I would like to preface this post by saying Assault on Grozny is my favourite map in Project Reality. Not just because of its great map design but for its historical references and accuracy aswell. It is always a different experience. I've spent countless hours on it and have launched PR many times simply because my mates let me know that Grozny is setnext. As pretentious as it might sound, I would like to think I know how the map plays out more than most people in the current PR playerbase. Therefore I would like to suggest some changes that I really think would make this map more enjoyable on public deployment.
Currently, the only layouts being set by admins on public PR servers are Standard and Alternative. I would like to point out some issues with Alternative and how they could be fixed.
Standard has all the possible flag layouts which carries the risk of the game randomly "choosing" a flag layout outside of the city. These flag layouts usually leads to quite boring forest defence games with no urban combat (for which the players usually vote the map in). This is why often players/admins will rather choose Alternative for the assurance that there will be a city flag layout.
Alternative forces one single city layout where Russians have only one flag in the city while the Militia side can spawn pretty much on the next flag and capture it without any trouble. This layout can be incredibly unbalanced without Russian Squad leaders who know the map and the timing of the map well, since in an uncoordinated public match the Russian team usually just rushes the first neutral flag without realising the Militia team has a team rally in the city centre, either running their trucks right into the enemy and getting wiped immediately or getting pinned down outside of any flag and being useless to the rest of the team because of it. This sometimes even makes people resent the map because they do not know how important the timing of the map is. The neutral flag is a very hard one to take due to there being only 2 buildings in the flag, both of which are some of the most defensible structures in PR. I would like to offer some changes and another possible flag layout to coexist with the present one on Alternative.
Here is a map of the movements of the Russian army during the 1994 new years eve storming of Grozny:
You can see that troops (red and blue arrows) entered from the West side, just like in the current Alternative layout, but also from the North.
Suggestion #1: On Alternative, open up the map borders around the airport. Keep the spawns as they are and the borders on the other sides of the city aswell, but please open up the borders from H3 to H1. This serves as an alternative way for the Russians to approach the city and therefore stand more of a chance in attacking the second flag.
Suggestion #2: Add another randomly chosen flag layout to Alternative.
As you can see only the first two russian flags change on this layout. It is historically accurate, the flags are not very radical compared to the other flag layout and it would make Alternative more worth considering to players who want to play the map strictly for its urban features.
Suggestion #3: Change the Infantry layout.
This layout never gets played for pretty obvious reasons - it offers the same old spawns, almost all the same flag options as standard (but less), and it doesn't cater to the needs of assetwh- ...asset players, which is why it never gets set over Standard or the rare Alternative.
For this suggestion, I present a layout Suchar made for me for an event I organized last year: tracker link
This layout offers a different perspective where the Russian team attacks from the east from the Khankala airport, which is again historically accurate.
Some things I would change compared to the layout from the event:
-Make first and second Militia flags 30 meters larger and neutral.
-Remove the assets we used and give both teams 1× BMP-1 and 1x Logi and some more transport (mirrored assets and veh
-Nothing else (Some might think the Russian DOD is quite shootable but that only depends on the ruleset of the server, so I would keep it as is/similar to what it is)
Honestly the layout was very enjoyable and I think you have nothing to lose by adding this instead of the current one that nobody plays (or will ever most likely play). In my opinion it could make for a great little seeding layout and it doesn't cost you much effort. If I could have only one of these suggestions make it in the game, it would be this one. In general Infantry layouts don't get played at all and it would be cool to see more Infantry layouts revisited across all the maps PR has to offer.
If you read all that, thank you for taking the time out of your day and hearing me out. Please post any criticism of these ideas you might have, I would really like for at least some of these changes to make it to the game so I'm very much glad to try and deconstruct any arguments as to why this is a bad idea.
PS: Suggestion #4: Add the new MTP-LB armoured logistics carrier to all Grozny layouts. pls.
