yea, possibly make the increments with more steps ive had our team lose a close call because the magical 12 players barrier was reached and all hell broke lose 6 players and smaller steps i suggest
Those are gross increments. Does the game support changing the income interval instead of the income amount? If it's not supported, then I guess we get non-integer increments. That's quite a pickle.
An incremental increase in cost when placing buildings would help losing teams alot more than any of these suggestions that I haven't read.
Dear god, that is a really fucking good idea. Things like refs could stay constant. Raxes, armories and repair pads could take a 20-40% compounding increase. VFs and radars could require something like a 60-80% compounding increase. Now that would fix the problem. You want to camp that VF right outside enemy main? Be prepared to pay nearly double.
ok calm down there, there's a reason the devs changed the cost of the rax from 400 to 200, because it sucked.
I've been bitching about this shit for awhile but unfortunately I cant really think of many plausible or quick fixes.. I did however notice quite often that the winning commander would research garbage or lock the VF so he could enjoy his victory longer or sometimes teams would just fuck around in turbo jeeps after securing 95% of the map. The really sad part was when a losing comm would drive into enemy and then get banned for grieving even though the match was well over.. but the turbo jeepers wanted to fuck around for 45 more mins so they would bitch or be the admins that banned the comm..
This has been a problem for ever. I say add a vote_surrender, speeds up the boring ass end game without giving more advantages to the team that is already winning. In Natural Selection, if one team has a certain number less players, they auto loose to speed things along. Except you can play a whole game of NS in the time some emp end games take, so its even more important. Maybe you loose a few awesome come from behind, APC in the comm's ass victories, but take the last 10 minutes of base sieging and comm chase off every map and you have time for a bunch more emp.
That's why the price would change. If you're dropping your sixth rax, you're paying a lot more than if you're dropping your second. I made a quick and dirty chart to demonstrate the effect of a compounding price multiplier from 10-80% and 0-5 buildings. EDIT- Google Docs hates merging cells vertically, so it looks a bit eww. The numbers are fine though.
Increasing the cost of buildings makes strategy a lot more difficult, but basically, the interval point is what I had in mind, or rather just adding it as a decimal, so rather going up in increments of the original value, it goes up in half increments. Whilst it wouldn't start giving you half resources (1.5), it'd just give you 2 one second, 1 the next, or something along those lines. I'd speak to Jephir about it but I'm wary of overloading him given the huge amount of time he's been putting in. On top of that, we've just added diminishing returns, so I'm unsure of if it's necessarily a good idea to do so much resource changing in one release. If it went wrong, we could have some serious poorfag teams. What may be an alternative is to simply add an SVAR for it, leave the default as is, and then should we find it's required, find a value that works and just "declare" it as official so it can be used in scrims and shit, until the following release, much like we do now with the increased tickets in scrims for the official maps.
Spartacus approves (and I know you require my approval for everything). Yeah, it's good enough to try one thing at a time. Since these changes don't make it harder (or easier) to learn the game for noobs, you're free to tinker from release to release and find what works. There's no pressure to unleash a dozen fixes and try to tweak them all at once. It removes un-intuitive (borderline exploitative) "strategies" like spamming 4 raxes at the front lines and only building one. But it also increases strategy and really makes the com think. "Should I drop this $280 rax out in the boonies next to this fresh ref? If I drop it out there, the next rax will cost me $392. Do I really need to drop that rax out there?" Building spam dies instantly and a whole new strategy is born. Right now the only mechanic that stops building spam is the building limit (which itself is a bandaid for the problem). This could not only help give the losing team a chance, but also kill off building spam. Win-win, amirite? EDIT- Sorry for picking apart the post, I hate it when people do that to me. ove:
I nearly missed that. The question is, how long do I ban him for? Also, what I read you as talking about is *more players = higher cost*. The increase of building costs the more you have has been bounced around for ages, that's not necessarily a bad idea, I even suggested it myself once. I just meant the idea that you'd be ready to place that 200 res rax, then someone joined your team and OH LOL 250 RES NOW FUCKER.
No no no no no. I explained it poorly, it's my mistake. Everything starts out at regular prices. As you build a building, the price of that building exponentially increases. I made a quick table to help describe the process. The formula is (1+[percentage])^[current_number]. So if Raxes follow a 40% increase (.4 column) and I already have 3 raxes, the fourth rax will cost 2.7 times (270%) as much as a regular rax. So the final cost for the fourth rax would be 2.7*200 = 540. If I want a fifth rax, it is going to cost 3.8 times as much (3.8*200 = 760). The sixth rax costs 5.4 times as much (5.4*200 = 1080). So the first 2-3 buildings are relatively cheap, but when you start spamming 5-6 of them, you pay the price. The system would hurt whichever team has more buildings. And who has more buildings? The winning team. The building spam fix is just a side effect.
As I said, it's been suggested multiple times before, and it was accepted as being a decent enough idea, and we started off by making the more refs you have, the less each extra one is worth, and if necessary, we've already got this planned.
The diminishing resources will help, but a conditional concede condition wouldn't necessarily conflict. Conceding would allow for more games in less time, which is a srs concern w the emps + getting shit maps done with in less time leaves room for better maps before I get burnt the fuck out. Conceding might however make people annoyed, robbed of their crushing blow, but as with all (well implemented) changes it would be accepted and largely benefit the game in the long run (such as it is?)
A surrender feature would be a fucking joke. The end of the game should be fun and engaging for both sides. It's the climax of all the work from the beginning and middle of the round. Implementing a surrender feature would be admitting that your game is so half baked that a single round cannot even be reliably completed. It would be throwing in the towel. It would be giving up. It would be the "surrender" of the dev team. There is a fix, Empires just doesn't have it yet. Maybe 3.2's fix will be all that is necessary.
Arty need to be able to be locked to avoid 108% of the team in arty tanks and you still have to get heavy tanks to use the nukes to kill off the mass L3 farm but the point still stands. How many players is empires supposed to be balanced for? how is this borderline exploitative? There is enough shit in empires that requires a spreadsheet to be able to figure out, lets not add building placement to the list. There are some quite popular games that allow a losing side to tap out before the win/loss condition has been meet. In fact, at higher levels of play, a player will almost always tap out before the win/loss condition is meet. The surrender vote has been suggested before but shot down because it was "exploitable and you can always just rtv". Right... Just to toss in a refinement to the surrender vote idea: vote is only available after 10 minutes (cvar) it needs 51% yes vote to pass. (again, a cvar) everyone on the team gets a yes/no vote and the 51% is based off of the number of people who voted, not the number on the team. This gets around afkers, n00bz, and people who cant figure out f s space.
A concede option doesn't really fix the problem though and it will possibly(?) introduce new ones. The problem is the pace slowing down, once one side clearly has the upper hand. The solution should be to keep the pace up even though one team has the upper hand - not just end the game there and then. Do we really want a win condition that reads like "We've been losing for a while, lets just call it a draw.... OK fine you win" Concede just sounds so horribly pap in a war game. I would just concede as soon as I could when I knew my team were full of nubs... and chances are somenub out there is still having a good time. Being as I am a lowly pubber unfortunately the majority of games I play are not balanced with a lot of fast paced back & forth action... But occasionally you have some epic come backs and those rounds are why I'll play 3 bad rounds because the next one might be great, some of my earliest memories playing empires are rounds like that and are the reason I play now. An option to Concede would make those kind of rounds less frequent to some degree I'm sure. What you really want to do is give the winning team an incentive not to mess around and mock the enemy by getting plasma/jeeping/lolforting but to get the job done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Likewise ticket attrition is a mechanic of the game so they should still have the option to make the losing team turtle whilst they prepare their siege-breaking tech or strategy. You can't force a team to flood the fortified enemy main with paper lights & apcs for rish of having their glorious justice stolen by a bunch of pissy loosers just because the other team lost all the fronts early. What I'm saying is that if you can do it with the carrot it is better than doing it with the stick. Give the winning team better way to show off their e-peen than by shooting lasers: How about you come up with a scoring system to rank/value the team's victory/loss to be displayed on the scoreboard at the end of a round? A reflection on the team's overall performance; something that shows the conservation of resources/tickets & so is not infinitely whorable like points. A true reflection of Empires skill - a team cooperating & coordinating efficiently to win. Stuff like how many reinforcements were required, how much money was it necessary to spend in research/tanks & how quickly victory was achieved. Basically score the teams on more than just win/loss so there is a reason to keep pushing hard all game - the commander & his team can show the size of their e-peen on the scoreboard & not by researching plasma and spamming radars like smug pricks. It would give people a reason to keep on playing even after it is clear that it will take a miracle to turn it around. Or y'know, 2 minutes after a team hits 0 reinforcements turn every player into a kamikaze suicide bomber with a HIT warhead strapped between their legs. Wait a minute.... This isn't the suggestions forum. Someone better inform Flasche. :tands well back::
An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or design flaw by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game's designers. Buildings are dropped with the intention to be built and used. When a building is dropped with the intention of its destruction, that is against the spirit of what a building is supposed to be. Therefore, it is an exploit. It may be (really) effective, but it's flirting the line between being a strategy and being an exploit. Do you need a spreadsheet to know that the rocket launcher does more damage than the pistol? Do you need a spreadsheet to know that a heavy tank has more health than a light tank? Do you need a spreadsheet to know that an VF cost more than an armory? No, but you'd need a spreadsheet or two to make sure an average player knows those things. There are also some popular games that allow you to level up every few rounds and get new guns and skills. What level do we get the 100-round orange/purple-camo scoped assault cannon? Popular != good.
Could just change res to tick every 10 seconds for 10x the current amount, give you a decimal without changing away from integers.
