Empires Revival

There's been a lot of noise about reviving Empires. That would be cool, but the biggest problem is this isn't Empires anymore. Somewhere along the line, the people in control of development began their own little thing and removed all the parts that made people want to play in the first place.

Gren power creep, mechanics flip-flopped completely every patch, mechanics changing monthly...that's not the way you build a stable player base. Any player shouldn't have to subscribe to "Empires Monthly" to figure out x armor is shit and y armor is OP in the current patch. They shouldn't, because making dramatic sweeping changes rather than careful and calculated adjustments *should* take priority over reinventing Empires.

Empires never needed reinventing. The people who stuck around did so because they liked it how it was. I uninstalled as soon as I found out about the numerous nerfs to the jeep. I might not personally play using it, but the problem with the jeeps was never health or speed, but rather how broken the BE model is.

I'm all up for making Empires better, but I don't want Empires II or Empires: Grenadier issue. I want an old-fashioned FPS/Strategy with comfortable movement and mechanics, with some random tanks and nonsense thrown in on top.

If you really want to revive Empires, you would really have to start again. Not from scratch obviously, but to carefully and quantitatively evaluate what works and doesn't work with the current state of Empires, and 2.24d which was widely known as the "best" version of Empires even if it wasn't fully balanced. You have to integrate statistics gathering into the client and calculate correlation and covariance rather than ask the grenadier players what they think and feel. A test server based on subjective opinion and misrepresentations of statistics is utterly meaningless and will never work. Throwing together mechanics and hoping they stick could work eventually, but basing changes off of actually gathered statistics will mean that the changes have merit.

Let me finish with this: I applaud the hard work that people have put into keeping this game running, and trying to constantly improve. I recognize that they really do care about the game and have spent a lot of their own time trying to make it better for free. The problem is, there are few problems that are solved solely from good intentions rather than data and slow adjustments. Any problem that can be solved easily isn't any problem at all, and if we truly want Empires to be revived in it's current state rather than being ported to another engine the process needs to change, not the base game. None of us would be around if the fundamental game mechanics were flawed to the point that they had to be fully re-written and if you hope for any form of Empires "revival", this needs to be understood.

 

...2.24d was the best version? Since when? I think you'll find 2.12 takes that category.

You don't, by any chance, remember when mines were able to take out a whole base at once, do you? Gren "power creep" has occurred because tanks have always been largely imbalanced against infantry. And because in previous versions a tank could literally decimate infantry, causing most of the game to become "tanks or lose", the balance needed to be redressed. It wasn't uncommon for 10 corpses to surround you after being near a nuke hit. That's one player, killing 10 players at once. Yeah, that's unbalanced.

Some things I do agree on, though. The research balance is now very hard to understand, with old traits being removed and other things being added. Most people don't know what's good or not, even if they subscribe to the Empires Weekly magazine. Which is a pretty bad state of affairs.

The people in control didn't start their "own little thing", though. We've just run past the most open set of development we've had in quite a few years, with things being added by request much more often than design. If you're talking balance, fine. But you should draw a line between balance and "parts being removed".

 

how can grens power creep if their shit is unchanged since forever, they got nerfed by extra armor on tanks.

 

I guess a more accurate description of 2.24d is more developed. After 2.24d, it was primarily script changes and such that dictated patches.

I wouldn't say that. Unless there's been a recent patch, tanks and gren fights range from 1:1 (in terms of respective units required to kill the other) to 1:2. While it's important for tanks not to roll over the enemy, this makes tanks near useless in most situations, especially considering many armor types are extremely weak against grenadiers. If you take into consideration that all classes have some form of anti-tank capability (albeit at different ranges and safety) then you see my concerns. Infantry by no means should be mowed down by tanks, but neither should tanks be easy to kill. The closer infantry and tanks are to each other in terms of effectiveness, the longer matches will drag on, and the less importance there is for the actual strategy portion, so it's important to have a strong balance. Tanks should not be able to be killed so quickly by a head-on infantry attack, especially at range. I don't mind if tanks have nerfed anti-infantry weapons but more resistance against grenadiers if that's what it takes.

Research is a very critical issue. It's well-known to be the subject of flip-flopping power differences and even in it's original state was complicated. The recent additions, while interesting, serve only to further complicate and increase the learning curve. Like I mentioned, the only way to properly balance this stuff is to collect data and process that data to make small alterations and see if the new statistics match the expectations according to game mechanics. Test servers have been, and always are meaningless because you don't get enough players balance according to population, and if you're not collecting large-scale statistics to adjust balance it's doomed to fail, and it has time and time again.

I get what you're saying, but very recently there's been major content changes that have primarily been spearheaded by singular people. Banning jeep boosters from the code itself rather than leaving it up to the server, making jeeps susceptible to small arms fire, and the various small tweaks have commonly been done by a single person with the unspoken majority disagreeing with the decision. I know when I heard about the jeep boost being removed, it was the "last straw" for me, and I uninstalled and didn't consider reinstalling for nearly a year, at which the game was completely and utterly different where I promptly gave up and uninstalled it for the last time.

It's good to be open to the community, but the community itself isn't always the most outspoken, which is why collecting statistics and data of the combat to crunch later is critical. Politicians rely on advisers to make decisions not because the politician is stupid, but because not only is popular opinion typically wrong, but if you're going to change a system for the better it has to be supported by our expectations and modified as it goes along.

Open development is nice and all, but like I said, adding things from request means that design decisions are solely from the outspoken few rather than the many who would like it. It's one thing to add a cool mechanic to fill out an unfilled niche but a completely other thing to add that mechanic before the others are balanced. There's actually been quite a few high-quality large scale games that are completely re-balancing their PvP systems from scratch because the imbalanced exponentially rise relative to the number of unbalanced weapons and mechanics added.

I can make some plans on a good way to approach this since I am familiar with project management, statistics and programming but there's undoubtedly multiple people who would oppose my suggestion of "starting over" because no one wants to try again after they've put a lot of work into a project. At any rate, I wanted to lay all of this out because the problem with Empires was never the community nor the developers but rather the lack of organization, management and careful mechanics adjustments that additively stacked until the critical point at which people played less and less.

I'd also like to note that optimally, it would be better to port Empires over to a newer engine, but unless someone can program the basics of what would be needed, and outline why we should use engine x over engine y, such discussion is pointless.

 

lmao 2.24d best version, ok man. At the end of the day, you can say what you like about things changing too frequently, but having the same stale meta for a long period of time is actually so detrimental to keeping the community alive. People need to have something to learn to enjoy the game and if they've learnt everything, then things just get boring.

 

Having the same stale meta for stable communities? Really? There are countless examples of this just being plain false. Age of Empires II is more popular than Age of Empires III not because they had patches on a weekly basis that flip-flop power inequities but because they had a solid and fair base.

At the end of the day, basing patches off of opinion is an exercise in futility if your goal is balance. Using the opinions of the few plus a casual test server match occasionally is no way to balance the game, and given your frequency of re-balancing patches that you led you should know this as a fact.

People don't need change, they need a game with solid mechanics. To borrow form Age of Empires again, it would be ludicrous to suddenly add the information age and industrialization to Age of Empires II because that wasn't the original design. If you're going to fundamentally alter game mechanics to such a degree, it should be done by a sequel (aka AoE III). You are thinking in terms of the natural product life cycle, but Empires already had it's "time in the sun", and the vast majority of the community is comprised of people who liked the original mechanics and cannot find another game that performs them better. The core problem is that you have people who envision Empires 2.0, but don't have the follow-through to port Empires to a new engine so they instead tinker with the original formula to try and make it similar to their idea, and give up within a year leaving their half-finished messes to accumulate to critical mass.

You can't just bury your head in the sand and say my point is invalid without having any actual reason for it. If you want to be actually constructive to the discussion, you have to actually say why you think I'm wrong and outline your reasoning, rather than flippantly laugh and go about your day. That same level of apathetic and irresponsible decision making is what caused Empires to be in the state that it is.

 

This thread is not a parody

This thread is not a parody

This thread is not a parody

Sorry, just thought it might be nice if everybody took a moment to reflect on this fact for a second.

I just legitimately find it humorous that there really is somebody out there that suggested 'going back to our roots' so to speak, when its the kind of thing I always used as a joke to talk about old empires vets.

 

Empires has a rich and varied history.

[youtube]dncB6yuT298[/youtube]

Notice the discipline and ease at which they play. Those old vets worked together like a well-oiled machine. Listen to how they never even get angry at each other.

Kids these days... They just can't play like the old crowd.

 

The timing of IT'S NOT DOWN YET times perfectly with emp_escort's wall going down =]

 

2.24d isn't a joke friend, it's a dream; don't believe in 2.12 junkie propaganda.

Great argument if only it'd make sense for Empires and not for Age of Empires.

 

You might want to try reading the actual post before you criticize it, given that I never said we need to reinstall a previous patch. If after step 3 of a process it becomes fucked up, do you say "Oh well let's just duct tape it back together on step 10". No, you go back to step 3, use what you learned from the failure, and start over again.

The previous version of Empires is needed as a base; however it's not a simple rollback and would instead implement some of the newer updates that properly fit within the game.

At any rate, if you don't have anything useful to contribute, don't contribute at all. I'm trying to discuss how we went from Empires being full server daily to requiring scheduling to field even a near full server. If you think my ideas are wrong, refute them and provide reasons. For anything else, it's pointless chatter that gets literally nothing done.

Expansion, yes, but there's two problems with that. Not only would an expansion of Empires just serve to split the community, but we aren't big enough nor popular enough for the same model to work. We constantly have a lack of commanders because even if you have a player who knows how to command, and how to play, he also has to be up-to-date on the most recent metagame else everyone loses. Victory shouldn't hinge on metagame; else there's no reason to have a tech tree. Rushes should be possible, slow advances should be possible, every tech tree should be useful for different strategies and situations, and if anything it's become less so over time. Some changes are for the better, but some are highly excessive because like I mentioned a lot of the changes are solely based upon opinion and statistically unimportant data consisting of 10 people fucking around on a test server.

 

They're both games that involve strategy, and the mechanics in question are involving the RTS section primarily. How is it not a good enough comparison?

 

Empires is an FPS with RTS elements, not an RTS, furthermore it isn't age of empires and neither has it ever had a "solid and fair base" in terms of balance..

 

Fine, here's some contribution. The reason the servers went from full daily to requiring scheduling to field a full server is time. That's it. Games get old, only the best of the best or those that manage to capture the hearts of many by being very widespread maintain activity for extended periods of time.

Any other situation is like ours: a group of dedicated players plays for as long as they can until it no longer becomes feasible and the community shrinks.

Believe it or not, but right now excluding some minor balancing (which is easily fixed with scripts) the game is quite probably the most polished its ever been. I am completely serious.

Suppose I should also point out that as far as I'm aware several source mod communities are in similar boats - it's a dying medium so to speak, with free games being readily available in other forms nowadays.

 

I am going to have to refute this, there has been an influx of people crashing constantly.
And I can't think of any particular reason why.

 

Alright, let's do this shit.

I'm going to have to start by saying that for a lot of text, you're not getting very many points across, so I'm actually having a hard time working out exactly which parts I'm meant to post rebuttal's to, but I'll try my best. I want to state that I feel you've been pretty aggressive towards some other people in your posting, so I'm going to reply in kind. And I promise you, I'm better at that than you are.

Right, so let's start by pointing out this is entirely conjecture. You have literally no knowledge of how things are done within the development team. You're not really being specific about "what" you're talking about, but I'm going to draw the conclusion based off the rest of this post that you mean the balance, and thus by that logic, the balance scripts. You're actually stating here that the balance of the game (i.e. changing numbers in text files) is infinitely more important than the countless hours coders and artists have put in to improving other facets of the game. Again, you have no real knowledge of how things work, so you've just essentially decided to lump everyone together because hey, that way you get to avoid being specific and actually having a point. But sure, again with the next vague statement, "removed all the parts that made people want to play in the first place". I think more than likely, "people" should apparently be replaced with yourself.

So let's start by saying that yet again, you're basing your entire fucking thread on "balance". Somehow, you think Grenadier has slowly gotten more powerful over time, despite the fact you've totally ignored the fact that everything else also got stronger in other ways to combat that, like infantry developing resists to Grenadier weaponry, tanks getting better armour and various bugs with armours such as absorbant, reflective and regen all being fixed contributing to stronger tanks in general. Again, let's tl;dr your statement - #1 qq grens hit me with mortars, #2 qq i hate having to drive my tank intelligently instead of just soaking up rpg sand mortars all day

That's really the heart of where your entire hypothesis essentially breaks down completely. You have this idea in your head whereby you think that a true "balance" exists in which everything works perfectly in conjunction with everything, but that just isn't how video games work. You balance around how you WANT the game to play out. I know in a reply somewhere you cited Age of Empires II as your example, despite the fact that the game had a tiny playerbase until the HD re-release. Yet I can cite Starcraft 2, Dota 2, League of Legends, even the FPS games like CS:GO who undergo regular balance changes in an attempt to change the metagame, simply because the same strategies develop as the most efficient way of winning the game, and people get bored of both playing and watching that. Do you know why those games are so popular? Because they can't be mastered. The player gets to learn something new every time they play, and the balance changes are a huge part of that.

Empires doesn't need reinventing, no-one has ever claimed that. But you're claiming here, yet again, that the entire game is being defined by the balance scripts, rather than the core gameplay mechanics that underpin everything. But no, this is basically where you sink your own argument by making an example you should never have made. "I uninstalled because they nerfed jeeps hurr durr de hurr". Are you fucking serious? Like, right there, you have literally proven everything I've said. You have no understanding, no comprehension of what Empires actually is, if you honestly believe that changing the balance or tweaking the role of jeeps and Grenadiers "changes or tries to reinvent Empires". The core gameplay mechanics of Empires have remained unchanged since the game actually moved to source. You start the game, you get refinery points, you research stuff, you get vehicles, you contest territory and eventually you aim to kill the enemy command vehicle, while preventing the other team from doing the same. That has literally never changed, ever.

Aight, so this is the bit I've been looking forward to. "2.24d which was widely known as the "best" version of Empires". Now, despite the fact that 2.12 is widely known as the "best" version of Empires, and the fact you totally made up that statement you yourself made, that's really irrelevant here. Allow me to bestow some magical wisdom upon you:

Empires has barely changed in the past 9 years. It is fundamentally the same game, and the balance within the game has had virtually no effect on the playerbase. What has affected the playerbase is the rate of development, the active servers and popular maps at the time, as well as the actual age of the mod. How many other mods from the HL2 sourcemod era can still pull over 60 people in to play on a weekend? The answer is fucking none. The same players come back to Empires time and time again because it's the game they love. And on top of that, the insinuation that data-driven spread-sheet based balancing is what's needed is not only laughable, but just flat out wrong. Because hey-ho, it's been tried and it just didn't work out, because there are metrics that simply can't be measured, such as the skill floor and ceiling required to use certain weapons that varies on a game-by-game basis.

I'm going to close with this argument. Around the time between 2.12 and 2.24d, I actually made very similar arguments to you. I felt the game was changing too much, balance was pretty appalling and I felt like the population was dying. But you know what? I was wrong. It took me a long time to finally understand that actually, active development of ANY kind is more important, but also, the balance of a particular version is never what made it good. I loved 2.12 because I thoroughly enjoyed that meta-game, I liked the super-lethal rifles and the fact a single Grenadier could blow up a CV solo. But by the end of 2.12, I was bored, and just like everyone else, I wanted it to change. 2.24d was no different for a lot of people, whereby reflective was researched every round without fail and the low damage infantry weapons meant learning spread patterns and taking HP upgrade completely superseded any kind of intelligent positioning in combat. It was ok at first, but after a year people need SOME kind of change, something new to learn.

The fact is, what makes a version of Empires great is never the balance, and to be honest it's not even the features, it's the core mechanics of the game coupled with the PEOPLE YOU PLAY THE GAME WITH. I loved 2.12 because it had tonnes of my friends playing. A lot of people loved 2.24d because it had tonnes of their friends playing. The fact that both those versions were the stable version for around a year means that it's a period that people can associate with easiest. By simple logic, more people are going to start playing the game over that 12 months than they are over the 1-3 months that other versions have lasted.

Empires right now is nothing more than a miracle unto itself. It should not still be going, it should be dead, but it's still kicking. The sourcemod scene is dead, and total-conversion modding in general is as well. Nowadays, it's all paid-for indie games or F2P games done by studios. Empires was never that, it's always been a labour of love. I don't dispute Empires could live on longer if it got a port to a new engine, and I definitely agree that CORE mechanics should be kept (others think they should be changed), but I genuinely do not believe you understand what those core mechanics are. You're so hung up on minor balance aspects that you're blind to the big picture. As I said, I made the same mistake myself. I made similar threads to you in the testing forums when jeeps had armour removed, when infantry weapons got their lethality reduced substantially, when plain armour got so strong it would take 3 grens to kill a light tank. But I can look back now and think, you know what, we still played, we developed strategies around all that and we became better players for it.

That's really all there is to it. If you think in your mind that freezing the metagame at 2.24d and just trying to tweak that would have somehow saved the game, you're probably beyond saving. But if you can actually step back and look at the game as a whole, you will actually see what I'm getting at.

In closing, I just want to say that I have no intention of replying to any more text walls. If you want to counter-argue with concise points, then go ahead, but I can't respond concisely to multiple chunky paragraphs and I have neither the time nor patience to spend the best part of 45 minutes writing a post like this again.