Empires 2.6.4a released

All feedback welcome and appreciated in this thread. I accept all blame for overpowered/gimp/ridiculously-unbalanced changes.

I removed Heat to Target because it's a bullshit mechanic that only serves to been either really insignificant or downright frustrating to fight against.

The buffs/nerfs to DU and HEMG serve to make them fill the role of a secondary weapon better. Previously, they were simply too heavy and generated heat too fast to be effective secondary weapons. By lowering their heat, damage and weight, there's less of a tradeoff to get one and they don't require too much thought to actually use.

The initial anti-infantry MGs got their falloff lowered so they won't be as effective at range. .50 Cal remains untouched because it should be raping infantry.

Railguns were preemptively nerfed in expectation of the nerfs to Salvo Homing; both burst DPS and long-term DPS still outshine most other weapons in the game.

Salvo Homing's weight was increased to 100 to match Railguns and its damage was lowered to bring it more in line with other weapons. It still has the highest burst DPS of any weapon in the game except for Nukes. The lock-on time makes it a bit worse at ranges, but doesn't really affect its use at closer ranges.

Composite got a health buff because people expect it to be a decently strong armor. It still has some of the worst health/cost and now beats out reactive for health/weight, but not by much.

Reactive was too damn expensive. It was less cost-efficient than god damn plain armor.

When I lowered Regen's weight, it's HP/W was too high for something that regenerates, so I cut its health a bit to account and shifted the regen rate so it's still about 4 hps.

Absorbent was too extreme. So I increased health, lowered StoD and removed the non-standard resists. Really, Speed to damage is a shit way of balancing, I don't know why people have been using it for years to make a cannon-resistant armor instead of just increasing the shell resistances.

Capacitive's health per weight was high. Too high. Even after increasing its weight by 2, it still has the best H/W ratio in the game. I did lower the decay rate though; now it takes 25 seconds to lose a plate instead of 20 seconds.

Due to removing Heat to Target, I upped Bio's heat capacity so it still has some sort of gimmick going for it. 125 is my limit because anything higher than that makes it's too easy to rapid-fire two nukes, and Bio has the worst cooling in the game, so it felt like a good fit.

I decided to add costs back in for chassis research. I felt that they were unique enough that it wouldn't be out of place for only them to have costs. Originally, I was going to have Heavies cost 3000 and Mediums 1500, but I decided that splitting the cost of heavies between two researches and shifting 500 from Mediums to Upgraded Chassis would help to reduce the issues with large up-front costs.

HMGs got a slight buff. Regarding the bullets, I wanted them to be able to fire full auto for longer periods of time, but the bullet display won't show more than 200 rounds. By doubling the bullets and cycle time, the DPS stays the exact same but a belt lasts twice as long. My goal is to make it an MG for suppressive fire, like an MG42, which is why the minimum spread is so high. I pretty much disabled accuracy upgrade for it to simplify it; accuracy upgrade was putting it into the laser rifle zone.

It's like 3 in the morning; I really ought to stop doing releases at 3 in the morning.

 

Shooting MG42 full auto for extended periods of time would probably result in you getting a nice little lightbulb sue me
////

Why did you lower the standing spread of hmg though? People already were using it wrong and just shift rushing with it.

 

Soooo you made plasma useless? Don't get me wrong, I always thought it useless anyway. What about nukes? Do they still have any justification without instantly overheating enemies?

Don't know what you mean by that but I saw a guy run through a 200 belt on an MG3 (which is basically an MG42 with minor modifications) and he seemed pretty exhilarated.

 

I think there are other ways to make weapons like plasma relevant without HTT. I'd be patient.

 

1:Ask someone to grab nuke tank with you.
2:Fire nuke together at the ground near enemy tank, at the same spot.
3:Watch enemy driver rage.

Well, nuke is really not the weapon for vehicle, enemy driver can just drive onto you and there's literally nothing you can do.

 

meh I was hoping for a tweak to bio... something along the lines of..

Lower bio DOT to next to nothing and then make the shit stack. A few pin pricks mean nothing but, take a bath in the shit is gana cause issues. This will make people start to consider their options against bio instead of just... Ehh I can "tank" it till this guys dead and then repair.

 

why would you remove heat to target and keep nukes in without any changes? you are just asking for a person to research it and wonder why it doesnt work. the description even says it overheats the target

composite is probably op

wow. does the mg falloff even account for the space around the vehicle where you cant even aim?

dont think any armors needed a nerf

 

Bio is a bitch to balance. Also, when I think of Bio, I don't think of constantly hitting the same side with it. That's one of the special things about Bio; you benefit a lot from hitting multiple sides instead of just one side, unlike literally every other weapon in the game.

I considered lowering the spread, but that'd make it too strong against buildings. Nuke sniping is already bad even with the high spread it has. I don't want to increase the speed because Nukes are distinctively slow. They're too strong and generate too much heat to lower the weight (Lower weight would encourage dual-nuke tanks which are just a bad idea due to how much heat they produce). Lowering the heat would be an even worse idea because I don't want to see rapid-fire nuke tanks. Damage is already high; it can almost tear off an entire side of Regen/Budget in one hit. I could lower the cycle time, but we all know that heat is what prevents nuke spam, not cycle time. Clip size is pretty much irrelevant.

Composite is probably OP; as Lazybum mentioned, I forgot to lower the regen rate, which would make it too cost-effective. Without regen, it's one of the best health/weight armors and one of the worst health/res armors.

I don't know what you're saying about MG falloff; all I can say is I got complaints about them.

Capacitive still has the best health per weight in the game, second-best health per cost, and I did also lower the decay rate. Regen was too strong for it's weight.

 

Just fixed the issues with HEMG, and pushed out a change to shotgun pumping.

 

the last flags were supposed to show up. somehow i fucked up when i never touched those flags in the first place.

in regards to the tickets: in theory the "change" is actually the same. all i did was divide tickets by 3 (number of tickets taken if middle captured) and make the bleed 1 ticket every 10 seconds instead of every second per number of flags taken. same amount of time, less confusing and easier to keep track of ticket bleed

 

i was aware of that when i made the change. you can make that case for every map though... and the tickets are set at 400 each. its not exactly district.
you can get tickets back by capturing the second to last flag anyways
the game i played yesterday lasted 30+ minutes. nice and not too long for a map thats supposed to give a break from commander maps