Empires 2.52.9 Released

Changelog:

 

Aside from Smithy fixing fucking everything (), we also tweaked the NFCV so can go all honey badger on turrets. It's still possible to turret it with multiple turrets and some crafty placement, but it's hard enough that I doubt it'll happen in most games.

Teef and Doc asked for this change and I was pretty indifferent. It turned out that no one else seemed to care either. So we'll do it.

• Removed BioMG and Bio Cannon from emp_escort.

Since bioML isn't on escort by default, it didn't feel right to leave bioCN in there. As a side effect, bioMG was yanked as well, but if you were using bioMG on escort, you're doing it wrong.

As heavies get slow enough, we'll be buffing 3-slot weapons. Partially by weight, partially by other means.

Also as a general trend, I think I want to just set all weapon, armor and engine costs equal to their weights unless there's an exception. Shit is just simpler that way and we're already so damn close as it is.

Just some balancing odds and ends. Nukes really got shafted in recent releases. I think this'll make them remotely useful.

Also FML wasn't OP, I'm slotting it next to Std ML, where it should've been..

Just some minor tweaks. I was on the fence on whether to make Brittle a 100 or 80HP armor. I hedged on 80 last patch and that sucked.

Likewise, I vastly overestimated the penalty of Capacitive's HP drain. It's probably too high now, but I want to see what people do when it's noticeable and everyone is still using it because they think it's OP.

Reflective now works the way that a lot of people would intuitively expect it to work. I think this is a massive buff to BE because their chassis are much much sleeker, but we'll see how this plays out.

DDD blackmailed me to slow down heavies and I'm not allowed to tell DDD no, so they got slowed down by -5 mph across the board. There are two exceptions. The reverse speed on std and coolant is cray cray low already. So now it's in line with what it probably should've been.

We'll probably be slowing them down even more and maybe making them more expensive.

Every non-ML vehicle weapon is now limited to one weapon per slot. We'll be doing something similar for MLs soon. Some weapons had to be tweaked because of that. In particular, Medium arty got turned into a glorified dual small arty. I never really saw anyone use medium arty, but dual small was loved. If it turns out that medium arty is close to player's hearts, we can bring that back.

Viroman suggested that we monkey with steering braking on tanks. I tried it on heavies and now it's hard to spin them. That was with Security desperately trying to spin a coolant heavy with 450 ping on my listen server, so it oughta be fine on a dedi with a better driver (and there are many).

I weirdly heard a lot of jeep complaints in the last week or two. It's stock scripts, but people didn't like em. Maybe it was the torquier engine or something.

Anyway, so we'll move back to those old NF jeep scripts that I was derping with. I copied and pasted them to the BE jeep and they seem to work alright. The script is like 90% from that one BE Jeep script that viroman initially made, so I figure it oughta be fine.

We added powersliding to the CVs and the LT. I wanted to do it with the AFV and APCs, but it wasn't good by itself. A few other changes are necessary to get those chassis to powerslide properly.

Note that I also tested an LT handling script that I had lying around with complete and some other folks. That was a fine script, but it was meant for a configuration where the other tanks are much heavier, so it's shelved for now.

Recycle times have always felt long to me. We'll see if shit is significantly different when they are all chopped down to 20s.

Now that turrets are automatically upgrading themselves, Lvl2 and Lvl3 turrets are nerfed a smidge. It's funny, this was originally where I wanted to put Lvl2 & Lvl3 MLs, but I admit that I sorta lurved that engies could drop upgraded MLs and not have them be complete dogshit, so I left em that way until now.

MGs have actually costed less than MLs since forever. I don't really understand that one. If anything, it should've been the opposite. We'll revisit that at a later release, but I think it's reasonable that they cost the same for now.

We implemented almost all of Empty's suggested infantry changes. It's like everything. It all changed. Like I'm pretty sure nothing was untouched. I don't mind change, but there's a point when I want to sleep instead of type. I give up.

 

I still do not understand the path this developing team is taking, in specific Imspartacus.
A lot of the community has yelled its dismay against this new wind of making new weapons and tech, like the new smg3 and the new autoshotgunhmg brittle armor bio canon capacitive etc etc, but still you take the same path without taking any advice from the people who play this game. This has lead to empires being spec populated more than ever. It used to be a few players playing now its a few players playing and 10 in spec discussing how poorly the game is getting developed. How many times of people asking for reversal to a development strategy based on tweaking is there needed before you step out of this"if its broken we replace it or add something new," path, does it take? Cause I do believe this developing of yours is unsustainable due to no consistency in gameplay for users. Everytime you add something new the meta becomes stale cause there is no balance at all. Shotguns, then multi missiles, then railguns, whats up next? Can we balance the game first and fix whats broken or op, before we add new stuff. I understand from spartacus his point of view how fun it must be to constantly get to add new stuff and try new things, thats exciting. Balancing and tweaking isnt exciting. But for us the players what you are doing is opposite to what you are feeling. So please stop singlehandedly murdering this game.

 

Actually, I think the 20s recycle change is a good one. Can't comment on balancing because hell knows I haven't played recently.

Regarding heavies...did you ever think about removing their (relatively new) ability to turn in place, then nerfing reverse acceleration real hard? That would mean once they're committed to a situation they would find it hard to backtrack, but you wouldn't have to nerf their forward movement as much.

Might be something to "test" anyway.

 

@ImSpartacus
Thanks for the updates.

But can you post to http://www.moddb.com/

I really don't get why that keeps getting neglected.
Every time an update is posted Empires will get listed on the front page.
Could help bring some more new people.

 

Goddamn it, I really need to, but I don't want to just leave the old changelogs out.

The reason I haven't kept up is fucking 2.5. It's a shitstorm of horrible release practices. There were like 4 subversions. I cry.

 

First off: the game was becoming dull due to the stagnation of balance. Tweaks to the balance were so ridiculously small that they didn't make any difference at all. So, I encourage radically new things being tried out and mixing things up.

But those new scripts also have to be balanced. Spartacus did miss some community calls there, as do most scripters who have to iterate their scripts on the live version.

I don't know if you were around when Krenzo did the Release Candidates (I think around 21 in total?) until we got the next version (1.07, I think). The game had hit a slump, and most of the active players were in the RC's. Some things were obviously game-breaking (mines sticking to vehicles, oh god), and others had to be tweaked before they could be included. It was a lot of fun.

And Spartacus is balancing and tweaking both the existing and the new features he introduced, so I don't see any issues there. "Gameplay consistency" isn't something I rate highly at the moment. There will be many more changes introduced that shake things up, too.

That's what helped keep this mod fresh and interesting as well. Admit it: pretty much the entire tactical space had been explored. Veterans grinding down endlessly into perfecting the best tactics (not saying you are doing this or even responsible for it, not targeting you in any way) for a given situation were also a big factor into this mod stalling in popularity. So, change is good, as long as it's polished up along the way (which I believe is happening).

 

I'd like to disagree full heartedly, the game itself wasnt dull at all, the research was stagnating but it wasnt at all completely out of balance like it is now. The game was amazing to play with a lot of people on. But people stopped playing the game cause the vets were being dicks to the new players due to the high learning curve, I was being a dick to new players aswell because losing games is frustrating. I think I can safely say a lot of the players who played during the so called " dull phase" wasnt because gameplay was dull but because we didnt have enough players to play the game.

Mixing things up and trying new stuff wont solve the problem of learning curve and attracting new players (I'm also sure we are already miles passed the point of no return of resurrecting this mod with new players ). Lowering the learning curve but keeping gameplay the same was the most important problem we had the last 5 years imho.

To further talk about my previous point. New players do not give a single fuck about what balance there is in the game except when its ridiculously overpowered. Really, if you try a new game the first 4-5 hours you tend to not know shit about research or any in depth stuff like capacitive armor regen or take another game dota for example you have no clue what most of the stuff does but you enjoy the game. The problem with fucking up balance lies with the experienced players. A good analogy for this is " if you give 2 different people who have never tasted bananas 2 different bananas and you ask them who has the better banana, both wont know cause its their first one ever. But if you give one person a really disgusting banana ( extreme unbalanced gameplay ) they'll say the other person probably has the better banana. If you compare this to giving 2 experienced banana eaters bananas they actually know their shit and can tell u if its a good banana or a bad banana "

I wasnt but that looks like a very early version of empires thus again referring to my previous point if you enjoy the game but are a noob at it it doesnt matter how unbalanced shit is unless its extreme you wont notice it and still enjoy the game. Now the population that still plays empires have a way higher average skill level then lets say 5 years ago because all the newbs left and all the veterans kinda stayed. KINDA. So you gotta cater to their needs.

I have talked to many players ingame about this problem and consistency is one thing, changing things is another but constantly adding new things and completely overhauling stuff is yet another major thing.

Consistency is slight tweaking to find the balance. Changing things is like overhealing one weapon a lot because its op. But what spartacus is doing is completely saying screw u what ever it is and Im going to change everything up. Yeah ok there is some spirit in that if we had the players to explore what would work and what wouldnt have a lot of games to learn from and give spartacus advice but we dont. We dont have constant 24/7 high pop games to understand what the meta is. The only thing we get from the constant changing is, what is op. We dont get to explore more and if we dont get to explore more spartacus doesnt get any input to tweak his patch so it is better balanced. If you change the gameplay up a little bit , small tweaks here and there it's easyer for our small community to find some consistency in gameplay and understand what is good. Now noone has a frikking clue what to do. That's not a great thing honestly. All of a sudden you are playing a really good game of empires ( I had this experience when he released multi missiles ) and the game ends in a span of 5 minutes, nf gets heavy gets multi missiles the entire lategame is fucking trashy as crap cause be cant do anything about it. Congratulations you just fucked up an entire element of empires. This he did too with the shotgun, he fucked up the entire early game fun infantry combat by introducing shotgun. Basicly you didnt need any inbetween weapons, either you get grenadier or you get shotgun if you wanted to prevail and really win. ( note the incentive to really win )

I would like to differentiate here between keeping the mod fresh and changing a fresh mod into a different mod. The gameplay was fresh, everyone enjoyed high pop games with teamwork cause teamwork is what most players absolutely adore in empires. No teamwork = no fun. It's not because an entire tactical space had been explored that it means a mod isnt fresh anymore it just means all the players have figured out all the best strategies to play and play optimal and efficiently. If you wanna keep the mod fresh change small things to what might be the optimal and most efficient way to play not remove shit and add stuff at his own will and see what he gets.

As you say in your last 2 sentences, the popularity of empires was stalling yes, this wasnt because of the unfreshness but like I said at the start of this massive wall of txt it was because the high learning curve and the unfriendlyness of experienced players plus the game is just getting old.
Change is good I agree, but the way spartacus is changing is is not polished at all because the changes are too big and too fast paced in relation to how big the changes are.

tl;dr Making solutions for problems that arent there, and overseeing real problems

 

It was 1.08 Beerdude. At least I think that's what you're referring to. And 1.08=2.0 because so much had been added/changed.

Testing 1.08 was the best time I've ever had, in all my gaming. The release of 2.0 and 2.12 are a close second.

 

All these walls of text and I'm just sitting here wondering how this bug:

is being introduced as a feature.

 

To keep it balanced, the BECV's new collision mesh lets it invade the NFCV's nesting ground on top of the BE barracks.

 

I just saved the cv by driving over a a wall because engies though i couldnt do it.

This is actually one great addition

 

I just pushed out the teeny-tiniest update that adds keybindings for selecting buildings, and edited the changelog appropriately.

 

I agree, but I'd like to test it a smidge more.

Mind you I deem a "balanced" 15 weight armor as having 60HP under the current armor scheme, so if you have 4 plates, then you have a little more than 25s of "bonus" armor after your first hit. Is that enough time? I don't know, but we'll see what happens.

They will all keep getting slower, but I'm up in the air about 3phase. I feel like it's ok to have a fast engine, but there needs to be a weight penalty that reduces either armor or armament (or both). We'll see what happens.

 

Fair enough

 

Bolded the core things of your post that I'll reply to (mainly due to time constraints):

Really high learning curve: yes, this has to be fixed. It's a lot of effort and takes a lot of time. We have a boatload of stuff planned out. We mainly need more programmers because the ones who volunteer tend to disappear after a few weeks / months even with loads of mentoring.

People being assholes to newbies: linked to high learning curve, of course. Could perhaps do a meta-compilation of all the "what should newbies know or be able to learn more easily" threads and put a fuckton of hints in the game. The emp_tutorial map should also be revived / remade.

Spartacus' way of introducing changes: I think most vets are holding on too much on the false safety of "consistency" and "balance". The first versions of Empires were unbalanced as hell and extremely fun to find out what works best. Of course, the tactical space itself was unexplored; something you won't get back by adding, changing (or removing) weapons, research and other small things.

That's why there has to be a push for the more fundamental content that's been in the pipeline for years. We're just hurting for contributors who can put in a few hours every week consistently. The contributors we had worked day and night for weeks on end and then disappeared off the radar (often taking with them their efforts). I understand people get fed up with development or feeling they have to do Empires stuff all the time, so I don't want people to do Empires stuff all the time. Just a few hours (or an hour) every week suffices. Finding such people is surprisingly hard.

 

So I can only compare to way back about two (or three? four?) years ago when dickster had the wheel so here goes:
Vehicle MGs detect hits properly now - yay; infantry weapons are no more peashooters and actually fun to use now, didn't get to test the new weapons, armor and engines yet. (except the smg3 which seems no different from the smg2 and 1 to me)
3Phase is friggin hard to control now, I'd say that's an improvement. Love the new regen armor too. Can't make that many statements about the vehicle weapons though. After playing many games with either very slow projectiles and targets or no projectile based weapons at all I'll have to adjust before I allow myself to judge them.

 

Changes without having them all written.

It looks like you guys are buying lottery.

 

There were too many changes for infantry scripts for me to bother writing a changelog.

Every single weapons spread, damage, recoil and falloff changed. Every single one.