Is Commanding Fun Or Not?

Need to fix the control grouping. I either select everything when I drag my box including players and infantry (while you can do this, if infantry are in the box then there should be a auto system where it will only select infantry. Other wise, you select all buildings) or the control group just doesn't stay. I'll set the group but then it resets or acts as if I never set a group. I need this mainly to help in targeting enemies.

Also, I have had way too many instances where I go from driving the comm vehicle to commander view and the camera gets stuck in the comm interface. It gets stuck going in a certain direction. I think this may have something to do with switching views and holding the forward or backward button while switching to command interact. This should not happen.

Also, the grouping in the command interface should be better. I am referring to the building, units, and players list. Perhaps there should be a separate box which you can toggle on and off that has all players listed so you can right click a player to go to them and give them targets. Oh, add the location grid they are next to each player name.

I probably should have voted Yes, needs improvement.

Another good idea is to have the option to disable spawning at a particular barracks. That way you don't have to recycle the entire freaking barracks and can focus player numbers in particular spots when needed.

While teamwork should be the deciding factor in where players spawn, you only have so many players for this mod. Therefore the commander needs to have more control over the battlefield so that those commanders who are actually good at commanding can have a more significant influence. From my constant gaming the past three weeks of around 40 plus hours with this mod, it seems that the teams that win are the ones with better overall cohesion, teamwork, and skill. So if one team is more skilled or works better in a team, the impact of a comm is very low. I have been on teams where our comm freaking sucked and we didn't have armor or engines. The enemy team had a comm who knew what they were doing. But because of the overall quality of players on our team, we won with crap shit.

I believe the comm should have more impact in the battlefield. Its lots of work and lots of things you have to do to be a good comm that scores well. Some players can do this which include watching their own vehicle, rushing enemy weak spots, wall in vehicles, targeting enemy players, and all kinds of shit! We need to make the comm job easier. Its tough being a comm. You have lots of shit to do and if your not really good at it, like REALLY good, you don't make much of an impact. Just build a ref there, research there.. and your good as long as your team is good. A game shouldn't be based on what team you randomly got on.

P.S. Perhaps we should add more buildings or dynamics to the RTS part of this game. Besides aircraft, we can add weaker or strong walls that are more costly or cheaper. Maybe AI bots that you can build at a barracks if that is possible. Maybe the possibility of being able to deploy bridges... bunkers.. towers.. trenches!! There is so much we can do.

 

Actually.. WOW. I think that would be a fantastic idea. Everyone is saying how Comming, you don't have much control over the situation. That the comm cannot change the situation no matter how good or bad. He just goes with whatever team he has and makes the best of it, hoping its a good one.

HOW ABOUT..

We can make AI infantry and tanks. Just like an RTS. The players would be HEROES. They have the upgrades and all, and the AI soldiers are just dumb unskilled soldiers who are cannon fodder. BUT this would give so much improvement to both the commander as well as the players. The comm could make a big difference. The players could take control over these squads and tell them to help build or follow him. I know that making AI form into squads is crazy. But you can script a follow me command for each bot you look at, or the comm can assign bots to a player, and you can have a "move here" command. thats the only two commands you need for bots really.

I think this would greatly enhance the game. It would make the environment seem more alive as there are more people there, and there are easy kills for new players to get and feel like they are winning. You want to play a game that you feel like your winning. So both new and experienced players can benefit from this and this would widen our playerbase a lot. It would appeal to a lot more people and see how bots are dumb, unupgraded, and are not as good as the HEROES of NF or BRENODI it makes everyone happy!

 

Yeah, also sharks with lasers and bomb penguins.

 

I actually like this solution. The players could be the officers while the AI would be the generic enlisted men. The commander would have units that follow his orders and the other players still have the freedom to do what they want.

 

U are totally right. On the tropical island map, the sharks should hav lasers so they can shoot us as we parachute from the air balloon. It will be... AWESOME

but yea. If you look at iron grip, these guys did this years ago. It's more heroes vs the masses tho. Good mod but noone plays anymore. The mod creators require you to download their software now which killed it.

 

Well, I love it, but it could be improved slightly...

Aside from a few minor things its alright. The thing about commanding is, you're going to lose often no matter what, because you do not control your teams actions, you just guide them. In general they are eager to listen though, but some ideas that you give them take coaxing. The only thing that's frustrating, besiding losing, is having the top down view of the battlefield, able to see most things, yet many players would take their own judgement over the commander's(Despite not knowing what the fuck they're doing)

An example is a diversionary tactic. Most people would get sidetracked and shoot at some easy targets, rather than hitting the enemy where it hurts.

The thing that I don't think most people get is that a few losses shouldn't get in the way of some impressive, and downright satisfying victories. If you hate losing more than you love winning, don't fucking play as a commander : /

EDIT:

And as to the AI idea, go someone else. Empires has been about actual people fighting, not throwing waves of cannon fodder NPC's into the enemy.

It's a trade off. -

Either have many games in the gray area, meaning somewhat fun but nothing spectacular, or having some really crappy losses, but extremely awesome victories.
For the most part, empires have been about the extremes. Sure there have been bland games, but those are when people want to take it slow and let it drag on : /
(not that slow games suck...Anyone remember the bitchen standoffs on legacy district? Fucking Right)

 

There is no reason you couldn't have vanilla servers. NS does this to great effect. Players would train on the bot servers until they had enough skill to play competently on the player only servers. I think Empires would greatly benefit from this.

 

Lol, tickets.

 

That would make it less annoying but it wouldn't make it fun.

For a strategy game to be fun it needs to be a pure strategy game. The FPS elements of empires remove a lot of the RTS fun and I don't see that as a problem, because I like FPS empires and empires doesn't have any interesting RTS elements to recommend it.

You can make commanding marginally less irritating but you can't make it a fun thing for any RTS player to do because it will always be vastly inferior to a proper RTS.

The only people I can imagine empires commanding appealing to are people who don't like RTS games but wish they could, people who don't want to have to tell their units what to do, who want them to do things themselves, but who for some reason want to feel like a commander.

Personally I can't see any appeal in that, either I tell my units exactly what to do or I feel as though I don't need to be there.

 

.... in combat mode. In classic mode there are very few servers left and the bots are still stupid. All they have is better aim.

 

Its been awhile since I played Empires, largely because I have been swamped with things lately. I vividly remember my attempts at being commander. The biggest problem with commanding is that it feels like you have little control over the situation. Players may or may not listen to you, but your role conveys no special ability to make them more likely to listen. After a certain minimal point (not actively screwing up commanding) the most help you can give your team is a good strategy. You don't need a fancy seat to think of a strategy.

I believe AI units would be an excellent way to fix this. They could be very poor at fighting and not cost tickets. The biggest problem with them is that the servers have enough lag already, therefore it might be unrealistic to put them in.

In that case, the best solution is to give commanders something to do other than busy work. I am going to think of ways in which commanders could function from their vehicle while remaining true to the spirit of the game.

 

not a real rts fan, so don't command often , but the times i did, i felt like the biggest battle i had was with the interface and being stuck in the map or having words with selecting multiple targets which end up being not given to the players, and only did so after 3-4 attempts , rather then with the enemy

so yes it needs serious improvement

 

I am an RTS fan and I think PintSki nailed it. When you're not fighting with the interface, you're fighting with your own team as they ignore you. When you're not fighting your own team or the interface you realise that you actually don't have much to do and what control you do have is very general: go north, get a tank, defend the base.

Contrast that with the other RTS/FPS hybrids out there that I'm familiar with: NS and Savage. In NS the only way to get a better weapon is for the commander to drop one for you, so there's a common rule of follow his orders, get better stuff, ignore him and get stuck with basic crap. The comm can drop ammo and health anywhere his players can see which gives him a much more active role in a fight beyond dragging a target box and then spectating. The research is more streamlined and the interface is a bit more polished (though it still has its own bugs that lead you to fight with it from time to time).

Savage has the same ability for the commander to heal his troops, and he can also give them a recall ability so they can teleport back to base which is handy. Savage does often run into the same trouble though with players ignoring orders, but at least you get 2 AI controlled builders so you don't have crucial buildings get ignored unconstructed.

Obviously Empires has its own flavour and not all of those aspects apply but I think there are at least some good ideas there. In particular I think Empires would benefit from a lot more emphasis on squad cohesion. In Savage you get a lot more benefit to being near your squad leader and the commander gives orders to squads rather than players - I really have to ask why the squads themselves aren't already the commander's default groups!

There will always be idiots who refuse to command but insist that the commander does everything they say, if the commander was a de facto authority rather than just "guy with a different view who drops buildings on demand" 90% of the time I think it would make a big difference.

 

The comm in NS drops piles of guns and ammo at the base, if anyone asks for ammo in the field he drops a million packs of the stuff. Both of those things could be done automatically by the game. As far as I know the NS team know this and have done away with commander weapon drops and probably are doing something about commander health and ammo drops too. If they could get rid of commander building drops and research the game would be perfect because you could get rid of the commander entirely.

There is no incentive to obey the commander in NS apart from in the hope that doing so will lead you to your team, but you can do just as well by following your team all the time because being with your team is important, not the commander.

Empires would benefit from removing the need for a commander, that way a very large thing which can go wrong is removed and things like building drops and research are made more reliable.

Increasing reliance on the commander will only make the commander even more ridiculously powerful than it already is, you already lose if you have a bad commander, we don't need to make it easier to be a bad commander by giving it more neccesary roles to play.

 

wow, complaints about bad UI in Empires? how original!



The other nice advantage of a comm in the RTS/FPS blender world is someone dedicated to knowing what the overall strategy is. Granted, in Empires the maps aren't complex enough so everyone knows vroom vroom go find baddies and kill generally works (or wall the bridge in canyon).

 

I'd say that is a pretty good reason to obey the commander. When playing games I prefer to win because that is fun. Usually, not obeying commanders (unless the commander is less competent than you) is a good strategy for losing.

 

Im not sure, but i kind of thought of this. People of said of having the commander have random(i guess) events like drop ammo or tanks or something. Maybe we could get something like a super structure taht would give a huge benifit to the whole team, like a random effect or just give a big bonus to everyone like extra dammage, more health, more rez, etc. Just an idea.

 

That AI thing is a good idea, except it would require a lot more resources in terms of computer processing power and etc. If it can be done it would be like L4D's zombies, which are all AI-controlled cannon fodders except for the bosses which are playable characters.

I like the idea. Someone should do that.

 

The problem with commanding really boils down to a simple catch-22, as touched on I believe in the thread about getting people to listen to you:

Commanders require players to obey orders to win

Players will only obey your orders if you win

You end up stuck in an endless cycle of losing because noone obeys and noone obeying because you lose. The only way to break out is to get some people you know to obey you and turn the game in your favour (wtf stax), become an infamous faggot (HSM) or ignore common sense and tell everyone to build jeeps (FN) - which the average player was probably going to do anyway, this gains their trust.

In NS the commanders reward the people who obey him (regardless of skill) with health, ammo and wepon. Others see this and follow the example.
In Empires, a commander locks the VF and gives vehicles only to people who do as he says and he is banned for griefing. Nice.

 

It's a good reason if all your commander does is order you to follow your team around, basically functioning as some sort of information terminal telling you where to go to find your mates, but if he orders you to do anything else it isn't an incentive.

Besides, you can find your team on the map.