I don't like HE Cannon. The problem is that I love HE Cannon, but it feels wrong. I feel like HE Cannon oughta be good against vehicles & buildings, but that's not true right now. Its DPS is basically the same as standard cannon. The splash is only about 50% bigger than that of standard cannon. That makes it great against infantry, but that's about it. The current iteration makes it a bit lighter and a bit more suited for its narrow anti-infantry use. Don't get me wrong, I lurve the concept of an anti-infantry cannon and we can have one of those. But should it be HE Cannon?
Its a problem built in into research. You cant have a single anti-thing and it be really usefull on empires tanks. Youll get probably one cannon, maybe a missle after meds, and then its onto heavies. Youll only see secondary cannons and missles after you hit heavies, so if your team is stuck with anti-veh cannons, they die to infantry, with reverse also being true. HE was the goto because it was good against everything. UMLs were decent anti tanks and great anti base. You either do something about weapons not colliding with heavy reseach, have heavies not be just flat out better (a difficult thing) or have weapons that feel samey.
I would keep the damage the same but provide bonuses against buildings. Rename it to seismic cannon, recolor the effects to blue explosions. Put it under electric, move improved cannon to detonations. Its still a good weapon because of the area of effect but bio missile does a better job against infantry than HE.
Ultimately zoom is right, it is a research problem. Teef's suggestion would be a decent temporary thing I suppose. I don't quite like the idea of reducing building resists though, that was part of the reason it was researched all the time before, it worked against everything really well. Though you can change the damage type to the same as siesmics and lower the damage to 30-40. This way you have something that works well against buildings while not exactly crippling infantry either. Though that might it kinda crap against vehicles too. I suppose increasing the damage but raising the resists of the buildings works, you'd have to increase siesmic damage from grenades and increase the infantry resists too though. Man, balancing gets complicated really fast. Maybe it would be better against infantry and buildings and weak against vehicles make it better balanced? I guess it really depends on where you put the weapon in the research tree.
how to fix HE having same dps than std cannon? give it 5 more damage. fixed. its meant to clear turrets. its supposed to be a splash add on to std. just like ranged cannon increases the range
I thought teef wanted it to be more of a specific weapon against buildings and vehicles. Spartacus is asking a similar question, in that other cannons are more useful against buildings and possibly tanks then he is. Something to consider though is that the explosive range of he is nice in a tank fight because even if you hit the ground next to them you still do decent damage. HE is an all rounder utility weapon really. Still wouldn't be opposed to a more specific weapon though. Not coolant territory mind you, but more specific and less general.
You could make the aoe bigger and keep the values the same to support the lack of damage. I prefer my idea before this one because it keeps the fundamental idea of that the cannon is a building killer.
I think HE is fine. It's actually useful as fuck against enemies that rotate their plates, because the splash makes it really easy to hit the side away from you. Also, note that it's the radius that's 50% larger. What matters more than radius is the area which is a whopping 125% larger than for standard cannon.
As long as we have a bunch of newbs that simply refuse to use tanks, anti-infantry ability isn't "that's about it". Anti-infantry ability is 20 times more important than you think it is.
There should be an anti-infantry cannon just as there should be an anti-building one, the real question (at least for me) is whether it should be effective against everything.
Like most things, it's more complicated than that. I pub a lot. I pub a lot. And I get a lot of feedback. One of the things that I've heard is that HE Cannon is wrong -not that it's unbalanced- just wrong. So that's the "because". Naturally, since its a rather amorphous "because", I thought it reasonable to at least make an attempt at getting more feedback on the topic.
We gave our feedback on what we think should fix the weapon. Complete says buff it, I say specialize it and make it a building killer, and others say its fine as it is.
Whatever you do, please don't make it any harder than it already is to kill other vehicles. Below is a video of the most boring aspect of empiresmod.
I think that's a problem with how it is easy as hell to kill something real close but much harder at a distance because you can just move out of the way. Like with the mortar. If you balanced it it not suck at long range tanks would explode in a second as soon as you get close. Something retarded but would work would be to make it do less damage up close and more at a distance, with the overall effect being tanks die at the same rate at any distance. Like I said though that's really dumb way of doing things.
I'm still of the mind that there needs to be a few powerful hitscan cannons to give tank fights a way to end. If you cock around too far away you'll get killed by the hitscan, but if you get up close then your normal cannons and MLs will be able to do a lot more damage.
