Haswell

This won't be so much a as guide on specific cheesing strategies for contract missions and such, but rather a discussion on the philosophy of expending bare minimum effort and time to satisfy whatever requirements or goals you may have. Contract missions and BP stuff will be used for examples because of their high applicability, but they are by no means the only candidates for minimal effort gameplay. I shall define minimal effort gameplay as a playstyle, in which the goal of playing is to satisfy specific requirements that do not demand continuous effort or contribution throughout the full length of games. This usually goes against the common philosophies of playing to win or playing as best as you can, assuming winning or high performance gameplay are not your goals. It will take far too many words to explain this in detail, so I'll start by using an example from the previous BP: Here, my goal is to achieve 6000 assist damage in 10 battles. There are no other requirements, nor are there any bonuses for achieving beyond the goal of 6000 assist damage. I do not earn extra progress towards the mission for farming more than 6000 assist damage per battle, and I have to do this 10 times. Why then, should I bother to stay any longer in that particular battle after I am certain that I have hit the required 6000 assist damage? It is not time efficient for me to waste time to continue the battle, I could have simply died and went into another battle to progress through the 10 battles faster. For tasks of which I am limited by time (either through mechanics or real life), time itself becomes a limited resource and a metric for efficiency. My goal becomes not only to satisfy whatever requirements I may have, but also to spend as little time as possible to complete the tasks. For example, in order to farm 2000 infantry damage for 10 batles as fast as possible, I can use the method of not staying in my battles any longer than it takes for my infantry to rack up 2000 damage. I can pile in 10 battles and complete the mission within an hour this way. Average active playtime in each battle: less than 3 minutes. The most common rebuttal to my minimal effort gameplay tends to be that you are not being a team player, or that you don't support other players in your battles. While that may be true, the mission requirements of which I'm exerting minimum effort to satisfy do not require any sort of teamplay. As I said above, the goal is time efficiency and not actual gameplay performance, there are no incentives or duty to carry others if it means allocating more time in each battle, time that could be spent finishing missions faster. Another argument is that minimal effort gameplay is against the rules... somehow. This one is easy to refute: there is no rule mandating anyone to play at any competency level. If playing poorly is against the rules somehow then over 90% of the playerbase would be liable to punishment. The goal and execution of minimal effort gameplay also isn't intended to grief other players, so anti-griefing rules also don't apply. In a nutshell, there are no rules against playing poorly intentionally or otherwise. The biggest challenge to minimal effort gameplay is that you are not playing as well as you can, and that your stats will suffer as a result. This argument is easy to address as long as you don't fall into the trap of assuming stats reflect personal performance. Stats don't matter, there is no competition in the game and the stats can easily be rigged, all that matters is how well you can perform when you are required to perform at high skill levels. As long as you can play well when you are needed, who cares if you play like crap when you don't have to play well? You may feel bad for not playing as well as you could, but remember the goal here is about time efficiency not gameplay performance. Playing well doesn't mean squat if you have to spend more time than it is necessary to complete your missions. There is one subjective factor in minimal effort gameplay, that is how much fun you get out of it. Minimal effort gameplay is grindy and not really fun, but neither is having to spend a lot of time to complete grindy missions like doing repetitive tasks for 10 battles. Sometimes the game feels like a chore and hardly fun at all in any way, you may want to complete your tasks as fast as possible so you can spend extra time doing other things you truly enjoy. The fun factor is something players have to address by themselves: how much fun or suffering do you want while grinding through tasks that are hardly fun? How much time are you willing to invest into the game as opposed to doing something else, potentially more fun than the game? I for one, prefer to exert the bare minimum effort required to complete my tasks as fast as possible, so I can get on with doing other things that I actually enjoy. If I have to grind out 10 games of 10000 damage each, then I will do exactly that and no more. This apply to contract missions, BP missions, anything that require repetitive grinding where I don't progress faster by playing better. TL;DR: play smarter, not harder.

But this is nice! The game is less dull when you can connect with your favorite anime characters in the game!

Best part of the game for me is NOT playing the game. Bantering with people and playing other stuff (L4D, Among Us, SC2) is ironically more fun than playing the same dull content over and over again. But if I have to limit myself to what is fun in AW, it's almost exclusively heroics and meme runs. Anything that will challenge my skills with real possibilities of failing due to lack of skill or experience. Spec Ops excluded, because the special mechanics are more annoying than being tests of skill.

Interesting, this could be fun and balanced assuming it runs on a magazine system like the AMX-30 and AMX-40. As long as it's not simply a full T-15 belt it should be fine. Then again, would anybody be surprised if this end up being T-15 2.0, but with a big gun instead of missiles?

Pics ripped from Twitter: It does bear a lot of similarities to the T-14-152, wonder what will make it special.

Armor thickness, damage, hitpoints, penetration, view range, camo, all these stats are arbitrary gameplay values that bear little to no resemblance to real life. You also most certainly won't see vehicle-on-vehicle engagements at 300m and closer in real life, nor will you see a team of 5 vehicles mowing through several dozen enemy vehicles within 10 minutes. I will also raise you the XM1A3 and 99A2, which are entirely fictional vehicles with corresponding fictional capabilities. Also physics-defying airships and flying drones.

First off, AW is an arcade game and IRL arguments for game mechanics rarely apply. So let's just ignore that completely. There are plenty of PvE maps that are currently easily soloable with squishy vehicles, provided you exercise good vision control and avoid taking unnecessary damage. Snake Bite, Umbrella, Stormy Winter, Phalanx, Meltdown, Quarterback, Perseus, Leviathan, these are just a few that came to mind as I'm writing this. This isn't due to squishy vehicles being too powerful as you can also easily solo them with MBTs; this is due to GOOD map design that allow both squishies and non-squishies to fully realize their potentials. As a general rule of thumb, squishies benefit from wide open maps that allow vision control via distance and maneuvering. This isn't to say non-squishies are at a disadvantage on open maps. On the contrary, they excel equally well on both open and corridor maps by having high enough survivability to brute-force their way through almost everything. Their inherent lack of vision control capabilities become irrelevant when they can simply push up and spot targets without a care in the world. Non-squishies in fact have far more versatility over squishies as they are significantly less constrained by map design, where squishies become far less useful in situations where vision control and mobility are not required or not viable. Squishy vehicles do not require buffs or nerfs for balancing, their playability and power potential are largely dictated by map design and not vehicle stats. You can give the Sphinx 700m view range and 50% base camo and 20k DPM, it still wouldn't make any difference or make them more viable in corridor maps because its vision control advantage becomes largely irrelevant due to the close distances. Is it any better if a supposed 5 player map is able to be beaten by with only two non-squishies? The vehicle class isn't relevant here, it's the inherent lack of difficulty that makes short-manned feats viable. Yes, the 2 man heroic run primarily used T-15s, but T-15 is an entire class of its own and OP compared to everything else. It also wasn't a squishy. As I said previously, there are no incentives to complete secondary objectives. I for one ignore them because it's not worth my time or effort, unless they have actual impact on gameplay. For example, destroying the boats on AD3 (tier 9-10) significantly reduces the number of bot spawns and turns the mission from challenging to cakewalk. This is something I noticed as well. There is no longer a need to conserve myself to last until the end of the mission, very few situations where I have to choose my engagements to avoid taking unnecessary damage. In fact, conservative play actually punishes me as it would take me longer to end engagments and complete objectives. It's no longer about staying alive as long as I can, it's all about how much can I get done before I have to respawn for more ammo.

I am both horrified and intrigued.

I'll have to respond to the survey here instead of the form, because some of the multiple choice answers don't really fit my thoughts. Sorry for the inconvenience, but here goes... I choose standard PvE, but not because it's easier or more fun compared to Spec Ops; I choose PvE because I can't stand the special mechanics and chapter system in Spec Ops. The special mechanics don't add any sort of challenge or promote teamwork, all it does is add immense annoyance to the overall flow of the game. Helis, drones, airborne targets and environmental "bosses" for example, countering them essentially demands some sort of autocannon or high DPM vehicle which restricts gameplay, and if you don't deal with them you will be at a severe disadvantage or outright fail primary objectives. Not being able to freely choose which chapter of Spec Ops to play on is a major disincentive to me. Some of the chapters are essentially snorefests where I spend more time waiting out timers than moving and shooting enemies (ie. CC1/2, BSI1, AN1/2), others are simply not fun because of the special mechanics but are necessary to slog through to get to the fun chapters. I like MC3/4, but having to slog through MC1/2 before I can get there means I won't want bother with it. There isn't enough fun in Spec Ops for me to outweigh the frustration. I also dislike the heavy use of MBT corridor meta in Spec Ops, it leaves very little purpose or viability for squishies to even participate. This is more of a map design issue however. None of the above. I almost always play alone, but I want more challenging content for platoons and organized groups. I enjoy playing heroics very much, but I almost never platoon when playing standard PvE. I'm fine with reusing maps for different missions. Snake Bite, Umbrella and Albatross for example all use the same map, but they have different mission objectives and utilize different parts of the map. This is a low budget, but actually elegant solution to reduce dev resources. As long as the missions are different enough, the maps will FEEL different and new. As I previously said, I hate them. They don't add challenge or promote teamwork, all they do is frustrate me into dealing with them as fast as possible so they no longer have any impact (ie. destroying boats in AD3 to reduce bot spawns), or flat out ignore them by speeding through the missions (ie. arty in BSI4). I like teamplay objectives very much, provided the objectives are not retarded or prone to intentional griefing. Examples below. Good objectives: objective deliveries in MC3/4 (with caveats, explained below) multiple simultaneous cap points in BSI2, AD3, SH3 anything that require people spreading out and be able to carry their own weight. Bad objectives: objective deliveries in MC3/4, too easy for one person to grief everyone by holding on to the objective and not delivering them. Particularly rampant in random teams. escorts. It's never about protecting whatever you are supposed to be escorting, it's always about rushing forward and killing everything before the escort gets there. high BP boss targets. Holding down the left mouse button isn't teamplay. I hate to say this because I know SS had a part in writing the narrative, but the story god awful and cringey that I actively try to ignore it. Turning off the narrative dialogues in the audio settings is mandatory for me. I enjoyed the narrative more when it was only about mercs and corporations jabbing each other, the whole "team Avengers stopping bad guys from destroying the world" cliche never interested me. I want to feel like a cog in the world machinery and working with others, not the soloist destroyer of worlds. The original story with just mercs and corps interested me the most. I haven't read too much into the expanded storyline and Seahawk stuff because it wasn't included in the game, but as long as it's good fanfic I'll probably be fine with it being canon. Do you like the new Star Wars movies? I don't, and the Fallout direction is basically that. Bring back the mercs and corps, there are so much unexplored potential in the standard PvE narrative that will never play nice with the Fallout direction because of the discontinuity. Heck, let us be the bad guys and fight against ISD forces for a change, players are supposed to be mercenaries working for whoever pays the most after all. Not sure if I want to restrict myself to specific themes, but I'd go with believable appearances because my suspension of disbelief is limited to things that make some degree of sense. I prefer my vehicles to look like something you would see IRL. This means no flashy lights or high visibility elements, you just don't go fight a war in parade paint. You can go sci-fi without the flashy lights, just look at the PL-01. Mad Max appearances like stuff coming out of the Middle East IRL is fine, just don't add spikes or flamers or stuff that make no practical sense at all. Yes, but you won't like to hear it. Separate PvE balancing from PvP. Yes it requires a lot of resources, but that's the price you pay for trying to support two separate game modes. It would be a lot easier if PvP just die. Make secondary objectives affect gameplay in meaningful ways. Right now most of them only give bonus credits and nothing else, make them affect the game more like extend objective timers or reduce the number of bot spawns. Spec ops had the right idea of tying secondary objectives with the special mechanics, now make them more meaningful so that it's in my best interest to NOT ignore them. Reduce the number of bots. It's not even challenging to kill your way to the objectives, it's just annoying to have half a dozen bots being thrown at you every other minute. It's like having a car race but also having traffic lights in your way that you have to obey. Increase the challenge of objectives. This ties with reducing the number of bots, make it so that the challenge is in completing objectives and not just mindlessly killing everything. Stop promoting the MBT meta. There's no point in playing squishies if MBTs can do everything better and faster. Scale the rewards better with performance. Make it so the rewards match the effort required to earn them, good players should earn more and bad players should earn less. AKA revert back to before the economy change in early 2019.

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/development-special-operations-mission-plague Short range combat = MBT meta, because who gives a fuck about squishies? Yeah, nah. I don't have any incentive to play spec ops in general, unless I get something other than credits, XP and useless cosmetics out of this I won't bother at all.

Would be nice if you include the vehicle names, I literally can't tell what you're looking at in the first picture.

Basically a Wilk with the Cent 120 turret, sexy.

OS: Windows 10 Home Game Version: 0.33.7478--2020-11-10_12:04 Brief Description: Active PvE missions in the HQ screen no longer refresh when changing vehicles across tier brackets, in the HQ screen. Steps to Reproduce Select a vehicle (vehicle 1), any vehicle Go into the HQ screen, note the currently active PvE missions for vehicle 1 While still in the HQ screen, switch to a different vehicle (vehicle 2) from a different tier bracket (ie. tiers 1-3, 4-6, 7-10) Note the active PvE missions after switching vehicles Go to the garage screen Go back into the HQ screen, make sure vehicle 2 is still selected Note the now different active PvE missions for vehicle 2 Result: Switching vehicles across different tier brackets in the HQ screen do not refresh active PvE missions properly. Expected Behavior: Switching vehicles in the HQ screen should automatically refresh the available active PvE missions. Fixes/Workarounds: Always switch vehicles outside of the HQ screen, to ensure accurate missions are displayed Consult the rotation tracker to identify currently active missions for any time slot https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/10-armored-warfare-pve-mission-rotation-tracker/ Other Notes: Video demonstration:

PISH is still useful for blowing up ammo racks, in fact your loadout should still be PISH heavy despite the nerfs. The extra damage and utility you get from reliably destroying modules far outweighs the tiny bit of raw alpha increase from AP. If you want raw damage, you are honestly better off with the XM1A3. Penetration decay don't matter in PvE at all due to everything being jam packed into close ranges.

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/maintenance-november-11

So just to recap, this is what we know so far: Tier 4: Shilka Tier 8: Kristama Tier 9: Kurganets (coin purchase) That leaves the tier 10 and arty. I'm guessing arty will be tier 6 to fill in the gap, but this will likely mean the missions will be even more awful than last time.

Crosspost: https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/5193-in-development-zsu-23-4-shilka/

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/development-zsu-23-4-shilka This isn't a York at tier 4, this is a reskinned GAU at tier 4. Unless it overheats significantly faster and cooldown slower than the GAU, there's no way in hell this won't be as broken as the York, if not even more broken. Crosspost: https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/4289-echoes-of-war-december-battle-bath-speculation-info-thread/

https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/4771-in-development-khrizantema-s/ Crossposting.

https://aw.my.games/en/news/general/development-khrizantema-s Looks incredibly... meh. It's basically a Stalker without the dakka, having thermos or double tap won't improve it much considering how awful missile noise and soft kill APS are right now. Mephisto basically do the same things but with autohoming. It's hard to come up with a worse vehicle than the Brosat, but this one might just do it. Cross ref: https://armoredlabs.net/index.php?/topic/4289-echoes-of-war-december-battle-bath-speculation-info-thread/

I guess it will have radar, that means no infantry or designate target. Which most likely means TD. I question the usefulness of the Kristama (name is too long and hard to remember), my impression right now is that it's simply a Stalker without the dakka, and the Stalker is already pretty useless right now. Adding to the fact that missile noise is awful in the current game, a missile boat sounds pretty unappealing.

Doubtful. SS said there won't be mortar carriers in one of the Q&As, but that was months ago.

There, I split the thread. It's so empty now. :c

This is going to be difficult, seeing how the discussion went directly into the Spec Ops event. Let me see... Edit: too hard, the only post actually staying to the original topic is your first post. You might as well make a new thread on your own with the original topic. >.>