I had put this somewhere else and decided to move it here based on suggestions purpose. The idea is to give the commanders the ability to recycle buildables, ie towers,bridges,dragons teeth much in the same fashion as a building. Too often, say for an old example, people unknowingly build the towers on slaughtered, giving the enemy a haven to attack from or someone builds up dragons teeth blocking a way for their own team. With the added new object models, having this feature might help the decision of map makers to include more of those things, since the commander will now be able to rectify any counterproductive building by the team. This would only be for items your team owns (you built them), as without ownership, this would be way too op. The cooldown should also be based on what item it is, i.e. dragons teeth comparable to walls, while tower/bridge be more in tune with barracks recycle time. With this addition, I can see new players getting yelled at less often, and map makers being more willing to include more of these pre existing defense systems into the game. Here is also a preview of the new models that have been introduced to make the post complete with the original.
recycles bridge on slaughtered as enemy team tries to tank rush. recycles towers on slaughtered to prevent enemy team being able to cap them after taking them. comm could recycle them so engineers could grind points. You'd have to give mappers full control over which buildables and their recycle time/cooldown.
I like this but a side effect could be that people could try farming points without spending resources. It's not practical since the commander has to recycle them but I think I would do it. Too much RPG for me lel
a comm could place walls for engis to farm points aswell, yet noone does it (except on money but out of a different intention, yet if you build up the walls blocking bridge you usually top the scoreboard), if youd remove every exploitable aspect of empires you might aswell remove the game as a whole. "it is exploitable", is a weak con. not saying it should not be mentioned so it can be counteracted (if its even neccessary), yet imo it should be considered insufficient to shoot down a suggestion.
Sure you could farm them for points. By the time you're spending time farming, the enemy is pushing up and taking your area. (You can exploit the engi walls thingy by building others' walls/turrets).
I haven't investigated how the map build-able system works so can't comment on this. But here's the preview I made for the models a while back: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4212192/2016-07-21 15-17-08.mp4 I'm hoping to do some team themed barricades and perhaps some debris models soon, just to get back into the modeling process. I'll also be doing some props that I've been asked for.
I just had a thought too; I could probably make some damaged versions of these really easy to bring some diversity. I want to update the textures on the Brenodi barriers that are used on a lot of maps so I might do that soon.
Simple fix, don't give out points for building custom engi buildables. Only give them for com based buildings, turrets and such. Any custom brush based structures should have the building recycle time. The lower was for the small dragons teeth, wall model based structures.
it really is not an issue, building stuff is probably the slowest way of getting points. Not to mention there are a dozen other ways to exploit it. And what Neko didn't mention is that building engineer walls does not give points. Keep in mind Empires is balanced for 26vs26 pug level games, in which farming points is not a valid strategy 99% of the time.
I like this idea. The bridge on Slaughtered wouldn't be recyclable as it isn't owned by either team, and if buildings changing ownership reset the recycle cooldown, then so long as the capture time is shorter than the recycle time, that wouldn't be an issue either I think.
