Thank you for the answer, communication of this kind is always appreciated by the community. And i trust you have seen our suggestions, that we already got cameras, radars, radar, enchanted senses, binoculars, that every player can spot targets and the commander should retain "attack this target" and being able to give order to attack 1 building/vehicle and probably gots a mic.
No we can't leave it to the commanders, because if the other commander give wallhack my team is fucked. Yeah but you people need to stop thinking IN THE BOX, START TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. ADD game mechanics instead of just "buhu the commander won't have anything to do :cry:". Yeah but if it was annoying why did you do it? Wouldn't it be much easier just to mark squads, give them a general attack/move/defend/set up stronghold order to an area and then having the squad leaders give secondary, lets say purple, move orders to guide his squad to the position he thinks will solve your order in the best way, using his squads ability to survive and spot enemies? With out wallhack squads would get better sence working together would be more important to survive sence you can't magically see all enemies all the time. Also have you thought about the infantry combat? How fun it it to know that every enemy knows exactly where you are? Thus allowing the commander to focus on research, building, and overall strategy. And ADD infantry research, doctrines, more commands for players/squads, textbox, improve current research, redo missiles and cannons, and lots of other things that have been mentioned. The fun with being commander is to dictate a team strategy, research what you want, and seeing it work. Not giving wallhack. God everyone seems to be so narrow-minded here.
Scouts already do this to some degree with their binoculars. You could easily modify that ability to make the scout provide targets for his squad.
One big reason why wallhack needs to go is that on big maps i want my team to spread out, that means ordering my team whit move or attack orders on different places on the map. Right now i can't do this, because i have to give wallhack instead. Wallhack hampers the whole ordering system. Also without wallhack i would have more time to watch my CV from ninjas!
Let the scout spot up to 3 targets and replace the "need artillery-fire here"-voice with the "thing spotted"-voices. I am for removing the mass-target idea. Let the comm only give a single target, but implement at least the sensor comm-ability that flasche mentioned (if not, all) and give it a cooldown of 30 secs. This removes the mass-target spam and at the same time compensates by having that sensor-ability. The commander will also need to think about where to use the sensor-ability.
or just new to forums. I happen to be latter. =] I realized how stupid it sounded after I read the rest of the thread.
Or give him a "Radio Backpack" to transmit the positions of the enemies to a radius. (Large radius, of course. Maybe a map square or a little more.)
So how is it going? The wallhack part still sucks and take away fun in infantry battles since you can't make any smart moves since the enemy always knows where you are and can shoot at your red diamond, they don't even need to see you really. What are the devs conclusion?
I skipped a bunch of pages, but does anyone remember when the red diamonds faded in and out? that way you had targets, but maybe not at the exact time when you needed em. or- targets could show where the enemy is when they are targeted but dont follow them, so, you get targets, and they fade out after a few seconds... this could lead to repeated target spam and more bitching from the guys on the ground of course.... but... meh, theyll get over it.
Looking back for topics on this thread, this seemed a good one (although I've not looked through all of it) - I couldn't see this topic in the 'organise things' thread though, which may be a useful place for it. Having had a break from Empires and returning, as soon as I received these sort of orders I remembered quite how annoying it was to have the wallhack. Even the engineer cameras are better as at least they fade in and out. Could it be made so that the targets only work when the target is within visual range of a player or camera (or maybe for say 20 seconds after leaving that range)?
I feel that limiting each player to only one order is the best solution and feels the most RTS to me and also removing any targeting orders on your death. In an RTS you can give a unit a move order, an attack here order or an attack unit order. If you give your unit an attack unit order it's knowns where that other unit is. The problem with Empires is the comm can spam the attack unit order for a player and those targets remain even on your death. By limiting it to one order per player, the comm can choose the most important target for a player like in a RTS, but at the same time limit the wallhack feeling people get from this ability.