1) I didn't post the changes. For now, it's better that way. I'll post them when I've patched it a few times, I don't want people exploiting flaws I missed. 2) I'd love script manifest, and I nagged constantly for it before I was a dev. But now, having been shown the information on a number of occasions, I realise how difficult it would be to get it in-game. Or to be exact, what currently exists is totally useless, it'd have to be entirely redone from scratch to have any chance of working, and suffice to say, that won't happen right now. It's a pain for me because it limits the changes I can make server-side, I can't edit weight/cost on any armours because then things wouldn't add up when players build tanks.
@paradox yes, thanks, i understand what "dont play anymore" means, you dont have to put that in parenthesis next to it. i also dont pretend that i "played a lot recently", i havnt played empires for at least 5 months - please point me to where i said something similar to what you alleged. still, the released version is almost a year old now and if my maths dont fail me that still plenty of time to find out what i like and dont. i also dont come to the forums to troll, i just state my opinions concerning the game (or political topics, youll barely find me arguing in other threads) i admit, i shouldnt have written about how much i played in previous versions as it had nothing to do with what i wanted to say in the end. all i meant was that i played each and every version of empires since 2.0 and that i have no time or interest to play a game which i fear to develop into the direction of mariokart for mentally challenged kiddies, rather then the serious scifi-themed wargame it was. but i never gave up the believe and i refuse to do so in the future. also lets be honest, gameplay wise empires hasnt changed much since - its basically only different equipment that is overpowered in each respective version - most other major changes in gameplay have been reverted bc they have caused more issues then they solved. edit: btw, the word you substitued with basemodel is archetype.
Trickster, you said this: I'm pretty out of touch, but why not instead of messing around with the modifiers (which always seemed kinda complicated to me), make the armours (as a test) to be effective against different weapons. I.E. make absorbant take 10-15% less damage from missiles, make Reactive take 10% less damage from cannons, make reflective take 5% less damage from both. Keep composite relatively high HP but take the same damage from all, and leave the rest. Would that work? If we take out all the other stuff or make it negligible for a test, then just follow that kind of rule, I think it would be hella-easier to get where we want to be, right? Or is that kinda pointless? It's just a suggestion anyway. We can always add those attributes back after they're no longer the guiding abilities of those armours ofc.
Rails: speed 3600, grav .3, .1 spread UML: speed 1800, grav 0, .5 spread (2.31) twice as fast, tighter spread If effective range is based on speed, rails have close to twice the eff. range. Actuley geting them researched and loaded on a tank before your base is dead is problematic. Are you saying that the models themselves are imbalanced? See my sig. Ive done too much analysis/text walls to bother reposing. Before you can do this -> needs actual resists -> needs code support.
I'm still advocating for what I stated previously that would make each armor unique and useful without making any armor particularly overpowered.
empires gameplay has been changed, for an outsider that doesnt play weekly it hasnt cause you wont notice the really subtile changes that have a huge impact on the speed of games and stuff.
If I mess with the resists a lot I can set up a system like that, but it ends up getting really complex with a tonne of dependencies. What I mean is, it's very complex, involves changing every weapon to a specific damage type, and then adding manual resists for nearly every weapon. There are other ways which are more convoluted but the basic issue is, it's a pain in the ass. In an ideal world, each weapon would have 2 attributes. The first would be the type of weapon it is: missile, cannon, MG, etc. The second would just be a subtype, i.e. Bio, Chem, etc. That way we have way less dependencies and it's easy to edit without affecting 5 other things in the process. But without a doubt, I see your thinking and agree with you for the most part, I just wish it was that easy.
sigh I figured it wasn't but I couldn't remember the exact reason why we kept coming back to those fiddly values. It's not exactly the most logical way to write a weapon system, but I guess when one person is in charge and they know what they're doing and what they'll need to modify to get a result - and they can just code it in, it doesn't seem like a problem... Gyah, well thanks for the response anyway (&Nickierv).
Don't you hate the feeling when something groundbreaking happens and you simply miss it? I have it and I'm not happy.
The issue with balance and tweaking is the underlying implementation and partially the approach. You are trying to balance weapons and everything else based on gameplay rather than a design approach. ex: Armor and its 'unique' abilities COUNTERS other RESEARCH, it does NOT get balanced to fit a GAMESTYLE So, hence if you wish to balance armor or anything else, you require that mindset to be successful. Think of our armor types as units in starcraft or any other well balanced game (C&C) Every unit has a unit that you can squash it with. A major weakness and a major strength. Our armor needs the same thing (at least A MAJOR strength would be a start). POSSIBLE SETUP/IDEAS to reflect the concept --------------------------------------------- Absorbant = DamageOverTime NULLIFIED, 50% damage on RAILGUNS, weak (2x damage) against High Explosive weapons, LIGHT (full plates typical) Reflective = 50% dmg from ALL MISSILES (turrets included), weak(2xdmg) against Grenades, Mortar and RPG, (add some weight to it to tweak balance) Reactive = 60% dmg from ALL weapons EXCEPT MINES (no plating underneath), weakness BIO WEAPONS, and weight at 150% Regenerative = SELF REPLACING, 1 plate per 2 seconds if no damage occuring over 5 secs, weakness PLASMA CANNON stops regen and increases damage taken to 2x for 60 seconds. ALMOST as light as absorbant : tanks 90% plates or higher Composite = 70% dmg from everything, light, weakness 2x-2.5x typical cost per plate, no other weakness ALSO, PLEASE COMMIT ALL RESEARCH FREE NEXT PATCH. Simplify the solution. ANOTHER THING, For overall vehicle balance, commit a design concept the Dev Team can agree upon to the goal. Example: Brenodi has slower, more powerful vehicles/weaponry (generally) , and NF has less armor, but faster vehicles. AFAIR, this was the concept initially and somehow it gets lost in the fog, but approaching game changes and balance with this in mind means you know what to expect from your games and how you want to mold the game into fun. An idea like this means each team will require different strategies to attack, defend, and the like, as they won't be cookiecutters of each other.:eek: Food for thought...... (btw, i don't even know what this devtest was all about, but after reading the thread i just had to post this, i recognize a lot of this is beyond the short term scope, but the game needs a direction to develop towards it)
The biggest problem with what you're saying there is that it's a complete nightmare, if not completely impossible to do. Weapons can only have one attribute in terms of something we can make a resist against, so short of making a specific damage type for every single weapon (bio ml, chem ml, mech ml, bio cn, chem cn, etc etc) which just nigh on impossible to balance over the long term. I've always said that if we're ever going to balance things properly, weapons need 2 atrributes rather than one. They need their type: Cannon, Missile, MG, etc. And then they need their element: Mechanical, Chemistry, Biology, etc. Then it drops it so I only have around 10 resists to deal with for each weapon, rather than about 50. And that's before we start talking about other attributes of an armour as well. And as well, a few things you mentioned like the plasma effect on regen just can't be done currently, there's no function for that. Overall, I believe the best thing we can do is just patch up what we have in the short term, and wait until our coders (after this release) have time to overhaul the way the weapon and armour scripts work, so that there isn't so much overhead, because it's just not viable to get a long term balance right now. But finally, I believe the difference in armours should be in how you use the, and how good they are at combating the weapon shooting at them by the way you use them. That is, if you use it right, reflective armour against a low-splash missile weapon could be exceptionally strong, but against a splash weapon then you stand no chance. Regen is good against slower firing weapons, especially if you rotate often enough, but against high rate of fire then it never gets a chance to really regen. Pure stats rock paper scissors balancing is boring.
Please. Do not make the weapons in a certain research category counter the armour it provides. I would suggest making HE average against absorbent, rails and missiles average against reactive, ER and DU average against reflective and bio average against regen. Why? Because then the counter to a certain research path is no longer doing the same research. Making Bio counter Regen or HE counter Absorbent would mean that in order to effectively counter Bio I would have to go biology/i] as a commander and if I were to counter absorbent the most effective way to to that would be to go into the same category that includes absorbent armour it self. The opposite is true the moment you reverse it and make it so that absorbent is the best armour against HE or regen the best way to counter bio. I would suggest not coming up with set values already but instead try to find out were you want to go with the armours, personally I would like to see: Absorbent: An armour against fast weapons and low DPS weapons. Reactive: An armour against slower high DPS weapons. Reflective: Similar to now but buffed(back to the 100% modifier). Regen: An armour that is worse then the others but rapidly regenerates. Composite: Jack of all trades, master of none: More like Standard Tier 2 then anything else. The problem with reactive and absorbent is that reactive is in EE which means in order to effectively counter guided, homing and salvo homing you would have to research EE, while at the same time, to effectively counter absorbent you would have to go into Chemistry and research HE. This exposes a fundamental flaw in the current system where in order to counter armours you would have research weapons that fall into the same category. Which causes Absorbent to be the most effective armour of all as the most effective way to counter it is by researching HE which is in Chemistry. ER, Homing(Unless salvo homing for heavies, which is extremely rare nowadays), Rails, etc. cannot counter Absorbent as much as HE and UML can. At the same time, HE and UML own pretty much every other armour available. Therefore it is not a surprise that today commanders barely ever start with anything other then Chemistry. TL;DR Chemistry is the most effective research path in the game as Absorbent counters almost everything except homing salvo and HE/UML while the weapons it offers totally demolish any other available armours. By making it so that the weapons of a certain research path counter its own armours or the armours effectively counter its weapons you force commanders into only going for 1 research path.
It is possible to have a damage limit kick in with about 2-5 lines of code. Reactive for example can be good against hi Damage Per Shot impacts by reducing the damage 10% or what ever. It would need to be hard coded unless they throw in a way for you to script the damage cutoff point and the % reduction modifier. This would have the effect of making reactive good against UML and nukes. Seems plausible to me that a reactive armor would be good against hi damage impacts.
leave grenadiers - or well infantry as a whole actually - out of the whole balancing considerations. why get an armor which has its counter unlocked right away? and if you take grens out of this, you end up with a brenodi only armor which fucks over your whole, "youll have to open an additional tree to get decent tanks"-concept, with ercn heavies
I think BitchSlap was just pulling examples from his hat to show how gameplay could work, rather than what you seem to have gotten caught up with which is "OMG! YOU CAN'T HAVE THEM ALL TOGETHER!!" Please, the research tree hasn't been shaken very hard in a long time and if it was to be, I sincerely doubt anyone would commit BS's idea to code before considering the idea properly. Yeah, I do have more faith in the dev team than that.
Anyone else afraid of electrical being OP in the next patch? I sure am and I hope devs will try to change dat.
