Some new things you may have noticed

It appears that Glyph and Seibertron have been busy within the game. Some players have noticed that they can "Select All" in the CR Chamber and in the Arena while others have noticed that there is a new action within the battles: Retreat.

Glyph had this to say about the changes:

"Well, I had a feeling there might be some fallout from the mission changes... Most of the stuff that's going on in this update is happening behind the scenes, so I appreciate you won't see much of it. Let's just say that the game should now be running more smoothly with less drain on the server's resources.

OK, retreat - this is something we've wanted to put in for some time. After all, how often did you see TF battles really go to the last man standing? No commander who fights like that all the time is ever going to win a war. However, the version that's currently in the battles is a stopgap - simply limited by mission time because we had to do something about the problems with E/Rs and to a lesser extent E/As, which were causing havoc by running on and on. I admit, it looks like it may have been set a little too short (there are more rounds going on in the game that don't get reported, e.g. if a bot can't find a target), so that can be extended a bit.

As AS said, the eventual plan is to have it be motivated by a combination of Intel, Rank and Courage - but this will be accompanied by the long-rumoured 'group tactics' as well. For now, though, it's there as a necessity; just a bit of a quick-fix so that we could get an update out more quickly and then develop it later.

Tactics have been tweaked a bit to try to stop Ram and Strafe completely owning the arena and missions respectively. Dual tactics should find they're not so hamstrung, Strafe now doesn't make the strafer unhittable for a few rounds (it doesn't stun either, but it used to), Ram's stun depends on both combatants' stats (Gore rams Bumblebee; Bumblebee rams Gore - should they both have the same effect?). The hope is that this, and forthcoming alterations, should encourage people to try out more varied stat configurations rather than just using the Strafer-with-a-SAR or Rammer-with-Axe-or-Fangs cookie-cutter.

Hope you enjoy playing with it, there's more to come..."

View the entire thread here and feel free to post your comments.