[Public Test] Empires Unbalanced Edition

Some things after testing for awhile:

1.Fully upgraded grens(with both upgraded and adv in every tree) are fucking awesome and should not be removed. It costs 15k+ res and 30+ mins, it deserves to kill a comm in 6 shots.

2.Mech seems rather weak.

3. Weapon damage descriptions are all off... Please fix

4.Research time and cost is far too high. Reduce one or the other or both.

5.Things for other classes besides gren in the new tree would be nice.

6. All missiles seem inferior to cannons. NF heavy needs 2 3-slot missiles.

7.Spread cannon and Swarm missiles need to fire multiples at once, not one after the other.

8.Bio mg doesn't need to explode, and if it does it should use green explosions.

 

I hosted my own server and messed around with some of this stuff, and let me tell you, this is a commander's wet dream. I cannot wait to see this balanced and implemented.

I look forward to being able to provide feedback

 

Atm, the most powerful weapons in the game are in the physics tree, fission cannons and fission ml ftw.

 

Theirs a tab above the window where the weapons are displayed

 

Trickester, The way I understand your idea, it sucks, so you're going to have to re-explain it or get a better diagram because the way you've drawn it isn't clear at all.

are you saying that in each level, you have to specifically research each weapon subtype? If so, then wow, that's a terrible idea. One of the biggest flaws with the current system is that for efficiency, commanders are only researching one weapon for a chassis, and it makes the vehicle endgame really boring. The enemy is all in the same type of tank with the same guns, and the

One of the strongest things I see in the new system is that aside from being easy to understand, you get a variety of weapons and choice at the vehicle factory no matter which direction you go.

If that's not what you meant, then ignor this.



Also, why are you trying to put Upg/Adv RPG in it's own tree? the point is that the weapons upgrade as the tanks do, so that vehicles don't mercilessly dominate infantry in games where the commander rushes for heavy tanks instead of stopping for gren upgrades.

If you're giving it as an extra, quick option for a team that wants to get ahead in grenadier tech, even though they would get it for free later, so that like with the current system you can rush adv RPG early as a tactic and try to dominate early game tanks, then I salute you for this fine idea, I had exactly the same one. And also if this is true then ignor the paragraph above.

But seriously trickster... explain your diagram.

 

but they should have the least ammo available.

Mech are the weakest, but should have more ammo or they should shoot faster

 

Ok, looking back over the diagram, it is pretty poorly presented, because even I'm like "wtf". I was somewhat intoxicated when I did it. But looking over what I wrote, this is the explanation for the RPG thing.

To say you get better RPGs with better tanks is simply "so not only will the team with better tanks dominate with them, they'll dominate with infantry also."

Both teams will HAVE to dip into logistics at one point or another, and this means if your team is losing, you can dip in, grab upraded RPG, and actually stand a chance, and it ISN'T wasted research, because you would have had to go into logistics at some point anyway.

With the Drag tree, it basically means the team who has super tanks also has super grens vs the team who has less good tanks, and less good grens. I mean, sure, they're winning, but thats basically saying first team to get a radar up wins the game because researching tier 3 automatically explodes the enemy command vehicles.

As for the subtypes, I meant, rather than have a tonne of weapons that your commander DOESN'T want you to use, this would allow him to mix and match subtypes. So it keeps the tiered system, but they're smaller, quicker, and more numerous. So you could have 2-tier explosives, giving you all the explosives (and in tier 2, high explosives) weapons, without giving you coolant ML, which you may not want. Because instead, you might want to supplement this with say, Bio-supply weapons or whatever. But rather than having to research an entire tier just to get to it, you dip into bio, pick it up, and haven't spent a tonne of res or wasted a tonne of time.

So, for example, say I wanted to get to regen armour, coolant engine explosives tier 1, bio-supply tier 1, explosives tier 2, then heavys. In that order.

So I go biology.
Regen armour.
Chemistry.
Coolant Engine.
Explosives tier 1 --- giving me access to explosive cannon, explosive MG, explosive ML, etc.
bio-supply tier 1 (already in biology due to regen) --- giving me access to bio supply weapons
go back to explosives tier 1, click explosives tier 2 to get HE etc.
Dip into logistics. upgraded chassis, advanced chassis, heavys.

These researches would be short and sweet. Not 10 minutes for 20 weapons, only 4 of which are useful.

This would also mean individual sections could be balanced, rather than "oh, well the chemsitry tier 3 is shitty except it has one uber cannon, so that balances, so we can leave it".

 

hm.... gonna have to try this out.

I'm liking the core idea of more flexibility and moving some tech into their own tree. However, how does this make life easier for a new commander? I get the feeling this makes life a little harder since there's more choices. But, I haven't tried it yet.

BTW, could you make a new pic of the most up-to-date tree setup? You started talking about "the Drag tree" but I don't see that in the OP.

 

@Mashav: Thanks for detailed feedback, the last two might be fixed, multiple missiles firing at once : they hit each other and explode = bad, so there has to be some delay. I also got to be really careful with all the missile spam, I hope future versions reduce performance loss due to these.

The thing with mech is, its really really cheap and light, both to research and on tanks. I know this isn't fancy and its not something you see at once but physic weapons cost 150 each, thats +300 res if you pack 2 of them. Mech weapons don't go above 70 res so you can pack 3-4 weapons + have full armor on your tank. (yes reactive armor)

Physics however is and should be a very good tree against tanks. If you look closely through physics weapons have a lot of weapons without any kind of blast radius. If you want efficient anti infantry capability with the tanks you need to pack MG's which are both expensive and heavy to carry. In addition to that phys versus buildings is... quite inefficient due to high heat weapons physic has. I see no need to nerf physics as it fulfills its role. (although slightly lowering ammo isn't out of question)

I think the research costs will go down to 500 750 1000 for the tiers (maybe 0 if needed), no use having the high costs as it makes game take longer than planned.

As for the research times, they will probably stay but the tiers might be seperated further so you only wait half as long for new stuff but still need to research the full time for every last weapon. As for the EXACT times of every single tree and tier, that is up for balancing, obviously mech will take a shorter time as its ROLE is fast spam while physics will keep it's longer time because it is aimed towards late game domination. (most weapons good on mediums + heavies)

As for weapon descriptions (meaning the non sensical damage numbers and whatnot) they are not in the scripts, I have to request code changes which cannot be shown with 2.24 + scripts afaik (would need to release .dll with the installer). The normal (text) descriptions are halfway accurate but not nice; I ran out of patience with the people offering to improve descriptions so that will have to wait.

The RPG upgrade can be moved to engineering tree, maybe add more of them and each one gives + 10-20 damage so you can go wild on it if you bother spending res on it. Or I'll make one available in engineering aswell as the other trees. Even with extreme damages the rpg doesn't seem overpowered against anything, not that you can afford researching everything in normal games anyway.

As for the placement of armors and engines in the research tree. This is probably the most heavily discussed topic and the dev team is also seperated on the topic. In this prototype tree the armors and engines can be easilly accessed. There are numerous arguments against that. But here is my rationale for not changing it YET:

We finally can see which armor and engine combination is actually used most of the time since they are not tied in trees you don't want. I know that a lot of people claim to already know what is the best armor and engine (always) but I think we should have some tests with a neutral research setup like this. THEN improve the balance of armors and engines a bit and if it STILL doesn't work there is no problem mixing the weapon + engines + armor researches back into combination.

 

I do like some of those newer ideas, but I feel getting a new armour should have a bit more of a commitment. It shouldn't be "oh, they have bio against our regen, guys come back to base, by the time you get here, we'll have reflective instead".

I forsee games with various tier 1 researches and all armours. D:

But seriously, can we organise a PROPER game of this, I mean we had nearly 20 people on last night, can't we have a proper pug with these scripts friday night or something, try and get at least 16vs16?

 

i agree this is a sort of "deathmatch" tree, very easy to see what is good and what isnt atm because time and resources matter little on the engine and armor research

 

If you're going to use engines like this, add more differentiation. For example, the new weights for engines were released 2.24, I thought it was an awesome idea but didn't go far enough. I want to see engines weighing between 20 and 50, or even 70. That's an extra 2 plates of armour, which is a useful tradeoff. I think the same should be done with heat, multiply everything to do with heat till a point where you can get more exact differences, then give adv. coolant more coolant, bio more cooling than standard (even though it is the worst researchable), give something to fission to make it a bit better to 3 phase.

 

I hate this type of post.

Firstly, when both teams are climbing the tech tree at the roughly same rate, then no team will dominate the other through the grenadier bonus. Being ahead in research will give you an advantage across the board, that's true. Unless the other team is well behind though the difference will be fairly negligable.

What is far more important is that with the current system, commanders need to get to heavy tanks as fast as possible, and often opt to miss grenadier research. This leaves players as grenadiers left behind in the arms race. This cannot be allowed to happen. There needs to be a system which ensures that you can never have commanders leaving their infantry, the class which people are forced to play when res is tight, obsolete.

Specifically choosing RPG upgrades puts your team behind the enemy in terms of tank research, and is often well ignored by the commander for this reason. "Dipping in to grab RPG upgrades" doesn't mean your team stands a better chance, because it also puts you further behind their heavy tank research, and when the biggest guns roll out even upgraded grenadiers are weak.

I do like the idea of having the option of the grenadier tree as well as the automatic upgrades, so that you can retain the tactic of rushing grenadier upgrades at the opportunity cost of behind further ahead in tank research. That's the good sort of choice that a commander should be making.

This is just... bad. It actually... really frustrates me... the dumbness of this part of the suggestion. Okay deep breath... Lets start off with the axiom that no weapon is bad, but some are only good in specific roles. the other axiom can be that there's no time to waste, so commanders only take what is needed before progressing up the tech tree.

Massive problems with the current system:

1.) Only a select few researches are actually researched
2.) Tank battles, especially later on when all the weapons are researched ones, are made less interesting because the enemy are all using the same types of tanks- same chassis, guns and armour.

Obviously, your suggestion is massively falling back to problem 2, as commanders only pick out the weapon they need and then have to move on. No commander is going to research two types of missile when they could be research towards heavy tanks, because of axiom 2. Obviously, unless there are several types of missile availiable, then you're going to be stuck using one type of missile for the entire game. This is problem 2.

Now, what compounds this problem is that it isn't just one type of weapon being researched per time, but it's generally only most versatile weapon. It's the weapon that is fairly good in all situations, and so with smarts, skills and luck a player with the weapon can take on any situation. HE shells for example are popular not just for their excellent DPS, but because you can use them against anything effectively. Plasma cannon, while slightly better against tanks*, is worse against everything else and so is a very unlikely choice. Situationally useful, but because of this it's rarely researched.

What the Drag suggested tree does is that it gives players in a team the option of going for a more specialised tank role, because the option presents itself. This makes tank use and combat a lot more interesting and exciting.

Your suggestion also means that there's no real dedication to one tree. It also loses the beautiful and easy to learn simplicity of the OP's suggestion. But that doesn't concern me especially and it trivial compared to the real, massive problems that we've been trying to get away from with the new system.

I don't actually understand what good you think 'driving commanders to research only the good items' will do for the game. Your suggestion here takes the improvements in the new system, tears it up entirely and widdles on the shreds.


*I think, it doesn't matter pretend it is for the sake of arguement.

 

Yesterday was an impromptu test, I just packed the installers and trickster spammed some people to join, if it had been a planned test I would have announced it in the thread and via steam. So yea, test sometime next weekend with different scripts.

 

new installer for the lazy people like myself?

make sure to proofread your scripts so reactive armor isn't useful anymore, nothing accidentally has more/less 0s than its supposed to, etc

 

<filler>

 

Weapon Name: Emp Grenade launcher
Problem: Doesn't hurt unbuilt walls
Suggestion: Make it hurt unbuilt walls

Weapon Name:Corrosive Bomb cannon
Problem: AoE doesnt hurt unbuilt walls
Suggestion:Make it hurt unbuilt walls

EDIT:
Weapon Name: Nanite Destabilizer
Problem: AoE doesnt hurt unbuilt walls, Completely inferior to Corrosive bomb cannon and is only missle for killing walls, giveing NF a disadvantage
Suggestion:Make it hurt unbuilt walls, Buff it by increasing damage and Splash, moving it down tiers and/or increaseing ammo and rate of fire

 

Weapons are useless cause they arent balanced, thats why we test it to balance it...
If grenadier rpg update isnt tied to normal research no-one will research it,
means grenadier is useless like now and thx for considering all the grenadier
players in your great masterplan, I dont like to beg the commander for better rpgs...

 

Just as I finish making fancy new effects for all the weapons, bam, drag decides to make more.

Jerk.

 

Hm, bad, unbuilt walls should have the same resists as built walls. Could be a code bug not sure I can fix it without releasing new .dll too.

The De/Nan missile, well I kept it pretty underpowered at first because you can snipe building all across the map with it. On the other hand you can do that with HIT too so I'll raise it to it's former levels again. Probably keeping the bad aim, increase rate of fire massively, give more ammo, increase damage a bit. This way you can't reliably snipe with it across the map you need to be a bit closer to hit even big buildings.

Edit: Well empty, you know you love making effects and the new/old ones can be used too in some cases.