Thats pretty much sums it up, 1 good game on escort every 100 matches. Why, because more people are starting to perfect the arty lame. Sticky doesn't compare as you can defend your tank against sticky by having riflemen. when facing a average/good BE team it can be nearly impossible at times to take down the arty as he just camps behind the BE spawn or apc, you try and take out an arty while every inf you killed while trying to get to the arty, spawns with spawn protection right next to it. And if you take it down the only chance of not seeing the arty return is hoping that the other team has some newbie wasting money on jeeps. I've always been against 9th mine, just because 9 mine flag camping is as lame as arty camping, doesn't mean the amount of lame should even it out and just have them both in. 9 mine can be resolved by other balancing if everyone suddenly started doing it. (while its a lot harder to time properly as one inf can ruin a 9th mine of 1 gren) If it means that it's going to be crazy hard for BE, thats not that bad, turret farming by nf isn't as bad because you still are able to counter it, or atleast try, tanks take out MGS, infs take out MLS. It's possible and the circumstances are a lot more forgiving than the arty camping situation. Nukes was removed, arty has always been worse, those brushes doobie added all over the map were not because of nuke but because of arty, back before you could unresearch items on a map. I don't know if doobie had the intention to remove arty if it was possible, or if he would have considered it, but I think it should be removed either way, I know a few new passages that could improve the game a lot for BE if arty is removed, if lets say incase removing arty would mean that NF suddenly starts turretcamping and 9 mining a flag that its imprenetratable, than some new quick passages (if solokiller wants to do it ofc) can always shift the balance more towards BE again.
Everything here is true. The map would be so much better without artillery, and more paths for BE to use. Arty doesn't really make teamwork happen for BE, and getting killed as soon as you walk out of spawn isn't fun for NF either.
what if--and this is just a brainstorm, i havent really considered it-- there were no arty tanks BUT also a greatly increased res flow? and more paths, but that's less easily changeable. I generally agree with Dizzy's assessment, especially when it comes to newbies, because getting instagibbed in spawn, even if it IS balanced, is NOT going to win us any players. Spawnkilling from a point halfway across the map will only scare new players away from the mod. Nine mining is a bitch, this is true, but at least it can be overcome with a an infantry unit riding shotgun who's willing to blow himself up. (And if infinite res were allowed, or 100k, or whatever mootant said, that might actually give jeeps a reason to exist!)
dizzyone: you just ignored my argument: escort wasn't designed with stickies in mind. Of course some random troll will say that it's better to remove every NF weapon. If you remove arty then it won't autosolve itself when NF can make a huge turret farms UNLESS (yes that's a radical change) you give infinite/very high resources so BE can actually use heavy tanks. I can't say if it's ideal or not but 2 not very funny things will be fixed: massive turrets farms will die from heavies 2xrails/HE and there will be no arty (spawn camping is much harder then). Game will be also more fun for noobs in BE. With a lot of resources stickies in NF are fine. (Now something for the trolls: if you think that stickies are fine ATM then think again. Without spending any resources and either having luck or rushing with lots of riflemen you can destroy a tank that costs 1000-1500 resources. It's worth 500-1500 BE seconds/tickets. That's as dangerous for the tickets as artillery is. TBH I don't care any longer about "you can have a good team that will do ....". That just doesn't happen. We have a constant flow of noobs coming to the game not experts playing it for 10 years. 1. people think that arty will solve everything 2. they throw nades even though they aren't killing anyone 3. they don't rush even it's enough to run 5m and camp the flag to capture it 4. BE go scout 5. if they lose vehicles they start whining that winning is impossible. 6. they think that they have to stay alive to help the team and just end camping BE flag I don't like the idea of adding more paths. It would make the map completely different. ATM it's fun that NF generally attacks from the top and infantry has to escort tanks. Also it would be pretty hard for NF to guard all the paths leading to the flag. Currently almost every flag has 2 paths leading to it.
Counter to Turrets (as I said before) make more routes for BE infantry so that turrets can't cover everywhere
Please explain how are you going to make it easier for BE if they can't get to the higher level? Throwing seismic nades from below fails and 10-20 MGs are better than any amount of grenadiers. Squad artillery needs too much coordination: in other words it won't happen in a pub game. Game should be balanced in normal conditions. Also: if you can attack area behind 4th flag without artillery/2x HE heavy then make a demo and show it to me. Such things just don't happen with at least few decent engineers playing in NF. One more thing: 20 vs 20 escort is different than 10 vs 10 escort. Keep that in mind.
TBH we get two versions of escort (essentially just two config files): 1) Nubscort with shitloads of res 2) Olscort with everything original: res, tickets, timer I've played Olscort on the BSID server with 42 players, and it was a constant struggle for both teams and very fun. Eventually NF won with 12 tickets left (starting from the original 300 or something). There were some other escort games on there where BE won aswell. There's nothing wrong with old Escort if you get vets on both teams that know how to play a game of Escort, but I feel we also need a nub version with a lot of res and tickets and other bells and whistles so newbies like it aswell.
escorts is fine, just too easy to defend first flag, 1/4 of games i play end up with BE (this is with pretty balenced teams) being stuck on the first flag for most of the game, and due to that will then get stuck on the next flag until the end of the round as NF all have 40+ points and are turret farming arty is lame, turret farms are lamer remove arty, what about the turret farms? removing lvl3 turrets on escort would be a step in the wrong direction imo the main problem is noobs, but you can't do much about them just tell them to do some useful stuff and hope they listen fact of the matter is its easier for noobs to camp a flag, than for noobs to take a flag, so if the 1st NF flag doesn't get captured and all tanks are lost, it usually means game over for BE 10 vs 10 escort is MUCH different to 20 vs 20 escort, if you look at the game play and the resources still being the same, tanks are more useful but when fighting double the enemies with the same number of tanks the tanks are easier to kill, with 9 mining and sticky rushes claiming most tanks (as well as no defuse heavies) with the odd squad arty is butcher arty tanks
m00tant, sub paths that lead to the main 2 paths can be added, nf can still defend 2 paths (while it's effectively 3 at the 2nd flag) and be has a lot more room to push forward. Arty is not the direct counter to turretspam, scouts can sabotage turrets, tanks can kill turrets, riflemen can sticky turrets, engineer can nadespam turrets, you might not be in the perfect situation to do all of these, but i'm trying to show you that the difference between countering turrets and countering arty is insanely huge and both should not be put side to side to arguement against removing arty. Again m00tant, I wasn't commenting on the sticky issue because this is all map related, not arty related, instead of responding to the sticky issue, I portrayed that the map can always be made more in favour of BE. In all the games I've played, arty really never played a big role in taking out the first flag, its bull that you need arty to take the flag, you need to take the flag to take the flag, how simple can it get. Teamwork issue != arty issue. I don't know what you're trying to say mkoll, arty infact can make it way too easy against noobs, so as BE you need arty to counter your own noob team?
Artillery is the one of things that can counter turret spam on escort. These things are: a) grenadiers b) heavy tanks c) artillery tanks Grenadiers can't do much and heavy tanks are easy to kill with stickies. I'm not saying that stickies should be removed. I'm saying that without artillery and with only costly heavy tanks left you need *FAR* more resources. NF doesn't have any reason to worry about it when there will be no artillery. About scouts, tanks, riflemen and engineers: everything other than artillery and heavy tanks is useless at 2nd, 4th and last flag. I didn't say that I want to keep artillery. But the effort required to destroy turrets without tanks is WAY BIGGER than effort required to destroy artillery. Look at 4th and last flag and their surroundings and try to win the game without artillery/huge supply of heavy tanks. Impossible. SO when you take the artillery out of the map (which is fine) you either completely redesign 4th flag area or give more resources. Giving more resources is better because: 1. driving tanks is fun. When I played Empires 1.0 first time it was cool to see that there are tanks in this game and I as a noob can try different loadouts without worrying too much. What we currently have is a setting where you probably want to KICK the noobs from the server just because they might buy worse tanks or instantly lose them. Balancing shouldn't be done only to balance something (insanely hard vs insanely hard) but also to make game fun. You focused on making it fun for NF and forgot about BE and generally noobs. 2. it doesn't hurt NF 3. rushing as infantry(with no tanks) is harder and against map design. As I said earlier escort's design is generally: NF attack from the top with everything they have, BE can use tanks and try to stay alive. It didn't change from 1.0 to 2.1. 4. it doesn't require a lot of work and testing What Mkoll was trying to say is that his clan goes scout when they lose artillery in BE and generally fuck around ("we're doomed, we're doomed!"). Exploiting on NF roof matters a bit but only a bit. (if in doubt: 9 out of 15-20 players in my team were scouts and a squad of engineers could capture the 2nd flag with only building a few turrets)
Triple or double the resource rate would be a good solution. Unless you make 9 mines not work on escort. That would be the best way to balance.
from the NF side - drastically increased res could change the feel of the game potentially, and taking out a hard to take out tank may just briefly set BE back as theres a dead person who needs to drive from the start to take his place in the queue of tanks. Thinking about it, I've not played escort recently so should probably just keep quiet. How hard is it to take out a mass of 6-10 heavy tanks all with 2 HE? I'd have thought it'd be very hard unless you get lucky with mines and manage to flip some, stickies are all fine and well but you have to get at least a little near. Would it ruin gameplay to have a light in the main passage before the third flag? I can never see much of use in that part.
Any amount of heavy tanks is friendlier for NF than 1 artillery. Map is narrow especially at the last flag. So all in all I want: 1) no arty 2) so many resources that the map design limits the number of vehicles you can effectively use
The first flags the main thing that needs redesigned imo, before be capped the first flag in one game i was able to kill 3 or 4 of their tanks with stickys, when you can do something like this be is almost guarenteed not to win. What i suggest: 1.Make flags ordered in difficulty as much as possible (e.g. 1st flag is easiest 2nd flag is harder, 3rd flag is harder again, then 5th flags the hardest)---at the minute i think the first flags harder to capture than the 2nd flag, mainly because of the cover the crates provide for nf when tanks are coming out of be spawn (dont say they dont because i can take light damage from the turrets defending be base and hide beside some crates until artillery blocks the turrets from seeing me, after that its simple to sticky 1 or 2 arty. 2.Increase the amount of resources BE get per second before they capture the first flag (i.e. make it 2 res (or maybe even 3, im not sure what it gives you after you cap the first flag at the minute) per second instead of 1) 3.Remove some crates from the alleyway coming out of be base, but only 1 or two because removing all of them will give be no cover. Doing even the last two things here would seriously help balance it out as more often than not the outcome of the game is balanced around taking the first flag (if its taken without losing many tanks then be can win quite easily if its not and be lose their tanks they wont win) addition: 4. Decrease NF setup time from 1 minute to 40/45 seconds or maybe even less. (the more turrets nf have the less likely the noobs are to rush the flag)
If you want to see how escort sans arty works, add the following to your server's cfg/maps/emp_escort.cfg: This should remove artillery, but not artillery weapons, so you have to remove those as well to save some bandwith. (if that even saves some)
You can't remove artillery weapons without removing the tank weapon of the same kind, it shouldn't matter as you can't see artillery weapons without selecting an arty. I'm all for more res if that makes it more fun for BE, heavy tanks can be real hard to take out, but atleast it's a challenge, especially at 3rd flag.
No, the first flag is easier... When I'm in my heavy, blowing up turrets and infantry, I can retreat if I need to. I can do my job of destroying the turrets effectively, and still retreat. At the second flag, I would have to go past the point of no return to do something useful. Every time I do that, whether we end up capturing the flag or not, my tank ends up dying there, because I can't retreat to get repaired/restocked before some grenadier or rifleman kills me. The most I can do at the second flag is shoot into the capture zone, and hope I kill any turrets that are down there (or any infantry that try to use those lower ammo boxes :D) and kill the occasional turret that they try to build in plain sight.
Jcw87 that's all fine but with 20 people in NF it's easy to lose your tank. BE can build 3 such tanks at the first flag and can either ragequit or start farming turrets to slowly attack. So my point is: no arty but more resources. For example unlimited resources. With fixed NF RPG it won't be a problem for NF. BTW Solokiller should make a clip brush at NF 1st spawn's roof.
