Here is an almost copy&paste of a gameplay concept I did write for another BF2 modification, but that seems to be just perfect for PR.
1: Respawning
Respawning is the first and toughest issue I'm going to discuss. Someone said it's what made the BF series turn out different from other games. It's partially true, because the flag-respawning thing in BF 1942 was at the time a rather innovative idea. The fact is that I believe it actually has a lot of flaws. I bet that most of you know that feeling of being in a tank and having almost capped a flag, then a full infantry squad with C4, mines and SRAWs just appears right where you are and blow you to hell. That happened because of the flag spawn, that should just be cut down to the main uncappable base, having to drive your way to the fight. Why?
- To prevent things like what I described above.
- To give the "frontline" feeling everyone seems to want (myself included) without forcing it (AAS, which I partially don't like)
- To make people advance together, instead of cahotically spread around the map.
- To give a chance to small infantry teams setting up real ambushes.
- To make people use transports as troop transports, and not as light tanks in the case of APCs or like one-person-taxis in the case of FAVs and the like.
- With this there'd be a chance to lower the spawn time, since there's not anymore the need for long spawn times (to permit one team to advance while the other is dead, and to prevent Jihad jeeping etc.). I'd personally suggest a spawn time of 5 to 10 seconds, and no man-down-time. See "3: Reviving".
Squad respawning may be kept, but limited to just a situation: When the leader is driving any vehicle. That way squadleaders hiding will not anymore "exploit" the respawning to send their fellows attack some flag, because they'd have no chance to hide at all.
2: Player Classes*
-Recon: Has a light body armor. Carries a full-size assault rifle, 4 magazines, a couple hand grenades, a couple colored smoke nade (to direct bombing or player controlled artilley fire, if you are willing to introduce it in the game), binoculars and the laser designator, or alternatively a bolt-action sniper rifle useful at mid-range, a pistol and the laser designator. He scores 1 teamwork point per every 4 different enemies he spots.
-Assault: Has a heavy body armor. Carries a full sized assault rifle, 4 magazines, 4 hand nades, 2 smoke nades that possibly create a smoke screen that's larger and lasts a little longer than 'nilla ones. An alternative kit may include an underbarrel GL with 4 to 6 nades with more range, a way larger blast radius than vanilla's and a true arming time.
-Support: He has heavy body armor. Carries a light machinegun, 2 mags\belts, a pistol and has the ability to refill teammates with bullets, this means no explosive devices (C4, rockets, hand nades etc), unless if he's in a transport vehicle. Being in a transport vehicle could give him the ability to even give away C4 and stuff, or even tank shells and HMG ammo to everyone close to the vehicle he's in. His bags can be thrown and picked up by people, to be istantly loaded up with ammo.
-Spec-Ops: Has light body armor. Carries a suppressed (?) compact assault rifle, 4 magazines, 2 hand nades, 1 smoke nade, 1 colored smoke nade, 2 powerful packs of C4 that can be planted instead of thrown. His two C4 pack combined are enough to disable (see "vehicles") or kill an APC and severely damage a MBT. An alternative kit may instead have remotely detonated Claymores or a single use AT weapon, like the AT4.
-Medic: Has light body armor. Carries a full-size assault rifle, 4 magazines, 2 hand grenades, 1 medipack that cannot be thrown. Doesn't have field shock pads anymore (see "reviving"). He can heal everyone inside the vehicle he is with, except himself.
-Anti-Tank: Has heavy body armor. Carries a pistol or a Personal Defence Weapon, plus an unguided rocket launcher and 3 total rockets. I'd personally like to choose the type of each warhead, like 1 HEAT, 1 Fragmentation and 1 Thermobaric. Balancing your loadout could be a lot important... I'm not sure whether it's possible in BF2 though. The HEAT should be able to blow out or disable a tank in one shot, if aimed at the correct spot. An alternative kit could feature a heat-seeking or wire guided missile useful at long ranges like the Javelin or stuff like that.
-Sniper: Has light body armor. Carries a bolt action sniper rifle useful at long ranges, a pistol, 2 smoke nades. No claymores, he has carefully place himself or to rely on teammates to watch his back. Alternative kits may contain a semi-auto scoped rifle useful in urban combat or a quite inaccurate but deadly anti material rifle that can disable light vehicles or parked planes with one well placed shot.
-Engineer: has light body armor. Carries an assault rifle or a combat shotgun, 2 nades. Has the ability to repair vehicles (just while on foot, though) and to deploy mines or to set up deployable defences (static ATGMs, mortars, MGs). Obviously just one per respawn, unless he picks the one which placed back up. Everything he deploys fades away 1 minute after he dies, if not used anymore.
3: Reviving
The way BF2 did the reviving option for medics is fun and useful. But it's abused like it is right now, and it looks like it's out of place in a mod like PR. I just thought that it could be changed to something like so: When your health drops to less than 50% you are affected by bleeding, and if it drops even more to say 20-30% you can't walk anymore (you have to crawl) and the only weapon you are allowed to use is the knife. If you get severely hit you still have a chance of getting off the field, and make it to a medic. But if the enemy is able to hit you once again, you die without chance of being revived. This is meant to replace the revive feature with something that fits better with the style of the game and that can't be easily "exploited".
4: Vehicles
Every vehicle in the game should match the specifics of the real thing in fact of speed, armaments, damage dealt and all, while taking in count the BF2's engine limitations and balancing issues. Man portable AT weapons should pose a real threat to MBTs and APCs (pretty much like they do right now in PR) that would have to be supported by helicopters and infantry to survive in urban areas. Every vehicle (this including helicopters, airplanes, transports, APCs and MBTs) should have a third state between "Operative" and "Destroyed", the "Disabled" state. This may be triggered by a >70% health loss, and would make the disabled vehicle unable to move or shoot anymore, but still protecting the crew from small arms fire and letting them be able to exit and try running to safety. The disabled vehicle could be repaired later by an engineer and reused. Let's see how this would work per every vehicle:
Jeeps: Can be disabled with one well placed .50 to the engine or any AT weapon not scoring a direct hit to the engine (which would obviously blow the vehicle up). I know hummvees are generally armored enough to counter up 7.62x39 bullets and close hand-grenades without taking damage at all. Can be damaged by direct hits from rifle launched nades or AT weapons.
APCs: Can be disabled or even destroyed by the typical amount of C4 carried by special forces or by direct missile hits to the driver\gunner area. Can protect dismounting ground troops with its armor and offer covering fire for them. Since the doors are on the rear, I'd like to actually get out from the rear rather than from the side...
Tanks: Can be disabled by AT mines, ATGM hits and amounts of C4 usually higher than what the SF guy carries. Can only be destroyed after one hit by high-penetrating missiles (Kornet, TOW), other tanks, top attacking missiles or rockets aimed to the weaker spots. Tanks may preserve the BF style layout by combining driver and gunner in one seat, but get an additional commander\gunner seat, that controls a remotely operated .50 machinegun on the top while being protected. The MG has limited ammo (like every MG in the game should have), its sight gives a quite limited field of view, but has a 4x zoom capability. The commander would be useful spotting threats and protecting the tank from infantry. Without a commander or supporting teammates tanks would be almost defenseless in urban warfare.
Helicopters**: They preserve the BF2 layout again. To the pilot are given quite limited FFARs that are useful killing infantry, transports or APCs. To the co-pilot is given control of guided missiles and of the front autocannon, with a chance in choosing the type of ammo when possible (HE or KE) and maybe a zoom feature too. They can be disabled with an AA missile, a rocket\cannon hit to the tail rotor or several .50 hits on some weak spot. Disabling in helicopters causes entering in auto-rotation.
Planes: Can be disabled by single missile hits or by 4-5 hits by other planes' gun. Usually one or two more hits should make the disabled plane go kaboom. There could be an "ejection seat" thing that takes a couple seconds to be triggered after you press the button. Simply exiting the plane should result in certain death. See "Countermeasures" for further details.
5: Countermeasures
Countermeasures should be close to the real counterparts in effects and uses.
-Flares: Since most modern thermal-imaging missiles are able to track planes without getting fooled by flares, so flares should only help to get out of a missile's way, when combined with evasive maneuvers. A good pilot may be able to know the threat he's facing, and be able to use the most appropriate way to beat a missile homing him (turning speed, maximum speed etc). Also I'd like to have a limited number of flares with a much less longer reload time between releases, like maximum 1 second, and that get released one or two per press.
-Chaffs: They may be just released with flares, to justify the fact they fool even missiles that are supposed to depend by radars.
-Tank released Smoke Screens: Those Should be wider and last longer than in BF2. Plus I know those are usually heated up to fool the thermal-seeking missile, making Kornets, Javelins and such miss the intended target.
6: Commander Mode
There's a few things I don't like about the cmdr mode. He uses his powers to make kills, instead of helping his teammates, most of times. I'd suggest to make it like so:
Sat scan: no more sat scan. If the commander is willing to look for enemies, he already has a zoom function on the map to do that. That's the best sat scan representation we can have, and I'd keep it as the only one.
UAV: I don't like the way UAVs work. It's too easy to actually instantly know where the enemy is, like having a wallhack. The in-game representation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles should match the 'nilla Sat Scan one. It spots enemy threats on the map then flies away, but without exactly telling the kind of threat (type of the vehicle) and just the larger ones. No infantry or FAVs, they need to have a chance being stealth.
Artillery: The commander can't drop artillery anymore. Since it looks like we'll have player controlled arty the commander will just be free to suggest general targets or particular targets to squads with one artillery player in them. Squad leaders could be able to set arty targets for their squad too.
Commanders get 1 point per every 5-6 targets they mark with the zoom feature.
7: Spawn Camping
Spawn camping is something that shouldn't ever exist. Approaching an enemy UCB should mean instant death, by static defences placed in strategic locations and a slow health loss when you enter an enemy base, just like the punishment for going off the borders of the map. We can justify it saying that's ground fire. After 10 seconds into the enemy base you'd lose health until you die. This affects everyone except planes, that should have a chance bombing their targets (and that need much more room to maneuver) They'd have a hard time because of static player controlled AA, though.
I know this is amazingly long, but I hope at least someone reads this all and tells me what he thinks about this.
*I found that a similar class suggestion (http://realitymod.com/forum/t3748-class ... ngthy.html) had already been submitted here, it's also much more complete than my original class idea. I'm reporting my classes here because my concept was built with them in mind.
**I liked this idea too: http://realitymod.com/forum/t4493-away- ... ssles.html
).
) or possibly a transport now and then. I consider myself to be strictly infantry, and I believe that a single tank in BF2 possesses far too much power against infantry. I mean, when a person is able to rack up 50 kills and 0 deaths while camping a flag in a tank, it's pathetic. In fact, it's not only pathetic, it's extremely frustrating for the infantry. They don't even try to cap the flag. They sit there and wait for people to spawn. I hate ground vehicles. Period. So yeah, getting back to the idea of disabling it - I really like that. It means that if I hit their treads ONCE with a rocket, then he's a sitting duck basically, and can't maneuever around or get away.