Arty Tanks are Confusing: Why using every tank means misusing every tank

Every once in a while, I hear someone celebrate that every tank chassis gets used in a typical 2.41 Empires match. This is actually a bad thing because it stales tank combat and provides unfair assumptions for noobs about arty tanks.



To understand stale tank combat, you have to respect combat that isn't stale. Almost every vehicle weapon in the game is designed to be a "side-grade" instead of an upgrade. For example, Chain Gun has a greater DPS than Std MG, but it's more expensive, heavier and less accurate. We strive for sidegrades because choosing between them is strategy. Choosing an upgrade requires no strategy, so it's a stale decision.

Medium tanks are almost a complete upgrade to lights and heavies are almost a complete upgrade to mediums. Once you have upgraded tanks and enough money, choosing them is a no brainer. This is an obscene waste of strategic potential.

Instead of an essential decision, getting upgraded chassis feels like a chore. When your team sees the enemy in a chassis one step higher than yours, they freak out because they know that there really isn't any "strategy" to overcome their situation except to hold on until they, too, have that chassis.



But that's just the first issue. The second, bigger problem is what this structure teaches noobs. They hear their com yelling at them to abandon building their light tanks for a newfangled "medium" tanks. They quickly learn that medium tanks are better in every way except for cost. Noobs hear the same speech for heavy tanks. It becomes ingrained into their heads to move to always build the newest tank.

So what happens the moment these noobs see "Artillery Tank" below "Heavy Tank"?



And the com is left...



It's not fun for the noob or the rest of the team and it's caused by the other "tank" chassis being boring upgrades over each other.



So I think it's pretty clear that this tiered chassis system stifles strategy and confuses noobs.

 

I, for once, actually agree with Spartacus in how I see tanks should be used, though not necessarily to the extreme that he takes it. As I've said before, I believe all tanks should be viable throughout the duration of the round, in that light tanks should have certain strategic advantages over mediums, mediums should have certain strategic advantages over heavies, heavies should have certain strategic advantages over lights. Though, I disagree in that most everything should be sidegrades. For example, it naturally should be that mediums and heavies will always be better than lights in a chokepoint map simply because there's not nearly enough room for lights to move around, though on large and open maps, light tanks should be useful throughout the duration of the round.

However, the single thing that makes this all pointless is the sheer complexity of trying to do a vehicle overhaul. The only things more complex would be the GUI overhaul and trying to port to Source 2013, but a vehicle overhaul would be by far the most tedious thing possible. By that metric, either we should do it very soon so that time isn't wasted balancing current mechanics that will change soon after, or put off for a good long while so that balancing current mechanics wouldn't be a waste of time. Obviously, it's not something that'll happen soon so it's something that'd be a while off, if it were to happen.

 

Lol, that's still a sidegrade because you conditioned it for mobility with, "in a chokepoint."

In that chokepoint, you might as well go for the slow tough tank because the mobility advantage of the lighter tank doesn't help you.

Equivalently, I could say, "Chain Guns will always be better than Std Mgs in close range, with a light armor & enough res."

That's the strategic decision part! You recognize that there's an arbitrage opportunity where a sidegrade's disadvantages disappear.

And that's why this is in Gameplay and not Suggestions. ove:

 

I think arty is more confusing that it even exists.

 

Can I have two seater arty tanks?

 

Brenodi should get double cannon arties because fuck balance. Don't worry though NF arties get a 2slot mg to make up.

 

Two seat arty tank could make for an excellent idea. Give it a rotating artillery cannon that can only be used from second seat.

Would require a tweak to the model and a tad more code.

The immense power of artillery would be offset by the need of two people or the fact that they can not quickly respond to incoming threats if only one person is using it.

optional:
Toss in a slight random nature to arty shells so that they are never perfect aims unless there are two people in the vehicle.

not going to happen though since no modelers.

 

I wished the speed difference between the tank chassis would make a huge difference instead of what we have right now.

Suggestion:

LT: Little damage, Fast speed. Base cost: 200
MT: Average damage, Average speed. Base cost: 600
HT: Heavy damage, Slow speed. Base speed: 1250

The speed we have on tanks right now for HT with 3-phase seems kind of over the top. I don't think something with so much firepower should get close to move as agile as a medium tank. I think expensive heavies should act as force to be reconed with yet easy to get away from. It's slow nature would make it an easier target for infantry with means the would need to teamwork to guard the expensive HT so it can advance to the enemy base.

IDK much about arty thought. It can be easily killed if someone gets close to the arty tank but getting there without losing your base is kind of difficult if enemies have their defenses build right (i.e. emp_money). Making it more expensive wouldn't be a bad idea though. I mean everyone knows how much one arty tank can wreck things up from a distance. A nuke HT tank is easier to kill as a medium tank than to go to enemy base and kill the arty tank without losing your tank while attacking it.

Basicly arty, as of now, is one deadly tank if in right hands and it is cheaper than heavies too. It is no wonder people go for it instead of HT because of lower base cost and its possible amount of carnage it can wreck upon buildings.

TLDR: Brenodi jeeps mate during winter. I hope you didn't think we just build em. They have feelings too god DAMN IT- (*PLEASE STAND BY*)

 

There used to be some code in that allowed you to shoot down rockets and shells, it was a leftover from the HL2 codebase. Perhaps it would be interesting to be able to shoot down artillery shells?

 

...
Enable a arty shell shoot down function by ML's? A fucking sweet new reason for ML's to exist and be uber useful in all situations especially turtle mode. The fact that ML's have slower fire then an arty shot means one ML cant handle one arty but, two could. And if the ML's are busy shooting at something else they can't very well shoot down arty shots unless they are able to switch to priority targets.

Speaking of which.... commander should be able to give target priority to turrets.

edit:
perhaps not... I see this as possibly adding significantly more overhead calculations to the server.

 

While that would be completely and utterly badass, I'm not sure if it would be wise to let a team counter arty.

 

The idea of making Mediums/Heavies essentially side-grades from the lighter tanks has been discussed a few times, I think I suggested it myself a long time ago.

The problem is, it doesn't quite work out because of the player aspect of it. The idea was, with LTs/AFVs you could swarm larger tanks, run rings around them and kill them, should you have the room (Duststorm etc). However, that requires that one really important aspect - coordination.

Honestly, I would love to have the early game tanks viable in the lategame, but it's just difficult to do when there's only so many players on the team. A large heavy tank with more armour and heavier weaponry is still going to hit a lighter tank, regardless of how mobile that guy is. In an RTS game, this is ok, because you just have lots of the lighter vehicles and you swarm him while the others take him down. But that's never going to happen in Empires, as much as I would really, really love it to.

But yeah, I agree with both your (and DDD made a thread als) idea of moving the Arty tank chassis a bit in the menu. It might help at least a little bit. I think the problem to some extent is also exacerbated by the fact that you never really see Artillery that frequently now, so when it does come up, noobs jump at the chance to have a go in one, which in turn means that they don't get researched, vicious circle etc etc.

The day we get per-vehicle restricts or vehicle caps that the commander can set, is the day the game opens up a lot more in terms of what we can do with vehicles in a more general sense. I always liked the idea of special (expensive) tech that only the commander could produce on a per-tank basis.

 

What about only making arty tanks buildable from the com view ?

 

This I like this

 

Would play into the idea perfectly, but it needs that system in place first. Once it's available, then having the commander build artillery tanks, or just set a max of 2 allowed on the field, would work out really well imo.

 

or being able to lock specific chassis, except I believe the issue with that amazing idea was that it required gui rewrite.