The Great Vanishing Act

Recently, the team have been beset by many a real life trauma: I have been working on Blur The Game (go buy it!), ScreamingCricket has moved to California to work for Carbine Studios and Nuka5 and most of the testers have vanished for the exam period. However! When we have had time, we've been looking at a considerable barrier to entry within VGO.

Hard Counters and the Speed of Failure

One of the problems we have been trying to overcome is the dramatic gap between skilled and unskilled players. We believe this was caused by the speed with which hard counters can destroy very expensive units with little to no recourse; if an assault is not pre-empted, it is possible to lose a lot of money's worth of troops in a very short space of time.

To this end, health has been improved across the board; all units have greater survivability. Hard counters are still hard counters, and they fire more rapidly than they did, but they also do less damage per shot. This gives the player under attack the opportunity to pull their expensive units back before they are completely destroyed in many instances, giving a player who failed another chance to regroup.

This has another nice bi-product: battles last longer. This makes for more interesting, more dynamic gameplay, as well as putting greater emphasis on healing infantry - medics now require less micro management when reviving infantry and as a result are now regular members of squads in most games.

We have also overhauled the visibility system. While vehicle vision will remain broadly similar, infantry now have a greater vision radius as do scout units such as the OH6. This encourages ambushes to occur in jungle areas (as stealth detection ability remains unchanged), as well as makes forward scouting just that little bit easier for most players.

The Brutality of the AI

For an experienced player of VGO, the AI was a pleasant challenge. For the new player, it was overbearingly difficult. As such, the NVA AI has been built from the ground up to be more easily scalable in terms of difficulty. The Easy AI is now a much more sedate experience, allowing new players to get a much better handle on the game and its mechanics; the hard AI is still as brutal as it always was.

We intend to expand this new system to the old USA AI; this is especially important because learning to play as the NVA is much harder than learning to play the USA was. The NVA build mechanics are fundamentally different in their approach, which usually takes players a bit of time to learn. It's worth mentioning at this point that the NVA AI is complete for all standard maps for up to 4 players and 6 villages. Glorious!