Ok, so seeing as the first weekend of Invasion and Westwall has wrapped up (and the rest of the forum has descended into flaming over the event rewards), I think I'm just going to plop all my thoughts into this thread:
Game Mode: Invasion
The Good
Anyone who's been reading my posts will know I like this game mode.
It's a nice change of pace - one of the clear differences between Invasion and Conquest is that I don't feel pulled in multiple directions and have to constantly go through the decision-making process of deciding which cap is most critical to defend. Do I defend the Rocket Base or try to capture the Airbase? Do I try to intercept the bomber formation or push to capture the enemy Command Center? Invasion has very clear schwerpunkt and there's a fluid nature to the battles as the Attacking team rolls over one cap after another. It also helps that there are very few "special" capture points, at least on the good Invasion maps - and by "special" I mean caps that ratchet up the pressure in ways that are hard to counter (bomber formations, missile strikes). Because of this, I can focus on the meat of the game - dogfighting. There's less "dead" time of people scurrying across the map to try and defend different sectors from attack. There's less frustration of losing a game just because the bots you were expecting to defend a cap suddenly decided to all suicide into the enemy's face. In invasion, you lose a cap, its done. No counterattacking, no juggling chainsaws bouncing around defensive points. Its done. The defenders get compacted as they're pushed back and the Attackers push harder against them, usually ending in one climactic battle where one side crushes the last survivors or takes the last cap. Ideally at least.
This mode also feels like it REALLY rewards staying alive. You stay alive, you're conserving resources as the fight drags on. I didn't feel like the bots were overly profligate with respawns... at least not without direct human input (in the form of enemy humans swatting bots out of the sky). No lawndart teleportation (just isn't worth it) and even killing yourself when your HP is low takes a lot of risk and calculation - are you really going to do that much better at 100% HP? What if someone dies right before you do and takes the last spawn? Personally, I've fought more battles on a single sortie than I ever have in Conquest: there just feels like there's fewer things to slowly grind you down in Invasion, compared with Conquest. Or maybe the games just end faster, before these things start becoming important.
A special mention about the bots - I have not seen a single Attacker fly into a rock all event long. Congrats on meeting the basic requirements of airmanship, bots!
Dogfighting skills seems to make a huge difference now - a good pilot or two can swing the battle wildly simply by mowing down the opposition so fast, they cannot make enough headway on the cap to either capture or defend it. A good pilot or two can build up such a large respawn advantage that victory becomes almost assured. At the same time, it never felt like I was unfairly being ganked by superior pilots/numbers and being constantly sent to the hanger unlike in Conquest where whole conga lines of bots would form to feast on me and consequences be damned. Overall, I never experienced many moments where I'm raging at the bots for losing the game for me - I always felt I had the agency to move the needle in a match: even the losses on the Attacking side - if I had just shot straighter or picked the Spitfire instead of the Beaufighter to kill first, I might've turned the game around. Never felt like "FREAKIN' BOTS WHY DON'T YOU DEFEND THE COMMAND CENTER INSTEAD OF MILLING AROUND USELESSLY OVER A GARRISON!?"
The Bad
Attackers are still handicapped. I think this is as much a matter of Map as anything to do with the basic balance of the mode - specifically, the new river map with its central airbase and the black mesa map with the three Garrisons seem to actually give the Attackers a fair shake; every game I've won as an Attacker or lost as a Defender have been on those two maps; the key being that on the Mesa map, the three forward Garrisons are easy flips that immediately grant the Attacker some breathing room in the form of additional time. What's more, they can be flipped so fast, the dogfight becomes much more even much more quickly, which is bad for the Defender, especially if they don't have the wherewithal to withdraw to their next line of defense. The river estuary map has the Airbase as a pivot - seizing it gives the Attackers a vital staging point and a place to retreat to for repairs in the heart of the defender's territory. And its relatively easy to swamp early on. Other maps like Archipelago and Asian Border are too fragmented, with Airbases flanking a central Garrison; capping the Garrison buys you 90 seconds but leaves the Attackers sandwiched between two fresh forces while themselves being depleted. I haven't beat either of those maps as an Attacker.
Ground Attackers and Bombers have is really bad in this game mode. There's something to be said about the Defending team having all the fighters in the world to go hunting these lumbering behemoths. In the past, with both sides more or less equal, teams had to choose between bomber hunting or taking out enemy fighters. And since fighters capped faster, they were the bigger threat and so the bombers and attackers were mostly left alone until the fighters were quite done. Here, there're enough fighters to deal with the clouds of lumbering death while simultaneously fighting off Attacking fighters. Ground Pounders in Invasion are free kills to eat into the enemy's limited respawns. They can be surprisingly dangerous when all of them hit a target at once but because of the limitations of ground kills vs. air kills, so long as the Defenders focus down the attacking fighters during the assault, they can weather the storm. Bombers in particular are hopelessly vulnerable in this mode and need either buffs to improve effectiveness (survivability, lethality) or have ground targets rebalanced to be worth more combat, capture and mastery points than they currently are. The latter is something to consider for Ground Attackers too.
This mode is NOT newbie friendly. The limited respawns and the compacting of the battlefield means that weaker pilots will quickly get sidelined in a fight. Even worse if they're on the Attacking side which requires players of a skill level considerably exceeding that of the Defenders. So overall, the experience for those pilots is probably reeeeal [edited]. They spawn in without a clue of what they should be doing and quickly get shat on by every member of the opposing team, because they're an easy kill and an easy way to rapidly deplete the enemy's respawns. The game mode is jarring for newcomers (I had a guy load in and go "wthwhy do they control all the points?") and if they're on the Attacking team... well, they're going to get shat on.
The Invasion meta seems to be really hard on less agile/lower endurance airplanes like the 190s, Republics and Heavy Fighters in general. Because the battles are faster paced than before AND, capture is permanent, it puts the airplanes that require considerable winding up for their success at a disadvantage. Of course, especially as a defender, lightly armed airplanes will never do either and so I do feel that the Spitfire meta is simply reinforced in this mode - fast, maneuvreable, able to take a hit and able to do the hitting itself. The only difference is in the vertical - because of all the bombers around, airplanes that can go high are valuable. The altitude advantage is also more valuable than before because of the increased focus on PvP dogfighting. Overall, planes I enjoyed all weekend: 109E, P-40, BV210, BV212.03 (this thing is hilariously OP in Invasion mode). Planes I did well in but didn't particularly enjoy: Mosquito, Spitfire IX, P-51K. Planes I hated: Fw190 A-5 (my favorite conquest plane!), Do217M (got shat on).
Event: Westwall
The Good
I think Westwall did way, way more things right compared to Albion.
The most obvious being the removal of a frankly silly Axis vs. Allies setup. While it sounds cool on paper, the fact that there're 2 Axis nations against 5 Allied nations ought to have clued the developers to how horribly, horribly wrong things could go. Just out of sheer volume of planes, you guarantee that there would be more Allied pilots than Axis pilots. And to cap it off, Albion locked you into one faction for the duration of the event. Which meant that people couldn't use their full airplane lineup. And people quickly realized that with gifts being doubled on the winning side, it just made sense to play allies to double up their chances of drawing one of the prized early-access airplanes or the missions for a free tier 8 premium.
Westwall drops all that. Now you can unlock either premium more or less as you want - if you're REALLY hard core, you could have both unlocked by this weekend simply be swapping between missions in BOTH reward lines. You're not locked into having to play one set of nations to unlock one of them, no. Just pick the mission you want to have active then jump into the fray. Nice and easy. No super-unbalanced 5 humans vs 1 human matchups. No "you MUST stay with one line for the duration. Just - pick what you want and have at it.
And I must mention the duration - I had issues with Albion simply because the US server is like 12 hours ahead of me or something? Albion would start at 7am +8GMT and end at 10am +8GMT. That meant I had to haul my [edited]out of bed at about 630am on a weekend in order to...get my face stomped in repeatedly because I played Axis. Needless to say, I didn't do it a second day in a row. Towards the end of the event, I just honestly didn't really bother one way or another - at most I could catch one hour of playtime. It felt too much like work. Westwall ran a full three days. I could actually, you know, participate on my own terms. Go in when I want, play however long I wanted and just take a chill pill when I needed to.
Also, speaking of rewards, Westwall is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more generous with its mission criteria compared to Albion. To even be ELIGIBLE to try for a free premium tier 8, you had to get lucky with your daily lootboxes (a lot of people ended up with pretty-but-worthless-unless-you're-trying-to-insult-someone fireworks). Individual performance really didn't matter all that much because even if you were a badass Axis player, you'd likely end up with half the lootboxes of an Allied player anyway. Or to put it in perspective, an Allied player could sign in, fight ONE battle, and get two lootboxes per day compared to an Axis pilot who had to pull in something like 50,000 Combat Points total to actually get his second loot box.
And THEN after you won the lottery and drew the ticket to unlock your free premium, you had to THEN complete the three missions provided IN SEQUENCE. Within 24 hours. And the missions were just as hard as the ones people are complaining about right now (I clearly remember a ridiculous ground kill mission which required something of the order of 50 ground kills). Only then you had 24 freakin' hours to complete them. I just ignored my "Free" RB-17 because stress and high BP are somewhat more costly to deal with than forking out the 60 odd dollars for a premium bomber.
The Bad
Westwall isn't perfect, of course. Far, far, far from it.
Let's be honest: while some people on this forum have been acting like entitled rectums over the two premiums, there are those with decent points about how the whole Reward thing was handled. Chief among them is that some of these missions are really only realistic for high-tier players to accomplish. While this is probably the intent all along (give these players something to aim for, absent end-game content), it does leave the rest of the hoi polloi out in the cold and disgruntled. And given the way those two premiums were hyped up, you gotta expect the disappointment to blow up, especially when you're rolling it out with a new more heavily skill-centric combat mode and attached economic tweaks that most people aren't familiar to with it.
Personally I think this could have been avoided by clearly indicating what kind of missions would need to be accomplished to unlock those premiums. A lot of people were shocked to realize that the planes weren't going to be unlocked unless they accomplished ALL tasks, including the "Additional" tasks. As someone said; "they aren't *Additional*, they're *Mandatory* tasks". And he's right; the prize being offered isn't the PILOT, its the PLANE. "Additional" objectives sound like bonuses you can take or leave... but how can you leave them if the entire reason to shoot for these tasks is to unlock the plane... which can only be unlocked by accomplishing these tasks?
Setting the correct expectations is something you learn really, really quickly in Marketing & Advertising and the way Westwall blew their Communications Strategy warrants at least a paragraph in the Advertiser's Hall of Shame, bordering on bait-and switching.
And, frankly, the payout for all the sub objectives is a little miserly. At least double the silver amounts awarded guys; you could earn that same amount of silver in a single game clubbing baby seals down at tier 2 and 3. Really not worth the effort to accomplish unless you're trying for one of the premiums... so what about those who aren't in for the premiums (or don't realistically have a chance of unlocking them)? The individual goal rewards should have been a little more valuable than they currently are.
Oh, and speaking of Baby Seals - there should have been an option for players to opt out of Invasion, IMO. People who enjoy it will still play it. People who want to grind the premiums will still play it, but those who don't want either... they have to do SOMETHING. Funneling them into their own little Conquest playground might have been a nice option to have (but is probably too complicated to program)
***
Overall, I thought the event was fantastic over the weekend. The mission difficulty is not insurmountable even for relatively new players like me. The new Invasion mode was fun and entertaining and a nice change of pace. And it was fun playing with so many humans in the same airspace. I'm looking forward to Attrition (I have my reservations on that one, to be honest) and maaaaybe unlocking the Pfeil this weekend.
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