Get rid of the commander target ability

First you have to make guns shoot where you are pointing.

seriously though, full fledged wall hacks are useless.

 

@Spawwn: There is nothing wrong with "the gay orange things." They are a different color, slightly larger, and fade-in and out. I don't see how that makes them homosexually evil.

@pickled: I would argue the current state of mass targeting, is LESS an RTS element, than if you could only give single targets. mass targeting is never something you do in RTS games in the same way it is done in empires, and the mass targeting system discourages real RTS orders.

If I try to tell someone to do something specific, it is at the cost of them having less of my godly wallhax at their disposal. I have to weight the cost of their increased awareness against my RTS desire to tactically command.

More over, as I've discusses with you in spec, mass targets don't increase the amount of skill required to command, but decrease it, since giving out wallhacks is a completely mindless task with OP benefits.

Also, wallhacks don't increase the amount of skill required to succeed on the field, but decrease it. It takes a keen eye, and a sharp wit to locate threats and track their movements. On the other hand, it takes a mouse to make a glowing red diamond move to the center of your screen.

 

mass targets do not represent attack move.

attack move is just sending a player to a location, of course he's going to attack all units he encounters on the way. Just as accuracy and damage are statistics an RTS unit has, accuracy, damage and awareness are statistics an empires player has. The commander's strategy (and decision making process) of "go here and kill stuff" isn't changed if he is able to give wallhacks or not, it just bumps up the awareness statistic of the player.

In short: there is NO depth at all and NO strategic bonus to the game to giving wall hacks instead of a move order. NONE. It's not "more of an RTS" if you can give players wall hacks instead of just expecting them to look for themselves. There's no "strategy" and definitely no skill to giving wall hacks for your team. It's just busywork for the commander.

If you want to see commanders win because of their decision making, strategy, research choices instead of their ability to use the interface, removing wall hacks is the first step. If team A beats team B because team A had a commander that knew about wall hacks and team B's commander was trying to use flanks, hiding players while enemy squads went past, deciding what research to do then the game is flawed. It's be like in chess if pawns could move 2 spaces forward instead of 1 if you just line up their base accurately with the bottom and left sides of the square they're on. I'd like to say it's the "illusion" of skill and depth, but frankly if you're fooled by this illusion you're a fucking moron.

This brings me onto my next point. The impact wallhacks have on the infantry combat itself. Wallhacks and the ability to know exactly where the enemy is mean:

flanking manouvers are useless.
hiding while enemies go past and attacking from rear is impossible
hiding in a bush, behind a rock, swimming in water, moving behind a length of wall, using smoke grenades as cover - all impossible. If you can't see how that's bad for gameplay then you need help, these are all interesting stages of attack / defence for the players involved and they're killed off.
you can kill a player by simply aiming your crosshair at where they will appear (the side of the wall/ rock/building or up a ladder) and kill them as they appear around the corner. This sucks, but when one player has wall hacks and the victim doesn't it's game breaking. (game breaking? yes. can you imagine if such a scenario was allowed in quake 3 or counterstrike or any other game for that matter? Just because empires is a mod doesn't mean it should be any less balanced)
the mindgames infantry play are destroyed. For more detail, first read this: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/yomi-layer-3-knowing-the-mind-of-the-opponent.html. Yomi level 0 would be chasing an enemy around a corner in order to kill him (the default), Yomi 1 would be turning after you've gone around the corner while the enemy can't see you so you can line up a shot. Yomi 2 could be waiting just before you go around the corner so that the enemy believes you didn't chase him and instead that you went another way, causing him to go back to the corner to shoot you as he thinks you'll be moving in a direction facing away, and shooting him as he appears. Yomi 3 = yomi -1 would be just keep on running once you're beyond the corner. This is just one example, but it's very typical of the sort of mindgames that get played all the time in FPS', and it's easy to see how players having wallhacks breaks this... collapses the wave function. A great player once said that although games such as quake and counterstrike appear to be excersises in crosshair accuracy and reflexes, there are actually deep mindgames going on every second of the game- such games are as mental as starcraft is.

I used to think that perhaps individual targets should be allowed, but even those are as unfair in their individual situations as the wall hacks, screwing up gameplay in the way listed above. All the commander needs is to be able to tell the player where to go, and if the commander wants to tell players to attack a place, then a seperate attack command that is static on the map [and doesn't spam the attack this location when repeatedly moved] covers all of the tactical options the commander can have: when the commander wants to give a specific target to a player, he can relay intel onto the map. When he's bored with doing that, he stops relaying intel and the target will remain where the last bit of intel was.

In summary: wallhacks really suck.

 

Indeed, they actively destroy tactics, making our deep game shallow. There is no outwitting your opponent, there is outwitting the commander target.

Less mindgames than css...sad really.

 

/agree

 

From the forum menu this thread was shortened to "Get rid of the commander".

I thought someone was crazy! lol

 

in RTS games, your units don't run around and flank and hide in bushes and shit. The targets system is an extension of this concept. Targets are essential to emphasize the RTS element.

Quite frankly I don't care if you want to sneak around and be a useless retard. There are other games for that. This is an all-out, in your face arcade style action packed rts-fps hybrid, not a sneaky ninja game where you have to hide in bushes and throw smokes and crap. Targets facilitate fast and furious gameplay. If you think they eliminate tactics then you don't understand the definition of tactics. Targets simply change the tactical landscape so that some tactics work better or worse than if there were no targets, they don't eliminate them.

edit: oh and sirlin is a fucking faggot. see this video for lulz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtdqJ9hHlcY

 

Or just maybe, possibly, we've played without them being the complete and utter staple to the game that they have become.

I used to have a tester title under my name that kinda used to underline the point that while I may be pretty crap at the game, when I compare something to something else...I do kinda know what i'm talking about.

Alas...dem days is gone, yo! :D

 

Nicely said, you don't need a wall of text to explain something as straight forward as this.

Some people just seem to forget that half the game is already a cat and mouse game, see jeeps, cv's, light tanks driving across the map like maniacs. Imagine what kind of cat and mouse game it would be if you didn't even know where the fuck the infantry went to.
Remove multi targets and you'll truly notice how little attention most of your teammates pay to moving enemies. (I recall funny games like an nf engi deconing and a BE engi repairing a barracks right around the corner).

 

So you take all of the depth out of combat, one of the reasons why FPS' while appearing simple are so popular, because it's more fun to be shown exactly where the enemy is so you can kill them?

The post isn't saying promoting "sneaking around and being a useless retard" style of play, obviously. It's an element that is involved in all game play, there are situations where it is better to run than to attack which changes the pacing, giving the player a greater breadth of experience to experience in the game, which makes the game less repetitive.

Every point i make could be extended to say, playing the scout in TF2. a deep class, and not because you're sneaking around but because actually, the combat can be interesting.

There's nothing wrong with Sirlin's writing.

 

@flasche: The things you mention have already been discussed, there is a difference between those and commander targets and there is a reason why these can never replace commander targets.

I'm not saying multi attack shouldn't be changed, or that radars and cameras shouldn't be changed, I am against removing it for reasons already explained in detail in this thread.

The rest is just speculating, the only thing I fear is bad gameplay and I'm certain from all the hours I've commanded that this will only detract from the game, which pickled explained very clearly.


@sandbag. Emphasis on RTS FPS, already been discussed, you should read pickled's post more thoroughly, it doesn't take all the depth out of combat, it streamlines certain parts of the combat in favour of teamwork and strategy, not a game of hide and seek.


Again not saying I think the way it works right now is ideal, but removing it just ignores half of the elements that make this game empires, and one of those elements is the current proportions, which do not allow a mixture of fast paced and slow realistic combat. If you want to remove multi attack, you'll need to change a lot more to the gameplay to keep the flow of the game going, rather than having commander waste their time pointing out targets manually, having players trying to find an engineer hiding in some corner of your barracks (while 2 double UML heavies are raping every other building in your base) etc etc etc. It doesn't work, stop thinking it will without major gameplay changes.

 

Balance issue, the game isn't built for that many players.
It's not really an argument since the RTS aspect doesn't change when have larger numbers, you'd first have to prove that with 64 players the FPS element dominates the game, but then again that isn't a very solid argument on behalf of the RTS being non existant at that point. Teamwork is still existant and resource management is still existent (maybe unbalanced, but it's there), classes, research, macro management, all still existent and the commander's role above all still exists (it's influence is dependent on the commander, not the amount of players) so what would you achieve by saying that only 6.25% (where did you get that number from?) play the RTS, because everyone is, indirectly.

 

I do agree that multi attack is currently a devils feature made of wall hax and spam, but you can't just remove it for reasons already discussed.

Mootant and I have discussed this as well, and we decided to remove buildings from multi attack, it just wasn't viable to remove multi attack as a whole, or else it would've been removed in 2.23.

 

I was thinking about this problem during a lecture and I think I have a solution:

The problem is:
-Wallhacks are a problem for the commander and create unnecessary imbalance between teams
-Wallhacks make the infantry combat really shallow.
-Wallhacks tell players where the enemy is. This really speeds up combat and gameplay and means that opposing players don't miss each other. This last point really reinforces the structure of "frontlines" of the game, which is a good thing as it gives order to the game so players can understand who owns territory and what saftey is like in the territory. (Counterstrike was one of the first games to add structure to normally random deathmatch which was why it was such a successful game)

This third point is all the things you point out pickeled and dizzy, and I agree with you. But I won't budge on the first two points either. I would say that the first two outweigh the last one, but perhaps we don't have to compromise.

I have a solution to this.

-Red dots on the map indicate enemy player position.
-This is only active in a certain radius, so doesn't tell you information that is not relevant to you.
-Always presented to all players, so no unfairness about who has wallhacks, pointless busywork for commanders is removed.
-As the dots are not on the main screen, they won't assist in aiming
-The dots are static and fade to 50% alpha over a period of [2] seconds and are refreshed every [2] seconds. This simply means that you cannot track a player's velocity using the dots, which is an important part of maintaining depth
-Players still get all of the relevant information about where the enemy is, which keeps the gameplay positive point of wallhacks which are outlined above. Players still know where the enemies are and so we maintain the fast pace of gameplay that wallhacks afford.