Individual Research Trees

Discussion in 'Game Play' started by spellman23, Sep 15, 2009.

  1. spellman23

    spellman23 Member

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    Proposed by Chris on many occasions, notably recently in the Slippery Slope thread. Quoted here for your convenience.


    TL;DR Version:
    • Each player has their own resources and tech tree
    • Players can now choose their own tech, becoming as general or specialized as they want
    • Creates diversity in tech choices allowing more niche tech to be utilized, even if only by a few members of each team
    • More teamwork as each player fills a role (or tries to fill all of them)
    • Perhaps pooled research to unlock major advancements, like new chassis?
     
  2. Empty

    Empty Member

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    Downsides:

    Comming gets cut, I like comming, fuck dat shit.
     
  3. Beerdude26

    Beerdude26 OnThink(){ IsDownYet(); }

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    Chris has always tried to cut out the teamwork part of the game instead of streamlining it. I think this suggestion would be more applicable to his other proposed gamestyle than Classic gameplay.
     
  4. ScardyBob

    ScardyBob Member

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    You mean making Empires into CSS with tanks?
     
  5. MiamiHeat87

    MiamiHeat87 Member

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    So what? It be Counter-Strike with vehicles? Screw that.
     
  6. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Please explain how forcing everyone to use the same technology has any impact on 'teamwork' at all?

    As I explicitly stated:

    With global research, everyone will be given a general purpose tank, because nothing else will work, that means that there is no reason to stick together other than simply being in a group to get protection.

    At worse, my proposed changes would keep that exactly the same, at best, they would encourage people to pick specific roles and rely on each other.

    As with everything I suggest it is designed to allow teamplay, but not require it, if nobody wants to go specialised everyone can continue to use the same general purpose tanks, if people do want to work together to use specialist tanks and be more powerful, they can also do that.

    Now if you want to continue to not read, not think, not really do anything helpful, please do, but in the unlikely event you want to improve something, come see me.
     
  7. -=SIP=-

    -=SIP=- Member

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    This whole idea just don't work on normal servers. Good players can keep their APC/LT/AFV alive forever and will have enough resources for perfectly equipped heavies. While the rest will do stupid or no research and waste their paper tanks.
    The result will be that vets will own noobs even more.

    And what if commander wants to do DU APC rush? It is already very difficult to organize this. If every player has to research DU by himself this will be impossible.

    And what about these players, who don't want to drive a tank? They often do a good job as repair and revive whore. But they won't need any resources.

    I only can think about own research for organized games like PUG. There you can make a long strategy discussion before game starts. So every player will known what to research to get the best result for the team.

    But own resources just doesn't fit to a team oriented game like Empires. If you want to have this play another game.
     
  8. Korpi

    Korpi Member

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    This must be the worst idea on this forum. Let's also remove the CV, make the sniper rifle own everything and add emp_dust to the map list.
     
  9. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    So make it so everyone gets enough res to do research and lose a few tanks, add infantry research. Research doesn't go faster the more res you have, so people who do well will simply have more res to waste.

    Do I have to do all the thinking for you?

    Who gives a shit about DU rushing? If people wanted to DU rush they'd do it automatically, if people want to fuck around with their own tanks they'll do that. The game is not about the commander, it's about the other thirty people on the team.
     
  10. -=SIP=-

    -=SIP=- Member

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    And again Chris0132':
    Most players have no idea of research. It's complicated and therefore we have one experienced player (commander) to do that.
    Your idea will only work if most of the players are experienced and even then, these players have to discuss about one unique strategy.
    This will never happen on a normal server.
     
  11. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Most people who can play the game know what things work, really speaking everything should work in some way, as I said the only reason things are bad strategies is because some trees are specialised, bio, HE, homing etc work fine as support weapons, so there should't be anything wrong with some players using them. If an item is universally bad, that's a balance issue, and entirely unrelated to my suggestion.

    Of course there will be new players who don't understand the research system but they can learn, and because most of the players will know what to do, it doesn't matter if a few players per team are a bit clueless.

    You're correct that it's very unlikely you'll get concerted monotypical teching on an average server, and the reason for this is that most people don't give a shit about doing rushes, they just want to play a tank/role they like, forcing them to do all-alike rushes means you're forcing them to do something they don't enjoy as much as the alternative, therefore it's a stupid idea to force them to do that. There's nothing stopping people doing mixed tech rushes, in fact those would probably be more effective because if you include, for example, a couple of bio APCs spreading bio damage to everything, and a plasma APC or two to disable enemy tanks, you'll probably do better than a basic tank rush.

    In the unlikely event people do want to do that, they can, I do not prohibit that in any way, so you can have your boring clanwanks if you want to, but at the same time, everyone else can just play the game, use stuff they like using, and have fun.
     
    Last edited: Sep 16, 2009
  12. Roflcopter Rego

    Roflcopter Rego Member

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    I think this man may have peeked inside the darkest recesses of Chris' mind, and has come out seemingly sane... how could this be possible...

    Anyway, another one of Chris' Ideas, from now on I think I might just refer to them as CIs. If you want this, go make your own mod, it isn't Empires. I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on it though, it will be fundamentally shit and no one will play it.
     
  13. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Which of course is nothing like empires, which is clearly the reason why we have such an enormous playerbase.

    Empires is fundamentally shit, all the fun is extracted on the rare occasions the fundamental shittyness does not fundamentally break the game. Most of the fundamental aspects don't work, the resource model means games are resolved in five minutes, the research tree removes any point in customisable vehicles, the infantry don't scale with tanks, the maps make infantry useless, the engine doesn't optimise properly on the maps/the mappers are all fucking idiots who can't optimise anyway, commanders mean that every game has a random chance of sucking because someone didn't place a building in the right place/your team has no good commander. On the miraculoulsy rare occasions that none of these affect the game, fun can occur, but this is very rare. Removing the fundamental shittyness would improve the game.

    As would killing most of the community because they're all retarded, however that is less practical, so I usually suggest gameplay improvements rather than mass murder.
     
    Last edited: Sep 17, 2009
  14. LordDz

    LordDz Capitan Rainbow Flowers

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    Then why are you still playing it?
     
  15. Roflcopter Rego

    Roflcopter Rego Member

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    I count almost 80 players as of right now, making this the most popular non-steamworks mod. Go STFU please ty.

    No only this, it has more players than smashball and synergy combined, both steamworks mods.
     
    Last edited: Sep 17, 2009
  16. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Boundless optimism. Besides when it is fun, it's remarkably fun, plus it can be funny if you have good people playing even when gameplay wise it's utterly abysmal.

    And piss-poor by all other standards.

    Until it has twenty (limited number due to large playercounts) or so constantly full servers all the time, it needs a lot of improvement.
     
  17. Roflcopter Rego

    Roflcopter Rego Member

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    Empires has almost 0 advertising outlets, just a few outdated and frankly shit pages on steam and MODDB. It is crawling with bugs and stupid exploits that should have been fixed years ago. The balance is all over the place, we have guns that can insta kill at all ranges supposedly countered by ones that are so dependent on server latency they can sometimes hardly fire. Maps are so poorly optimised that you need quite a considerble rig to run it at decent frame rates and graphics settings. We have some frankly ridiculous artwork, a zillion poly buildings and tanks that can be easily compared to whales. And of course a community that spends it's whole time pissing each other off. It seems the only thing going for empires is it's gameplay, which is absolutly amazing, and what you want to remove.
     
  18. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    lets not change anything and live in the blissful morning of yesterday for all eternity
     
  19. spellman23

    spellman23 Member

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    I'd like to know where you're getting your stats of how awesome Empires is doing.

    Here's a quick dump from the Steam Content Tracker.

    This is near the trough of online gaming on Steam, and I see plenty of horrid games that are outperforming Empires.

    I see 57 players in Empires servers at this time.

    I see more players playing NeoTokyo (79) and Natural Selection (over 200).



    A "Steamworks" game isn't necessarily a good one. It's just one where they obliged with the Valve code stuff and they get nice distribution and a quick blurb int he news when they release.
     
    Last edited: Sep 18, 2009
  20. Sheepe

    Sheepe Member

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    After reading all this I thought: "Why does Chris get so much shit, he may be a confrontational prick, but he has interesting ideas"

    Then I thought: "Wait! Why not interconnect the research tree so that support weapons are easier to research and main weapons a bit harder? And why not slow tanks down a bit while we are at it, because games are decided too quickly!"
     

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