You've changed my mind. I'm really not concerned about grens being able to wreck absorbant; gren anti-vehicle ability is probably underpowered (thanks overpowered versatility!). I see the problem as their inability to do the same to absorbant's partner. If the gren had a speedier anti-vehicle option (one can hope...) then it might be a different story. Or carry any old ML. That's one of the reasons that I'm not a fan of armors with silly resists and what not. You can carry numerous weapons to hedge, but you have to go all-in on your single armor choice. As long as the resists are meaningful, then it'd always be an unfun choice. I'd like to mention that TML does 80 dps, but I understand where you're coming from. It's more than rails. It's the most in the game. And yeah, 3 MLs at once will knock off nearly a plate of Brittle. It's the most powerful non-nuke, non-salvo "shot" in the game. So I think less than one plate is pretty good. Comparatively, reactive loses an even plate to the same payload, but it weighs 33% more. Reflective has the potential to lose less than a plate depending on your skill, but it, too, weighs more than Brittle. Regen loses only 1.5 plates, but it still weighs more. As far as armors that weigh less than Brittle's 15, compo loses just shy of 2 plates from those 3 MLs. Budget loses an even 2 plates and Absorbant loses a smidge more than 2 plates. They weigh less, but not that much less. The fact is that we're talking about a trigger pull from the single strongest vehicle weapon meant to usefully put consistent dps on vehicles. It's not going to be pretty. In fact, all of the 3-slot weapons are unapolgetically powerful. They only show up on heavies and heavies have to be a big deal. I heard a nice one-liner from Security (or someone) that I found rather compelling. He basically said if you're letting the enemy attack one of your buildings unabated, then you probably deserve to lose that building. I thought that was fitting. You win Empires matches by maintaining aggression. If you try to turtle, there are game mechanics that the enemy can use (cough*heavies*cough) that will make you have a bad day.
I was making the comparison based on why abs exists. Abs takes 22 damage from rails, a tad more than half a plate. Compare to brittle and how it takes 90% from triple ml. While abs gets a couple extra plates. Do you see what I'm talking about? If you want to make armors into hard counters there should be some sort of consistency between the factions favorite weapons against said armors. Asymmetrical balance is what your aiming for, I get that. It just isn't quite working right. If you really feel like heavy weapons should be able to destroy buildings at some extreme ranges( you can fire and hit buildings outside the draw range) you should make nukes just as accurate. I mean what's the harm in that?
I wouldn't think of damage in terms of plates. You're not adjusting for weight or raw weapon damage and it's making my head spin. Yes rails eat roughly half a plate, but they do pretty much that to all armors because they do half the damage of one tml "shot". I'm reluctant to get all spreadsheetpires with you, but I'll tell you how I configured those two armors. I figured out the effective hp/weight for both 1800 and 3900 speed weapons on both armors. At their "specialties", they get roughly 8.5 hp/weight and at their weaker ends, they both get about 4.5 hp/weight (slightly below average, but still better than paper). Note that 2.51's absorbant did like 10-11 hp/weight against rails. That's my benchmark for a "hard" counter. 2.6's absorbant could hit that mark against rails (and paid dearly to get there). I won't pretend that these are perfect and will never change. They will certainly receive some more love, but that's my methodology. I think it's pretty sound barring a few peculiarities with infantry weapons (which all either ignore spod or are slow). Oh and nukes are as accurate as uml, fml and the multi mls. That happened in like 2.52.9 and fucking candles hasn't stopped researching them since. -_-
The early game is the most enjoyable part of empires for me but isn't doubling research time on everything a bit of an overkill? Didn't it take more than 5-6 minutes to get heavies already? I mean, I don't like tanks at all but they are the only thing that can stop a good squad from just wrecking everything.
I guess it's a temporary fix until people can look back into coupling res with research? There wasn't much resistance to the research points idea.
You are not alone. I always go with the customization of 6/5/5/4 or 5/4/4/3..etc There's no reason to NOT put most armors at the front.
Heavy tanks accelerate faster going forwards rather than backwards (unless that's been changed this patch, I don't know), so wouldn't it make sense to put most armor at the back, then drive backwards, but retreat by going forwards?
Yes, spike has been advocating that for the longest time. It's probably just real awkward though so people still don't like it. Edit: Ah, even though it's a bit slower it's almost negligible. So there's a lot less emphasis really. Though, why was heavy tanks made to match reverse and forward speeds? I didn't really consider it til trainzack mentioned it.
Sorry, I was a smidge vague about that earlier in the thread. I figure that heavies need to get pretty slow, but the goal isn't to make them glacial in reverse. So I feel like matching the forward & reverse speeds is a way to let heavies get a smidge slower without feeling that slow. And besides, they were so stupidly close that it was silly to keep them apart. 3phase is sorta retardedly fast in reverse now, but I figure people oughta have that option if they "pay" the weight penalty. It probably would've made more sense to just keep decreasing forward speed only and not messing with reverse. That would've basically done the same thing.
I suppose, but it does make it easier for someone to "strafe" to avoid fire. It's one of the reasons that it's incredibly worth getting 3 phase over a few extra plates of armor. I'm really hating the vehicle scripts, nothing feels terribly consistent and modifying certain parts can have big effects even if it doesn't exactly make sense for it do much at all. I will find a way to slow down acceleration though, I think the key to making heavies "balanced" lies in that.
If there's an issue with 3phase, then we'll obviously address that. Concerning acceleration, I suppose you could slow down acceleration by playing with the gears.
Yeah, that doesn't quite work. I need to fiddle with a couple of things like shift timing and max rpm. I mention max rpm because for some reason just modifying the max rpm can drastically affect acceleration. Higher decreases acceleration speed and lower increases acceleration speed even when you don't mess with rpm shifting. Working at low speeds makes it harder for higher gears to kick in it seems too, not to mention there doesn't seem to be any sort of consistency between gears. At least I know they do shift, that's important. Sorry for random rant, but this is really stopping me from finishing the scripts I'm working on and I'm getting impatient.
Haha, I can relate. I just did a quick bit of my own testing (there were quite a few challenges, but I didn't want to make poor security fail at them so I didn't notify him) and I noticed that a std engine NF heavy can't even get up that one hill on arid from a standstill. I thought I recall viroman telling me that once, but I didn't want to believe him. There goes our benchmarks for horsepower... But yeah, I recall that max rpm does all sorts of crazy shit that it shouldn't do.
I'm honestly going to throw out that benchmark, it really is a mapping issue. If anyone complains they can go up one of the other hills that aren't so ridiculous steep.
did you read the WTF trickster thread. I found shit was just cray cray with vehicles when I was trying to figure shit out. You could end up with ultra reverse speeds. excerpts from that thread...
Some comments: Doubling research was a bad idea, making games last hours, it was removed from Viper. SMG2 and Rifle Spread is bad now - changing how you must play on Dick Street. I had the bead on guy, close range, who would have normally been dead, I never touched him. He even said it was funny how the bullets didn't touch him. Next time I kneeled in front of two guys and mowed them both down. So game play is now focused on laying down and planting yourself. At a long distance it is easy to chew up enemy as long as your not rushing. Regen - OP dejour armor. Stomp Candles Nuke/Arty tactic on Candles by rushing Bio Eng/Regen heavies. It's almost funny - lose all armor and just dodge a bit and regain enough to keep fighting - even when tank health is at 10%. BIO Tank so slow - don't plan on coming back for heal - fight and dump or push as engineer and heal yourself. Reminds me of a great old Cartoon - REBOOT. Where Enzo got his wish to be the smartest player in the System. So everything was slowed down so much that he was the smartest. I think that is what Spartacus is doing to the game. If your fast at firing - he'll soon slow your turn speed. I see guys shooting backwards while driving just to get some speed. Start speed was broken on Bio since it used to spin out. Instead of fixing that he just make bio engine SLOW. Go Gas for some speed. 3Phase is still too heavy. BIO Engine used to be the nub engine, I thought he was making this a game for nubs - where camping with MG would rack up kills and vet rushes were easily mowed down. But now he makes nubs easy kills in a tank. No idea what is going on with this game - random changes as usual. I used to have a reason to go down every research path and different for every map. Now there is a quick research that is identical on every map. Nubs are more pissed than ever. PS: A while ago I think I recommended dual HE direct shot on a jeep should obliterate it and it would be cool if it burst into flames and flew threw the air. Must be careful buffing HE without doing something similar to ML's. But I hardly ever research HE anymore. When another weapon is 4X OP over HE - why bother with HE?