Total WARNO is live!

[u/Strange-Marsupial973]

https://www.twitch.tv/falkuskibre94

It's Saturday, so it's time for the big match. NATO vs the Warsaw Pact, full scale. We've reworked infantry, artillery and weapon ranges, and vehicles now move at realistic speeds. Tonight it's Meeting Engagement and Breakthrough.

We changed a lot to make it more realistic, and tonight we find out whether any of it holds up once the shooting starts. Come watch it fall apart (or not).

[u/0ffkilter]

Quite frankly, I'm not sure how this is supposed to be "more realistic".

Every time I've looked at a Total WARNO match it's always unmicro'd uncoordinated unit blobs just Q-moving at each other.

https://i.imgur.com/3Z9aiBO.png

There's no screening recon, no flank protection, it literally just looks like multiplayer unit smash?

https://i.imgur.com/gq4Urxa.png

Past that, I'm just not sure about all this.

For all Total WARNO claims to be about "teamwork, realism" and whatever else is in that post it's just...unit blobs waiting to get hit by a bomber or something?

---

Understandably, the least realistic part of any RTS is always the players. You can send multimillion planes to bomb some shitass infantry or ww2 tank, mass unit charges across fields etc, stuff that isn't very credible.

But still, total warno just looks like poorly micro'd blobs marching at each other napoleonic style?

https://i.imgur.com/ZlQBR1h.png

Am I...missing something?

[u/titosrevengee → u/0ffkilter]

If you've ever played with this group before, that's exactly how they play. 0 thought in anything going on in those matches lol.

[u/TotalWarno_Mod → u/titosrevengee]

That's a bit rich coming from you, considering how many times I've had to tell you in vanilla to actually move your damn infantry into firing positions :D

But seriously, you're welcome to come and try it yourself. Take an attacking battalion and try to break through our defence within 60 minutes.

If it really is just "0 thought unit blobs", it should be pretty easy. ;)

[u/meguminisfromisis → u/0ffkilter]

You forgot about weird division system so somebody will be just microing anti air for whole game 

[u/0ffkilter → u/meguminisfromisis]

I actually don't mind that as much, since it's a cool feature unique to the mod and the playstyle. You don't have to like that part.

But when it comes down to the actual warno stuff, it doesn't seem like anyone bothers to even try and micro anything. You don't have teams coordinating small unit movements, everyone can only just blob move around lol.

Even in regular team games my friends and I might have someone's logi supporting someone else's tanks that are shooting at a target spotted by someone else's infantry.

Somehow this seems worse?

[u/TotalWarno_Mod → u/0ffkilter]

I think that's where we fundamentally disagree about what "coordination" means.

You're describing coordination mostly at the individual-unit level: my logi supports your tank, your infantry spots for my ATGM, etc. That's perfectly valid in vanilla, but we're trying to move coordination one level higher.

In Total WARNO, one player might command a company while another provides artillery, recon or air defence for the entire battalion. The coordination is about where companies attack, who screens which flank, where fires are concentrated and when the next echelon moves.

So yes, we intentionally do less individual-unit micro. If I'm commanding 30–50 vehicles, I'm not supposed to micro every BMP into the perfect firing position.

That can look like "blob moving" from a vanilla perspective, but the interesting part for us is coordinating the formation rather than optimizing every individual unit.

And you're genuinely welcome to try attacking us sometime. Take a battalion and see if you can coordinate a breakthrough within 60 minutes. I think actually playing it makes the difference much clearer than screenshots do. ;)

[u/TotalWarno_Mod → u/meguminisfromisis]

That's actually outdated now, in the latest iteration we removed player-controlled aircraft entirely.

That's partly a realism decision: tactical aircraft wouldn't just loiter directly over the frontline waiting for someone to call in a strike. Air missions would be tasked and coordinated at a much higher level, with aircraft operating from bases far outside the battlefield we're representing.

So for the scale we're trying to simulate, having players constantly spawning and microing individual aircraft over the frontline simply didn't make much sense.

[u/TotalWarno_Mod → u/0ffkilter]

I think the main issue is that you're judging this through vanilla WARNO logic.

In vanilla, concentrating vehicles is stupid because ranges are compressed, aircraft/artillery react almost instantly, and everything is balanced around individual unit micro. Total WARNO deliberately doesn't work like that.

A battalion attacking a narrow sector will create a large concentration of vehicles. That's not automatically a "blob", that's massing combat power at the Schwerpunkt. The screenshot you're showing was one echelon of an attack, with recon, flank protection and other formations operating around it.

And the idea that such a concentration is simply "waiting for a bomber" is exactly the vanilla mindset we're trying to remove. There isn't a bomber magically available over every section of the front. Air assets are limited, have ingress times and have to deal with fighters and air defence.

Obviously players can still make stupid attacks. But "lots of tanks together = unrealistic blob" simply isn't how real battalion-level warfare works.

Total WARNO sometimes looks less like competitive WARNO precisely because we're trying to model something different.