Balance cv strength against ticket wins.

Turrets also have the ability to make enemies panic.

 

But not our resident god-tier gren, eh?

 

or anybody else who learns themselves not to

 

I had a random idea. It's probably not great but it showcases the things we could do with the ticket structure, especially in a game like Empires.

What if we had two CV's warring over an (undefined) power source in the map? Where they are both siphoning this energy to power their breeding/cloning chambers (and thus earn reinforcement tickets) as well as power a 'shield' for the CV. So the more respawns a team has, the lower their energy levels would be and the lower that shield would get.

[An interesting addition would be that killing an enemy recharges 1/3 of the power it would take to respawn, i.e. a 1/3 of a ticket and the comparative shield increase on the CV.]

It should be pointed out that this 'shield' shouldn't really be an infallible energy shield or the like, but rather a damage mitigating shield or extra hitpoints - perhaps similar to armour. And just like armour, we could make it have a weakness, so if we decided tanks should penetrate the CV shield more easily we could do that. Or if we decided it should mitigate blast-type damage (say from mines and stickies - effects notwithstanding) but be more vulnerable to things like deconning etc, we could do that.

Whatever was decided to be the better part of taking a CV down could stay.

 

Tickets are, inherently, a bandage. The point of tickets isn't to encourage long drawn-out stalemates, it's to break long drawn-out stalemates. If you want long matches, the solution isn't to make the CV stronger, the solution is to remove tickets. Making the CV stronger only puts a bandage on the bandage, and then you just encourage bacterial infestations from giving them a good environment.

Personally, I hate tickets, but there's really no good solution to that problem. We could put time-limits on all maps, but then we don't get epic drawn-out stalemates at all, or it's so high that it doesn't really matter. We could set a countdown to sudden death, but then it encourages having one scout run across the map to sticky-stun the enemy CV.

I do love the drawn-out rounds, but Empires can't really support 3-hour Slaughtered matches anymore with its playerbase. It used to be fine when there were so many players, that some could leave and others would just take their place throughout the round, but not so much anymore. And at the end of long matches, half the server is incredibly tired from it and leave the game.

 

Its sad to see people say theyve never seen a ticket win.
Unless its a stomp, those are usually some of the best matches.

 

Wanna know why no one plays? Because every round ends in five minutes from some stupid rush/hobbes. Well that and because no one joins the game when all the servers are empty.

 

Pub more.

 

Because no one boots up Empires. It's such a hassle. You load up and then you see the screen and you're like "maaaaybe I don't want to play right now".

 

Erm, Steam server browser much?

You just favorite EPIC and VIPER and you're done.

I have the "Server" dialog box as Steam's default dialog box when it starts up or when I double click the system tray icon.

 

I was around when they were introduced, but now I think that if you removed tickets they would make a difference in only 5% of games, if that many. Probably more like 3%.

There are many ways to make tickets actually part of the game instead of a plaster, but unless you look for them they'll just be some more sour lemons to squeeze.

No idea where that metaphor came from.

 

The only thing that you did wrong was get into a pushing match. I've never seen a productive CV pushing match. It's too risky.

There was a good chance that one of us would get pinned by the other. The only reason that I stuck around was because I had infantry support & a nearby rax. Normally I haul ass if I have to do that shit alone.

 

Probably suggested before but what about unlimited tickets for an hour. Then limit them.

 

I can actually list all the official maps where tickets can make a difference fairly often: Crossroads, district, eastborough, urbanchaos, glycencity, escort. All the other maps have either too many tickets or they're too open, and oftentimes it's both. Crossroads and canyon have 300 tickets per side. Mvalley and duststorm have 400. Slaughtered has 450. Streets of fire clocks in a whopping 675 tickets per team. Arid, notably, only has 250, which is faaaar less than any other map as open as it is. Tickets are the major balancing factor in escort (360000), district (225), urbanchaos (225), glycencity (6000 with bleeders) and eastborough (1500 with bleeders). And the only time they ever matter on Crossroads is when you get a 15v15/20v20 happening on it.

Anyway, the major point I'm making is that ticket "wins" aren't wins so much as they're ties. You're really not supposed to win through tickets, that's why every map has over 200 and a vast majority of them break past 350. If a game goes to tickets, either one team was really fucking bad, or a map was picked that was too small for the playerbase.

 

They're basically inf maps or inf heavy maps. They're where the tickets were most needed because no one wanted to play urban chaos for 6 hours straight (well, it was kinda nice for four hours, but only four hours really). And glycencity...man, I spent a whole night playing one round of that.

On command maps the tickets are balanced to not be a factor because the idea is people will want to play that map to completion. It should only come into play a ways down the line, if it does.

Really, tickets should just be replaced with either a super passive mechanism (like time penalties) or a interesting active one - where you try to conserve lives and revive for maximum effectiveness, instead of respawning.

 

I used to do that. Now I just have enough friends that play empires that whenever I want to play I just have to look at my friends list and join game.

 

Yeah, I'm slowly getting every remotely play empires player on my friends list. It pays off.

 

I use steam server browser to check my ping every 10 minutes, if a server has 30 players sure I'd join, but what I refer to is planning to play empires, then launching empires and suddenly not wanting to play empires anymore.

I used to do that until people on my friends list stopped playing empires.