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

As I stated in the succeeding post,

So far, what I've gathered is that original idea of straight-up removing them from the menu unless the player is the commander, combined with jumping straight to the specific chassis a player is in if they're on the repair pad is the best option as far as usability goes, but implementation-wise can be difficult.

 

My posts are easily missed; I don't take much offense at anything nowadays. But simply because Empires is unintuitive as it is doesn't give us a pass to justify a new change being unintuitive too.

It's definitely a combination of the GUI and Source being unoptimized for open expanses. As I've stated before, the worst offender is the minimap because the entire thing is resized and redrawn every frame, making it a major part of the ~25% of the frame rendering time that the GUI as a whole takes up.

 

The problem isn't how it's rescaling it, it's that it rescales the whole minimap Every. Single. Frame. Which includes the player/building/vehicle icons, background and even the gridlines. And then it redraws the whole minimap Every. Single. Frame.

Size-wise, the vehicle panel is the worst. Efficiency-wise, it's the minimap.

 

Yeah, there are pretty big risks, but it seems like the simplest solution.

I'm not the guy implementing it, but I would aim for the KISS solution. Normally, that tends to be a half-baked fix, but it doesn't seem bad in this case.

It shoves the effort & risk to the CV. That's where it should be.

Worthless Anecdote Time!

I rarely ever refit vehicles. I can't recall ever wanting to refit almost immediately after building due to an "accidental" customization.

I typically find myself refitting mediums because that's the only time where you may build a tank with only a single cannon/ML and then later have a broader heavy-worthy selection. Arty doesn't really suffer from this issue. It needs extended range and that's about it.

 

What if it checked for com/on repair pad, but there was also a defunct vehicle with 0 weight limit/slots named something that indicates that non-com players can't build artillery that shows when anywhere but repairpad/com?

 

YES.

Also tank destroyers.

As an (perhaps cheaper or more effective) alternative to heavies or mediums, these tanks can easily be out-flanked by the faster light tanks and will be very easily destroyed from behind or the sides (even if we cant model damage from different sides, you can still limit the amount of plates available on specific sides on a vehicle).

 

TD's : cheaper alternative to heavies, but only can equip a 3slot CN and have 5 plate of armor?

 

That's the idea. No rear armor and little side armor. Plenty frontal though.

Could work with dual 2slot ML for medium equivalent or something. As long as it has a very limited forward firing arc and must rely on turning the hull to hit moving targets.

A dumb semi-idea i've also been playing with (but obviously would ruin everything and shouldn't be added) is a light tank equivalent which has dual 3(or 2)-slot forward firing MGs to mount DU/HEMG/plasmamg

 

Slightly unrelated question here, but Candles, since you mentioned recustomisation of vehicles, can I ask what stops people being able to spawn a vehicle anywhere? Is it a specific zone that operates within the vehicle factory and you'd have to extend that over a map? Or is it a default set of coding that operates anywhere but has been restricted to the VF?

It's probably a terrible idea to make vehicles spawnable anywhere, but I was still interested in how it was set up in the code.

Edit: Also, what I wanted to ask on-topic, was has anyone really been turtling very well recently? The last time I was in a turtled base, we could barely keep out the heavies, let alone the arties. They destroyed us almost on the first pass.

Which is starkly different from how it used to be - used to be able to hold off heavies by the skin of your teeth, if you were playing well, and the arties couldn't be countered even then, but were more necessary.

 

Trickster once enabled people to spawn vehicles everywhere on the map so i guess it's a very simple if (player inside vf == true) condition.

 

That's what I thought, thanks

 

I'm not at home right now so I can't tell you what actually happens code-wise, but there's a server variable "emp_sv_debug_build_vehicles" that if set to 1, will allow you to make a vehicle anywhere. We often use it when testing vehicles because making a VF is quite the hassle.

In fact, I have a little script that enables debug build vehicles, does all research, zero command vote time, makes the calculator instant-build and sets the refinery multiplier to 1000 for when I need to test things. It's a pain to try and type all that in when I'm testing a vehicle thing, like a half minute of just typing commands into the console, and if I'm doing a local rapid compile/test for something, those half minutes really start to add up.

 

Empires has a god mode.

 

Post of dubious value + shitty gif = Spartacus