Currently we have a quite silly smoke grenade implementation in empires. If you didnt notice that already you may consider reading this post. In the following I will first explain the purpose of smoke grenades on battle fields and then I will explain how the implementation in empires is like. Smoke grenades should: Hide (friendly) troop movements by stopping the enemie's ability to visualy localize friendly troops from positions far away. That means the enemy is not be able to see you because clouds of smoke are between him and the friendly troops. Why would you like to block his view? Because he cannot predict your movement or fire any weapons, which require a visual localization (like guns do). Shooting with guns into a cloud of smoke becomse completly meaningless because you dont know where to shoot or when. Of course this only works if there is some distance between the smoke and the enemy. If the enemy is running inside or behind the smoke, he is pretty well able to identify and localize any close units. In empires it is exactly the opposite: You can very well see through the smoke from far away and localize anyone who is running inside the smoke. The very only time where you cant see shit is when you are inside the smoke. Then your screen turns grey and you cant see anyone inside or outside the smoke anymore. So why should you use smoke grenades in empires? Not because you want to hide your movement behind the smoke, but because you want to have the enemy run inside the smoke not seing you outside or inside. Currently the most efficient way to use smoke nades is to throw them inside the enemy barracks in order to use melee upgrade and enhanced senses. Any poor guy spawning inside this barracks has ~1% chance to leave the very same barracks alive, because you can just punch him in his face before he even notices whats going on. He is not even able to see you on screen... What should be changed? If possible make players inside smoke very hard to see (nearly invisible) from outside. Give at least 60% visibility of players inside the smoke to players inside the smoke. And 60% visibility of players outside the smoke to players inside the smoke. With that setup one could use smokes in a proper way making the described melee spawn killing much harder.
Its been talked to death before and if I remember right its something to do with HL engine. I wish it was as you say it should be!
The best is when your tossing this shit in a BE barracks and YOU ARE BE doing the smoking of your own team. Just pure fun.
Smokes and concussions should be interchangeable, at least where turrets and radars are concerned. If you could get smoke to disable turrets for a bit, that would be good, then you could do away with concuss's, since they are for close play games really, not Empires.
I always thought it would be neat if turrets didn't fire on anything in a smoke cloud. So you could smoke yourself a path to run through or smoke the turrets themselves. Naturally, then you give Scouts thermal goggles and you finally have a useful class. Trickster is in the United Arab Israelistan. He'll get back to flaming once he's finishing getting shot at.
i dont even ... oh and my 2 cents on topic, so its less of a complete waste of disk space somewhere (or even more?) smoke should be opaque no matter if you are inside or outside it - thats what smoke is. if you throw it on the enemy or yourself is irrelevant and situational.
I want smoke grenades like in COD2 - those fuckers covered up the entire width of a street, and limited vision considerably.
I farted around with smokes for a bit, because I never used them before. They really are bad. It takes like 4 in the same spot to really block someones view. Can't they just work like they do in cs? Smokes do exactly what they should in that game. Would like to extend that to have the smoke blow a little, so it isn't just one perfect sphere.
Considering it is the scout that gets it, a class that only has like 1-3 players at most playing, it isn't that bad. Considering smoke in its current state needs to be piled on for it to actually obscure your vision, it also isn't bad. If smokes worked the way they should, then yeah 5 might be too much. But you have to fix the problem before you can complain about something that may or may not be a problem.
A thing to consider, as jsut like with bangs, smokes are a spam weapons. Limit the amount of active smoke clouds per player. I know, its artifical, but imho still better than having to fight smoke and mirrors when someone decides to be an utter douche. Also, smoke should still allow you limited vision. You SHOULD be able to see that you were running into a wall/crate for the past 5 seconds.
I just want it so when I touch the very edge of the smoke my screen doesn't go completely gray. There is a gradual change too, so it can be changed. Currently though you move just 20 centimeters and it blanks out. Too quick of a change.
I know we shouldn't balance around maps, but the maps were smokes would be useful would be escort, dickstrict etc. And drop a such smoke in a base and it's gg.
Smokes would have to be really reworked anyways, so seeing 1 or 2 feet in front of you would need to be coded in too. No proper smoke grenade makes you completely and utterly blind.
