Game should be tanks supported by infantry not infantry steamrolled by tanks.

There isn't any way for a pyro to kill a level headed heavy in TF2 other than by luck if he gets a critical. The minigun works better than the flamethrower at point blank. It only works if the heavy panics and sprays madly or has his minigun spun down which is unlikely as I always spin it up when I enter a dangerous area. Even then I've gotten kills with a spun down minigun.

However assuming you just mean 'if it gets point blank' then that still raises the issue of how exactly the grenadier is supposed to do that if the map isn't a close quarters one?

 

We shoot it till it's dead.
On a serious note, if the tank hasn't got any Chainguns or Machineguns, we simply kill it.
A good strategy is to put down some mines, and have the tank chase you over them, which harms the front armor.
Then you shoot it in the front.

 

Dual HE? BIO ML/NUKE combo? seriously make a video of it and post it here.

I usually use my heavy to clear mines on maps like slaughtered.
It takes 10 mines to kill a heavy now or even more dont know it exactly.

 

Can we pull out some statistics and see what we can improve then?
Maybe you are that good of a heavy driver. What are you afraid of as a Heavy driver? Can we make that even scarier? Or are Heavies just the instant-win vehicles?

So far we have had these suggestions:
Lower the turret turn speed.
Add more ammo to tank-killers.
Lower tank damage to tank-killer classes.
Add special effects to hitting tank in different places: disable a weapon, movement, heat venting, anything.

 

Two mediums, three lights, unexpected minefields, other heavies.

You can make mediums, lights, unexpected minefields, and other heavies more available.

 

The whole "more small tanks kill a big one" doesnt work cause theirs a vehicle limit...

 

Minefields are only good in the early game when all the drivers are engineers. Around about the late-MKII to Medium stage everyone tends to switch to defusal gren and/or rapes minelayers with laser MGs, as indicated by the steep drop-off in mine kills.

 

Well I thought that there was agreement that the anti-infantry weapons for vehicle would be toned down/have more spread/weigh more and so be less likely to be equipped on a heavy tank, similarly a minor decrease in turret speed could work. My fault for not explicitly stating that.

It is not an invalid strategy, but is not one which will guarantee success either. The heavy tank is not the ultimate tank, it is for crushing heavily defended bases and for providing heavy fire support. If your team can hold the line with MKII lights while mine has mediums then the teams are probably not even skill wise. Heavy tanks are not cheap either, so you will not be able to field as many heavies as I could mediums. The mediums however will be better at attacking the heavy tank and running away for repairs while the heavy will have to sit and take it for the most part.

I'm not sure why you would get the impression that I want to make heavy tanks immune to grenadiers or how infantry would be unable to close with them but that is not my goal. With slower heavy tanks they are less able to dodge rockets and run from riflemen requiring something else to keep the infantry off them. With the decreased effectiveness of vehicle mounted anti-infantry weapons this role should be filled by riflemen and dedicated anti-infantry apcs.

The way infantry usualy advance in empires is by pushing up with wall segments and using them as cover. The riflemen will need to stop the enemy from destroying the wall segments so the rest of the infantry can move up.

Walls require a very large amount of firepower to die, and very few people have the patience to sit around and plast through a wall, especially if there is an engineer waiting on the other side to repair it. Yes you will eventualy get through but it would be quicker to have infantry flank the engineers repairing the walls and kill them rather than trying to blast though them.
On any chokepoint map you will end up with one team periodicaly trying to blast though the other's defences when those defences are not necessary near the refinery points or even in a very critical location. This is the only time I can see a heavy rush working because you are using the right tool for the job, and even then the enemy could succeed in breaking your defence with medium tanks.

Mediums would still be effective against bases but the heavy tanks would be there to break the hardened bases.

The heavies wouldn't be the only way to destroy bases, just that they would be there to destroy the very well fortified bases.

The idea is that by sorting out tank roles and giving each of the tanks a job that it is designed to do we can better tailor the grenadier to deal with the problems that tanks pose. The lighter tanks can be fended off with the RPG while the heavier tanks can be mortared more easily. Perhaps a system whereby the more weight you put on a tank the slower it accelerates would be a good idea.

 

So don't you think perhaps a way to increase unexpected minefield frequency is to change defusal? Hmm? Or is that too much of a logical leap for you?

 

Change difusal to show mines as glowing lights, so they are clearly visible.
Do all vehicles use the same ammount "vehicle resource"? I haven't been paying attention to that. If yes, the Veh limit can be upped, and the more expensive tanks cost more, with the lesser vehicles costing less, and therefore evening out this balance. That's how units in StarCraft does, why can't Empires do the same? If this is already implemented, can the effect be heightened?

 

I like having more than one vehicle thank you very much

Also, that would encourage light tanks to exist

 

I am sorry, I will try writing in short sentences so you understand.

Up vehicle limit, to maybe 50.
Up vehicle usage of said limit, depending on vehicle etc. So a Light Tank maybe uses 13, and a Heavy uses 22.
No more Heavyspam.
Numbers above can be adjusted for balance.

Alternatively, have the vehicle limit low from the start.
Put "upgrade vehicle limit" in some research tree.
Have commander pay for having a shitload of vehicles.

This together with other suggestions in this thread can be helpful.
This might make tanks expensive enough to be guarded.
It MIGHT solve the issue of tanks being instawin.
Can we try to come to a consensus?
Because now, everyone is just picking out small errors in posts of others, to look smart.

 

the commander ALREADY pays out the nose for fucking tanks

seriously, goddamn every tank is fucking expensive as shit

 

I have not stated that cannons would be changed at all, tank cannons are primarily anti-vehicle and anti-structure weapons rather than anti-infantry ones. That said the splash from some cannons, HE in particular is ridiculous and should be toned down.

The heavy tank will be able to act like a direct fire artillery piece however it will also be a tank which is capable of beating mediums and light tanks in a straight fight. This is why I said that the mediums and lights would retreat rather than face a prolonged encounter with the heavy tank. One of the problems with the current system is the lack of differentiation between the weapons that mediums and heavies can equip, if there were more 3 slot weapons in the research tree then the heavy would be more than just a medium with extra armour. The point about the tanks are that there should be an escalation in fire power as the game goes from early to mid to late game and rushing ahead would be a risky strategy.

RPGs will weaken heavies but will not kill them on their own, for heavies you will either need to have upgraded/advanced RPGs or use the fact that is slow moving to mortar/artillery strike it to death. Without the ability to quickly go and drive away it will either have to sit there and take it or plan its retreat in advance.

I see few instances of tanks ignoring everything and blasting through defences, more often the tank driver drives around the walls and blows up everything on the other side or he is an engineer and he parks his tank very close to the wall and deconstructs it before getting back in.

They can do a lot of damage to walls but if their are engineers repairing them then the walls will not die, otherwise the walls will crumble after a few salvoes. There is nothing to stop the heavies shooting at the buildings inside the base but then the buildings will be being constantly healed/rebuilt by engineers and the defenders will have the advantage of the walls to shoot back from.

Bases will tend to get more heavily fortified as the game progresses, more walls and turrets are built and lvl3 turrets are researched. On choke point maps teams will fortify either sides of the choke point and the defences will get larger as the game progresses.

Artillery and heavy tanks do have a lot of overlap but that is something which all the vehicles have. The heavy tank would be mostly constricted by its very flat cannon arcs and missiles while the artillery tank can use its large arcs to hit targets behind walls. Conversely the heavy tank would be a lot better at hitting enemy tanks because of its cannon arcs.

Grenadiers can be effective against tanks, slower accelerating tanks would be less able to run away for repairs when damaged causing them to either leave earlier or to rely on others to cover their retreat.

The problem with this is that it would require the light and medium tanks to be useful late game, while currently they are not. Also the problem with paying to increase the vehicle limit is that the vehicle limit is a limit imposed by the server's hardware rather than the game and that it also ensures that the wining team keeps winning as they can field more vehicles than the looser.

 

Oh, I did not know that.
What I meant was we the top-researcheable-vehicle-limit is also the server limit. And there are tiers beneath it, with the lowest one being availiable as soon as a VF is built. Building a second VF allows for more vehicles.

 

Me like.

I think repair bays should heal faster overall too. It give more incentive to build them instead of being a spot to swap out the loadout of your tank.

 

I'm going to start compiling a list of actually decent ideas. Let's start with stealing from zenarion.

Note that implementing all of these would break the game, so we need to start picking out a set that we want.



So far we have had these suggestions:
--Lower the turret turn speed.
--Lower tank speed in general (dubious).
--Add more ammo/dmg to tank-killers.
--Lower tank damage to tank-killer classes.
--Add special effects to hitting tank in different places: disable a weapon, movement, heat venting, anything.
--Force vehicles to choose anti-vehicle or anti-infantry more stringently.
--Adjust healing speed based on time since last damage to prevent repairs in the middle of battles.
--Make repair pads heal more to create fallback points forcing tanks to move away from the front line to repair.
--Change defusal to a mine detection (or something less broken while in a tank).
--Increase infantry/turret missile speeds and turning radius to make it easier to hit vehicles (possibly researchable).
--Slow down larger tanks to make them weaker to lights, but increase armor to give more survivability making heavies "battleships", heavy firepower and damage absorption but weak to infantry and lights who can wear it down.
--Mapping design to give infantry an advantage in more regions (doesn't fix inherent balance, but gives more ambush points).
--Reduce machine gun effectiveness (lower accuracy, increase weight cost) to make tanks weaker against infantry

 

putting any of those in would make empires a shitty boring game

 

<fixed>

 

Because those lights will still get slaughtered if they encounter the heavy backed up by anything else -- if they ignore the heavy and focus on fighting grens / other lights, they'll get slaughtered by the heavy's big guns while their attention is elsewhere; if they try to kill the heavy, its armor will let it last long enough for its defenders to take out the attackers.

Of course, this might require some buffs to grenadiers and so forth, but those are needed anyway.

On large open maps, lights will probably be a bit better, yes, because they'll be able to rush quickly from ref to ref. But on maps with chokepoints, with less room to dodge, the heavy will be vital (and make the chokepoints less of a grind, hopefully) -- with support, it will be tough enough and have strong enough weapons to force its way through, even if it's getting worn down in the process. It'll be able to steadily advance, with a few LTs and grenadiers moving ahead of it to finish off enemy tanks that try to run away, able to retreat back to the heavy's cover if they get into trouble themselves.

Since the heavy is too lumbering to easily retreat/rearm itself, when a heavy meets an enemy heavy, you'll see chokepoints quickly decided by big heavy battles, with everyone trying to support / protect their heavies so they can take out the enemy heavies.