Empires 2.52.6 Released

Discussion in 'News' started by ImSpartacus, Nov 29, 2014.

  1. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    Last edited: Dec 6, 2014
  2. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    Since infantry weapons are more or less not 100% broken, I decided to finally fix some of my last (& most troublesome) pet peeves in vehicle combat. Yay, let's write a book!

    This was a tough one. I tried to think of ways to fix BioMG.

    To figure out how to fix it, first I asked myself what the "goal" was for BioMG.

    Honestly, the goal is BioML. To me, that's a good framework for a bio weapon.

    Its projectile is slow, which makes it tougher to aim. Also the fire rate is pitiful, which makes your misses more tragic. That slow fire rate also gives the bio DOT more time to work, which is the entire point of using a bio weapon.

    Likewise, BioMG's projectiles are quick, which makes them much easier to aim. And it's an MG, so its fire rate is tremendous compared to BioML. There's no time between shots for the bio DOT to work.

    You can't change those two traits or else you're no longer left with an MG.

    So I concluded that we had to replace BioMG with a cannon. Cannons are much closer to an "ideal" bio weapon compared to MGs. They are easier to aim than missiles, but still aren't effortless like MGs. Also essential, they can have sufficiently long cycle times that can justify equally long DOT times.

    We will probably be tweaking this a bit in the next few versions, but I think it's good enough for now.

    I would've liked to remove BioMG entirely but that would fuck up people's preset indices. Therefore, it was given a token buff just so it's not as broken as before. I would not advice its use.

    I've been putting off fixing DU. It feels like it's easy to make it OP.

    In the end, both DU MGs have more or less the same DPS as they did before. Now they are quite a bit cooler (and hopefully more usable). They need to be cooler because you need sustained fire to do much of any damage.

    DU MGs still can't damage most buildings due to a rounding error (thanks to Lazybum for noticing that). I think I'll fix it by rescaling all of the building HPs. But that's a pain in the ass, so I'll put that off for now.

    I don't really know how to make Plasma MG useful.

    It used to put off mad heat, but also mad heat to target. I toned it down just to bring it into the realm of usability, but it still wasn't useful.

    Now it's more like a lukewarm HEMG. Not quite the same DPS, but a bit more HTT/s. I hate to leave a useless weapon in the research tree, but we'll see how this goes.

    HE Cannon is a bit troublesome.

    Its DPS is technically less than Std Cannon, but it devastates infantry.

    Since it's really only useful against infantry, I figured we could dial its weight back without breaking much of anything.

    I had a goal to make all non-nuke missiles use a consistent 40 damage so if you see a missile slowly flying through the air you always know how much damage it can do.

    But I like the idea of a research giving you missiles that are individually "special." For me, UML isn't about throwing a giant salvo at the enemy. It's more about saying, "my missiles are UPGRADED. Fuck you!"

    So what do you upgrade? The damage? That's boring. What about explosion radius? HE cannon did that and it's a fun weapon to use. Also, I never liked that BioML was the only ML that was good against infantry. BioML is good against everything so it still felt like there weren't any good anti-infantry MLs. Now UML can take that role as well as its anti-vehicle role. Its DPS dropped a bit to accommodate the increased utility, but I think it'll still be worth it.

    Firstly, I noticed a minor typo in the description. It just kinda shows how often we read the descriptions, lol.

    Otherwise, I've been wanting to remove BioML's massive clip for a while.

    I was once specing a certain taiwanese fella so I could help him git gud. After a particular skirmish, he had one bioML left in his clip. I asked why he didn't reload it. He said that one shot was enough.

    That really stuck with me. For me, Bio isn't something that you should be spamming. It's more delicate than that. So I want to see what happens when missing your BioMLs starts to matter. I think you really only need one missile, but you got two since some players need to git gud even more than our taiwanese friend (not sure how that's possible).

    Salvo is generally underused. It's a troubling weapon because it'll nearly cripple most mediums if you can get all of the MLs on target, but it's not terribly useful otherwise. I originally planned to have a 6s fire time instead of a 9s fire time, so we'll try that out. I think it'd also be neat to see if an extra 10 weight matters.

    The change in explosion force is just to make it consistent with std ML.

    Same deal with the other salvo weapons. Their explosion radius & forces were oddly set. I didn't really see any rhyme or reason, so we'll see what happens when they are all consistent.

    Also, guided salvo hasn't quite felt usable enough for me, so we'll test what happens when its speed is closer to other MLs.

    GL's explosion radius was changed to match that of UGL. It felt sorta odd that they were so far apparent.

    In general, GL is usually useless, so a modest buff couldn't hurt.


    It's always felt like MLs got the short end of the stick. If you have to give up your ML or your cannon on an LT, what do you do? You give up the ML every time because the cannon is simply more reliable.

    I think some of that comes from the increased accuracy from its speed. So we'll see what happens when we have a 1-slot ML that moves as fast as UML but can fit on an LT without any necessary research.

    This is another 1-slot weapon that fixes a slightly different issue.

    The problem occurs when you have a heavy and you dump a salvo ML on there, but you have a spare slot. If you have extra weight, you'll often through an extra ML on the empty slot. But the problem is that this ML doesn't sync up well with your salvo and it just doesn't contribute. It's irritating. One solution would be to make a 3-slot salvo ML. That's doable, but it would end up being pretty OP because it'd need like 10 MLs (and would take a full second to fire).

    Another solution is to add a small modular weapon that can be added to a salvo without much of a weight penalty, fired in sync with the salvo & not prolong the firing sequence of the rest of the salvo. As a bonus, you could throw it on an LT if you're feeling crazy, or two of them on a Med if you're running out of weight for the heavier (but more lethal) 2-slot salvo.

    This is the big one. Since forever, MLs have felt like second class citizens to cannons. They are often treated more like "tools" than actual primary tank-killers. Nukes are useful, but you won't be killing tanks with them. BioML is very useful, but you only need one because the DOT doesn't stack and it ends up feeling more like a finicky yet powerful "sniper rifle" than a swift & fun "assault rifle."

    I want MLs to have their own "Rails". Something that makes the enemy call out to their commander because it changes the tank combat.

    UML is the closest thing that we had to that "pure dps" role for MLs. But it didn't scale up to heavies well partly because it was only a 2-slot weapon and it has to play nice on mediums. On heavies, you end up throwing a stdML on just as a token thing. A 2-slot weapon plus a 1-slot weapon does not equal a 3-slot weapon. 3-slots are generally a bit more potent than that.

    We needed a "rails". So we're gonna try the two "Multi" MLs (if anyone has a better name, fire it off). The 3-slot "Triple" ML does 80 DPS. That's about 30% more than a single rail gun (we always need to hedge for ML inaccuracy).

    I'd love to put two of those on an NF heavy, but we can't do that yet. As a band-aid, we'll try a "Double" ML that can sync up with TML and nudge that DPS up to something useful. Hopefully we can get close to letting NF heavies go toe to toe with BE heavies without needing the boring BioML crutch.

    We voted in "Plain" armor, so I figured it made sense to roll back the engine name as well.

    If anyone cares to have a different description, throw that out there.

    I like the idea of a slow & cheap engine, but I never felt like it was a good idea to cannibalize an existing engine for that purpose. Turbine received a modest speed bump & its HP now matches that of 3phase.

    It's still not as heavier nor as costly as it once was. I figured we don't need a million 30-weight engines, eh?

    A new engine fits the "cheap & small" schema a little better. Since this is engine is dedicated to this purpose, I figured it would be fine to make it even smaller. It's pretty similar to Biodiesel, which I figured would be a good starting point. It doesn't have Biodiesel's heat-resistance abilities, obviously.

    Just tweaking some research times. For some reason, no one likes Budget armor despite it being almost identical to the very light version of Absorbant that everyone complained was OP. I got nothin.

    Also rails were sped up a bit since two full minutes is a bit long for a weapon that can be crippled by a common armor.

    I put the new engine & MLs in Electrical since Electrical doesn't really have any useful MLs except for homing which has pretty meh DPS if you ask me and 3phase a bit chunkier when placed on tanks these days.



    I added a nice framework for testing vehicle handling. We'll talk about that later.

    For right now, NF jeeps were rolled back to their shitty state. The goal wasn't to redo the jeeps as much as just see how sensitive people were to having handling edited. I was surprised how few people commented about that jeep despite jeep handling being a hotly contested thing on the forums. Always good to hear that people are willing to do a little testing!

    Tanks were edited very very slightly to improve sliding a little bit. There's more that can be done to really turn em into spider tanks that'll stick to walls, but I'm satisfied with baby steps at this point. Stay tuned.

    Candles & a few other people were complaining that repair pads were too expensive and I can't really argue with them. They are a bit cheaper and a bit tougher when dropped in hostile territory. We'll see how it goes.

    The previous ML turret changes were pretty good. They changes are pretty small this time around. I'm pretty satisfied with how MLs operate now.

    Grant told me to do this so we'll do it.

    I liked the decision that had to be made about giving up your secondary, but it ultimately ended up being confusing to newer players that didn't expect to see grenades in two places.

    Cycle Time was rolled back to how it used to be. Standing spread decrement was edited very slightly and kick was increased quite a bit on the first shot.

    One funny thing to note - pistol2 was nearly laser accurate while prone AND moving. The moving spread was actually lower than the stationary spread. I'm pretty sure this was unintended.

    Just some minor tweaks all around.

    I hope the BEAR damage bump doesn't make it completely broken. I wanted to tweak its accuracy instead, but I honestly just didn't have time. Testing infantry weapons takes about ten and a half years.

    The NFHR's falloffbase was brought on pare with the BEAR. This shouldn't be an enormous change.

    SMG2 gets up to its max accuracy a bit quicker now. It only takes two shots while standing and 4 while crouched/prone. Still, the max spread is pretty nice so I don't think it'll be too big of a deal.

    People keep losing their shit over how many pellets the shotgun uses so we'll see about decreasing that. Spreads were decreased such that the overall "pellet density" should be similar. So the killing power is more or less the same, but you just have to aim a bit more. It's also tougher to get double kills (which were fucking awesome, but oh well).
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2014
  3. Z100000M

    Z100000M Vithered Weteran

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    I hope im just unconscious somewhere in a ditch and this is all a bad dream
     
  4. complete_

    complete_ lamer

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    bump yet again. because people keep bringing up earlier topics

    ill add my complaints here later
     
  5. Grantrithor

    Grantrithor Member

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    Cool weapons I guess, I mean I'm not entirely sure how well they balance into the game, especially since they were made by spartacus but whatever. Complaint I have is that NFHR is still a semi-automatic 15 round mag shotgun.
     
  6. Lazybum

    Lazybum :D Staff Member Moderator

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    Spartacus, you forgot to change that htt value, unless you really want to see how things play out for some reason.(Hint:|t will suck and be no fun)
    You could also just change bullet resists in the scripts right? It's just vehicle mgs with the property. Considering you lowered the clips by quite a bit I don't think everyone will start rushing apcs with mgs to kill buildings either.

    I don't get the research times though, at least with budget. I thought that was 90 secs? I was grabbing it all the time because it was right next to gas and super cheap, which was great for me because everytime I had to command I was behind in everything due to bad starts.

    Everything else is neat I suppose, gotta play to see.
     
  7. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    The changelog wasn't updated for that particular change. BioCN does 1 HTT, so that's 15 heat over time. Good catch.

    I'd rather take babysteps with this one. DU is partially balanced by its spread. With immobile buildings, you can drive right up to em.

    Gas is no longer super cheap and everyone hates Budget, so they won't mind.

    I mean, Budget got researched like a million times today and people still whined. It's amazing. I don't try to hide that this armor is sorta good, but they'll have none of it.

    But yeah, you're 100% correct.
     
  8. D.D.D. Destroyer

    D.D.D. Destroyer Member Staff Member Moderator

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    Be meds handle pretty bad now, I kept spinning with bio diesel as if it was 3phase. Also ifantry is much thinner than in call of duty, and melee is a bitch in comparison.


    Tanks still too healthy, turret farms on cod still a bitch.
     
  9. flasche

    flasche Member Staff Member Moderator

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    so its either hecn+bioml or biocn+heml now?
     
  10. BigTeef

    BigTeef Bootleg Headshot master

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    When do we lynch spartacus for making every single engine except coolant into fucking spinners?
     
  11. Kylegar

    Kylegar Specstax Rule

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    One of the directions I tried to go a few years ago was "MGs kill Infantry, Cannons kill Tanks, MLs kill buildings". Obviously, this wasn't a hard rule, but this is one of the reasons that there are no MGs that kill buildings or Cannons that kill both Infantry and Tanks (HE was a slight exception due to it being a 'core' research when I was team lead).

    I would be incredibly worried about allowing DU (or any MG) to kill buildings. Remember, Bullet weapons hitscan and have no max range, so you can snipe buildings from across the map.
     
  12. Empty

    Empty Member

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    Surely we could implement falloff for vehicle MGs too and have it round down so there's a maximum range at which you can hurt buildings?

    Although that does feature the problem of 'WHY WONT THIS TURRET DIE OMGGGG' maybe we need hit-ticks too.
     
  13. complete_

    complete_ lamer

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    yuck yuck dumg hurting buildings. thats what hemg is for
    du is a just vehicles thing
     
  14. Ikalx

    Ikalx Member

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    Some of the changes look interesting. Though as I got further down the explanation page I got a little confused. Why are ML's not for killing vehicles again? They used to be top dog at that - four ML's on target would strip the armour right off something, and there'd be no splashback like cannons could sometimes do.

    Of course ML's weren't really long range weapons per se. At least, not all of them. It was generally easier to aim cannons long range - even with the arc, because the projectile was faster and you could fire in succession.

    Do bear in mind that for the longest time it was Rails VS Nukes, true, but it was also HE and UML that made up the majority of real tank combat, and UML was no sideshow.
     
  15. complete_

    complete_ lamer

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    the vehicles not being able to fire if it reaches heat capacity is unintuitive. you'll have people trying to fire and not knowing why they cant fire. it also it removes tank overheating mostly (still overheat from damage/weapon effects)

    dumg didnt need a nerf. noone used it

    reducing missle damage is probably a bad idea. hurts nf in the long run since they are missle dependent, regardless of speed increase/explosion radius.

    bioml is not noob friendly anymore. it wont be researched with that change

    bio cannon, whatever. might as well have plasma missle now too

    1 slot missles are interesting. may turn out to be a bad idea. and fast ml doesnt seem fast

    compact engine seems to negate biodiesel engine. see what happens

    you broke tank handling. they now act like they're on ice. revert to previous handling which is pretty much as good as its gonna get.
    and people did complain about the jeep handling. without any priming on my part (all i said was jeeps felt different)

    repair pad change is good

    lvl1mg change hurts me

    grenades back to where they belong makes me happy. now bring back concs, which allow scouts the ability to disable turrets without hide crawling for ages.

    smg2 still sucks
    shotgun still 1 hits (lag dependent too)
    rifles on a whole are not fun to play with anymore
    dont know what pistol 2 is (is it the shotty pistol, or the tundra falcon x22. PLEASE BE SPECIFIC)


    everything else ill see what happens
     
  16. Empty

    Empty Member

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    You can have 2 compact engines on one tank.
    Is this intended behaviour?
     
  17. ViroMan

    ViroMan Black Hole (*sniff*) Bully

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    does it make a driving difference?
     
  18. Z100000M

    Z100000M Vithered Weteran

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    The second one allows you to spawn in a jeep when the tank blows up
     
  19. ImSpartacus

    ImSpartacus nerf spec plz

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    pistol2 is the BE pistol. If no one cares, I wouldn't mind rolling back those names. I can't remember them to save my life.
     
  20. Grantrithor

    Grantrithor Member

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    It's not entiiiiiirely spartacus fault, spinners come from latency.
     

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