Hi all, first I apologize for posting here without even playing the game. But I've readed all the thread, manual and a lot of other posts because this mod got my attention. But getting back to the thread, I have seen that you're needing some help making the commanding role more attractive and making people following issued orders. In matter of fact, that's something I saw in BF2 (that was quoted some times in this same thread), just think, do you really need a commander in BF2? I don't think so, ok, you can win the round more easily with a commander, but if your commander s***s or you don't have a commander on your team, it's ok, you can still fight and win. That had put the commander role in a "secondary" place in the war theater, of course the UAV, spoting, drops and artie are nice, but the main role of theese actions is to keep the comm busy. If you are a experienced player you know that anytime you'll have some of theese things to do, plus, giving orders to the squads. But that don't work so well, since you got a lot of lonewolves, and squadleaders that only remember of you when they are in need of something, making you get a low score. There's also a bonus of 2x your score if your team win, making the comm role more attractive, wich makes the comm role more attractive, but that relies almost entirely on the hands of your team. With that in mind, when BF2142 was made, EA have linked orders and points making your score raise if you follow orders, sitck with your squad and kick the bad guys a**es. That was a clever move, since if you want to climb the ladder, you should play as a team, or else you'll take long years to get in the higher ranks. That's a point that should be at least considered. As I said, I'm not a Empires player, I'm willing to be, but I've already have played a lot of online games to know for sure that most players needs an incentive to act in a determined way. Just beacause in the end, of course winning the round is nice but, all that matters is your score, you can lose the round, but i'll be happy if your name is on the best round players list. I don't know if you got my point, and I excuse for anything I might got wrong. Thanks
Empires doesn't have a persistant stat system though, so how would we implement those incentives? Battlefield isn't a team game really, it's a lot of people fighting a lot of other people and those two groups of people happen to be using the same equipment, but there is no teamwork really, it's just a lot of duels which cross over. Empires requires team coordination, you have to go capture resources and you have to do that as a team and the commander has to drop refineries there. The only way you can make empires more fun is to either remove the teamplay requirement (make ref points flags, make buildings automatically placed, make tanks destroyable by one grenadier like BF) or to make it impossible for people not to play as a team, NS does this by making marines useless on their own, so you have to stick together. At the moment empires doesn't do either as you will see if you play it, and as removing teamplay would turn empires in to a battlefield clone, the only logical solution is to force teamplay, how to do that is another matter entirely, but this isn't it. I have given some thought as to how teamplay might be forced but I haven't devised any real solutions (or I've forgotten them) yet. I will make a thread about it if and when I do.
That is the problem. You need teamplay. However if you force teamplay, it will not happen for real. People will get angry at the system and leave. That is part of being in a clan, and playing with people you know. They know how to be a team. As Shinzon as stated, people don't like listening enough. About commanders, don't make them noob proof. Damn it, the commander is meant to be a hard position.
All you need to do is make them client based with wins/losses and times commed. This would be easy because of the orange box as the TF2 system alows this
Hi all! I think the teamplay shouldn't be forced too, or you'll get the players fleeing, but I'll make my point clear again, you could "enforce" the teamplay. I see some points that might work: 1 - Ranking ladder: Ranking ladders are common theese days, almost every war game have one, this is one of the most used resources to make the player keep playing a game. A ladder put an objective to the player, making you want to play. I think that's (making players wishing to play) the biggest point on this thread, since you got players willing to play the game for any reason, part of the problem is solved. But, i think that will chage the focus of the mod itself. 2 - Beacons: Beacons, in my POV, are the brightest solution I've seen in the whole thread to solve the teamplay problem (I'd loved the football drawing too, but it sounds more like a game resource than a solutuion), since they act as a rewarding system AND give the squads UNIQUE functions that can't be done of fufilled by any class. Beacons could be either something you attach to your char or vehicle or an equipment that can be mounted on ground covering an area. Players whould get theese beacons buying them with points (I'll call them comm points - CP) that are earned by following comm orders, but the beacon should only be avaliable for some time or until the buyier spawn again, making sure squads don't just follow comm orders until it gets all the avaliable beacons, like it happens to the skills. Also, players should be able to transfer CPs to other players in the same squad - improving the squad leader role, and have them reseted to zero as they change squads or team. 3 - Lesser spawn time: Please don't flame me for even considering the option, this is just and idea. I think that spawn time could be lessered by the way you get more and more CPs, of course, with an limit. That should be measured individually and be based on the total CPs you got on the round. Another thing that might work in this solution, is making the the lessering proportional to the ammount of people folowing comm orders, I mean, if all players have a lot of CPs, your spawn time wouldn't be a lot lessered, but if almost no one is teamplaying and you have a lot of CPs, your spawn time will be a lot lessered. 4 - Making the skills temporary: Have to say anything else ? Partially agreeded with the clan thing, BUT, AFAIN this is a naturally born teamplay game, so it still require a minimum of teamplaying even you're not on a clan. Totally agreeded, don't send a boy to do a men's job. I will! LOL I apologize again by making so many comments without even playing the game LOL!
Well, regardless of you never playing the game, I like you. First one, ranking brings ranking whores. Not worth the effort. Second, Beacons are fun... however we already have squad ability's. The squad ability's should be a bit more passive for the team however. Third, no. That could cause super abuse. Fourth, we want teamwork. We don't want to make individual skills worthless though.
If you do it badly then sure, it will annoy people. To do it properly you need to make it so that all the player's actions benefit the team, you need to make people want to teamplay because doing so is more fun than not. I suggested an idea for the scout a while ago, about giving him a rifle that makes enemies hit by it show up on radar, it also works on vehicles. This is the sort of thing I mean, whenever the scout uses the rifle he will help the team by revealing the enemy, scouting, in other words, he will use the rifle because it's his primary weapon, so he is going to have to reveal targets simply by playing the game. I also suggested that he get points for revealing so many targets, which would encourage him to shoot tanks because it's easy to do (just point and click) and gets him points, so he'll want to do it. This system produces a scout who can and will want to reveal as many enemies as he can in an area, he helps the team because he doesn't really have any other choice, but he isn't bothered by this because we have made doing that fun, and not get in the way of what he wants to do. That's what I mean by forcing teamplay, if you can deduce a way to do that with all aspects of the game you're on to a winner. I also don't see why the commander should be a difficult position, you don't gain anything in gameplay terms by making it deliberately hard. The only benefit it confers is that it gives the people who can do it a bigger e-penis, but as a difficult command position will result in only a few people who can recieve that benefit, at the expense of all the other players who end up with noob comms most of the time, it doesn't make sense to make it difficult. Making it as easy as possible results in most games having a competent commander and all the players on the server enjoying themselves, which I'm sure you'll agree makes far more sense.
It should be a hard position because you are fighting the other team, and need good strategies for that; and because you need to get your own team to carry them out. That should, though, be the only reason being a comm is hard. Assuming a comm knows what all the buttons do, their sole worry should be the two teams (confronting the enemy, and managing their own.) The interface, the controls, the basic mechanics of being a comm -- those things should not pose any challenge at all. It should be entirely about strategy. There is a difference between "real" difficulty and "fake" difficulty. Real difficulty (for the position of comm) is in making choices that confront the enemy strategy, coming up with long-term plans of your own, making your team listen to you and follow through on these plans, and so forth... things like that. "Fake" difficulty is wrestling with poor controls or an unintuitive interface, making 'obvious' decisions or taking obvious actions that have zero strategic significance, memorizing things from the manual and so on. Some degree of "fake" difficulty is inevitable, and a comm is certainly going to have to know what everything in the game does to be competent. But it isn't a good thing, and should be minimized as much as possible -- the tech tree should be displayed in an intuitive fashion, the controls should be straightforward and shouldn't require wrestling with to get things done, etc. Why make the distinction? Because when I win, I want it to be because my team did things right, because the two teams competed directly against each other and mine did better. I don't want it to be because someone got stuck on unintuitive controls, or didn't know one of the by-the-book secret tricks needed for high-level play, or anything like that. Nobody says "gg" when you win a game due to that, because that isn't a good game. The only legitimate difficulty in the game is the difficulty presented by the other team. Everything else is rough edges, garbage and junk that ends up in there as part of the process, mistakes -- some of it is inevitable, but it is never, never a good thing, and every piece of difficulty that a team faces that doesn't ultimately come from the enemy team makes the game itself worse. It may not always be worth the time and effort to smooth those rough edges out, when they're small and don't have a huge impact on anything -- but when it can be done, it should be. They detract from the real challenge fun of playing against other people.
Fighting the game to get it to do what you want is never a good thing, a game should be slick and responsive, source in general is extremely responsive, which is why I like the engine so much, and also why I'm going to edit the snow textures from glycencity to remove the friction modifiers because skidding around on the floor all the time is not fun. It's why the clip textures exist in hammer, so you can iron over areas of geometry that players might get stuck on or fall off too easily. The world should be have in an inutitive way. The game should be as intuitive and non-complex as possible, now complexity can be different from depth, you can put plenty of depth into a game while not making it complex, chess is a very deep game but it is hardly complex. The controls and rules are simple but with them you can do a great deal, which is why it's so popular, doing a lot with very little is a big selling point, it's also hard to design for, but the effort is well worth it.
Chris, please stop acting like you're the one in control, the person that made glycen probably had a good reason to add friction modifiers.
No I mean for my map because it uses the glycen snow textures for the base ground, and it's making it difficult to control the player, so for kutm I'm going to remove it. I'm not going to replace the ones on glycen, I'll make a separate vmt for my version. I haven't noticed a problem on glycen so I wouldn't have any need to change it. Nor could I for that matter because I don't make the mod.
ok making it more fun to command? i would command more if i have not to battle following things: Getting stuck in the skybox Getting stuck by moving arround on ground Getting stuck on view (cant move anymore) Cant leave CV Cant select anything Cant select enemys Cant give targets Mouse gets stuck as soon as i hit the target giving button Cant place buildings without a reason Cant place revinerys (yellow ref bug)
Hy all! This is my first post on this forums. Just, first of all. Thanks to all participating to make this a great game. Regarding this matter. @ Mayama. Thought it was my problem all this happening to me. And I didn’t know you to use the interface. I’m sure this has been discussed before, but I would like to mention it. It would be nice if not everybody is shouting at you if you loose as com. I saw it even on the training server. Com did it fair good, we lost cause of some dumb infantery errors. (Like building walls in front of turrets who where defending a bridge). And people where shouting if the com is the only one responsible of loosing the battle. To get at a point this would be a nicer job if not every body is not that under pressure. Also think that would be a nice feature that you could take yourself out of com vote. I mean there are a lot of people out there you can’t com, cause they are newbie’s. But get voted. I remember the first time I was joining this game, I got nearly voted for Com. Just because I wear a clan tag. (Glad I read the wiki before, so I knew what was going on.) And Com should have the possibility of removing buildings set by his team. I was once playing as com on the training server and some Joker set a radar, a wall and a turret on the three ref points near to our base before I could set a ref there.
I think they main reason for players shouting at the comm for losing is because they consider him to have the responsibility of protecting the base, by building turrets, properly placing buildings, etc, while the players have equal responsibility, and are trying to put the blame on somebody else. If you make it very clear that they have to work as hard as the comm, they might stop being so annoying.
There should be a small scoreboard at the end of the game, showing how many turret kills the commander got [including vehicles] how many structures placed, how many resources used, how many buildings lost etc. Just a brief overview, it might give people some perspective.
THIS is a very good idea. A sort of statistics list for the two sides showing the comparison between the two commanders/teams. I like this alot.
