FreeGameDev

Following a recent discussion with Quin on IRC about the current SVN grenade settings, I'm making this topic to find out what other people think.

For those who aren't aware, in 1.4 (Elara Edition) grenades are extremely powerful, too powerful. In 1.5 (Q? Edition) they have been reduced a bit, but they're still too powerful, despite them being 'the weakest they've ever been' (Quin). Servers which run SVN settings are play.redeclipse.net, freezurbern.com SVN r#### and my own, UK SVN Pro (but has explosives disabled), there may be others but I don't know them.


The main issue with grenades is not that they do too much damage, or have too much explosive range (partially) but rather how they work. I am aware that the things I'm about to say can be changed as server options, but most servers are unmodified and the goal here is to change things for the better, not just do my own thing and hope other collie on.

Fundamentally there are two reasons why grenades are too powerful:

• Kamikaze
• Cooking synergy

Kamikaze is much quicker to explain so I'll do that first.

Kamikaze
The issue here, is that as long as you are holding a grenade it's like a "don't touch me" sign, if you get to close chances are you'll die. This is worsened by the fact that if you suicide you also blow up and gain points for any kills you make. It's a horrible mechanic that isn't very nice as it really limits the potential of using most weapons without getting yourself killed in the process, and they don't even have to do anything to get you back, just stand there.

While I have mentioned this, this is not the key subject of this topic, it's just a minor addition.

Cooking synergy
Ever since 0.3 or so, grenades have had the ability to cook, that is you can hold down the fire button and then release it to 'shorten' the lifespan of the grenade, allowing you to control roughly when it'll explode. This on it's own is a great mechanic, sort of, the idea behind it is good but it has it's down fall.

Movement in Red Eclipse is quick, especially when you know how to do it properly and know maps well with good geometry. Additionally, the majority of the maps are small, or sectioned off into zones. A basic example of the zone idea is Ghost. Ghost has two bridges, two bases and the four corners, a more complex example would be Livefire, Livefire has the 'rooftops' (the wooden hut thing with the rocket spawn, and the surround raised area), the indoor corridors (indoor pusher and door etc), 'yard' (that bit below the 'rooftops'), and a few other zones like that. These zones split a fairly medium-large sized map into much smaller areas, and these small areas limit options for terrain traversal sometimes (especially rooms, like those in keystone2k). The combination of this, the cooking and the great speed that people can move, all the power is in the hands of the grenade user.

The map design creates synergy with the fact that you can cook grenades, and grenade cooking allows the user to create a powerful explosion at a precise location, and the small size of the map just makes them more and more effective. Ultimately, the smaller the map is and the more sectioned it is, the more powerful grenades become. This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that small maps often feature lots of grenade spawns, or higher density of grenade spawns (keystone2k has 8 in the rooms in total and 4 in the middle, while ghost only has 4, yet livefire has 10) and apart for the start where items are generated slightly randomly to curb lag there's no randomization in the spawn times, allowing people to setup almost farming routes to exploit the insane power of grenades.

The obvious fix would be to remove cooking, but Quin isn't big on the idea since that's been in since 0.3. I suggested replacing that instead of cooking changing the lifespan of the grenade, it changed how fast the grenade travelled in the air (and thus the distance it could cover and how it's effected by gravity). Without doing something to the cooking behaviour, I see the only way to fix the issue would be some combination of removing grenade spawns on smaller maps, increasing and randomizing their spawn times and generally making larger maps. This options are all much more work than changing 6 or 8 variables (either way, it still has to be balanced afterwards) and reducing the explosive radius (yet again).


Overall, the question I'm proposing is what would people prefer to be done, and no 'leaving them as they are' is not a valid option. You are allowed to vote for two options. For those who're interested the original conversation is in the link here.

Personally, I do find grenades slightly problematic, but I do not agree with any of your ideas.

Personally, I feel like cooking should slightly affect the damage of the grenade, but only slightly. I'm not talking about -50% here, but more around the -20% range, perhaps -30% if you cook it for really long (so, grenadedamage = 100 - (30 * cookingtime) with cookingtime being "1" at the moment it explodes in your hand). Just enough for throwing a cooked grenade "close to the player" to not kill them on full health, but still severely damage them. I'm not completely sure about this, though, but I consider the grenade balance to be fairly close, the only problem with cooking is that there is no real risk, only reward, and a small tweak like this could balance it out.

I don't find kamikazi a problem by itself, I feel that it is an interesting mechanic. Unlike cooking, it does hold a serious risk to the player as they cannot defend themselves in longer range.

Another thing I noticed is that grenadeselfdamage1 and grenadeselfdamage2 are both defaulting to 0.5, which doesn't make any sense. Even if you hold onto a grenade for 100% cook and it blows up right in your face, you only take 98 damage from the explosion and the burn, mitigating a lot of the downside of flinging high explosives at short range. If grenades hit yourself for the same damage values that they hit everyone else at, it would require a lot more care to try for short-range precision throws without racking up -6s to hurt your score more than they help.

I don't know who's responsible for the design decision of "wherever there's a grenade on the map, there should be two of them", but a lot of maps show clear signs of that goal in their layout. Livefire is perhaps the most blatant example, but it's quite pervasive; in fact, when campgrounds was added to SVN, all its grenade spawns from the DOOM server were doubled up for no reason I can tell. Just undoubling those across the board would go a long way toward getting the proper density.

I like how it's now the grenade, as the do a big splash, but they aren't so frequent because they must be collected.
The tactic I use most with the grenade and I find more irritating is right-click sticking them to players. Once you get a sticky grenade on yourself you are fragged within 5 seconds, and there is nothing you can do. Sticky grenades are also excellent for defending flags.

Two grenades near each other are the only practical way to get the max of grenades, and having two grenades feels like having a kill or two in the pocket.
Just putting one alone feels like wasting the fact that you can carry two.

Small maps make the all weapons more powerful, except the rifle.

Being hit by the own grenade should harm as other players.

I like the grenades, they're fairly useful at their current power. If I *had* the choice, I'd say don't mess with them. Despite this, I think the grenade explosion should affect the thrower a LOT more.

wheres the last option? make grenades slower and give them more gravity :P

restcoser {l Wrote}:wheres the last option? make grenades slower and give them more gravity :P

That wouldn't really fix the issue at hand.

A grenade is supposed to kill the enemy when hit, and it does this perfectlly as it is. I don't think there's a need to nerf it. If there's something that needs nerfs, is the shotgun's pellets, its like you can't escape that damn thing even with medium distance. For me it should keep it's pellet count, but lower a bit the damage they do.

Sniper-Goth {l Wrote}:A grenade is supposed to kill the enemy when hit, and it does this perfectlly as it is. I don't think there's a need to nerf it. If there's something that needs nerfs, is the shotgun's pellets, its like you can't escape that damn thing even with medium distance. For me it should keep it's pellet cout, but lower a bit the damage they do.

This isn't about the damage they do, nor is it about Shotguns.

Bobbo {l Wrote}:This isn't about the damage they do, nor is it about Shotguns.

No, but while we're at it, Fuck Shotguns. ^ I agree with Sniper.

I don't think cooking should be eliminated since it's just so satisfying to get a grenade kill and without cooking it's impossible to be precise.

Maybe a good solution would be to have the player slow down while cooking. This way they can't charge people and others can run away, and they'll be an easy target.

Another solution would be to have players explode when hit while cooking, but this could cause camping.

For kamikaze, wouldn't it be better for players to drop an un-cooked grenade at their feet when they die? So people can't hang around their bodies but kamikaze isn't instant.

Also, I agree that weight and selfdamage should be increased. But leave stickies alone! They take skill and nothing feels better than stickiying enemies

It seems if the selfdamage option was in the poll, it would get most votes
Yet, there must be some reasoning for the current setting of that var. I don't know.

Greaserpirates point about dropping nades upon player death is quite intuitive - I guess that has been considered before? Maybe there are technical difficulties, e.g. to keep the timer of a dropped nade that has already been cooked for a second or two.

I voted "Make cooking effect grenade speed". Please don't add respawn jitter: randomness sucks and will not help (people can control the items, regardless if there is jitter or not).

Calinou {l Wrote}:Please don't add respawn jitter: randomness sucks and will not help (people can control the items, regardless if there is jitter or not).

This is true, but it stops people from farming spawns because they won't know when a grenade will spawn.

Bobbo {l Wrote}:

Calinou {l Wrote}:Please don't add respawn jitter: randomness sucks and will not help (people can control the items, regardless if there is jitter or not).

This is true, but it stops people from farming spawns because they won't know when a grenade will spawn.

No, it does not. I said it: people can practice "item control", like in Quake: defend around the item until it respawns.

Silux {l Wrote}:Once you get a sticky grenade on yourself you are fragged within 5 seconds, and there is nothing you can do.

Kind of going back to the kamikaze tactic, if that happens, you could run into a group of players ASAP and damage most of'em.

greaserpirate {l Wrote}:Another solution would be to have players explode when hit while cooking

Isn't that the current behavior? Also, (and I could be wrong), grenades explode when you shoot them in mid-air, right? If that's the case, then I would assume that the same thing would happen if you shot one in a player's hand... Additionally, if you were holding two grenades and got hit while cooking one, the initial explosion would blow up the other grenade. Or at least, that sounds right.

Calinou {l Wrote}:Please don't add respawn jitter: randomness sucks and will not help (people can control the items, regardless if there is jitter or not).

I agree with increasing general respawn times (and removing reliance on grenades), but not randomization. That could give one team an advantage if their grenade spawns happen to activate before the other team's.

Calinou {l Wrote}:

Bobbo {l Wrote}:

Calinou {l Wrote}:Please don't add respawn jitter: randomness sucks and will not help (people can control the items, regardless if there is jitter or not).

This is true, but it stops people from farming spawns because they won't know when a grenade will spawn.

No, it does not. I said it: people can practice "item control", like in Quake: defend around the item until it respawns.

Except then you make yourself a sitting duck, and very prone to others with grenades (or anyone who has skill).

Bobbo {l Wrote}:

Calinou {l Wrote}:

Bobbo {l Wrote}:

Calinou {l Wrote}:Please don't add respawn jitter: randomness sucks and will not help (people can control the items, regardless if there is jitter or not).

This is true, but it stops people from farming spawns because they won't know when a grenade will spawn.

No, it does not. I said it: people can practice "item control", like in Quake: defend around the item until it respawns.

Except then you make yourself a sitting duck, and very prone to others with grenades (or anyone who has skill).

correct; item control in games like Quake only exists because the item can be quantified as having a higher value than other ones (in the same way diamonds are worth more than dirt), and that is because it is the only one (or two) of it's kind in the map; this is in addition to it's added boost to health/armour, or value in adding attack or defensive range/ability. Grenades in RE maps are often scattered throughout the map quite lavishly in some cases, so they don't have much value in that sense.

In Quake, usually these items have a prolonged respawn of at least 15, 20, 30 seconds or longer, so as to facilitate entire map control, rather than individual item control. When in RE the grenades respawn so quickly, there is no point to doing so; add to this the numerous other pickups of equal or higher value (i.e. rocket), and it's really quite stupid. RE isn't a game to camp in the first place anyway

The poll on this topic is rather one-sided, and doesn't represent a "leave them alone" option. Whether you like it or not, it is a valid option, and its absence will only ensure the results are fixed; thus reducing its validity in determining the right course of action. If the issue isn't resolved, I won't be using the results of this poll to determine the future of the topic at hand.

I agree with qreeves about the poll.

I'd even like to have a sort of grenade that explodes instantly on impact.
Cooking grenades has the option to make them explode in the air doing more damage, but it's too approximative to use it as intended.
Most of the time I throw grenades waiting some and then hoping the splash is large enough.

Silux {l Wrote}:I'd even like to have a sort of grenade that explodes instantly on impact.

I actually tried that at one stage, only to have it pointed out that this duplicates the functionality of the rocket. That being said, there are possibly other ideas which would fit better. I'm already considering making kamikaze drop a grenade with a longer lifetime, due to the abovementioned suicide tricks.

I'm sticking to my "make them slower and give them more gravity" idea.
Making them slower will give players more time to run away, because the grenadeuser wont get away from his own nade that easily. (also, /selfdamage 1)
Giving them more gravity would help so that noone can throw them across all of the map.
Another alternative would be to remove all their gravity and make the grenades get slower over time.

i'd vote for leave them alone as they are in SVN.

Personally I like the way grenades are in 1.4, even if they are incredibly powerful that's what they are there for, Red Eclipse characters are built to navigate quickly so if you effectively move in a predictable pattern somebody is sure as hell going to blow you up, that's the way it works!

qreeves {l Wrote}:I'm already considering making kamikaze drop a grenade with a longer lifetime, due to the abovementioned suicide tricks.

Given the circumstances this would resolve a lot, including the "instagib-medieval" crisis(short of removing explosives entirely), it definitely has my support...