Is Tank Combat Fun?

I enjoyed vehicle fights very much. It's a core of Empires.

Light vehicle battles tend to be more interesting than heavy tank battles, because they are much more skill-oriented.

 

Right now & for some time it is more of a grind, less skill based and more research based, less about cooperation and more about sheer numbers.

Tank combat is fun, but it is more fun with infantry support.
I think it is more to do with how the game is played than just vehicle balancing & of course the ready amount of resources. Back in the day when you might afford 3 or 4 vehicles in a game tops you treated your tank carefully, wasting a heavy tank was akin to griefing. APC rushes were actually ballsy; becuase you didn't get 5 shots at it without making a dent in the bank balance.

I remember playing games where the tanks and infantry cooperated. Fortified areas with cover and armouries were safe havens where tanks could get ammo & get their armor repaired and any enemy tank getting too close had a hard time as they also had to deal with engineer turrets, sticky stuns, etc.

Tanks pushed up and had scirmishes and the infantry followed, spraying down would be stick stunners.

I really feel like tank combat used to be much more nuanced than it is now and probably for a few reasons.

Now things tend to simply work on how many high DPS tanks you can push out and when you choose to do a rush. Rarely are tank rushes really taken full advantage of because everyone is in tanks, no-one is behind building up refineries, turrent farms, repair pads, etc.

Its simply a case of Push until your tank is nearly dead then try to get back to the repair pad and do it again. People don't "hunt" in pairs or do anything smart now - all the "higher level" play is based around infantry rushes and sneak tactics which is also fun but I do think something was lost I dunno maybe a few years ago.

There are certain people still who you can rely on, if you see them in a tank you buddy up. Things like baiting a tank to follow you into a choke point, or taking some hits for someone whilst they rotate their armor.

But really I think its just that no-one thinks that part of the game exists, it does but it is buried deep. Lots of people are pretty good at driving a vehicle together - but when do you ever see now a squad of tanks sticking together and using tactics.

Ohh how I long for yesterday...

 

One thing that i see not coming into play at all now is the vehicle limit. Back in the day, you were plain prohibited from having those deathball 20 heavies. While i dont miss people trolling the team by buying never dying jeeps, I feel like setting a hardcap of heavy numbers could be an interesting experiment.

 

APC rushes used to hurt a lot more because of the tickets lost on a fail, due to lower ticket numbers. The only maps with high tickets were cyclo, streets and slaughtered. Now there aren't any maps with a realistic ticket penalty other than emp_cod.

Tank warfare is basically cannon warfare. You just keep shooting your cannon at the enemy and hope that after about 20 shots the splash kills the engi that's making the damage you're doing to the tank he's repairing meaningless. The bio missiles are kind of good at this too, but due to no arc they often hit the walls that the engies hide behind. Missiles other than the bio one barely have any splash at all.

Just writing about this and trying to figure out where shit went wrong makes my head hurt. It always seems like it's not just one thing here or another thing there that needs fixing, but the entire structure. The design of the infantry/vehicle/building dynamic seems flawed.

 

You know, with the resources we have, it's a miracle if the designs aren't flawed.

But overall Empires is pretty playable and I don't know if we can ask for more.

 

I'm talking about the relation between each element of the game. Like, the purpose of vehicles, infantry or buildings. To kill each other? to support each other? The empires we've been playing could have become overindulgent in tank combat and lost the focus on what made the game fun.

 

I believe there's an infantry skill rework in the pipe. But the GUI redo slows everything else down.

A lot of stuff gets filed under, "Maybe once the gui is fixed."

 

It's not horrible, but tank combat can be dull. It still has that feeling like you're shooting plastic bbs at each other.

 

That's an interesting perspective.

Like most things, it seems like the tank dps-v-armor dynamic is a complex one.

 

Why not try a pentagram balancing?



Arrows outward indicate strong against, arrows coming towards indicate weakness.
Ex: Storm is strong against rock but weak against plague.

 

I just want to note that you can construct a pentagram out of an isosceles triangle with the base being one fifth of the total perimeter and having additional vertices bisecting the long sides, simply by reflecting the top across the line that connects the bisecting vertices and then reflecting the two resulting triangles over the base using the line that connects the vertex that is now at the center to vertex that connects the remaining part of the line to the base (I wonder if this can be proved mathematically). That triangle can then be easily deformed to form a pentagon, which approximates a circle, where each object beats the one clockwise to it.

In other words, that's just rock-paper-scissors.


You can do something similar using an equilateral triangle with vertices at each midpoint to form a hexagram, also known as a Star of David.

 

You reminds me why I didn't want to touch Algorithms and decided to stay as an inefficient code monkey.

 

Is that even a thing? Its been talked about for so long i believe we will get balanced weapons and get aircraft before we see any gui changes.

 

I think Herbie just sent an update on that project a week or so ago.

In general, any time you touch something that the player can see or interact with, it's hellish. So I really can't overstate how difficult GUIs are to implement. I don't envy Herbie.

 

Better than a new flavor every patch.
People always stick to one thing, my idea forces people to constantly adapt.

Because games where compo was the only good armor= fun.

 

So whats your idea of balancing a game where every patch means only one good armor?

When I became active, chemistry was the only thing researched.
Absorbent and advanced coolant, and sometimes 3phase.

I didn't really learn about the other stuff until Mel taught me to com and the game updated.
Like we could keep doing what we are doing but that doesn't fix anything, and I think I had this talk with candles one on one before.
And we came to the conclusion everything would need to be remade. And we both know that won't happen unless somebody gets paid for it.

Everyone with coding experience has a life and a job and unless they got paid to fix empires, we are going to keep going down this slow path.