Rex's idea won't work without coding support. More importantly, I think now that things should remain consistant. meaning, Armor should remain the same after researching it. If armor changed from something to something more, it would add unecessary confusion to the game, as you'd not know exactly what your armor did. As much fun as a dynamic armor system would be as a commander, I don't see this being very functional, especially with how new players are anyhow. I also would like to see armors stay in separate trees, if only to distinguish themselves from eachother. If all armors were in the same tree, it's a lot like armors are just there because. same with engine. I want to know by what is being opened up, what to expect from my tank. Will it be slow and useless? (bio), will it be slow and spammable? (chem) will it be hella fast? (EE) As soon as I see a research completed, regardless of where it is, I can tell what has been researched by the com, and what to expect if I buy a tank. There is a certain amount of comfort that comes with such consistancy. http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=b4143ef6d05a2427b94117dade8fc295e04e75f6e8ebb871 That is a research tree that I made as sort of a template as to what I thought would be better than sticking engines and armor into a single tree by themselves. The idea is that the engines and armors aren't in the same tree, but they are in the same location in each tree, and take roughly the same amount of time to get regardless of what engine type they are. Also, the tree's are all layed out exactly the same as one another save ME. Only other thing I did with this tree that is unique is I stuck MG's in ME under advanced machining. but that was just for the hell of it. Didn't want to stick MG's with the ML's and Cannons at the time. Consistency is far more important than many things in everything you do that has repetitive qualities. This is the only way, IMO, to make empires more noob friendly,
A. I don't take orders from furries. B. See Metalsmiths post. So persuade a coder to do it then someone can make test scripts. Beerdude and me had similar ideas for the armors a while back, just no time to implement the coding changes. I dislike the proposed research tree here greatly. The only thing it does is use the old shitty research tree and add a few more streamlined weapon researches. And yet again its back to the commander researching one weapon for the whole team to use, what if I greatly dislike the weapon my commander chose? I'm fucked, like always in Empires. Greatest flaw in the old system still here. I like some of the research name changes though.
And rex's! Drag, we're not supposed to talk about anything..soft. Ish. And I was kidding....don't take it seriously.
All you have to do with the old system is make weapons easier to unlock but keep the general tree alive. I will say that more weapons are needed to be available to be used by players but I like the amount of current weapons for tanks.
I think implementing the upgraded and advanced rpg into tank chassis is a better solution as a seperate research. But their are two problems. First, the light tank and afv are still almost impossible to kill for grenadiers. Second, a medium is easier to kill as a afv and a heavy with, for example, rails is easier to kill than a medium tank.
If you simply make it easy to research an uber weapon, but easy to research the uber counter, and then easy to research the uber uber counter, then the game will keep its flow. That was the intention of my tree. So you rush tier 3 explosives, but lets say that sucks vs...I dno, some electrical subtype. But lets say that sucks against some physics subtype. It would keep the game moving and mean you constantly have to adapt to what your enemy uses, and would also allow players to have access to more weapons.
it will also make anyone getting behind a step able to counter very VERY easily by just countering what they are using atm... dont know if that is a very desirable effect
Once you get two weapon and armor sets it's going to get chaotic if they're hard counters. Some people will be using one armor and some the other, and some will be using one weapon and some the other. If weapon A counters armor A but sucks vs armor B, while weapon B counters armor B but sucks vs armor A, then suppose someone with armor A and weapon A comes against someone using armor A and weapon B, the second player will get completely owned because their gun does nothing to the first player's armor but their armor is weak to that player's weapon, so this tank will be ridiculously easy to kill. However if that player uses weapon A instead of weapon B, they'll be evenly matched, because they're both weak to each other. If one uses weapon A and armor A and the other uses weapon B and armor B they'll sit shelling each other doing nothing at all. It's just arbitrary, it's like saying 'hey for no apparent reason this tank which looks no different from the others on the field and has slightly different gear is COMPLETELY INVULNERABLE to your weapons, fuck you.'
And thus why it's hard to balance a spreading diverse tech tree. It's easier in a more linear one like StarCraft since lower tech usually will lose, but there's specific units you can pursue (read: spend time and res putting your overall tech behind) to help counter the enemies' high tech. Soft counters and +/- percentages to match a playstyle is the proper way to deal with a spread out tree. That way you can tweak and get nice boosts in specific areas. At the same time, Chris makes an excellent point about not being able to distinguish what the enemy loadout it. This should be fixed in the near future after the core elements get re-worked.
The best way I can think of doing it is to go with the soft counter system for inter-vehicle combat as you say, and also to ensure that no tank can do everything. As in you can take AT weapons but they're almost useless against structures, while HE is pretty crap against tanks but good against infantry and pretty good against structures. You could allow tanks to take more than one weapon type but they should incur a significant weight penalty. You can do the same with armor, all the anti-vehicle armors are pretty similar, but in the same way you can make anti-mine and anti-sticky/rpg armors for use in specific situations. Most tanks however should be pretty evenly matched, you can have weapons with different methods of use, like homing missiles can be made more of a support weapon with a minimum range, arcing trajectory, and a long reload, along with some support cannons which lob powerful anti-structure or anti-infantry shells like artillery but with a similar long reload. These however should not be primary combat weapons.
I think that this is the more serious problem. Games like TF2 get away with hard counters by making it very, very obvious what each class looks like, so you always know what you're up against and can quickly understand the relations, as well as what you have to do to adapt. Empires doesn't do that. You have to carefully read the manual to even get the fact that the relations exist right now, and even if you're a perfect player who understands everything, most of the time you still won't realize whether you're at a good or bad match-up until you've already lost/won enough to, probably, decide the game. When you look at a friendly tank, you have no way of knowing which armor he's using or whether he needs your help to cover his weak point or not. Soft counters which encourage players to rely on each other a bit more in vehicle combat would be good. But you need to be able to see composition at a glance for it to work. Not quite sure how that could be done, though, aside from making only the chassis and weapons the important factors. I mean, maybe tanks could have different-colored skins, if someone wants to make them. Maybe steam/smoke whose color identifies their engine, or identify engines by sound. Maybe regen could sparkle magically when it's regenerating, or there could be a flash of color when you shoot a tank that tells you what armor they have. Maybe bullets hitting a tank could make different sounds based on the armor they're using. Who knows.
GLOWING AURAS! Doings things by sound only is a poor idea. Color composition, much easier to tell. Something else would be that grens with armor detection get a nice readout of what armor the enemy (or friendly) tank has.
TF2 doesn't have hard counters, all guns works equally well against all classes, some just have different health and speed, which is comparable to our chassis. The only thing that makes one gun better for one class is that some guns are hard to hit fast moving targets with, while some are unaffected by speed, thus negating that classes major defensive advantage. In contrast the precise weapons are more powerful, meaning they offset the benefit of the tough, slow classes. In empires this would be like comparing HEMG against extended range, HEMG is much more effective against light tanks than some cannons.
TF2 does have some hard counters. For instance, an uber or a properly-used demoman is usually a hard counter to an engineer, in that there is basically nothing the engineer can do to avoid having all their stuff blown up when facing them.
In a way yes, but that's not because the demoman does massively increased damage to sentry guns and takes next to no damage from them. It's just that sentry guns can't move, and therefore can be killed with stickies. It's an extreme form of the soft counters present in the rest of the game, it's the same thing that makes heavies vulnerable to snipers, snipers outrange heavies and heavies can't dodge snipers. A comparable scenario in empires is light tanks vs artillery, arties can keep away from most tanks but a fast small tank can stay inside arty's minimum range and dodge the shells they rain down on approaching vehicles. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it's an emergent property of the weapon and vehicle behaviour, not an arbitrary numerical difference.
