Currently, empires uses a simple chassis mechanism whereby bigger chassis have more slots and more base health, at the expense of more cost and lower speed. I propose making a change to this, and making the chassis have a direct and innate effect on the armor of the vehicle, specifically, categorising the vehicles into three armor types, light, medium, and heavy. The point of this is to introduce more variation into the weaponry, instead of having a cannon that does the same amount of damage to all chassis, assuming that they have the same armor type, you could instead introduce weapons specifically for taking out light vehicles, or heavy vehicles. Here's an example, say a medium tank goes up against a heavy tank, at the moment the heavy tank is always at a universal advantage, it has more armor plates and its weapons will be just as effective agains the medium as they will against other heavies. With this system I'm proposing, the medium could be armed with a 'high-penetration cannon' which excels at damaging heavy armor by piercing the exterior shell and detonating its charge inside the tank, but doesn't work well at all against light armor, because it overpenetrates and doesn't fragment within the tank. So this means your medium becomes adept at taking out heavy tanks, but could well lose against a light tank. On the flipside, you could arm your heavy tank with a couple of autocannons, which are easy to hit light tanks with and their shells will penetrate their light armor, but if used against heavy armor it will have greatly reduced effectiveness, as the projectile is simply not powerful enough to penetrate the heavy armor. The proposed classes for the vehicles that I would use are as followed: Jeep, light tank: Light armor. APC, medium tank: Medium armor. Heavy tank, CV: Heavy armor. Now the whole reason I suggest this is because it open up some more possibilites. You can start having more variety in weapons, and specifically you can balance weapons explicitly against heavy tanks, without having them automatically become overpowered against lighter vehicles or having to resort to things like projectile speed. This also applies to infantry weapons so you could make the grenadier RPG better against heavy armor than it is against light armor, meaning the grenadier is equally effective against all tanks and also meaning that it no longer becomes overpowered against light tanks if you want to buff it. Of course this can be a research option if you want it. You can also start bringing earlier vehicles into the later game, by giving them weapons to combat the late game tanks. Which is something I think a lot of people want. Another benefit is that it makes the CV a bit more resilient to early weapons, lengthening the games and making rushes less effective. I also would have this go on top of the existing armor varieties, so a heavy with absorbant armor would be weakest against slow-moving high-penetration weaponry, like a tank-killer missile or something, but very strong against light, high speed weapons, like an autocannon. A regenerative light tank on the other hand would be weakest against biological high-speed weapons, such as bio MGs, while it would be strongest against low-ROF high-penetration weapons, such as an armor piercing cannon. The problem with this is that it might overcomplicate things, but I think the benefit to gameplay would be worth this risk, and it isn't that much of an addition complication, all you have to do is comment in all the weapons about what chassis they're best at. Anyone want to add something?
like it but it would only work if every weapon/armor has a discription how good it is against what. Like a simple star rating system or something similar
Sound very cool, because this makes jumping streight to heavies pointless cause they could get HEAT rounds and take the tank apart. The brenodi medium would still have a big advantage with its 2, 2, 2 weapon slots, making it not only fast and well armored, but very easy to refit for the situation. The only thing i hate about refitting is how it has to refit your armor, engine, AND guns instead of just what you change...
It shouldn't be hard. Just try to make all the weapons gradually decrease in effectiveness as you move further away from what they're designed for. Like an anti-heavy gun could say 'is most effective against heavy tanks' and the player could then assume that it was less effective against meds, and least effective against lights. Unless you specify otherwise, this method should hold, and I can't really imagine what situation you'd want it not to be like that. Presumably the NF heavy sponson guns will change that, as it suddenly becomes much more versatile.
Sounds like something pulled out of warcraft 3...still doesn't sound like a bad idea, only downside is you'll need a few people to create this new system, and the fact that it's something else for tank rebalancing. Should make tank combat a lot more interesting, and diversify the usefulness of different sized vehicles...
IMO seems overly complicated and a lot of work and not really viable without significant coding/work which doesn't seem realistic right now. There is some work being done looking into single slot cannons of different types though afaik. I wouldn't mind seeing greater differences between chassis though in the way of max heat and hull health.
The reason a heavy should kill a light is because it is a damn heavy. The only reason a light should kill a heavy is that it has more numbers. The amount of price a tank costs, is the balance we need. 1 Heavy should be rare, and a focus point to attack. Have some lights as backup, and a med or two. Current it is, HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY MED HEAVY MED MED.
The problem with making one type of tank rare and universally powerful is that everyone wants to drive it. This results in things like VF camping, griefing when you don't get it, all sorts of problematic things. Making tank size less of a determining factor and introducing new elements into the mix reduces the frequency of that, because you don't need to wait for a heavy when you can just get a tank of any size and still be moderately effective against whatever the enemy is fielding. Obviously bigger tanks = more firepower and armor, but this makes it so that bigger tanks = not the only thing worth having.
Then we run into the problem of who gets that heavy. Some random noob gets it then all the sudden your teams fucked. Who wants to be in a LT when you can be in heavy wtf pwn everything tank? No one wants to be the light fighter, everyone wants to be the deathstar. And yes, I just made an ogame reference. edit: DAMNIT CHRIS DELETE YOUR POST MAKING ME LOOK ALL SLOW OR I"M GONNA RAID YOU IN OGAME!!
All I want to do is ensure variety, as the mod has the potential for lots of that, it's got lots of guns and lots of chassis, the only problem is that there is only one real winning formula, which is big tanks with expensive guns. If you add in tanks which are adept at killing the big tanks with expensive guns you start to get a nice rock-paper-scissors system going, and as a result, variety.
I think if we make more weapons currently in the game more viable and reduce the wtfpwnage/gayness of some (ie nukes/rails) we'll start to see more of a mix. I'd also like to see weights played around with a bit so its not such a penalty putting a couple different weapons on your tank. If I have a choice of tanks and i'm seriously trying to win and I can't have nuke tank or dual rail I'm very partial to HE/UML mediums. One thing I wouldn't mind seeing is buffing heavies weights and hulls but reduce their movement speed and differentiate tanks a bit more based on that. Right now I heavies are somewhat slower than mediums but the difference isn't really significant (alot of this comes from the whole "tap left or right and lose all speed turning thing") For me that seems like a good way to encourage a mix. Heavy tanks can load on the heavy damage and take out bases quickly but you need some mediums and light tanks to chase down enemy tanks when they run as well. One big idea is having turret speeds being different and somewhat slow for heavy tanks. But thats kinda not really realistic atm.
Why not just have a 'size modifier' for weapons? Say, a weapon with sizemod_heavy = 1.2 will do 120% damage to heavy tanks, and so on. This would make it easy to design weapons that do additional or reduced damage to various size targets.
