A man awakes from a raster induced comma. pixels fly as he stretches long unused muscles. "It is finished!" He half cries in glee. This deranged creature lunges towards you and shoves a piece of paper in your direction. He is like a cat with a fresh kill, he cares not for your growing sense of horror. "you must look" he stammers. You reach out a tentative hand hoping to get it back, and that some how this will appease him. Wanted to share some thoughts on the game's class design. In general all the games infantry models are kind of generic. Face to face there is indeed some difference, but most of the fighting is not done at this range. When you play a game like TF2 you know at a glance what you are fighting. When you see a heavy at range you know it's a heavy. You know in that half a second what to expect from them, and you react accordingly. emp mod is similar in the respect that there are specific classes that do specific things. In empires when you see an enemy at range it's a dot you don't really know what he does or is until he starts firing at you. So in the interest of giving the classes some personality I made this. I decided to start with the scout since it needs a redo pretty badly at this point. When I started playing the class was being largely played as an invisible sniper. My first though on this is why invis? If you're running an army and you have this technology why not use it on all your units? If you're fighting invisible enemies where are you're thermal goggles, cyborg eyes ect. why do these "future" armies not have simple modern day things like heat vision and lazer sights? These are my suggestions for the scout ditch the current invis. It's doing a few too many things at once and making a class that you can't under normal circumstances return fire at. possibly ditch or change sabotage. I can see turrets being vulnerable, but walking up to any point on a building and suddenly disabling it doesn't make sense to me. There would be sensitive stuff like generators and fuse boxes that would be easily destroyed by a sneaky man with a molecule thin cutting tool. make these at specific spots. remake the sniper gun as a long range anti tank and personnel rifle. give it a setup and take down time. these are weapons that need to be bolted down. once the gun is down you're there until you unbolt it or abandon it. their other rifle choice should be a much lighter guy (i.e. they can move faster) the only purpose of rifle two is to mark targets for the com and other players. it should have about the same zoom and fire no damage tracker rounds. his other slots should be close range weapons that he can get in fast and use when not burdened with his anti tank monstrosity. Basicly if you want to make a class that can be versatile that's cool, but you should maybe not let him do every thing at once. he has to pick and choose his load out. for either long range sniping, or scouting long range. In closing I'd name this new class the ranger if I had my druthers. that's all for now. It's sleepy time.
I can tell what my opponent is at ranges past 200m easy. If it's an engineer, he's not shooting at me. If it's a scout, I'm confused, because very few people are dumb enough to play scout. If it's a rifleman, one of us is already dead. If it's a grenadier, I can see mortar shells incoming. But srsly. Engineers are always hunched over (engy tool) Grenadiers usually have an RPG or a mortar out, which is very easy to see from a distance. Rifleman are usually in the rifle pose. Scouts are rarely seen so they don't count. They do actually surprise me when I see them. Your picture sucks too.
I can give you a very simple answer to why not every soldier in the modern world has life support tanks that keep them alive no matter what. It costs
yes make scouts in bright colors so they cant sneak around completely denying them their purpose - especially if you want hide being removed, bright blue probably is good camo on green and brown maps. i like that idea, it would only be consistent with giving them a pointless weapon ... i wonder if guys think trough their ideas at least a single additional time. its so obviously flawed ... but what to expect from one of those "zomg i is scout, i pewpew headshot, cuz i is uber pr0" guys :cry: i repeat what i say in every scout thread, get rid of the pointless scoutrifle once and for all - dont give a fuck if you have a replacement or not. its just a horrible n00b trap. you nerfed it so much because empires by default will always have large plain open areas, but you didnt counter the real problem - its exsitance. your only archievment was to create even more useless players - now they not only neither build nor take down stuff, they also dont kill anyone ... GOOD JOB
although i agree with you, i would like to state that the average cost of equipment per infantry person has increased tremendously over the years, this is mostly because of an increase in life sustaining material like flak vests and protective padding so yea, if we ever can produce a machine that can somehow replace our vital organs to keep our body alive and going for lets say a day or 2 after mortal organ injury/failure (while not being bigger then the size of a field water bottle) i bet some armies would consider it an option for some "extreme environment" missions the problem with such a device is you have to somehow stop internal bleeding, because even if you somehow can keep yourself alive with a mashed potato liver the blood that it leaks into your abdomen and possibly out of your wound will make your blood circulation stop no matter how hard our "survival kit" tries to sustain your life, even an artificial heart cant keep you alive without re-routing the blood to bypass the broken heart ... id say possibly this would be a "medics" equipment, so he can keep a person alive for an extended time, maybe even keep him to carry his own weight even after serious injury that would normally kill a person within 30 minutes in public life today (after hooking up to the machine and some field surgery like burning the veins shut leading to that organ, possibly making it start to die and "rot" inside you but you will be able to go on for a few days this way)
ok A you just highlighted the current uselessness of the scout. B the point I was making is that recognition kicks in after you're being shot at or killed. The role of a scout is to send back intel. "um yea I went north, a dot on the horizon shot me." ,is fairly vague. As for the way this picture looks I made the background contrasting to show off the design. If I put him on a hill 20 yards away in red camo you just can't see him very well. that's fine in game. this is concept art. i.e. I want to convey a concept to you. not make you play Where's Waldo.
Well for me, I can tell their class through a sixth sense or something. It's not quite as much as TF2, where if you see a tiny part of a model you can tell immediately who it is, but I can tell fairly well.
This isn't TF2. This game more closely resembles a Battlefield or Enemy Territory game in its basic combat model. Classes should be distinct enough (through clearly different weapons or simple, easy to read outfits) that you can tell your teammates apart when you're traveling together, but not so distinct that they're carrying a giant red flag that says HEY GUYS I AM AN ENGINEER, PLEASE RUSH UP TO ME AND SHOOT ME to the other team from a mile away. Gameplay is not grounded on instantly recognizing every opponent, and it would in fact be detrimental to the threat presently implied by enemy infantry.
more homophobic manly fps players. I'm so sorry I covered up the good bits empty. god knows you like to draw them in ms paint.
Reminds me of dune for some reason. Oh, and "play the game longer" is not a fucking valid excuse for having godawful looking models that require more than an instant to identify.
