Let's Make Empires Great Again!

Comm Vehicle protection needs its own thread, wouldn't want it to derail this one. Its something that has been discussed many times but ideas towards this are always welcome because its always been a problem.

Personally, I'm against a hard counter system but the former balance as Ikalx described it always worked really well for me. I really like the system where certain armors and engines favor certain playstyles rather than hard counter enemy research - though the balance that allowed this to happen fell by the wayside somewhere along the way.

It used to be that your research often changed how your team played - regen had teams going for hit and run attacks, reactive for sieging, reflective for maps where combat tended to happen at angles, absorbant... to be honest I never really got where absorbant fit other than being an armor in chemistry, and composite was prohibitively expensive and all-around good making it basically an upgraded standard armor for high resource late game. Now, as we all know, your research merely determines if your team calls you shit or not.

I do agree that there probably should be some soft counter like abs takes less damage from rails etc. to add dynamics to mid/late game.

 

These ideas seem great on paper Donald, but you've forgot just one thing: empires isn't just an RTS. For everyone but two people on a server it's an FPS with RTS elements (or chatroom with explosions in the background) and what you are proposing would make the game absolutely shitty for the little guy.

Hard counters work in strategy games because ultimately, units are just pieces on a board. Players aren't forced to write letters to the grieving spouses of marines dissolved by banelings. Neither do they have to worry about their soldiers ragequitting, uninstalling the game and badmouthing it to their friends when they get killed one too many times because one player sitting in a monster truck made the wrong move and ruined the game for everyone on his team. Players are people too, people who often choose to quit games that seem too unfair to them.

This idea of yours Donald takes an already serious issue with the game and makes it ten thousand times worse. You may as well build a wall around the steam page to keep new players out, not to mention all the old players you'd be deporting if the devs followed through on a trick like this. Frankly, this plan smells dangerously COMMUNIST, sacrificing the FREE MARKET of skill and strategy that ensures every player has a chance to team up and win the game, the FREEDOM that makes Empires GREAT. Your plan would replace this freedom with a pair of socialist BEAN COUNTERS leading a team of COLLECTIVIST DRONES in a race to see who can make the best PLANNED ECONOMY of RESEARCH. Empires would fall as surely as the USSR in 1991 should hard counters make it into the game.

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You get my point. Research in Empires may have serious issues currently, but it doesn't make the game terribly unfair so long as both comms are aware of the current best research path.

Hard counters would destroy any sense sense of individual agency players have. Hard counters, far from encouraging an abstract ideal of teamplay, would actually serve to crush the anarchic, freely associating teamplay we have already.

 

He pretty much covered all my reasons to oppose "single-weapon-hard-counter" (Something is bad against rail, good against Ranged..etc)

Oh and I haven't voted.

I agree with hard-counter, but I won't go beyond "Abs is good against bio, bad against vehicle MG".
I will also make sure the counter isn't that "hard".

 

I agree. In my opinion, this problem largely exists because of a lack of grouping effects.

Right now, when a commander researches something its like researching rock or paper. If your team don't have the counters to build, it sucks for them.

Instead, each research could get *multiple things at once*, there-by enabling players to make counter decisions on their own. You can still have some weaknesses or strengths in there. Maybe the Bio MG is a worse machinegun generally, but it hedges the Bio ML research, so you don't lose absolutely when that is hard countered.

Thats the basic premise at least.


The real problem is that players can be terrible. This is the major complicating factor of empires, and I have no great solutions here related to it. If you give players access to counter systems, then they terrible 8 year-old section of the community will be capable of being even worse, and its already a bit of a problem.

 

apparently if you write a joke in your post alongside your argument, its a troll and is to be ignored (along with any other no that our lord and savior deems a "not reasonable" point)

 

Actually, we DO have these damage types, I used them to implement that 15% damage reduction for Abs against vehicle-MGs.

 

You fail to understand the important part about what I said. Counters are weak now, that is *why* it doesn't matter much.

You go on immediately to plan something that will experience the problems I described. These are the really basic traps we need to avoid if we have stronger counters.
If you are going to separate it, it needs to be so a given tech tree has many different counter types, not just one. Not just 'bio' for biology tree weapons, but HE weapons and MG weapons, for example.

 

I am saying that the way research and the technologies you get right now are grouped, this is an imminent problem if we try to implement counters.

 

*cough cough* Tried to suggest this here.