Contact Expansion Livonia Feedback

[teabagginpeople 398]

Having being busy only picked up Contact now. By far my my favourite map in the series. such a shame it was not a full sized one but none the less, great job. Felt like I was in Ireland at times.  

[Ex3B 266]

How is 164 km^2 land area not "full sized"? Tanoa is 100km^2 of land, stratis was only 20. 

Its basically takistan

Livonia's terrain is only a bit smaller than chernarus, and smaller than Altis. Since when was anything smaller than Altis not "full sized"? Personally, I consider 100km^2 to be the lower limit...

Granted, separating that landmass into islands and such makes it seem bigger. Using some water to increase total playable area makes maps seem bigger, but water based gameplay is still minor in A3, despite the swimming and SDV improvements

[teabagginpeople 398]

Why thank you. Map looks smaller but guess not.

[stburr91 1002]

5 hours ago, Ex3B said:

How is 164 km^2 land area not "full sized"? Tanoa is 100km^2 of land, stratis was only 20. 

Its basically takistan

Livonia's terrain is only a bit smaller than chernarus, and smaller than Altis. Since when was anything smaller than Altis not "full sized"? Personally, I consider 100km^2 to be the lower limit...

Granted, separating that landmass into islands and such makes it seem bigger. Using some water to increase total playable area makes maps seem bigger, but water based gameplay is still minor in A3, despite the swimming and SDV improvements

 

 

While I agree that Livonia isn't small, Altis set a new standard/expectation. I fully expect the Arma 4 terrain will be at a bare minimum be as big as Altis, if not bigger. I'm also hopeful that like Altis, most, if not nearly all buildings will be fully enterable, and not like the only partly enterable buildings that Tanoa, and Livonia have.

[krzychuzokecia 717]

6 hours ago, Ex3B said:

How is 164 km^2 land area not "full sized"?

 

With Jets DLC content and features, such as fast airplanes, reworked sensors and increased radar ranges etc. even maps like Chernarus or Livonia can become seemingly small very fast. Granted not every mission use jets, but sensors/weapon range upgrades are also applicable for ground vehicles.

[Ex3B 266]

@krzychuzokecia I agree almost completely. A 12.8x12.8 km square is plenty for infantry combat, and starts to seem a little small for tank combat when one considers that tank FCS can handle distances of up to 5km (T-140 Angara), although that requires rather high view distance settings. From one end diagonally to the other of such a map, its 18 km, so I think its not so applicable to ground vehicles, particularly given the limited spots where you can get such a line of sight, and the limited speed of ground vehicles with such weapon ranges.

If one places two bases at opposite corners of the maps, they distance between them is significant. Its a bit different with artillery though. MRLs and howitzers pretty much anywhere on the map can engage pretty much anywhere else on the map.

With jets, it really makes the map small. There are rarely 2 airports even several km away from each other. The maps, including altis, are all really too small for two teams with fighter jets to operate.

The jets do 1 km every 3 seconds, so 10km takes just 30 seconds to cross. Take off at one end of the map in a black wasp, and you can pretty much identify and shoot down any non-stealth aircraft that gets above ground clutter anywhere on the map (at least for every map except Altis, but if you take off at the main airbase, its still true).

 

The Jets DLC also added a carrier... which can fix the problem a bit on island maps. Place carriers around 20km off shore, at opposite ends of altis, and you can get a good 60km of separation between bases on Altis. I can get carrier bases 50km apart on Tanoa -moving carriers too far off the map can cause problems- So the airpower can be put farther away and again make the battlespace more reasonable.

 

Livonia is landlocked though, so aircraft carriers don't really fit well with it (they can just sit there on land), and jets can just land right off the edge of the map, so a base placed farther away can be moved closer, unless made with scripts or objects that can't be moved. I find ships offshore to be a much more aesthetically pleasing solution to the small size of the maps for aerial warfare.

 

That's also why I made my mod "offshore assault", because NATO was well suited to operating from a ship (Black wasps + blackfish carrying marshals and Rhinos will curbstomp Xians and Taru's carrying LSVs and MRAPs), but CSAT isn't.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1744603050

 

 

[dragon01 902]

For jets (and also meaningful naval operations), you really need something like 100x100km (TOH-sized) maps. For ArmA4, I'd very much love to see something like that, but making a map like that detailed enough for infantry operations is nontrivial, to say the least. An option would be setting the game in a desert (something like the Persian Gulf, with lots of water on one side), which would allow concentrated high-detail areas with plenty of open space between them.

[EO 11275]

Not sure if this know but AI can fall through the floor of the big airfield building if it's in a damaged state....

 

[mickeymen 324]

On 3/24/2020 at 6:57 PM, dragon01 said:

For ArmA4, I'd very much love to see something like that, but making a map like that detailed enough for infantry operations is nontrivial, to say the least. An option would be setting the game in a desert (something like the Persian Gulf, with lots of water on one side), which would allow concentrated high-detail areas with plenty of open space between them.

 

I believe, that for jets it is not advisable to make maps that are not islands.

 

Like Livonia, other maps (not islands) are not suitable for aircraft gameplay, since on the land, the unnatural borders of such maps are very clearly visible from above.

For an aviation pilot, this looks unnatural and ugly.  But if map is an island, then at the end of such map, the pilot sees the endless sea - it looks natural.

 

I want to believe, that in the Arma4, any map for jets should preferably be a huge islands, superior to Altis several times or even a chain of such islands.

Yet we can get tired of only islands. Still if the map is not an island, then the end-borders of such map should be blurred, not clear - end-borders smoothly turning into a void, not as clear as we see in all non-island maps.  In this case, the terrain beyond the borders of the map,  should have a smooth transition to emptiness in texture and objects, which unfortunately we can’t say about Livonia and other maps

[dragon01 902]

Once again, a desert helps there. If you've got water on one side and a sea of sand on the other, the boundaries won't be as jarring as they are with heavily forested terrain. Even DCS has this problem near the edges of its maps, and it has a much larger scale and lower detail than ArmA.

 

An interesting option would be a peninsula with high mountains on one end. They also wouldn't have much vegetation, and they do a good job of obscuring things.