first the observations: vehicle speeds and sounds are all fucked up. The nuke explosion is over the top. at least make a way to turn it off or something for some people, it's ridiculous and bad for gameplay. I can't see shit when one of those goes off. Using 2 guided missiles at the same time on a NF heavy gives you a very high probability of the missiles colliding with each other midair and detonating prematurely. now the thoughts: can't you guys ever make SMALL changes? Whose idea was it to go from a 90 damage plasma cannon to a 30 (!!!!) damage plasma cannon? Plasma cannon has gone from a niche weapon that can only really be used effectively with one engine (that isn't in the same tree as plasma cannon) to being completely and utterly useless and guaranteed to never be researched. Even a patch ago when it did 50 damage a shot it was grossly underpowered compared to the other cannons. All of my tweaks to 2.24 were all very small changes. Almost everything I changed is within 5-10% of its original value, and my scripts were pretty successful right away. Not only that but in the tester feedback I provided some good fixes to plasma cannon a while ago to make it less exploitable without totally nerfing it into oblivion. I guess reading has gone out of style though. These massive fluctuations just piss people off. Especially when it's obvious to many that you're just going to break something. If you're in the mind to make some bigger changes you need to set a plan and do them slowly, one thing at a time. Then when you reach a point that you're happy with, you can stop making the changes, and you're much less liable to piss people off along the way.
It matches the blast radius, either it matches the blast radius and is big, or we nerf nukes, or we go back to the fucking retarded pre-225 effect.
I agree with vehicle speeds. they are all out of wack. You can get up to 67 MPH NF heavy with scout speed vs. 42 on a BE heavy. Why are NF heavies faster than jeeps? Is the test server running the final balanced scripts? if so then they are not good... Who does the scripting? What can we do to get the balancing better? Do we put in the bug tracker balancing issues? Some other small issues: -Flashbangs look like huge fireball grenades. I thought they were supposed to be like a flash and a bang... -A single flashbang destroys engineer turret. -Vehicles shoot out of the vf at relativistic speeds... (well not so much but I have hit 90 -100 mph out of the vf) -Cannot see health bar of BE radar when attacked by NF engineer -Recycling Health bar of destroyed friendly tank shoots way passes the 100% mark. -Recycling health bar of destroyed enemy tank does not work. -Some of the shells shoot by tanks and grenadiers are bouncing off buildings (is this intentional?) -RPG shoots slightly to the left of the aim cross hairs (when shoot unguided). -Internal assert window still pops up every now and then. Dont get me wrong... The current build is more stable than a couple of weeks ago. Vehicle driving feels ok (except speeds) Visuals and particle implementation look good.
meg: all of it should go to Mantis (www.empiresmod.com/bug_tracker) One bug report for 1 issue. Balancing too.
Half of the problems with vehicle speed is the fact that the vehicle factory shoots them out. I killed 4 NF guys by building a jeep with the comm view.
Agree on plasma and vehicle speed... ive seen alot of posts saying that NF heavy outruns the BE heavy when the NF heavys a freaking COW. Plasma seriously? It overheats yourself more than the enemy and barely does damage if he has something better than Paper armor. Either tweak it totaly or remove it. And tweaking it sounds hard right now. (Also this is just off topic but Plasma is a different kind of state like for EX. Gas. Solid. Liquid. My 8th grade teacher told me it was a different state of Matter [ <-- dont know the real name of that stuff] but idk it sounds reasonable after what i heard about it, cuz its not really a Solid, Liquid, or Gas. Ex. of something plasma is Lightningh. Hope it is plasma cuz than educations fucked up lol.) K done
plasma is state of matter that is similar to gas but electrons roam free (means its conductive) - you could also call it ionized. almost all matter in the universe is plasmid ...
Not sure if it's a bug, but it's connected to vehicle speeds. A BE heavy with duel rail guns (and advanced coolant) can go faster by using just it's duel Rails than it can with it's engine. You need a bit of space but it works. You can do this from a standing start or get up to max speed with your engine then take your finger off the drive forward button (or not) and fire backwards. I got up to 77mph (without scout speed) on money with both engine and guns firing, almost double the speed from the engine alone.
This is why I like to drive into battle backwards. If I get in trouble I just drive forward while firing = quick escape.