I have found Gas Turbine can be very handy on very hilly maps if u want a constant speed, but I do agree that the heat dispersion is pritty shitty. Give a slighty better heat dispersion (but not too much) and it should be ok
Gas Turbine has always been my favorite engine to go with Rail Heavies. Now maybe I'll see that combo 1 game out of 100 (the 1 game when someone gets us Rails)
By the way the engines shoud vary even more. You don't feel a big difference when driving gas turbing, nuclear or 3-Phase. Different weight is good chance to balance the good and bad engines. But more important would be, if every engine (not standard) is a good engine for certain environments.
It would be even better if the maps actually HAD different enough environments that researching a certain engine would logically demand a certain manner of attacking, 3 phase on the flat and straight and gas turbine for luring the opponent in an uphill battle. You could even affect the engines cooling ability depending on the environment the engine is being used in: going uphill in a 3phase -> crap cooling. Alas that's probably more depth than the average player is comfortable with.
Fission rapes bio diesel alot of the time. I dont understand why people think that fission is that useless... it also does not stall when getting hit.
My idea regarding engines was giving certain engines a bonus if used on heavy tanks for example (fission/gas turbine) but dizzy nerfed it he says its bad balancing cuz of limiting choice However differenting engines is not as easy as it sounds. Maxspeed: This is pretty much set in stone, if standard gets any slower its completely useless. If 3phase gets any faster its completely useless. Horsepower: This is extremely wonky, I mean change it by 100? 200? and try to spot was has changed; I already sunk hours into trying to understand how horsepower affects tank behaviour beyond "uh maybe it accelerates faster..." Increase it too much and the tank explodes on spot, decrease it and you have a brick. Bad thing is this ALSO affects how tanks drive in ways I don't comprehend. Gear shift settings: WTF, no idea if this is used at all and even if its used I have no idea what increasing or decreasing those does. I tried using RL logic but that failed hard. Summary: Can't even fathom "making engines vary depending on the environment" Heat diss: Most important thing, but you can only set it to like: Takes 2 heats away, takes 5 heat away, not much space to differentiate. Cost: Engines take 7-15% of total average tank costs. It could be increased at the cost of base-tank-cost. Weight: yea...
I searched the figures of the engines but I only found the explanation in the wiki and the ingame discription. Would like to make a suggestion to adjust them. But of course therefore I need the old figures.
By the figures I have... Speed 3Phase > Fission > Gas Turbine > Bio Diesel > Coolant Horsepower 3Phase > Gas Turbine > Bio Diesel > Coolant > Fission (But all so similar it hardly matters) Jeeps are slow. Heavy and Medium tanks have the fastest reverse speed if they use fission. Fission and Coolant are slightly more tolerant to high heat. 3Phase loses horsepower from damage, heavy. Not to mention it'd make build orders very monotonous. Each map would have an engine that is best for its type of terrain, and it'd be highly unlikely that a different research path would be worth using a different engine for.
I have already gone over this all before, but I will describe it again. Horsepower is the force applied from the center point of the vehicle proportional to its current speed over max speed to get it to its maximum velocity. At high speeds it means almost nothing even if ridiculous, at low speed the same numbers would just make you flip on the spot. It has the subtle effect of changing how you turn a bit. The max speed you can maintain on level or near-level surfaces is limited by your horsepower, though the high speed will still let you gain more additional speed while going downhill. Maxspeed can change if you also decrease horsepower, making the vehicle capable of long-distance travel in a straight line while making them not ridiculous on the small scale. Gear settings, I am pretty sure, just affect the sounds the vehicle makes while driving. Differentiating engines comes from permitting extremes. For example. An engine that goes forward and backward equally well. An engine that has a high top speed but poor acceleration. An engine that has the highest possible horsepower and decent speed. An engine that has very good cooling. An engine that is not affected by heat or damage at all. An engine that is overall slightly above average. Wait a second... that is already more than the number of engines we currently have! The problem is that the differences try to be subtle and end up worse off. If you made the top speed of 3-phase twice what it is and reduce the horsepower in half(or maybe even a little less), you actually get an interesting engine type that quite coincidentally is terrible at ramming but good at hit and run that doesn't stop moving. The reverse speed also can be incredibly useful for turning because of the different points on tanks that the force come from. A tank with good acceleration and backwards speed can basically turn around in a second, making it realistically possible to direct which part of your body is hit in real-time.
