Ideas for future vehicle armor and engines (more counterplay)

> casual player
> 1337 hours

Yeah, no

The 'meta' weapon research you brought up (except homing. Nobody sane gets homing against BE, because it's very hard to land HML on a BE medium) is considered that because it has the highest damage potential (except UML is better than guided but good luck landing shots consistently and quickly, maybe two people still playing can do that). Since tanks are primarily meant to beat other tanks, and secondarily break defense lines in their entirety, high damage and ease of use are key factors that make ranged/guided and bio MG the go-to weapons - as long as they remain kings in the "effective DPS" department, they will be the meta.

Bio MG's reign might come to an end with the next patch, as it will address the currently reduced damage of DU and HE MG. It depends on how much impact that will have and I dare not predict that.

As for the suggestions:

• I agree that something should be done with bio diesel's viability, as ever since it became impossible to overheat yourself, overheated tanks became a thing of the past, which makes the engine a hotter and weaker gas turbine. My suggestion would be to bring back the ability to overheat yourself (along with some warnings and pointers regarding the overheated state), but that'd be a hugely unpopular decision.
  
• Regenerative has almost double the HP of plain (72 vs 40), and a single plate grows back in about 15 seconds from the start of regeneration. If you burst it down with heavy-hitting weapons, it will melt in a short period of time, and regeneration won't kick in. Hell, it barely kicks in during normal combat already. On the flipside, the last time regenerative was continuously restoring health, there were complaints of it being too strong*, but it's been a while and I feel like they were overexaggerated.
  The problem with regenerative is that if you beef it up too much, infantry will have even more trouble with regen tanks. Then again, the last time regen was the go-to armor, APCR wasn't even thought about, so it's probably not that much of a problem anymore?
  What I'd do is remove the regeneration reset period and see whereit takes us - either take it away directly from regenerative, or experiment with a second biological armor that has less HP, but better regenerative properties - both the delay and the regeneration rate. Either way, dramatic changes would require hotfix-style fixing, which, while easy, requires constant monitoring, and you know how this has been lately.
  
• Deflective has been largely irrelevant for a long time now, but that might change once anti-vehicle MGs get a bit of a buff and bio MG stops being dominant. If it still doesn't get use after the next patch, it's probably in need of a small buff (I still remember how we got here). Instead of anything complex like scaling the deflective modifier, I'd just tweak said modifier or increase its HP.
  
• Fission does require a tiny bit of cooling while stationary by virtue of it cooling only when the tank is actively accelerating - it makes a terrible choice for combat tanks. It might be okay on LTs, but those become irrelevant late-game so you shouldn't worry yourself too much about what's good and bad for them.** It might also work on support APCs (hahaha) but APC engines are all equal weight and you don't really concern yourself with cooling either, so your only real priorities are handling and speed, for both of which there are better engines. If we could change fission's cooling to work dependent on vehicle speed instead of acceleration, it'd be sweet, but alas.
  
• Coolant is cool, pun intended. It's siegebreaker tech, much like nukes and artillery, but it can also be used in main battle tanks to passable effect (unless you want to retreat). It's where it should be as far as I'm concerned.
  
• Capacitative is supposed to be used with engineer vehicle cooling to pretty good effect, but it can't stomach the heat generation that comes with my playstyle, and most players don't know vehicle cooling (or heat management) exists. That reliance on cooling makes it a really poor choice as the main armor. Homing signal jamming is nowhere near important enough to offset inferior parameters like weight and HP. Turrets are nothing major in most tank engagements and HML has niche usage.

*I believe the complaints largely stemmed from the misconception of assuming a deep red plate indicates a plate of at least 1/3rd plate health, while in reality it means any amount of health between 1 and ~some low number before it starts becoming noticeably orange. 10-15%?

** Yes yes superlights. They work in the early game and they set you up with good research for the late game.

 

I've used capacitative when APC rushing (nuclear is a good place for this setup), the heat isn't a problem when you aren't shooting.
And i've found it works well early game when the heat output and damage taken isn't as high. Good on meds and lights, not suitable for heavies I think. I've also found it rather resistant to gren RPGs compared to other armours.

I dislike seeing the same research paths too... i want to see more variety in strategies.

However I can think of a few good reasons for the electrical opening play...

1. electrical engineering contains turret upgrades, turret spam is very strong with few players.
2. 3phase engine, it's the fastest, and has very good cooling when stationary.
3. composite is too weak to vehicle MGs and too expensive, need a new "best armour" (Reactive)
4. Dual TOW guided is too strong

The main factor i believe is the opportunity to upgrade turrets, so in low-pop games, electrical makes the most sense as turrets are necessary for defense. So when the population increases, electrical is all that's practiced with, so we see it more in high-pop games.

I'm all for moving turret upgrade to a separate research tree, and see if that changes the choices...

I'd like to see plasma, rail and bio cannons used a bit more tbh... Although I think rails need a buff vs structures, and plasma needs less heat output. Also, what does anyone think to a bio grenade launcher?

 

I'm certain that the only time regen stopped regenerating was when you stripped all plates off it. It's pretty easy to see if you set the regen parameter to 1, which instantly regens the whole plate. Unless this was changed in the last 6 months, I don't remember patch notes very well cause I haven't been playing nor bullshitting on these forums lately.

Bio diesel has higher max heat, 125 compared to the 100 of the other engines. I remember saying it'd be neat if something like 3phase had a lower max heat to kinda illustrate it's a hit and run engine but it was shot down cause nukes take 75 to fire or something. Still it's not like diesel has nothing going for it, it's just not obvious and with the way sieging works coolant is still a better option. Security giving it the same reverse speed as top speed could make it pretty good though, especially on maps like streets where you don't have room to turn or maneuver.

I don't get the beef against fission either, for lights and meds( I think) it's cool rate is 4 at idle. For comparison to the others the whole thing goes:
Standard(4), Fission(4), Bio Diesel(5), Gas(6), 3Phase(6), Coolant(9)
Looks low but it's not that bad really. Heavy tanks have their cooling stats something like 30-40% increased, so:
Standard(6), Fission(6), Bio Diesel(7), Gas(8), 3Phase(8), Coolant(11)
Point is fission isn't cooling at zero nor at near zero, it worked like that at 2.4ish and that was super noticeable. Also what you mean better engines for apcs destroyer, fission is second fastest engine and has highest horsepower, so it's easier to do certain things in it. Though looking at it just now, the horsepower on apcs is way different then the light tanks. So that explains why there's not that much difference in handling between the engines for apcs I guess.

 

I'm too lazy to go digging for threads dating back to the time when regeneration would happen continuously, so you have to go on that adventure yourself or just take my word for it. This is a change from many many months ago, not the last two patches, and it didn't last all that long either.

The higher heat capacity of bio diesel is enough to fit in 2 or 3 extra shots (assuming firing at full capacity - cannon, MG, ML). After those few shots, bio diesel is at a disadvantage when compared to gas, and given the average person's accuracy, that difference is negligible, so the former is an inferior engine. Reducing the heat capacity of 3phase would be an interesting attempt at curbing it down IMO, and we don't need to do a giant 25% nerf, a smaller one (10-20%) would be more than enough for a trial.

The cooling rate of fission is on par with standard engine, that is nowhere near enough to sustain more than a single weapon while stationary, and the short bursts of active acceleration don't mitigate that well enough to allow for a full complement of weapons. Sure, it could maybe work with a cannon + MG combination for mediums, but heavies with fission will be sad and hot. And this is before we get into the handling problems.

The horsepower of fission APCs makes them quite prone to spinning out, particularly when starting off, which makes handling much more difficult than with weaker engines.

 

That's exactly what I said about regeneration. It happens continuously unless you remove all plates from a side then it stops for 3 seconds or something. The only change that I can remember is when it was made able to regen from 0 plates back in 2.52.8. Since then there's been no mention of changing how regen works. Unless there was a misunderstanding somewhere, it sounded like regen pauses when taking damage from both of your posts when that's not the case.

I never meant diesel having a higher heat capacity to make a great engine, it's a small buff that might be handy if you play with a lot of high heat burst weapons. I do think having a high reverse speed that's suppose to come in the next patch would make it a unique engine that I would research on certain maps though.

About fission, this is where people should be researching the right stuff for the right map. Fission is still a great choice on maps like dust or ward where you generally never stop moving. We just have a problem of wanting single solutions for every problem. Of course, part of it too is how I see players just not move their tank really. Most people do find it hard to move and shoot, so they stand still to do it, so even maps where you should be constantly moving like dust has people just stand still as soon as the enemy and fire away. So I can kinda agree that if I don't have great players on my team, or even slightly better then decent, fission is a bad choice even on super open maps. This doesn't mean fission should change though, fission has it's place and I wouldn't want to remove that uniqueness it has just cause people suck at this game anymore.

I'm not disagreeing about things spinning out with fission, I meant more you can run up walls and hills easier with it so you can get to more places or past defenses. So in the hands of Hobbes it's incredibly great, in the hands of the average player not so much.

 

It sure doesn't feel like it keeps on regenerating, but I'll assume I'm just too impatient to notice it and take your word for it.

Empires doesn't have weapons that generate enough burst for the extra heat capacity to properly come into effect, with the possible exception of dual salvo homing and an MG. Every other weapon combo (I can think of) benefits more from being able to dump off the excess heat quicker.

The problem with fission is the same kind that leads to people refusing to research artillery tanks, but to a lesser extent - players will not be able to utilise the tools you give them correctly, which will result in them being not as efficient as they could be, or actively hurting your team. The skill floor for fission is too high, and you pointed that out yourself - people can't hit and move at the same time.

But I'm sure we can appreciate the high skill ceiling in our small group of weathered veterans

 

Point I was badly making is that with regards to engines there's very little to actually change. Any safer then it is right now is the same as just making everything gas turbine, something reliable no matter who's on the team or what map it is. Which comes back to arguments over armors, weapons, and everything else in this game that's researchable. If it's not idiot proof it might as well not exist. I don't entirely disagree with that either, we certainly had some things that were like that that really needed a change like old fission for instance, but I don't believe current fission is in that camp.

 

But....it's already like what you said in the summary, just not taken too far to make sure that each weapon is at least sort of usable in every situation. The problem with extremely specialised weapons has been highlighted numerous times already - they aren't viable as a starting option because you might get blindly hard-countered, and that sucks for everyone on your team.

A bio GL would be useful if the bio cloud lingered for a while, thus denying an area. I don't think there is code support for that though.

 

There kinda is actually, it's in the scripts as a parameter. It basically retriggers the explosion in whatever area it detonated every interval over a set time, kinda like how bio works. The problem is how it actually functions though, because it would also retrigger the explosion particles, which would kill fps like no one's business. I think there was also a slight problem with it ignoring walls, like if you shot bio grenades next to a rax the damage and smoke would seep through the walls, but maybe I'm thinking of something else.

You can still find them in the scripts commented out, it's used under "toxic gas grenade" and "static grenade".

As an aside it's a shame friendly fire doesn't work for helpful things, you can give weapons negative values to do helpful things, but sadly they only affect the enemy or yourself. I know what your thinking, but I was once tinkering with the idea of an aux slot on tanks that would have minor special abilities, like cooling your self off real quick or launching a grenade that would heal yourself if you stood over it. I mean was awkward, but that's what you have to do if you want to abuse scripts for all they are worth.