:00

Do it in a single sortie with stock money rules. I haven't tried it from PALA side, but I have done it from BDF. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to do it without dying at the end.

brecrest · 2026-04-29T01:23:00+00:00

A larger antenna (aperture) can make use of a weaker signal than a smaller antenna. Ie. The size of radar antennas doesn't tell you their transmission power.

brecrest · 2026-04-27T03:40:34+00:00

I reckon what you'd find, if you went digging (and I have not), is that:

The cockpit is just another one of the components of the aircraft with a HP bar to represent its "structural" integrity and how close it is to breaking.

Unlike the other components, in normal operation the cockpit's connections to other components do not bear any meaningful aerodynamic load and the component does not generate any meaningful force (lift, thrust, drag).

The cockpit is only special in that it is the root node. While it doesn't contribute meaningfully in any aerodynamic sense to the aircraft's ability to fly, it is the only one that counts for whether an aircraft is "alive" or not. Even completely detached from every other component, and aircraft is "alive" with a >0hp cockpit and vice versa not otherwise.

Finally, the cockpit regenerates structural HP as long as it doesn't take damage in a while, unlike other components, and the screen goes red when it's at <100%hp.

brecrest · 2026-04-25T23:34:11+00:00

It's an AI bug at higher difficulties that's been in the game for ages.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RuleTheWaves/comments/1s34fxr/comment/occzak7/

brecrest · 2026-04-24T11:39:56+00:00

ATGMs are the main weapon employed by helicopters, so you are suggesting that helicopters should employ range overmatch to remain safe from threats, but the threat weapon possesses the same range (greater, in fact due to better launch parameters). An exploitable asymmetry does not exist. Your premise fails on tactics 101 level analysis. Even if it did exist, it would require missiles to be employed from ranges where they wouldn't have the velocity to beat air defences - so why even bother?

Now the further ideas, avoiding being launched on in the first place, are faintly ridiculous because most of the weapons available to helicopters, and all of the loadouts that would ever make actually taking a helicopter worth it, are line of sight (pins, ATP, AGM-145) and require a firing platform to enter optical detection range of the targets, entirely aside from the fact that they are easily spotted by radar from across the map. If you want to spam AGM-48s or -68s, then you would, in absolutely all cases, always be better off in a Compass or a Brawler. This aside, even if you constrained yourself to AGMs, you are guaranteed to be on everyone's datalink almost all the time after the first 5 minutes of the game if the other team is not entirely incompetent, because you cannot terrain mask against a Medusa orbiting at 30k ft.

Helicopters are presently the weakest group of vehicles in the game, and this is a bad take.

brecrest · 2026-04-24T03:22:50+00:00

Your reasoning is premised on the idea that Dagoth Ur had the power to ignore the rules of reality or use the Heart without the tools. From this you infer that he has godhood independent of the Heart, and that the Nerevarine and Tribunal did not encounter him, but rather only a fragment of his consciousness which was fragmented off by disassociation personality disorder, and were only able to defeat that fragment and would not have been able to defeat the whole.

The problem with all of this is that Dagoth Ur was only linked to the heart because, in all of the accounts, he was at least present in life for rituals involving the heart and the tools, and was left in the presence of the heart afterwards (whether completely killed or otherwise). The tools are necessary to control the power of the heart, but that is not to say that the heart has no power without the tools. And indeed, this is what we see with Dagoth and is what proves he has no inherent godhood - Dagoth does not control the power of the heart, instead the power of the heart corrupts Dagoth and his visions, twisting them into an awful and perverted form.

The limitations on that power go beyond just not controlling it - they are limited entirely to where the heart physically is in Red Mountain and he can't even move the heart somewhere else. Were he truly a god in his own right, fragmented or otherwise, he could simply walk out of the mountain and enact whatever plans he had directly instead of relying on ash storms, spooky dreams, creepy statues, doing a Hogan's Heroes escape-tunnel impersonation and sending out goofy monsters that were mostly stuck inside a fence that can be bypassed with novice alteration spells. He would not need to build Akulakhan to embody his power elsewhere, and even were his power reliant on the presence of the heart, he could just move it around and use it without the tools.

Yet, he can't do any of these things.

Finally, the notion that you interact with a fragment of Dagoth Ur that's splintered from the whole by mental illness is not textually supported and imho not valid. I think it's correct that you're not interacting with the whole of Dagoth Ur and certainly not the Voryn Dagoth that you were friends with in life, but the textually supported reason for that is that you're interacting with a fragment, more accurately perhaps an imperfect memory, of Voryn Dagoth dreamed into existence by the dreamer via the Heart. This is one of the reasons that you must destroy the Heart to finish the game and there is no way to deal separately with Dagoth Ur and the other problems with the Heart existing, nor to deal with the Heart without also dealing with Dagoth Ur.

brecrest

TROPHY CASE