Get rid of the commander target ability

if there were no commander targets, i would make you cry by destroying all of your bases. keep them in for your own sanity

 

Also if a commander cant handle holding A and dragging a box every few seconds on a couple areas im pretty sure he can't handle anything else about commanding other than sitting idle and placing buildings and maybe researching on time if he's lucky. this is such a fail argument

 

lololol If there were no targets a 3 man squad of good players would annihilate every structure on the map I guarantee you, you guys aren't imagining this properly.

How many times have you been commanding and theres someone running around in your base and not only are you telling people he's there but you are SPAMMING target on him and it takes people a full minute to respond?

Imagine this x10

this thread makes me so mad you're all retards

 

Tr-Tr-Tr-Tr-Triple post.

 

lololol. Yeah 3 man squads from each team. Well done you plonker.

Contrary to popular belief, I do remember the time when I could take out a base single-handedly as engineer. That was 2.0, before mass targets became such a staple, you could actually sneak somewhere as something other than a scunt. And where saboutage wasn't so OP because it was the only class you could get to the enemy base with, without being discovered.

I do love the way you justify dumbing down the game. "Hey the people who play can't understand the target in your own damn base, how can they understand anything else." Well to be frellin' honest, I wouldn't want to play a game completely composed of those kinds of idiots. But surprising as it is, Empires actually has a lot of intelligent people playing, and a lot of newbies who pick the game up fairly fast.

Just because 10% are dyed in the wool noobs, doesn't mean you should only cater for them.

You're the one who looks most like a retard on this thread. I think the 'against' faction were doing a lot better before you showed up.

Hey, and way to destroy the genial nature this thread just about managed to generate. You're a real troll, wait for the moment when everyone starts discussing things calmly to strike. What did you do except set this thread back another half dozen pages? If I was a mod I would just ban your ass, because you obviously can't follow the posting rules or debate civilly.

 

Rather than removing commander targets they need to be replaced with something better. One of the large problems with commanding in empires at the moment is the difficulty of communicating with your team.

With commander targets you can easily communicate to your team where the enemies that the commander can see, something which is very difficult to do otherwise. The inadiquacies of voice communications has been dicussed many times and trying to use text is just impossible.

To remove commander targets you should replace it with something which allows the commander to share his information more easily with his team rather than less.

 

thank you flasche, at least someone understands how impactful it is when i actually feel the need to respond

 

i AM a retard, i never disputed that. However, if you were to remove commander targets people who embody the amount of pwn that i do would make you want to reverse the decision immediately. you'll be begging for targets on us. BEGGING

 

What makes you say that lol? You could hardly pwn me more than I get anyway.

*sigh* I am hardly ever in a situation where I get targets on the guy who kills me, anymore.

I'm not opposed to a radar ya know? I feel that would be a better idea...have a little radar at the bottom of the HUD which just updates with target locations every time it goes round, but in a less "Oh hai, you gotz a target strapped to your back" way.

 

I think we can all agree that the Commander needs a way to communicate what s/he sees to the rest of the team. However, the question is, how much should the Commander see, and how should this be communicated to the players?

 

What the commander sees should be communicated to players in the easiest possible way, having to use the voice channel to describe the position of enemies will just irritate everyone. In future versions it might be possible to work in a more complicated system for intelligence which would limit what the commander can see but that would only be possible as part of a much larger rework of how the commander works.

 

The question is, are you advocating that players on the ground should be able to see pretty much what the commander sees?

 

True. That would solve half the problem, which is definitely a solid start.

Also note that infantry already have an excellent mechanism for relaying enemy positions to other infantry(f w w by default). Spotting a target works well, because:

• It uses the orange blinking diamond, which introduces a level of imperfection in the target to keep it from being too wallhacky
• The targeting only lasts for a handful of seconds, to reflect the fact that calling out a target doesn't mean you know where they are for the rest of their natural life.
• And you can only call-out a few targets at a time, so the power can't be abused.

This to me is an argument against wallhax, because you are basically stating that the addition of the wallhax reduces the maximum possible skill cap. More achievable skill = more playability.

Also, if the commander sees a guy one minute and then never sees him again, should all the ground infantry always be able to see them...

I have conceived of one way in which this problem could be appropriately compromised. The notion of stale targets:
When a target goes "stale" it fades to (let's say) grey, and becomes stationary. i.e. Doesn't follow it's subject around anymore.

If we say that the rate an acquired target goes stale is directly related to the amount of targets he/she currently has, such that having one target would mean that target stays fresh for 30 seconds, and having 30 targets would mean each target would only last 1 second.(or some similar rate which could be discussed)
It would promote giving relevant targets as a comm, since the closer the comms targets got to wallhax/spam, the less affective they would be as wallhax. The Comm could still give-out groups of kill orders at any size, with a result of larger orders becoming less accurate sooner.
It would help to promote healthy FPS game play, since infantry wouldn't be permanently tagged, and if evaded long enough could elude.

The difficult part of this strategy would be to get the stale-rate to target-count relationship such that relevant attack orders stay fresh for a reasonable amount of time, while wallhacky attack orders go stale ridiculously fast to lower the pay-off for giving wallhacks far below giving relevant orders.

Anyways, that's one theoretical solution that sounds like a fair compromise to almost all the arguments I've heard.

 

I'm taking this quote from another thread, but I think it also applies to what we are discussing here. I think that, for now, players should see everything their commander sees. However, I think this should be limited so that only people that can be seen by the commander are highlighted by our targeting diamonds. Basically, if an enemy that is in any of the areas of the map that the commander can see, even if s/he isn't looking at that exact spot at the moment, should be on the minimap and/or have a target diamond on him/her. With the current attack orders, a target can walk far into the commander's fog-of-war and still have their exact position registered. Change it so that every enemy who is viewable to the commander has a diamond on them, but that the diamond disappears as soon as they cannot be seen. As soon as someone can't be seen in the commander view, they can't be seen on the minimap or by the target diamonds. This way, both the Commander and his/her Troops have the same information.

From there, we can work on figuring out just what the commander should see, and how the detection is presented to the players. Whether we want to limit this to only what can be detected around structures, or include what players spot, or whatever I don't know. I just believe that what the Commander sees should also be seen by his/her Troops.

As for how the detection diamonds could work, I agree with the above post on the fading diamonds, but I would extend the fade in/out to attack orders too. I would make the more distant targets have smaller diamonds, and the attack orders would only tint the diamonds red. But this is just speculation, and I would rather stress what is above: Give the Commander and the Troops the same information.

 

To summarise the last page of discussion

Okay, so the crux of the matter now is this:

The commander needs to point out enemies to his troops.

Is it adequate for the commander to place a static attack waypoint on the ground and have the players spot the troops in that location

or:

Does the commander need to be able to relay exactly what he sees to the troops

Some elements to consider before contributing:
-The static waypoint is as accurate as the commander can actually see: If the commander sees enemy troops on the screen he can put the attack order right on them, and move it as they move. In essence, the intel provided is equal to the effort that the commander goes to to provide intel.
-The tracking, autolocking waypoint is more dynamic. It allows a commander to give targets in half a second and then move off. The intel provided is above and beyond what the commander can actually see- indeed, the commander doesn't even need to actually see the enemy, he can simply select a large area and targets are provided automatically.
-Remember that this is only the information that the commander has and needs to give to the troops. This is not all the targets that a player receives. Targets will be provided to all players in the form of orange blinkers or minimap dots as outlined here for gameplay reasons.

So:
Static attack order:
+What the commander actually sees
-Commander time intensive
---note that the commander will have more time to micromanage troops when he is not forced to provide targets for all his players on the map all of the time

Tracking targets (i'm moving on from wall hacks as the suggested implementation would be something much better, perhaps similar to the camra style orange blinking diamonds):
-Not (neccessarily, usually) actual intel that the commander decides he wants to provide to his men
+quicker
+commander able to move off and do other stuff
-the gameplay negative effects of only one team getting information on the other team
-commander still obliged to provide target updates to all troops
+- nothing really changes

I believe that there is no contest. The issue here is what sort of commander support in the form of targets the commander should be able to give, not what targets the players will get. The commander should be able to give the information that he sees, not more. If as a commander you need to label specific troop locations and you can see those troops, stick a target right on those enemy troops.

You want to tell troops in the middle of duststorm to attack men on a ridge. you can see and point out the men on the ridge, but you attention is also needed elsewhere to place some refineries. This situation really sums up where the issue comes up. Some people believe that the commander should be able to stick targets on the men on the ridge and then move off, and the intel should keep coming to his men on the ground. This is the current situation. Others believe that for as long as you are present, you can give accurate information about the ridge, but when you move off you should no longer be able to inform players that the men on the ridge are falling back etc. Beyond that point the players need to work it out for themselves, using their own personally provided targets or their eyes and instincts.

There is no situation where the commander needs to relay information to his troops that will become less specific or less effective, i.e where the commander would need to supplement his order with voice communication, because of the use of static targets provided instead of tracking ones.

 

Another minor factor to consider:

At the moment, the advantage that targets give to your team encourages them to listen to you. That is to say, if I'm a typical infantry player running around on the ground, and I get some kill-targets from my comm, I'm more likely to listen to them than I am to a move order, because I know that the comm is giving me an easy (or at least easier) kill by highlighting opponents. The fact that comm targets make it easier to get kills means that your team is, I suspect, more likely to listen to them.

That's a good thing, I think. Not sure that it's enough to offset the annoyances of targeting and the extreme nature of the advantage, but I thought I'd mention it.

 

I really can't stand this anymore. The constant whining and bitching for targets is really really REALLY getting on my nerves.

So, I don't plan any changes to commander targets, no, I propose we make other methods more reliable to reduce the load on the commander:

Camera's should paint orange diamonds on enemy infantry that do not flicker or fade, and are constant (like oldskool).

Anyone spotting enemies using the F-menu spot, paints a red permanent diamond on the target.

Can we agree on these?

 

Possibly also consider massively buffing Enhanced Senses. Would it be OP to have a scout simply count as a walking camera / engie radar for his whole team?

Of course, that would require that people play scout... the whole scout concept needs to be revamped. But in any case, it seems like it'd be a good start.

 

Enhanced senses should only work on a squad level IMO. And the f-menu spot making targets permanent would make squad targets obsolete.