Get rid of compo

This... isn't bad. All the other armors have a significant difference with notable tradeoffs.

That said, the other thing that can be done instead of flat out removing it would be to change it such that it truly is the 'late game armor' that I once heard it was - though I'm not entirely sure such a goal is doable.

 

compo needs to increase in price or be nerfed

 

We don't need to get rid of it, but we need to do something.
I would just make it heavier which would either limit weapons or how many plates it has.

Is it possible for armors to make vehicles slower?
Because if compo is the heavy armor, it needs to act like heavy armor.

So make it heavier and slow vehicle speed by a quarter.
That is what I would do.

Now which is the shitty armor that was brought up in another thread?
We had a discussion on which was better, paper armor or that one.

I would make that armor lighter and have it increase vehicle speed so serves a purpose other than cheap armor.

 

I don't know why you guys wanna keep nerfing tanks. They already cost a TON with composite and all you need is a moron driving off into battle with one of them to waste the teams resources by 1800 Res.

If we were to remove composite there would be no decent armor left to fight infantry with. Grenadiers/Riflemen can take out tanks so easily nowadays so why get rid of the only armor which doesn't suck against them. And now that BIO ML and BIO MG does not "bleed" infantry to death anymore, the only options to kill them now is to use "Might-Hit-MGs", Nukes, UGL or CNs.

 

The cost doesn't matter.
I can get one and basically survive forever.

 

The meta has been the same for the past few years.
3 phase compo HE/Ranged Bio ML.

 

If I remember correctly there was suggestions to make tanks weak against infantry so infantry-based combat had its purpose in this game, which is the current situation. And because research didn't cost anything, they made tanks more expensive.

This pretty much leads to tanks only being given to people which know how to use them if the resources were dire or else you would have doomed the team itself to lose the game.

What would you do if you were commander in such a situation? Give it to an amateur so he can have his fun and lead your team into its demise, or give it to someone who is more experienced with it so you could have a chance of victory for your team?

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Back on track, give composite longer research time. That would balance it out.

And no, MGs suck with latency, if you have a ping of 100 or higher, you have to aim a bit behind the enemies model when he is moving sideways. A new player would hopelessly fail trying to kill an enemy with vehicle MGs because he would hover the crosshair over the enemies' model.

 

I've always been of the opinion that it should be the endgame armour. The problem is, it's not, it's a midgame armour at the moment and that's the issue with it.

I know it might seem minor to you, but I think substantially increasing the research time on Composite would really shift it to the lategame. Balancing by cost would be ok IF the commander could restrict specific researches. The intention when we get this facility is to increase the cost of Heavies, make them stronger (and maybe slower) and have it so the smart commander builds them individually. They'd almost be seen like "Hero" units given how few of them there would be. Same for Artillery.

Composite currently takes 2 minutes and 30 seconds to research. I've just doubled that in SVN. This makes it a serious commitment to rush Composite. The cost increase isn't really practical now, but when we get into a position to give this power to the Commander, it'll go up in price as well.

EDIT: I didn't commit it because I can't commit from here, the internet is too shit to upload a fucking text file. I'll do it when I get back to the UK on Tuesday (if I remember).

 

My post has largely been rendered useless in the light of the last two posts, the last one particularly since I was going to say devs are pretty receptive to feedback now.

Anyway, I'll just leave the values for the armours here, if anyone (like me) was wondering what they were:
[Plain: 15WT, 5C, 40HP]
[Regen: 15WT, 15C, 55HP]
[Absorb: 12WT, 5C, 65P]
[Reflec: 15WT, 15C, 70HP]
[Comp: 10WT, 25C, 75HP]
[React: 20WT, 20C, 120HP]

One thing I would like to add is it'd be nice to know what the actual resistances for the armours were, tacked onto the descriptions. Not the nitty gritty details but like "resistant to inf" "resistant to missiles" "resistant to bio" etc. Phrased nicely of course. Because I don't know them, and I don't really think it's right that I have to ask the playerbase what works every time I play the game.

 

^ You mean have advanced technologies building off a combination of basic techs?

...that would be certainly more interesting anyway.

 

Make composite a research in advanced chassis or in upgraded chassis?

 

I always liked the idea of Prerequisites for some research, but I never quite realised how appropriate it would be for composite until you said it there. The idea of having "loose" prerequisites (any 2 armours, any 2 engines etc) is another interesting idea as well, though I'm on the fence about it. I'm not sure how I feel about arbitrarily limiting what people can research.

 

How about looking at it from the other way; if you get maybe two other good ideas for research, it might be a viable route. If it's just the one, it could be an exception instead.

 

Let me say my bit that's less about composite and more about fundamental aspects and issues of Empires balancing in general.

Mobility in Empires. (I did say this was going to be general.) This should be obvious to anyone who's ever played Empires for a period of time, but people value mobility over everything else in the game and minimizing traveling time. You can see this in Speed Upgrade, where it tends to be a Gren's first, a Scout's first or second, an Engineer's second or third, and a Rifleman's second or third; It's easily the single most important skill by that metric, getting high usage across all classes. You can see this in the jeep health nerf; many people complained that they were dying too quickly, but the major, actual result of that was a massive reduction in a jeep's mobility by disallowing movement near enemy troops; if you could still ram a jeep through enemy lines, it wouldn't be complained about nearly as much. Finally, the most obvious example is 3-phase. 3-phase has the second worst cooling in the game while moving, after Standard and tied with Bio. Regardless of that, it's the most commonly researched engine in the game, even on maps like Streets of Fire. This wouldn't be so bad except...

Empires is incredibly vulnerable to catastrophes. It's quite an interesting concept, but in short, it's that small changes make little difference until a certain point is hit, where one more small change causes drastic shifts in things such as geologic features and behavior. In Empires, people will stick with something that might get slight nerfs until it's useless, then suddenly switch to something else. We can keep nerfing parts of 3-phase, but because of how much mobility is valued in the game, it would have to have other stats lowered significantly before people decide to switch to another engine. It's also why the meta, according to Security, hasn't changed in forever (I really hate that term, there's nothing "meta" about it. Empires passes out ridiculous amounts of information, it shouldn't be considered "metagaming" to know and use that information, it should be expected). We can keep changing values, but because of how one value seriously outweighs other values in the player's minds, it doesn't matter. If it was only certain values being drastically overvalued, we might be able to work around it, but...

Certain values are also incredibly undervalued. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is cost. People research heavies and composite regardless of the cost, but it's also noticeable in absorbent. Absorbent is cheaper than the urea in my piss, but because cost matters so little to people, it never gets researched, even by teams that are scrounging for every bit of resources they can get. Balancing by cost is a snipe hunt; you can make something piss cheap and as long as the cost isn't negligible, it won't change research patterns, and you can make something exorbitantly expensive and as long as its cost isn't entirely crippling, it won't change research patterns. Combining with the previous paragraph, people won't ever research absorbent until its cost drops to something like 2 or 3, at which point you'd have many people getting it as something cheap and quick as an intermediate. Which combines with the problem that...

No one gives half a shit about research times and balancing around them doesn't really affect the game until you hit an extreme. What's one, two minutes in a game that can easily last over 60? Or thirty seconds, even? Empires is a slow game. A lot can change in a short amount of time, but how often does that actually happen? Over a 60 minute match, how much change happened in small periods versus long periods? Sure, a game can turn from a win to a loss in 3 minutes easily, but that's disregarding that the rest of the match had very gradual change. UGL got its research time increase to 90 from 30 some while ago, didn't make a lick of difference in gameplay. So we can't balance by cost and we can't balance by time with any amount of change because they matter so little and any change to them large enough to cause a significant change would either make the item in question worthless or overused. And then some values are impossible to change because they would cause too significant of a change due to being overvalued, such as... (start from beginning)

That's my two cents on this. Balancing in Empires is beyond hard because some things are overvalued in how people treat them and some things are undervalued as all shit, even if they do have less of an effect or more of an effect than players give them credit for.

I have no idea where I'm actually going with this, but I suppose I'm saying that balancing Empires is a pipedream.