I'm sorry but how does reducing the insta-kill mortar to still a fairly dangerous weapon ruin the entire game for everyone? Gren is meant to be anti-tank. You even say so. But you also want to one-hit infantry? Failarguement.
The best thing about 2.24 is... It brought eth0 back!! Now we may all bask in the glory of his rants once more!!
Empires is now a lot more fun when there are 62-64 players playing. The start of the game is always the same, it seems, "who wants to command." But when we get over that you'll notice that it will be a lot more fun. It isn't anymore a 5 member group here, 5 member group there and the rest 5 go and do something around the map. Now it feels like there's a whole front at one location with enough manpower and there's another front at the other edge of the map. It's just so much fun when there are so many more people playing. Also the game is just so much more fun when there's so many new players and the variety of skills is so colorful. For example on escort during 2.22 you didn't even bother place the mines anymore because you knew 9 mine was gone and everyone will for sure have defusal, so why bother? Now that isn't so obvious. There are always people who drive without defusal and they get hit by the mines and at sometimes they blow up and sometimes they don't. And basically it's just so much more enjoyable to fight against different skilled players. Empires is meant to played with 64 players. Though I did notice a few deficiencies now with 64 players. For example on escort. Last night NF ran out of tickets already at S turns and they had to be given 100 more tickets and still they ran out tickets when NF started to defend last flag. BE was around 2000-2500 seconds when NF ran out of tickets at S bends. So I would suggest dynamic ticket scaling. Meaning that when there are X amount of players on the server/team from Y amount of player the team/teams will get 5 more tickets per every player who joins a team. For example when a team has 20 players and when the 21st joins the team, the team will get 5 new tickets. Or something like that. Also I noticed that there needs to be more ammoboxes in the armories and basically get the spawns and armories a bit more roomy. It looks funny when there are 13 players at one ammobox at the same time trying to get ammo from that tiny little ammo. That's just way too crowded. :p Anyway, this is very good release. It's on its best when played on almost full 64 player server. AND ALMOST NO LAG AT ALL. Some hickups occure from time to time but almost all the time it is smooth. Now we just need improved vehicle code so we can raise the vehicle limit from 20 to 40. 20 for each team instead of 10.
10 tanks supporting the rest, are way more fun than the whole tankspam on servers with less players and higher tank limit.
Can we please just make it so defusal doesn't make people immune to mines anymore? At least not while in a tank? Those two paragraphs above show, perfectly, why it needs to be done. Defusal, as it stands, is simply making the game worse by making it too easy to negate mines.
Yes, definately. Make it a damage reduction. So you still take 1/4 - 1/3 of the mine's damage if you drive over it (no damage if you walk over it with defusal still though).
And protecting 0.5-2K piece of gold on wheels isn't? And what about huge quarter map sized mine fields protected by lvl3 turrets, infantry, vehicles and walls?
If you feel that mines should be removed from the game entirely, go ahead and suggest that. I disagree, and enjoy having some defensive emplacements that can't be negated by taking one skill and driving over them while shouting WHEEE. But the point is, defusal takes away from strategy. It means you don't have to think or plan or work with your team at all to deal with mines -- you take one skill and boom, mines cease to be a factor for you. That is stupid. No, defending your 2k piece of gold on wheels is not supposed to be easy. Tanks are supposed to be somewhat vulnerable in Empires, and not expandable. If you want to go on mad charging-forward lemming rushes, you should play as infantry, who you can afford to waste until you run out of tickets. Using a tank should imply some risks, and you shouldn't be able to make one of those risks go away completely by taking one skill. It is also completely out of line with most of the other skills in the game. The game's other skills generally give you some small to decent advantage to an ability you already have, or give you a somewhat useful ability to support your team. Defusal makes you totally immune to an entire weapon type. These things are not equal. We do not have a "let me walk through walls" skill, or a "make me immune to artillery" skill, or a "make me totally immune to turrets" skill. I would have nothing against a defusal that worked against mines the same way that hide works against turrets, of course -- make you immune to mines as infantry as long as you're crouching, and enhance its defusing ability to 'chain-defuse' any mines in the area, so it can be used in a reasonable timeframe. And also, of course, give it to the scout instead of the grenadier, so it can have some synergy with hide, smoke, concussions, and so on when mines are protected by other things. But making a major defensive aspect of the game completely go away for you because you took one skill is silly. Weapons and defenses and so forth are in the game to make you think and work with your team to get past them, not so you can go MINE-INVULNERABILITY SPECCED and rush through them singlehandedly as though they're not there. The current implementation of defusal is also very bad for teamwork. The people who have it are the ones who care least about actually getting rid of mines, because they know that mines can't hurt them. It's a skill that protects only you (and anyone in your vehicle), without helping the rest of your team at all -- in fact, it encourages people to work alone and leave their team behind, because the only possible way you can be hurt by mines once you have defusal is if someone else sets them off. Defusal -- that is, the skill that lets you actually remove mines -- should provide no defense against them. None, zero; or, at most, it should let you crawl over them as infantry so you can approach a minefield without setting it off (you won't have crawl the whole way, just a few inches as you get near.) If people must have a skill that helps you resist mine (not immunity, obviously), it should be totally separate and go to a completely different class -- but the important thing is, the people who are capable of removing mines need an incentive to do so, and giving them magical immunity or protection from mines takes away that incentive.
played a few small games right after the forum release and non since, so i havent gotten a feel for it yet, but thanks for getting this out for us.
Do scouts still have hide? I can't remember whether it works against turrets or not. When was the last time i was a scout...
Hide does protect you from turrets when hidden, however unlike defusal you have to have been crouching/prone for a while for it to work.
defusal for vehicles should ONLY work when the vehicle is not moving too fast. OR defusal should only give a certain percentage of protection against mines eg. the faster and heavier a vehicle is the more likely it triggers a mine. I myself prefer the last one though it is more work to code in..
That's a great idea. As if the electronic system preventing the mines from going off can not do it's job when you drive over them in 2 milliseconds at 70 miles per hour. When driving a vehicle some small defusal icon could be visible somewhere on the hud, but once you reach a certain amount of speed the icon would go away and you know you won't be protected against mines anymore. It's then up to the driver to decide if going through a narrow canyon that might have mines will be safer at high speed (might get damaged if there are mines) or slow speed (grenadiers can hit his tank more easily) or to stay back and to kill as much people from a distance before advancing through the canyon.
Another idea would be timer based. Defusal will only prevent detonation for ~3 seconds, after that the mine goes off.
