After a year of playing other games ...

I'll barely dare to read the comments after this, but here goes ...:

After playing other games than Empires for over a year I noticed it's very difficult to get back into the game. I can now understand why new people would try it for half an hour and stop. Apart from the small playerbase, there's some core problems that will always hold back the gameplay for almost any gamer these days. On top of that there's some stuff that never completely worked out as planned.

Why infantry often isn't fun on commander maps:
- Small people vs big empty maps: running around for hours gets very boring
- Not sufficient cover in maps so you're always getting targeted
- Late game becomes impossible: well armored tanks can take a grenadiers entire supply of ammo, retreat in 5 seconds, get repaired in 4 seconds, and be back at the front while the grenadier is still begging engineers for ammo. In fact they can repair their tanks while being attacked. Tanks can repeat this indefinitely.

Conclusion: lots of boring running around often to get instakilled in the end or to be completely useless once you've arrived at your destination

Notes:
- I do not think a grenadier should be able to destroy a well armored tank; but neither should tank drivers be able to ignore anti tank infantry and defenses or be able to undo any damage in a matter of seconds again and again.
- Infantry should remain fun in late game, as not everyone will be driving his own personal tank. Saying the late game revolves around vehicles is admitting that players will have to accept that empires won't be fun - even very frustrating - for most infantry players from a certain point in each game.

Why vehicles often aren't fun:
- Turning circles can be hugely annoying
- Vehicles behave like snowboards, sliding everywhere. When hit by a jeep, the jeep just takes the tank for a ride. In the end even the most powerfull tank feels as strong and serious as a snowboard to drive.
- Complete clusterfucks in bottleneck maps. In maps where chasing isn't an option, vehicles stop dying from a certain point as they constantly repair themselves. This means a blockage of tanks on both sides, and an immens drop in performance. Only reason these maps end is because players get bored and start driving straight towards the enemy desperately trying to break through.

Random things that aren't fun:
- Always looking for ammo and it takes ages to resupply
- Half of the skill upgrades aren't that usefull and their effectiveness difficult to notice
- Scout currently holds back his team most of the time (there are exceptions, but not enough)
- Bio and plasma are annoying

Suggestions ... if time, skill and the game engine weren't a problem:

Maps:
- Add more eyecatching features and details to open maps so infantry can run around much more interesting terrain, have more cover and get a bigger sense of speed from the objects passing by.

Infantry:
- Increase both running and sprinting speed by 20%
- Increase both the amount of stamina and stamina recharge rate by 40%
- Sprinting should work in sideway movement as well, so you can target someone straight ahead while moving left or right. (this is by far the biggest problem I have after returning to Empires, and I never even noticed it in the 8 years before that)

Vehicles:
- Give vehicles more grip
- Make jeeps very cheap, but only buyable with personal wages or by the commander (yes there will be a lot more jeeps, but it won't deplete the team's resources)
- Jeeps take massive damage from bumping into things with half or more their own mass and when falling from a certain height. Jeeps will simply take a percentage of damage depending on the impact, and the same holds true for its passengers health. Hitting a tank at high speed with a jeep means everyone in the jeep will be dead and the jeep will be completely destroyed btw.
- When hitting a tank on the side a jeep will not go under it but explode; hitting it in line with the tank's forward movement however the tank will drive over the jeep, destroying the jeep. The jeep wrecks collision mesh should allow the tank to just drive off of it.
- Wages should be required for vehicle repairs, be that on a repair station or repairs from an engineer. No matter who does the repairing, the cost is for the vehicles last driver's bank account. When someone new takes over an abandoned tank, it can't be repaired for 15 seconds. Drivers who keep ignoring grenadiers and ML turrets will run out of wages and won't be able to repair their tank anymore. Drivers will have to try to earn more wages from slaughtering than they spend on repairing. Vehicle stalemates in bottlenecks will end themselves.
- MG's, including the infantry MG's, should be able to damage the hull of vehicles that do not (no longer) have armor. This means riflemen and grens can work together. Plus it'll be usefull against jeeps, of which there will be a lot more.

Misc:
- 50% more ammunition for standard infantry and tank weapons like rifles, smg's, cannons and ml's (not grenades etc)
- Double the speed at which you replenish ammo (armory, ammo box and apc)
- Ammo boxes have a limited supply of grenades (not mortar shells or rockets)

Bio:
- Bio ML gets a slightly bigger radius
- Bio does damage over time to infantry but only to 5% of max health, after which your health slowly (half speed) regenerates to what it was when you got hit. This makes bio an excellent support weapon against infantry, yet infantry would at least have a chance to either take cover without the fear of dying or to rush their attackers to take them out before their health drops too low.
- Bio works as a regular ML against vehicles, where the damage comes from the impact only. The MG does no damage against armor but as all MG's it would do damage against vehicle hulls.

Plasma:
- Plasma makes vehicles that get hit by it more vulnerable to damage for a while, while doing some impact damage itself. This makes plasma an excellent support weapon against vehicles, just as bio is a support weapon against infantry.
- Against infantry it works as standard MG's and cannons, where the impact itself does the damage.

Scout:
- 20% more speed than other classes (this includes crawling)
- Very inaccurate but powerfull shotgun replaces the scout rifle and makes the scout the most effective class in close combat, easily beating riflemen, becoming the preferred ally to have with you in these situations.
- Sticky stun grenades get replaced by a secondary weapon (more or less a small range grenade launcher) shooting sticky stun bombs that will prevent vehicles from moving for a very short while on detonation. Vehicles will still be able to shoot. Range goes further than sticky grenades but is still quite limited, and the gun will have much more ammo.
- Concussion nades have a bigger blast radius so they become very viable against turret farms
- Sabotage does not do continuous damage to buildings
- From within a close distance (50 yards or so), scouts can hack the VF, Rax or Radar. During 2 minutes after the hack the entire team can see what the enemy is currently researching, when a vehicle gets created and which chassis it has or when someone spawns and what class he is. Hacking takes a while, and the scout will be visible and shown on the enemies radar while hacking.

Skills: (this is by far the most subjective suggestion in here and comes from my interest in rts games)
- Make the skills a true, noticeable part of the gameplay. Increase some passive abilities values up to twice the amount of what it is now, reduce the point requirements for others or greatly increase the duration of some passive abilities since you're forced to run around in this game a lot not actually using the skill time.
- Make passive abilities visible to both teams, for example: a slightly red glow around someone's weapon means they have damage increase; a blue glow could be accuracy increase etc. Since the passive effect is now big enough to change the game, it's a tactical element you'll not want to ignore and might make you decide to target the buffed up players first. Not realistic in the fps aspect of the game, but important for the tactical aspects and to integrate abilities much more into the game.

There, that would fix Empires for at least 94% for me, not counting the graphics of maps like canyon

 

I love these venting threads. Shit builds up and up and you're just like, "fuck it, it should be better." WoT engaged.

 

In fairness I actually agree with most of your suggestions. I can't be bothered posting the technical problems with a lot of them right now but if you / others want me to then I will later.

I think your scout changes are a bit excessive though and combined would make the scout totally OP.

I especially like your changes for vehicles and misc changes.

 

You'll be pleased to know that when the port is done (our preliminary testing shows that we currently only have some really weird rendering issues, but that appears to be it for bugs), we will implement decisions we have made that address most of your issues.

 

I am pleased to know, though a bit skeptical after all this time

And yeah the scout does look OP, but i'm not convinced it actually really would be. Especially since most things could be balanced: weapon damage, accuracy, player speed, hack time, hack duration, vehicle stun duration and range and ammo, ...

 

There aren't nearly enough arguments and ill will in this thread.

This is a side effect of the beloved cheap/tough/fast tank syndrome.

Tanks are so cheap that it's ridiculous to not drive one during endgame. And since everyone is in a tank, it would be unfun if some gren could walk out of a rax and insta-rape it. Therefore, they are tough. Also since everyone is in a tank, it would be lame to slowly creep towards the end. Tanks need to be unrealistically fast, handling be damned.

When everyone is in a tank, no one is in a tank. [sub]Learn 2 Pacing, Empires.[/sub]

Honestly, I'd just remove the jeep since physics won't allow it to weigh significantly less than tanks. The moment Reznov/BloodRaven/Creeper/Bluesky completely disable your >1000res tank with a <100res jeep, you just want to quit. It's just not fun.

Yeah, I'm not sure why the max ammo amounts aren't 3x-4x more than they are today. Getting ammo is simply unfun. There is no counterargument.

Band-aid alert!

I wouldn't mind removing jeeps from the player build menu in order to only allow the com to make them, but if you are going to put them next to other vehicles, don't use a different way to pay for them.

Yes, it would work, but it would be a shitty, confusing solution. That's a band-aid.

Another band-aid. It may solve a problem, but it's not intuitive. You have to add in really shitty stuff like that 15s limit to prevent abuses that your fix just introduced.

Buh-buh-buh-band-aid. We chatted extensively about this one in a recent thread.

Hard counters are no fun.

I also see way too many noobs attacking vehicles with APC MGs.

Obviously they shouldn't dominate, but they should achieve damage to vehicles & buildings.

That's inconsistent. Bio & plasma are flawed, but they need to do the same "thing" to both infantry & vehicles.

Yeah, I always wonder why we don't have more particles to communicate this stuff. There's probably a performance concern.

 

I definitely agree on the first and third points, although the second one is a bit iffy because it can be greatly mitigated through the use of smart engineers and teamwork. Infantry simply becomes boring in the late-game on open maps and large maps, which is a major buzzkill for certain players who prefer to play infantry over using tanks, such as myself.

The first one is a bit difficult to deal with, the second one might have a solution, although I'd have to look into the specifics of the physics code between dynamic entities to see if it is. The third one, however, is in my view a simple fact of chokepoint maps. People go into the meatgrinder, back out at the last moment and have someone take their place. To fix that would require more substantial changes, I believe.

The first one is true, but it's debatable whether the solution is to give players more ammo, or if it's to encourage more teamwork. There's something to be said about ammoboxes already being a suitable solution to it, but one that just needs to be improved. For the second and third ones, we're chucking ideas at each other and will be focusing on them and infantry in general after the port.

The last one is complicated. I like bio and plasma. I like them because they're different, because they're more interesting. Almost every other weapon can be characterized in terms of RoF, damage, blast radius, projectile speed and drop rate. That's boring, diversity makes it more fun. Sadly, diversity doesn't do much if the implementation makes it either useless or necessary, which tends to be the case in plasma and bio respectively.

 

Gotta' split into two posts, 10000 character limit and all.

The bad news is that the game engine will always be a problem for the foreseeable future. If, by some crazy determination and a few drops of insanity, Source 2 comes out and Empires got ported to it, even then I'm not certain how much better it would be in the places where Source 1 is currently lacking, such as in vehicle physics and map size. The good news is that I have time, and where I lack in skill I make up in ridiculous amounts of sheer willpower.

On one hand, you're right. Empires maps definitely could use more details and nicer terrain. Sadly, because Source is designed to work with numerous enclosed areas and not wide open expanses, that it has to render almost everything because of how visleafs work (I shouldn't be saying that, chances are you know them better than I do XD) make large, open maps hard to optimize with lots of detail in them. And when I'm saying open, I'm talking Duststorm open, where you can be at one corner of the map and see a damn good amount of the rest of the map.

I'm going to throw this out first, I'm already biased against this. Why? Because I'm a shit aim with a gun and only decent with the mortar, and increasing speed will make it easier to dodge the mortar. But, because I can see that I'm biased, I can recognize that this really is something that Empires could use. Walking is boring. Waiting is boring. Running for three minutes only to die is boring. So I suppose I'd just play engineer more and go around hunting refineries.

That first one, I don't know if it's even possible with any reasonable amount of time and skill. Skipping the second for now, I'm iffy on the third one; I want to say no on the basis that this is more of an arcade shooter and less of a realistic driving simulator, but it's definitely wrong for a jeep to be able to do what it currently can. The fourth one, I like the idea of tanks crushing jeeps, but implementing it in a way that looks half decent would be difficult, to say the least. Skipping the fifth for now too, I do agree with the sixth one.

I wanted to group the second and fifth ones together because I wanted to say that I strong believe that wages should not be expanded. We're trying to hack out a way to remove wages, and the hope is that we might find a way to fix a lot of resource issues in general (wages, snowballing, resources on maps etc.)

Again, iffy on this because the argument can be made that instead of giving a blunt increase to ammo, we can make it easier for engineers to supply ammo. Although, I am leaning towards agreement on the third point.

Perhaps if the impact damage was increase to a bit strong than UML but the speed was kept the same, I can agree with the third point. I can't remember if Bio ML dealing impact damage was ever fixed though. I definitely agree with the first and second points, although I'd go further and say that it shouldn't destroy a player's stamina. Perhaps reduce the regeneration rate of it?

This, I like.

As I stated further up, we're taking a look an infantry in general with a specific focus on the scout. The second one is actually in the works, but the more specific details of operation haven't really been set yet. I'll definitely take some of these into consideration when we get back to it though, although that last one wouldn't happen due to implementation issues.

Good news for you, a skill system overhaul is being thought of too. That second point though, I'm trying to think about how that'd work out. On one hand, it would be a good tactical element, but I feel that a glow effect for every passive ability would end up being extremely intrusive.

All in all though, you definitely have a number of good, thought-out points.

 

I have to admit I was wondering if there would be enough interest left from coders to consider going to Source 2 when/if it would come out.

But yeah chances are they'll be sticking to some of the same ideas, so big open maps and vehicle behavior could remain a problem even on another engine.

Also that last sentence made me think of myself really.

Edit: btw concerning the ammo, even if you start with 50% more, you'll still run out quite quickly, and you'll still need ammoboxes, apc's ... just less ridiculously fast You'd have a chance of surviving untill your killed engineer gets back to place a new ammobox

 

I have to reply to the comments about infantry not being fun in late game btw. I'm an infantry player, have been for nearly a decade. I only jump into a tank when no one else is spending the resources on vehicles. As long as other people want to drive, I let them.

Any map with a decent resource balance will not have all 48 players driving in a vehicle. If a map does have 48 tanks driving around, this proves either the map has a problem or the gameplay has some bugs in it. 48 vehicles in s-bend in slaughtered for example is no fun. 24 vehicles would really be the limit for anything else than complete open maps like duststorm. And on vanilla servers, it rarely even reached those numbers.

With an average of 1 player on foot vs 1 vehicle, with those vehicles having HE, Bio, etc ... that can (insta)kill infantry with groups at a time and with the ability to get repaired at the same rate as 3 grens would be able to cause damage, infantry in late game haven't had a chance for as long as I can remember. Not the mention most of those infantry players are, as usual, running from the spawn to the front, or building/repairing things, or getting (shot when getting) ammo from an ammo box. Yes 4 grens can take out a heavy, IF it has a slow engine AND it's far away from a cliff to drive behind. But since there's less grens and with most of them waiting on respawns and travelling to the front, you'll much more end up as 1 gren vs 4 heavies. And even if it is 4 vs 1, if there's 1 engineer nearby that tank, those 4 grens haven't got a chance. because they'll die with each shot of his cannon, and after two dead the engineer will be repairing faster than they can damage him.

And again, as I said in the first post, I agree tanks must be strong. They shouldn't become less powerfull. However that doesn't take away the fact that halfway through most games, things become frustrating and unfun for most infantry players, which is the definition of bad gameplay. Fine, have infantry die constantly at the end, but let that at least be worth something.

Hence my suggestion for limiting repairs with wages. ML turret damage and grenadier damage would actually have a permanent effect, your actions would have meant something. Yet for real tank drivers, those that know what they're doing, this limit wouldn't be a limit.

But if wages will be gone ... no idea how to improve this. I still do want drivers to be able to repair their tanks to full health indefinitely, if they are good enough, to continue battling for hours with the same tank. Drivers shouldn't be punished for playing well. Penalties like reducing health after repairs etc would turn tanks even more into one time only products. Putting a noticable price on repairing though would be unfair as well to the rest of the team. Hence again why I suggested wages for this. Got no other solution.

 

One thing I want to add when it comes to infantry though. There's a little test I use called "The Rifleman Test". Essentially, when I think of or read about a proposed change, I think to myself, "How would this effect the best rifleman in the game?" At the moment, that would be Security, so I imagine how a given change would affect him, because I feel it's important to look at the extremes.

So, for example, increasing the effects of accuracy upgrade. Using The Rifleman Test, nothing really changes at the top end. Security doesn't need more accuracy, hell I'd bet he doesn't even need normal accuracy upgrade. Lets try it on giving him more ammo now. Oh dear, it looks like he's become an unstoppable killing machine now because there's almost no reason for him to stay with an engineer. He just keeps shooting. And shooting. And shooting. By the time he's done shooting, the entire enemy team is dead.

Which is why I'd be more for making ammo more accessible instead of just giving players more ammo.

 

Ahh, you're right. I forgot about that.

I concede that ammo limitations are moderately important to serve that purpose, but it feels like a shitty way to solve such a problem. I would call it a band-aid. It's completely functional, but pretty shitty.

The first time I read it, I thought it would be kinda shitty, but rereading it, it's not so bad.

The linchpin is completely redoing plasma into a completely new weapon that only shares the plasma name. That would work.

And considering that the current heat system forces plasma to be pretty shitty, entirely replacing it might not be a bad idea.

 

Candles, what you just said makes no sense on multiple levels.

 

Made sense to me, at least.

 

So, what you are saying is that you are trying to balance the game and justify any change on your assumption of what may happen to one player that plays one way. Also, disregarding that everyone is utter shit compared to what they used to be and that the current games have no bearing on what-should-be empires.


Totally radical.

 

Yeah but security plays all the time, so I'm glad that Candles makes sure not to buff him.

 

Ok, I got it.

So we ban Security!

 

No, that's just one way I measure impact of a change. It's not like I'm basing the merits of every single change that's proposed from how the top 5% or 1% of players are, but I feel that it's important to think about how something will directly affect players that are considered to be at the top of the skill ceiling. Really, it doesn't have to be a specific player even, it can be a theoretical rifleman that's just as good as the best in the game. By connecting it to an actual player, it makes it more concrete and helps me to think through how it would effect others.

Increasing the amount of ammo that everyone has and can carry benefits the top end of players more than it benefits the middle or low end, because they'll do more with each bullet than lesser skilled players. Lesser skilled players will die sooner, aim worse, waste bullets and so forth. Skilled players are the ones that lead the push at the front lines, ammo is the only thing stopping them from pushing indefinitely.