World in Conflict Open Beta

[defanatic]

I played my first few games today. My results were varied between coming first or second in a match to coming close to last. Generally, I found infantry to be fun to use, although it was very frustrating if the enemy had a decent support player, whereupon my infantry can't move fast enough to both capture points and evade artillery. I'd usually try to tacstrike the enemy's artillery, then.

With armour, I have no idea how to play armour. I had some success using a combo of 1 midAA and 3 heavy tanks, although those ended up being tacstrike fodder. A comment on the tankspam comment above. I had some fun driving eight light tanks behind enemy lines. They only killed three heavy artillery, but it was joy.

Air, I seem to be the worst at. No idea why.

Support was fairly fun, especially if there were a large number of aircraft players on the map. I couldn't find out how to have large numbers of heavy artillery without totally ignoring everything else (e.g. heavy AA/repair vehicles).

I was also the only person I ever saw to destroy a bridge.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I love to destroy bridges. Laser-guided strikes are fun.

The biggest mistake I see armor players make is they just leave their units on the default line formation. This makes them a prime target for the exceedingly cheap and extremely effective tank buster strike TA, whereas putting one's units in box formation and keeping them spread out will necessitate the enemy try to use the standard airstrike TA, which is more expensive and less effective.

[Vympel]

Some random gripes (yes, the game's awesome, but I'm going to complain about missed opportunities and inaccuracies, dammit)

- T-62s are inexplicably called T-64s;
- No gun-launched ATGMs for the T-80U. That was just screaming to be the special attack;
- On what planet is the Mi-24 the heavy attack helo and the Mi-28 is the medium?
- Kamov scout helicopters? Eh?
- PT-76 is in, but it's not amphibious?

[defanatic]

I went infantry for quite a bit today, and found that the enemy had pinpointed my drop zone, and artilleried it, napalmed it, and quite a few other things. I changed, and he found it again. I was bombed most out of all players on the level. Why is that?

[InnocentBystander]

Keep changing your location and move your shit as soon as it arrives.

[White Haven]

You know what'd make an awesome special ability on, say, medium artillery, to both make it useful and cut down on the artillery spam? A counterbattery fire ability on a cooldown. Punch the ability, target a point currently under artillery fire, and it lobs a missile up to try to backplot based on ballistics. That'd make people save artillery for when it's needed, not just randomly shelling the shit out of capture points. Plus, hey, medium arty not being useless would rock.

[Stark]

There is now a huge schism in WiC - many (ie, the whole top 500) appear to have been playing *constantly* from launch (ie, 320+ ~10m games in 2.5 days lol) and then there are the noobs. I really hope the matching service on Massgate works: I've seen matches start and end while I've been looking at the server browser!

Mi-28s being 'air to air choppers' with no AT missiles makes me giggle. Just like 'Russians have no MRLS and US has no big guns', etc.

[Chris OFarrell]

I would have done the helicopters slightly differently. Have the Apache and the Havok as both the medium and heavy choppers, their special abilities now both ATGM and AA missiles instead of one plus countermeasures.

Then make the UH-60 and Mi-24 transport attack ships. Each can carry one squad of infantry, each carries a mix of miniguns and rocket pods as a special ability called 'Hot LZ'. When you arrive at the drop off point, you use the ability like a TA strike and blast the crap out of any infantry and light vehicles in the area (of course you can't see the infantry in the tree lines unless you bring a scout or have previously figured it out) then you hot drop your men into the LZ.

Would have placed much more emphasis on co-operative air mobile infantry attacks.

[Stark]

The chopper-AA thing really seems to need some work overall: I mean, dueling choppers? No area-AA, no longrange sensors, just SAMs outranged by AT missiles? Scout choppers with IR scanners, but fucking gunships WITHOUT IR scanners?

I'm hoping this is just a stress-test for their servers and the game, and there's still some unit changes to be made. I mean I'm not as perfectionist as Vympel (for once) but having an 'AA chopper' with 16 AT missiles on the model is stupid. I wouldn't mind more unit flexibility overall, actually, like trading the TOWs on a Bradley for something else - that'll never happen though.

They need to change the UI to extend the 'special' area to show all specials for all units in a group. Just extend it. With a mixed group you want to see cooldowns and options, and there's no reason not to show it.

[Alan Bolte]

Been playing for two days now (name is Missile Dance), and it's pretty fun. The medium chopper swarms are pretty annoying, and I really can't get the hang of infantry combat. If I click on a forest and the little shield symbol comes up, they should fucking take cover in the forest! Also, the scout copters seem more like anti-infantry copters. I never use them for scouting.

[InnocentBystander]

The problem I find with this game is that if you do not take support you will not have sufficient air defense, and if you do not take armor you will have a hard time taking territory. Infantry is nice; but if you are against someone who isn't retarded they're extremely easy to murder.

[GuppyShark]

IB - sounds perfect to me. Field a balanced team, the game even tells players what the team mix is when they enter the match.

[Stark]

When you are lucky enough to get a pub team of not-idiots (gosh, they use q-menu and respond to requests, what a massive level of coordination! ) it's much more satisfying. That's why I prefer playing on the EU/US servers, because the AU servers are full of a) drooling idiots who leave units totally stationary and don't react when you part trucks next to them and b) obsessives with 600+ games who will micro you to death in seconds.

[GuppyShark]

Bloody hell - getting frequent hard crashes since the update.

Oh well, guess that's what beta are for.

[Stark]

I've been having all kinds of connection problems, and it's definately become worse with the update. Huzzah?

Then again, Alan Bolte told me how the damn keyboard shortcuts work (ie, holding the button puts you in 'special mode' instead of 'click - target, click - target' so you can ripple off multiple aa missiles (etc) very quickly.

[Chris OFarrell]

Yes. Air to Air Choppers are so much fun now that 90% of people still don't know how to use (or know that they CAN use, for some people in the pre patch beta the shortcut keys didn't work no matter what) the shortcuts.

I had a hell of a fun time yesterday running around with 6 Cobra's or Havoks, ripple firing off two missiles per enemy chopper and finishing with guns in 10 seconds.

Then you'd see them suddenly turn towards you and you knew the poor barstard was about to point a click a missile, countermeasures away!

I must have wiped out God knows how many choppers for the loss of only one or two each round.
It was absurd one round when half the bloody enemy team was going air for some stupid reason, we kept winning maps in about 3 mins.

[Stark]

Heh. I thought they were 'conventional', so I was pressing the button then clicking a target (which not only didn't work, deselected the group). Much better now.

It's amusing when a map is won/lost so quick - almost always due to hopelessly lopsided force profile. I've seen 100% air/support teams! How the fuck do they expect to hold a line?