if anyone pulls the "you can't prove I exist" card during a debate, that's the same as admitting defeat. just fyi.
There is no way I can argue against being a troll though is there? If I say I'm not I'm obviously lying, and if I try to prove I'm not anything I do is obviously just an attempt to not get banned. If the conclusion is already foregone there is hardly a way to change it, is there? Increase building resiliance and make them harder to build anywhere at the start, so battle lines are always drawn near the middle of the map, and advancing past them requires a bit of tech progression or a concerted push. You can also add things like the listening posts to give teams a home field advantage, as well as perhaps some limited ML turrets on all buildings to stop tanks driving straight past. Slowing the large scale progression of the game would give it more time to 'develop', at least if you mean what I think you mean by that, without impacting the fast paced fighting of the players. However you still need a way to fix all the things that break most of the time and make the game unplayable, you need to ensure both teams get off to a good start, which the slow progression will then maintain for a while, otherwise slow progression won't change anything, except making the painfully slow losses even more painful.
Maybe we need a master list of all the gameplay issues, from small to large, that can be just given to the devs to work on gradually..?
If they aren't going to read this/play the game enough to get their own understanding of the connective links between problems, then giving a list is not going to help, because in the unlikely event anything is done about it, they won't understand why it needs to be done and will probably get it wrong because they don't grasp the reason for any of the changes.
Well that's a cop out. If nothing is ever going to get done, then dissolve the game ffs. I'm sure we could add a concise explanation for each change...and let's face it, the "organise stuff" is kinda fail atm because of the backlog and mixed suggestions. If we have a pure mechanics list, at least some of the stuff will get done.
in the most basic sense, this game is an RTS and an FPS. meaning, we won't be dropping the RTS components, and we also won't be dropping the FPS components. THe complains about what is broken about the commander mechanic (IE if the COMM sucks, the game sucks), is normal RTS> In starcraft if you don't know what you are doing, you are going to die by the hands of a small rushed force in the beginning, and if you don't take territory immediately you will die by being rushed later. It is simple, understandable, and commonly happens with newbies. Starcraft has complexities equal to or greater than Empires, and the entire single player campaign can almost be seen as one giant tutorial. Listening posts and more resilient buildings won't change that. Of course they will help, but at the end of the day if the COMM doesn't research, the team loses. If the players don't walk to territory and take it so the comm can place refs, the team loses. These RTS elements are here to stay. Making it more GUI apparent that research is not being done is important. making calls for refs cause a sonar ping (repeaded expanding circle on the minimap from the infantry that requested it) would be helpful as well. What this game is trying to do is combine FPS elements into an RTS, and the RTS causes some gameplay mechanics that aren't just plain "fun". However, removing the RTS elements defeats the point of Empires entirely Chris.
Pretty much this. This reminds me of the "off limits" mod which hasn't been released yet. originally, it was a battle battle between 2 teams 2 kill an NPC alien. Now the unique aspect of the mod has been scrapped because of technical problems and it looks bland. Weapons, vehicles, and armor...whoopdee-fucking-doo. Empires greatest aspect is also it's biggest obstacle. Currently, as many people have stated many times, there are problems with the commander, however you can't simply remove it because not only would you alienate the entirety of the current community, but you would also destroy what makes empires unique, and appealing in an age when mediocrity is the norm for multiplayer FPS. 2 teams, lots of guns, maybe an simple unique aspect to make it less generic. tf2 has hats and classes, BF2 has vehicles, Quakewars has vehicles...etc... Nothing out of the box like a full on RTS-FPS Hybrid. What I find fucking hilarious is that Chris suggests to make empires more like Renegade(in his own dialogue), and I came to empires because I was dissapointed that renegade wasn't an FPS-RTS, just an FPS with RTS elements(like the gimmick game mechanics you see in every other FPS) /rant
i dont care what you all say here, but some elements of the commander are seriously flawed and often make the game less fun to play. taking away power or dependency from the commander would fix it
'If we stuck an RTS onto an FPS and didn't bother to think about how it would work, then it's natural that it would suck, so it's perfectly ok' is a really, REALLY stupid idea. If your implementation sucks you CHANGE THE IMPLEMENTATION. Which means if bolting an RTS interface onto an FPS and hooking all the FPS elements into the RTS system produces fucking stupid games, DON'T DO THAT. For the last time empires is not an RTS, the enitre team is not there to facilitate the RTS, so if the RTS commander sucking shits all over the rest of the team that's REALLY STUPID and NEEDS CHANGING. If the point of empires is to suck balls then keep the broken-ass commander dependency, but if the point of empires is to be enjoyble, it would be far more sensible to improve it, by fixing the broken shit.
why have you invested so much time into the game if you hate it? I dont get it, Ive stuck around with empires for 3 or 4 years because I like it It's not broken, it's a work in progress, and each release has been an improvement. This theorizing about the game is all fun and whatever but it would be far more productive to isolate elements that need to be tweaked to work within the game as it exists currently here's a couple for ya make the grid system on the minimap standardized so that comms know where the fuck E3 is. make the skyboxes on all maps high enough so the comm can click around the map without all the headaches of hitting f2 over and over I realize these are issues with maps, but they effect the comm a great deal. the idea of making a list of broken mechanics would lead to a lot more reasoned and specific debate than all the head butting that's happening here.
a work in progress means it needs work, if it needs work it can be improved, so things may change while it is being developed
Has been tried many times. Also, see the Organize Stuff thread as an attempt to help codify the better ideas. Apparently according to the new sticky in the Suggestions Forums, the devs can't be bothered unless you bug them personally in IRC. Good luck.
Yeah I know about the organise stuff thread. I figured if we had a list then we could just as easily use it to bug them in IRC. Every time I get there, i've pretty much forgotten half the suggestions that were good...especially after spending all the time talking on the forums about it I'm already feeling too lazy to trawl through this thread for the few good suggestions that I know are there
What really needs to be done to improve Empires is to improve the integration of the FPS and RTS elements because at the moment the two are very separate and it is this separation which causes many of the fundamental problems Empires has. This can be summarized under two main point communication and the commander. Communication Communication in Empires is difficult, there are limited options for trying to instruct you team to do anything more complex than go over there and kill those guys. The voice channel is mostly used for this but as it is global only one person can use it at a time, so on maps with more than one choke point only one choke point side gets to use voice communications. With vets this is not a problem because they know what they are doing, however with newer players they don't know that the tactics that the vets do so you have to talk them through it but by doing so you are tying up your entire team's voice channel which another group on the other side of the map might want to use to coordinate their attack. Having more voice channels would allow people to communicate more easily, original thread on the subject is here and discussion should go there. The text chat can be used instead of the voice chat but it is only really possible to use the text chat when you are not in combat and it is a lot slower than voice chat and it is easily missed by the commander amidst his target spam. Move/guard/single unit attack orders all suffer from the problem that if you give them to a unit then that unit loses his mass attack order wall hacks and his situational awareness will therefore decrease making him less effective against similarly skilled opponents. Commanding The commander in Empires suffers from too much to do but so little of it skilful, if you remove most of these skill less elements and improve communications then the commander will have more time to try and lead his troops. Mass attack orders, these have been discussed in length elsewhere but in my opinion they should be either always on (auto targets on everything that the commander can see) or removed altogether. Dragging a box, holding a and dragging another box is boring, reparative and time consuming. It is also not explained anywhere in the game, making it another hurdle for a new commander to cross. Refineries, refineries should be free and able to be placed by engineers, this will not only help with slippery slope issues ( a winning team can afford 100 res more easily that the loser) it will also reduce the commander’s workload while being ungreifable as refineries can only be placed at certain points on the map. Original thread is here and discussion on this point should go there. Building placement in general should be improved, when you go to place a building the ground should change color to show where you can and can’t build the building (like in settlers) and when you try to place the building there it should snap to the first valid orientation for the building so if you want to place the building it is as quick as click on the building you want to build click on the green area you want to place it and it is placed. This will help new commanders tell where they can and cannot place buildings and help experienced commanders place difficult building more easily (I always struggle to place the barracks in the lower s-bend on slaughtered). Research, I am not going to touch on the balancing side of this, which has been discussed elsewhere in depth and would make this huge post even longer. Rather I would like the implementation of a research queue and research paid for over time rather than in one go. The research queue would allow commanders to queue up their research so that when one item finishes they do not have to stop what they are doing to start the next item but instead can plan their research when things are quieter and not having to worry about it when things get noisy. Research paid for over time would reduce the hassle of locking the VF to build up enough for the research item. If the cost of the research comes directly out of the res flow from the refineries then your team can still build tanks but the impact of locking the VF and waiting for the res build up is lessened. It will also even out the slippery slope a bit as the losing team will suffer from this more often than the winning team. Well this post turned out to be longer than I expected, but I believe that all of this stuff needs to be done for Empires to work correctly. The idea is to remove all the accumulated crud from the commander and streamline the game. Once this is done then you can decide whether to go down Chris's route and remove the commander or use this as a polished and stable bedrock to build the commander up to new heights. There is no reason why the commander principle is inherently flawed nor any reason why Chris's suggestions are fundamental improvements but this post is getting too long now so I will save that for another post.
A team has to keep research and buildings going or else they loose eventually. Research and stuff costs the same amount regardless of how many tanks you can afford, lets say it takes the res flow of 2 refs. If I have 4 refs and you have 5, then 4-2=2 5-2=3 I have 2 refineries worth of res flow to spend on tanks and you have 3 refinerys of res flow to spend on tanks. You have 25% more refineries then me but you get 50% more tanks. That is why slippery slope is so bad, a team with a small ref advantage is getting a huge tank output advantage. Plus 2 tanks now > 2 tanks one at a time. As for FPS/RTS buisness, thats what makes emp fun. There are better shooting games with prettier graphics and more guns, but in emp there is strategy (or tactics, in a game its all the same shit). The people on your team matter and teamwork is possible beyond just shooting at the same target. That results in lots of :mad: but also lots of :p and when your team does pull together. Its also fun that skills other then pointing and clicking are useful. Pure skill is hugely important in empires, but almost everyone already has decent FPS skills, so teamwork makes the difference in many games (well, less then half but still...) As for the commander: Commanding has a bunch of simple little tasks that need to be performed or else you have a huge disadvantage. Drop a forward rax no exceptions, research an armor and engine no exceptions (well, maybe 1 or 2), give targets no exceptions, keep research moving and research actual items instead of just tree opening techs NO EXCEPTIONS EVER and so on. Some of this can be fixed to make less busywork and more early game strategic choices. Also fixing the commander text garbage spam would help ALOT.
strategic choices have to be made late game, not early game unless you want a com that ends the game within 30 mins by selecting a "wrong" choice
Chris, there are improvements to be made. So suggest some. IF you don't have specific ideas to suggest, don't whine about how an aspect needs to be nerfed or removed. That is stupid. If anything, the commander should have more power available to him (like turning spawn points on and off, etc. No new commander would even use this functionality so doing this isn't bad. Amoung the other suggestions here Melarion makes a good point. Each player, even on foot, should have some RTS elements available to them and be able to better interface with their commander. Being a squad leader should be more obviously important, a squad leader gui identification that lets them know they have special abilities and responsibilities. personally, 5 and 6 on my keyboard execute the squad special abilities when I am on foot. ADding in more functionality with the minimap would be cool. Adding in squad leader functionality, or even finding a way to add in some functionality to the normal squad member, or helping to link these RTS components from the commander to the players, will better help to integrate the game components and increase the level of fun. Making things like votekicking the commander more intuitive or the like would be better as well
