I really appreciate this response. I rather enjoy how much you considered everything I had mentioned, I think with good testing, you will find the right balance. Maybe get in touch with those guys from the BTB site and throw this into Max Extra's Forged Fridays. If anything you might find insight on balance issues. As far as the river goes, that's rough. Even if you prefab the map over to Tidal, you can't get the water proper due to elevation changes. All that aside, I feel you have taken this map in the right direction. I look forward to the outcome.
BTB site? Everything will surely be tested before it gets into matchmaking. After thinking about this for a couple hours during a long drive i had tonight i decided to go back to 3 min respawn for the banshees for now. Regardless it'll all get figured out but 3 min is probably the proper place to start.
With prefabs dropping as part of Anvil's Legacy in a few days, do you have any plans to port this map to Tidal in order to make use of the water?
I have a suggestion: Near fog needs adjustment, (as well as the sky color, but the near fog is more prominent) I'd HIGHLY suggest turning the Near Fog scale down to about .30 or .20, turning the thickness way down and bringing up the brightness so it has a nice fluffy white look, and then changing the distance fog to 'Desert Blue'. Right now, the current sky has a bit of a washed out look in my opinion, and the 'clouds' look really bad due to their super unnatural scaling and the fact that when you look up into the sky, they'll follow your retical around due to their small scale.
Kind of wish that the Hydra Launcher would be brought back to replace the Missile Pod or use the ONI Missile Pod so that air and ground vehicles could be locked onto.
Im pretty sure when i rebalanced the map it was intentional to allow the paper vehicles to have more influence than they did on the original MM version. The original Viking is still available on my fileshare though if you use it for customs.
While a pretty coordinated team, such as will often be found in custom matches and in rarer instances matchmaking (8 player fully communicating fireteam facing off against another 8 player fully communicating fireteam), will likely see the balance you were striving for; however, the trouble is that most matches within the BTB playlist that type of coordination (on both teams) just isn't there to help check the role and influence of the vehicles which is why I think the ONI Missile Pod might be the best solution. It grants a very helpful (in-base) counter toward opposing vehicles who are perhaps too aggressive in applying pressure onto the base; plus, there's not nearly the incentive with it for random players to pick-it-up and pocket it on the run (like the Hydra Launcher created) which can often led to it getting wasted (on opposing players instead of vehicles) and in turn unused for it's primary role/purpose -- especially if the player who took it simply died while holding onto it. Dragging the ONI Missile Pod Turret out into the field makes a player a slow moving target and since it doesn't lock onto opposing players there's an increased skill level required for defending oneself when trotting along; these two aspects means that most likely the Turret will be left available until it's required for it's primary role/purpose -- counter a vehicle that aggressively positions itself.