A.Filikov wrote:I think the main appeal of PR is not large scale never ending firefights.
It is all about planning with patience and gathering the fruits of your relatively longer - more stressfull efforts.
At least for me.
So i don't think 4km is large for 64 players.
100 players are okay but i think it is pretty early for 256.
I don't post on these forums much because I don't play PR much, but larger servers really pique my interest. Why?
Because in real life you would never see troop densities as low as we see in PR except for
maybe when the recon elements of two forces started to overlap in a meeting engagement. Even then, you'd see way, way, way more capability in the space than we see in 64 player maps. In essence, having platoons fighting over 4x4km (16km^2 for those not gifted in maths) means that you have 4 players per square kilometer. Assuming you put them in squads of 6, and assume (incorrectly) that their capabilities are the same as a real life squad, you are now putting roughly one squad from each team in each kilometer box.
In practice this is a problem at the player level for two big reasons. Firstly in practice there is no value in dominating every box. What that means is that outside of the few areas that are (still largely under) contested, people can just walk around without much risk of being shot. This is exacerbated by weapons being too inaccurate. This makes the entire game feel like a prolonged awkward skirmish. The second reason is that the game has so little flexibility about where forces can be sent that force ratios are always too low to produce many different interesting situations - again, awkward skirmishing feeling. Very unrealistic attacks are usually the most effective, defenses are never even vaguely realistic, there's no incentive to partake of the dozens of other tactical actions 10 people can do in real life.
But it really starts to bite at the commander level since there's nothing to really command and everyone has such huge freedom of action. At the barest level, PR has had most of the tools of infantry tactics in place since 0.75 but has still had virtually no application of tactics. This is partially because of unrealistic weapons, but also partially because of troop densities being way too low to effectively employ real life tactics (too easy for small groups to just bypass or infiltrate stuff, little incentive to do much else).
Getting two platoons with half the capability they should have fight with each other for a battalion or brigade sized objective just doesn't work and is terribly unrealistic. Boosting their capability by tacking on armour and air assets doesn't work either because then suddenly you have a squad of units that can actually capture objectives and a company's worth of armour and air assets fighting a war of attrition everywhere else (hello Kashan et al).
So here's the thing. Commanding 30-60 people isn't easy, and tactics aren't particuarly easy to pick up without training either. NATO/ABCA armies train junior officers for between 18 months and two years depending on where you go to be able to do it to something even approaching a battlefield standard. And they consistantly preselect so that only roughly the brightest 2-15% (again, depending on where you go) of applicants get the shot at it, with attrition rates of anywhere from 70% down.
This is exactly the reason why leaving it in is an excellent thing. If you imagine a scale from dysfunctional team to functional team, 64 player PR capped off at the functional end too low. "Teamwork" mostly consisted of not being overly selfish and "tactics" mostly consisted of having 6 people defend a flag while getting two whole squads to attack the next flag. Employing specialist assets, if not virtually automatic and with little more than token commander involvement (OS), simply had to be using their assets to best effect in some way vaguely connected to the team to be useful (tanks somewhere near infantry etc).
In other words, Commanding is mostly a token job at the 64 layer and the difference between a good and a very mediocre commander was minimal. 128, and dare I say it, 256 player games will change this. At these sorts of force densities, realistic tactics won't just start working better, they'll start to be the decisive difference between mediocre and good teams. Things that just didn't matter for tits before, like how you structure your subordinate commands, will start to become very important, as will managing subordinate commanders. Commanding will, in other words, start to be about command and tactics.
So here's the thing. That "planning with patience to gather the fruits of longer and more stressful labour" thing is unrealistic and bad. The planning should be happening for the individual in a much more limited scope, but for the team should encompass a far more complex and interesting scope. For the individual and the squad, this means getting specific tasks that actually mean something very definite for the team, not airy-fairy orders to 6 man groups like "ATTACK/DEFEND OBJ A" (followed by running to objective A, shooting people along the way and sitting in the capzone) - it's going to be "Suppress OBJ A's eastern overwatch positions IOT allow SQUAD B to achieve break in and assault. Tell me when you're ready." (Followed by orders for the other squads involved).
There aren't going to be a lot of people in the community that are going to have all the skills it takes to make it come together off the bat, but in time the community will learn it and the game will be so, so, so much richer for it at every level. This is easily the most positive thing announced since pretty much forever. This will tie in suppression and the LMG buffs to start to produce a coherrent tactical game.
The first time trained military leaders plan and execute a company sized defence ticking off all the principles and people run into it in PR, it's going to be a beautiful day for the game.
Now if only weapons worked properly (couldn't resist).
