arties cant turn, they are easy kills even for lights - and if you can land a couple of shots on a heavy its already killing it. only works in tight spots though, shit is mobile ...
Yes of course I know that - but what I said was TAKE A SNAP SHOT so you can build your own statistics with every release. But with releases every week randomly changing everything I doubt they care enough to attempt a balance. I just finished a game of 2v2 Vehicle training playing NF and it was ridiculous. ONE shot of plasma will strip five layers of compo. One volley of HE will take off all of absorbant. Tanks are so bad right now - it's not worth playing with heavies on NF. So I'll troll on BE and claim I'm a great player. Switch to Bio Engine and you crawl everywhere and even though you can move when overheated you can't move fast enough to get away or dodge any shots. Triple ML is only good for long distance shooting, get near a plasma BE tank and your dead. Get near a Rail tank and your dead. Switch to absorbant to counter rails and bio or HE kills you quickly. Would be funny pushing on vehicle training with jeeps since heavies are such crap. Very sad game right now. Not worth even playing.
Give arties a limited (~11.5 degrees each side) turret-moving radius. @JGF: This is probably why we probably should have done the major release all at once. We'd be in a much more balanced state if we had. (Of course, that assumes that noone rage-quit Empires entirely, but I think a long, tedious unbalanced period might be worse.) Of course, I've played like three matches in as many weeks, so what do I know?
If you want to start the insult game. Here I go. You just skipped my whole point because you have zero logic ability. Also because you are retardedly bad at this game that you don't even know why BE got more kills. You are also retardedly bad at driving vehicles, I don't even know why anyone should take your opinions seriously. I've seen people whining about a certain weapon being OP, but they fucking ignored the fact that the enemy driver was far better. I am sure you are one of them. 2.62 is a bad patch, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with your shit.
And how would you ever know what is unbalanced if you don't test Heavies vs Heavies? We joined to test this specifically. The solution is to ignore the facts? Are you recommending that NF compete vs BE heavies with mediums on a map with infinite resources? Security - yes I am skipping your whole point.
There's no one map that will let you test something as complicated as vehicle balance. In particular, the circumstances on that map lead to gameplay that is relatively unique to that map only. For example, if I'm on nf and I decide to get into a heavy tank on a low pop match, then it's not uncommon for me to run dual guided salvo with rails and hemg. That works great on that map when I know I'll only need to deal with heavy tanks at a distance on large flat ground, but it would be terrible on a more traditional map because it's useless against infantry & buildings and it's not optimal against vehicles at closer ranges. Vehicle training is one slice of gameplay, so you only get one slice of facts.
It does seem that Arty's are not super useful - but I do believe the original intent was to cripple very strong weapons and make weaker weapons easier and faster. All the recent changes are watering this down with no clear purpose other than random - let's see what this does - kind of changes. Adding old weapons that were removed for a reason and increasing the research choices does not make the game easier for new players. I tried dual homing on a NF heavy last night and it was a joke. 2 NF homing Heavies vs 1 BE heavy died quickly. We stacked NF about 1.4 to 1 in skill level. It only took one player to combat most of what we threw at it. The best setup to counter rails was plasma canon + 2 slot Bio ML, which was countered with dual plasma. Since there is no engine to get away from Plasma - we lost every encounter. We switched to dual three slot ML and we could kill one BE heavy before we lost both of our NF heavies. We tried Bio engine which is useless since it's so slow. They just trailed us all the way back to our base keeping us overheated or using rails stripped all armor quickly and destroyed both tanks. Once I realized there was no solution I told the guys - we're done, I'm out! I'd vote for change from weekly releases to quarterly significant releases with bug fixes in between. Document the release a week PRIOR to releasing it. Make decision on whether that change should be applied. ONE person should not be deciding what is best for Empires. I've heard some plans that may seem like a good idea at face value, but in practice really suck. Use of PUG server to test releases with skilled players at least once a week. Ask for write ups from each player independently. What tends to happen is one person says "Hey I think Gren is OP" and every one else just chimes in the same. Some players just follow a respected players lead and their input needs to be decided based on it's solo value. Then if more than one person says the same thing - it holds more value. Normal Development: Get Requirements - taken from the community, Design - document before implementing, Peer review plans, Implement, Test vigorously with mods prior to final release - rinse, repeat, Release Bug Fixes What we currently have: Think up of something cool or decide based on trolling in spec, Implement, Release, Take grief from community for screwing up game, Ignore input and focus on something else cool, Change, Change, Change, Change and pray everyone stops bitching at you, Randomly throw in new releases to make something else worse than the last thing you broke so now the community focuses on that - and you consider your last break fixed since no one mentions it anymore,
The one slice of information I'm reporting is: NF Heavies are only good at a distance, Engines are too slow for them to run. BE Heavies are good at a distance and up close. Just once I'd like you to admit you screwed up and are working on a fix.
There's a "screw up" in every release. Sometimes it takes a week to notice. Sometimes it's two months (cough*thisthread*cough). For these "screw ups", there will always be a fix in the works. Always.
Salvo ml, that 2 slot weapon in chemistry, is decent enough with that 5 sec reload time. Because of the weight you can shove on a cannon too, so you have something to use at a distance while you close the gap. Uml is fast enough to use at a distance if you wanted to put uml and plasma for a cannon, I think that might work out nicely too. I'm just saying, it's not that bad of a balance, at least the few times I got fight heavy rail tanks. The amount of ammo rails and triple ml still feels silly to me. I feel like you have to try to run out of ammo. 30 might be a little low for any driver that can't drop his own ammo, but 60 for rails and triple ml is a full minute of nonstop firing. That's a bit much to me.
I don't quite agree, I do remember backing off a few fights when I saw I had no ammo and wasn't engy, I would assume other people had similar problems. Or people just lose tanks before they run out, I don't know.
60s of fire time is the benchmark for vehicle weapon ammo. Most vehicle weapons are close to that. It seems to work well enough. It's been that way for a while barring some minor oddities that no one ever noticed (e.g. plasma mg).