engineers with smokes & rumors

HELLO SUGGESTIONS BOARD,

I heard rumors from an unknown source that smoke in empires has been fixed. By fixed I mean that smoke actually conceals rather than be relatively transparent but cause the player's screen while inside it to be obscured. From the rumors, the fix was a simple change of particle.
...
If the thing where your screen is obscured while in the smoke is still there, THAT BETTER BE REMOVED. The amount your screen is obscured should only be the amount that the particles of the smoke grenade block it.

This being said, please give engineers the option to take seismic grenades or smoke grenades. Since the engineer is the also the medic class, it should be able to take smoke grenades that allow the engineer to obscure the enemy's line of sight to a wounded teammate. With a smoke screen, engineers would be more easily able to revive teammates.

The engineer's role on the battlefield is to shape and support infantry combat. They do this by deploying area denial (turrets), building fortifications (walls), setting up recon (cameras), and supporting their squadmates (revives, healing, repairs, ammunition). Why not further define the engineer's role on the battlefield by giving it a fork feature. If an engineer takes smoke grenades it is better equiped for infantry support, and if it takes seismics it is better equiped for destroying buildings.

Examples of effective smoke grenade use:

• creating safe paths to objectives
• obscuring minefields, turrets, cameras and tactical formations
• obscuring advances
• obscuring retreats
• deploying cover at a location too hot for walls
• obscuring line of sight from enemy to wounded teammates, making reviving them much more safe.

Thank you,
Sergeant First Class FN198
Brenodi Sixth Infantry Division

 

I have a question to the developers.

In order to make "particle only" non-obscuring smokes useful, would it be possible to implement some kind of negative accuracy modifier to weapons shooting at smokeclouds?

You have something similar in Dawn of War, where smoke grenades still let you shoot, but makes you miss more.

Now my train of thought is as follows: If you want to make proper smokes without crapping out the server or making any kind of vision inside the cloud impossible, why not add an forced effect on weapons?

The thing is, people from outside will still be able to shoot at stuff inside, which is exactly what you want to prevent with smokes, because they're too visible.

Now if you add a slight inaccuracy to anyone pointing at the cloud, it might or might not hit properly. So, high rate of fire weapons or area-of-effect weapons will have no problems with that, but long range accuracy definitely will suffer, as intended. It might even hit, who knows.

All I'm saying is, this would create proper long range weapons cover, regardless of how the graphical implementation would be. It would have a certain tactical effect to use them and could be optimized for least serverload, while not totally annoying players AND still being useful.

 

Engineers has already many functions. Smoke grenades should stay at the scout.
For me the ideal teamwork would be if all four classes are supporting each other.

 

I would like an option as to make the class dynamic, yes.

 

Hooray griefing with a portable ammo box. Now you can grief on the go and look like a normal contributing team mate while doing it!

This is stupid. If you kill someone and then a smoke appears near him throw nades or shoot where his dead body is. Seriously are you guys still trying to balance this game based on game play from district?

 

smoke in empires is shitty anyways

it blocks view from inside, but not from outside
and you can spam it to rape everyones fps and possibly grief your own team

 

But hes right about the FPS loss and team griefing. This is a horrible idea and further more the smokes should be removed from the scout class as well.

Also cameras see thru smoke. The idea of smoke screens only works in games with out wall hax.

 

clearly people do not understand the practicality of smoke screens.

it's like smoke is some codeword for lag or griefing

I don't know what you guys mean by lag, because if you're running source, your card should be able to take a dozen smoke nades like it's nothing. This isn't hl1, and smoke barely lags hl1 if your card is decent enough to play source. the only thing that causes lag these days is a bad server or a full 64/64, therefore lag is not an issue.

the only reason smoke nades can "grief" a team would be if friendlies tossed them at other friendlies (like griefing with concs) or if they used them to give the enemy cover.

All of these situations should be included in the next tip's edition and should be common sense how to use smoke grenades. ignorance is an easy excuse in empires because there isn't enough documentation for the player to read while loading or while playing. If someone is incorrectly using it, and is told to stop and informed of the proper usage of the weapon but does not stop, they are clearly a griefer. It is easy to discern a griefer from a misguided user, therefore griefing is not an issue either.

Although commanders can assign targets to enemies inside smoke, those targets do not indicate that there are obstructions between the target and the unit the target is assigned to if there is smoke around the target. smoke can conceal topographical cover, walls, anything to obscure that which is aimed at. It is not terribly easy to discern the location of the head hitbox of a red diamond. For these reasons, commander targets do not negate a smoke screen, and there is an evident net gain of using smoke cover.

Because lag is not an issue, griefing is easily dealt with and the fact that targets do not negate the effect of a smoke screen, smoke grenades have a supportive advantage. This advantage is in lieu with the character of the engineer class and should be a secondary option to each engineer as an alternative to deploying with seismic grenades.

 

http://www.forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=10709

 

Lag IS an issue with me and many others. I dunno why I'm not a dev or anything but I do know for a fact that things get really laggy and a huge FPS drop happens when I am near them.

Greifing is not that easy to spot specially when most of the time to find a smoke spammer you look to see who is a scout. Now if they are engineers it will be a lot harder to tell. They could spawn drop there smokes and leave and do it every time and no one would know who is doing it.

And targets do negate smoke because hit boxes are shit in empires and before the smoke appeared you could see if something was in the way. And when you hit someone its pretty easy to tell because of push back or things like vipers damage thing.

 

Opposing this on account of possible griefing is like removing recycling from the commander because he has the potential to recycle the base.

 

is there really a massive need for it? i rarely see smoke used anyway, i always go with flashrape grenades because they instantly confuse turrets (albeit temporarily) and then can sab them.

 

No it's not, if someone recycles your base how hard is it to find out who did it? Smokes are a lot harder to find out who did it. It's not like walls where you will see the creators name on it. And its really easy to secretly spam spawns with them and get away and do it again later. The last person I banned for smoke spamming I caught because I saw he was a scout.

 

Players should be able to see the name of the player who is source of the smoke within a radius of the smoke grenade. /problem