surfaces hit as in tris or the actual underlying entity (like a disp) - since if its really only tris its quite easy to explain why people are invisible on displacements, they are a lot of tris even if it looks flat ... also really, 100% alpha? go play with photoshop you dont notice black lines on white background (obviously you dont since they are transparent)
If you have my eyes, I think you can notice that the character model have yellow eyes that don't go transparent. On Isle, I can discover a hidden scout on any hill from middle ref spot.
even though it also questions some things that aint in the game anymore and isnt directly related to the OPs concerns, this is from 2007 - but maybe i just should stop reading what other people read, damn you currently active users link!
Sgt Security - you are right about my local awareness. I'd say I'm average, and better than when I first started com'ing. Like I said I moved every minute, but really I have to just watch the minimap. Still I think it silly that I am completely deaf when in com view. Can we make it fair and at least to add something that helps the com in com view to be more aware, rather than require paranoid bouncing back and forth ? It just sucks to lose a game because the com is focused on feeding the team. I will work on my less than ideal abilities there. I do give a lot of targets, drop armors, and tell guys of troop movements in com view. Now that will suffer which I think does not help the team. I will also do as Trickster said and position myself better within the base. I need protection but also a quick escape path. The issue I have is that there are TWO players who will from start of the game do continuous attacks on the com for a quick win. I have done it and have taken down 10 year veteran coms. Should it be so easy to destroy the com. Can't scout sticky duration be shorter. We added more armor to NF tanks - that adversely impacts BE coms, although balances the NF vs BE tanks. Can't the com's have more armor. End of game scenario the armor really doesn't matter. It only matters in surprise attack. Scout sticky duration also traps the com for too long. To defeat Extended range arty we could just make a new Money map and extend the distance between the bases. Arty is fairly useless on every other map. Put some skin in the game if you want to push arty. I love that there are so many levels of learning in this game. Most games you achieve a level and you can't go further.
i fear its already the maximum distance - and if theres space left its certainly not enough ... the only difference to other maps is that on most of them you cant have your arties as secure as on (old) money - canyon is a huge exception. thankfully people are not used to arty there so its not researched - ive seen plenty of games where it did though, long time ago, worked quite well, was a shite game - arties are boring for either side, either you die to someone you dont see or you kill someone you dont see. and you wouldnt even see eachother over plain open ground since arty shoots way longer then draw distance. the new version of money reduces the impact of arty a lot though since you can rocketsnipe them from bridges, but it also turns a bit into bridge camping which is shite aswell. btw want to learn another annoying thing? on a lot of maps you can fire tank HE CN from base to base with artillery feedback. its just not super efficient so noone does it, its quite annoying if buildings get constant damage you cant prevent though.
I don't consider Arty much of a threat on Money. We build three bases and even if we lose all three, we can rebuild as fast as they take them down. We just need one engie in a jeep and the com to work. Normally money loses when you don't get anyone helping at main. Arty is just a major PITA, and does help if skillfully used. Also good for knocking out turrets which are rarely replaced. When the other team starts shooting Arty I say good - they are wasting their time and a good player - get in their base. It can be effective though. Last night I switched teams to balance out the teams and since NF researched arty and I took NF com, I took out all their refs, and they never bothered to rebuild. So we won. But I felt dirty. Since I had to baby sit the com and I wanted to play, they had researched arty, I decided Arty and protecting a base entrance as gren would help our team.
you only needed to bombard the refinary spots on old money - you needed 3 arties for that - dunno about the new one, but it looks like its a bit more spread out now. i thought all this was the reason for the change of the map actually
Yep my diamond was right in the middle of the four refs, and they went down at the same time, like a group of catholic girls. To distract them from their missing refs, I then hit rax and vf in middle, then bombarded south refs. I know engies get bored of repair so I was hoping they would expend their 100 count in middle then just push out of base spending the last of their resources with little to replenish. Another guy jumped into Arty, but I didn't see any hits in enemy base. One guy taught us about Gren Arty Feedback - lol. Hey - long ago I didn't know about that either.
No, I parked it literally a metre away from the A3 refinery. And @ JustGoFly: Look, I'm not trying to wail on you for your commanding skills. You seem to be pretty competent and are pretty decent at getting the job done. But you've made a thread complaining that the game is broken nearly every single time you've been killed by a coordinated squad. I'm genuinely not trying to insult your commanding skills, but the simple fact is, there is a substantial group of commanders who simply don't allow this to happen. I know that if I'm against FN, LordDz, Jephir and a bunch of other commanders to be honest, I can almost be assured that I won't be able to get away with tactics like that. They simply won't put themselves into a position to allow it. I honestly feel like that stems from being on the other side of it, from enacting those strategies themselves. And that's really a problem I see in a lot of commanders now. You see people doing a lot of commanding, but you don't see them doing more squad-based commanding without being in the CV, leading their own squads and really trying to put together more innovative tactics and strategies. How on earth can they expect to combat such tactics if they've never done them themselves? You can't just expect that the more you play commander, the better you will get. You have to learn about the other side of the fence, and really find the weaknesses yourself, so that you can prepare against them. And lastly, this is really a point addressed to everyone in this thread. Take situations like that game, but as a more general thing. A team is losing, pretty much on their last legs. The game might be dragged out another 20 minutes or so, but they've lost too much territory that they won't be able to pump the vehicles out to retake territory. The game is over, and it's nothing more than just waiting to lose. Is that how you want the game to be? Decided part of the way through with absolutely no hope of a comeback? Do you seriously want a situation where you're playing and you know, almost definitely, that there's absolutely no coming back from this point? Because the fact is, in Empires, unlike almost any other game I know of, it's always possible to still win. There's almost never a point at which defeat is inevitable, there are always strategies and tactics that as little as one person can enact, that can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The game is never over, and that's what makes the game so exciting for me. Do you honestly want to take that out of Empires? Do you want games decided 10-20 minutes in, and then just play the rest of the game for the sake of it? Ask yourself that, because for me, that's not Empires. Empires is the game where you never give up, not at any point of the game. You play as hard as you can until that CV dies, because no matter how bad the circumstances are, there's almost always a way to win.
Well stated and point taken. I think the only request is to make it take longer than 30 seconds to kill a com with scout having the ability to keep the com immobile for longer than 30 seconds. Time a scout, engineer and three riflemen behind a com to determine the time it takes to end the game. I still think scout sticky should not last as long as it does. Having a situation where as you said "There is nothing you could have done" is not what empires is about and that is in fact your argument at end of game for the losing team. I am not saying we should remove the rush ability, but the stun from an APC is cheap, sneak and stun is cheaper. Give the com a chance to get away.
I don't care about winning, I just want exciting games. Games where teams swap sides like 3 times are cool, actually base swaps in general are cool. Then there are games where a team ends up doing a nomadic thing and and just push from spot to spot, taking parts of the map. Happened on slaughtered with freak commanding nf, was one of the better experiences I had. Point is these were team efforts where everyone had to try their best. Trickster is right, its not over til it's over, but I personally don't like the idea that what decided the entire team victory was just a few individuals. It isn't fun to fight against and it isn't fun to participate in either. I think JGF is kinda right, stickys should last 5 seconds, not the current 10.
Just remember that you're like basically lead dev so you're kind of biasing the fuck out of things, you don't want to nerf a strategy you like to pull off. I'm not saying you're right or wrong, I think ninja tactics (or coordinated squad hide stuff) is pretty fair right now, a lot better than say 2.1 where any faggot grenadier could win the game given 8 seconds and ammo upgrade, but you need to be careful with how you see the game. When you develop you have to try and be a little objective, is it *really* fair? Is it *really* fun? Is it *really* good for the game? In particular, you don't ever seem to acknowledge that there are 2 teams and different people have different knowledge. If the commander and 4 people on his team are aware of your ninja attempt, they can fight it but the other 20 people on the losing team don't know. So the outcome of the game was decided by: Your ninja group (2-10 people), their reaction (2-10 people), and maybe the rest of your team holding the line or running a distraction (10-20 more people) The other say, 10-20 people on the losing team have *NO IDEA THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO LOSE* You might be having fun, the guys fending you off might be having fun, but 20 people are going to be pissed when they lose for no reason, they aren't the majority but they are a large number. Everyone is entitled to enjoy the match and have an impact on it, but if you make ninjaing too good or too reliant on the actions or 1 or 2 people, then you've got a vast number of people who didn't matter. I for one get REALLY angry when I'm, playing a good match and a commander gets ninja'd, even if I was on the winning team, because it takes me straight out of the game I was getting into. It happened the most recent time I was playing cyclopean (my favourite map), within 10 minutes a scout squad had snuck into the enemy base, sabbed everything and stunstickied the commander to death, I was fucking *LIVID* because I hadn't gotten to play a good round of cyclopean in probably 6 months, and my first opportunity was squandered before the battle lines had even been drawn. Just remember that for every second of adrenaline you've experienced on a stealth run, you've stolen entire minutes of gameplay from each other player on the server.
I think everyone's kinda right here. I'm not sure but I may have come up with a solution: Sticky stun has little to no stun effect at CV health 0%. Perhaps it has more at 100% CV health, and less at 50% and then a tiny 1s stun at 25%. I'm not sure if that would be code-able, but I think it would address the situation. JGF thinks the CV should have a chance, I think that's right. I also think the part-original reason for stuns (CV boomtanking) should remain as a useful tool and proper consequence. Hopefully this preserves both.
empty hit it spot on, its just egoistic, nothing else. and even if hobbes will cry (and a ton of other people) i think boomtanking is actually an equally worse problem. these two things is what drives players away - and also stupid things like 10mile punches, arty strike shenanigans or the shotty but in comparison they are minor - you cant fix players, so fix the damn game. player base already starts to reducing itself to the same playerbase there was before and long time players will get bored fast. then youll have a game you can have your anual pugs in apart of that its gonna be dead - wow so fun, much ... ah screw this meme it sucks i understand the point of being able to fight back - but imo this has more to do with inf vs tank balance, a horse beaten to death. it has little to do with the above though - if you lost, you lost, nextmap - a snuck victory doesnt make it any better and if you install mechanics that allow you to win even if you lost, what keeps you from using them prematurely?
Can we have a self destruct button on the CV? So when the com is about to die, he can take everyone with him after a certain threshold of health is gone?
and what exactly should be the point of that? if people would attack the cv instead of camping raxes it would die fast enough. and about camping raxes, thats the next point - theres people doing nothing else (some only till they get the tank of their choice). build jeep, drive pass everything because it doesnt really threatens you, if you happen to die just try again, find rax, drop mines in it, punch people that try to keep you from doing it. if theres people in the way try to run them over since its really hard to hit jeeps or drivers (especially with retarded turbo which worsens the problem by a factor of 10) great gameplay, should be recommended for game of the year
To be fair going into a rax is fine when your team is actually trying to kill it, having to deal with repair engys makes it really hard sometimes. If it is just you and you don't have a real chance of taking it down? Then yeah, sitting in a rax is pretty bad, people need to stop that.
You don't see the point behind a self destruct button when you are about to lose.. If I am going to die, I want to latch on to every single thing in arms reach and take it with me. Especially those who are responsible for this.
