Ok, so idea on how to police tank-building. Why not tie it into the ability point thing. You can't build an APC until you unlocked rank 2, you can't build medium until 3, and heavies at 4... Or at least have it as an option. maps like escort and vehicle training, that'd really suck, but conquest maps and the like... might not be too bad. [EDIT: srry, I dont' know what it's called, but it's the padlock thing when you're in character creation]
emp_recruit thinks: "Hmm these big tanks seam to be bugged, I can't build them... lets make a jeep!!" emp_recruit builds a jeep (1)emp_recruit builds a jeep (2)emp_recruit builds a jeep Later: (3)emp_recruit has played 20 minutes as scout and killed 4 people. He wants to build tanks but... the big ones don't work. He spams crapy AVFs that all get destroyed quickly. He, emp_recruit, (1)emp_recruit, (2)emp_recruit and (4)emp_recruit build so many of those crapy AFVs that the team runs out of rescoures without having one useful tank. Brenodi Empire looses. :p
Like it wasn't a pain to get your troops to get inside heavy tanks.. Now I'm gonna force them to revive each other until they got 40 points, so they can get a bloody tank out? :p Seriously... NO
Also you could have awesome players join a team at the end and not be able to build shit. People who crash ext. Its also not unheard of to have both teams at heavies with a lot of the team under 40 points. Do you want one team to win just because they can field more heavy tanks because they had more people building walls or something. Yeah, fail.
Make it a yes/no commander-enabled option, like restricting vehicle creation. For example, the commander can restrict vehicle creation for players with under 20 points. It would definitely be less constricting than the current option.
What a terrible idea. Can you imagine? Whichever player pointwhores up to 40 points first would immediately slaughter everyone else with his heavy, which would be the only one on the field. I can't even begin to describe all the ways this is bad. Empires is supposed to be a team game. I already think that the impact of points (while it's good that it encourages people to do helpful things for their team) is too much. But the really major increases in power -- getting new tanks, say -- are at least dependent on the team. If you made it dependent on personal points, then everyone would just focus on their own score. And... I mean, honestly. My team is winning, using a carefully-planned pincer strategy to take most of the res nodes, and then suddenly we get slaughtered because an enemy helped build a bunch of useless walls and reached level 4 before we did? Weak.
Yes.....but the current system severely restricts the commanders strategies. I rarely go for comp/gas turbine or reactive/3phase anymore because all it takes is 1-2 noobs to waste all of your res. If their was some system (maybe not what the OP's suggests) where the commander could selectively restrict vehicle creation based on rank, then commanders could build more effective strategies that use more of the research tree.
yeah, disconning and losing points is a pain >.< Yeah, again, just threw it out there. Glad for all the input. But, aside from the comm having a check-list of who can and can't build what, what other way can we keep armorless-advance coolant-LT/AFV spam from going on?