Because sometimes, you do NOT want people to build jeeps, or you do not want THAT person using a featherweight heavy.
Or you don't want people using comp on anything other than light tanks, or you don't want them to use it at all but the previous comm that was voted out researched it. There's a new interface coming, let's hope it includes some serious control over tech and vehicles and who gets to build them and who is banned from building anything. Dizzyone will post saying that you should lock the vf and build vehicles yourself, of course that adds a ton of micromanagement not to mention it doesn't stop people from refitting their tanks with comp on the repair pad.
chassis weapon class player spawns tickets i should be able to restrict these, so I can finally have no scouts, riflemen, jeeps, afvs, plain/standard, composite, noobs, or people spawning at that one rax i wanted built just so we have a presence there, NOT to have the entire team spawn there and dick around
No. Don't limit that. It is unintuitive, and only frustrates new players. Sure, the commander will have more control, but I'd rather communicate to my team what I want to do, rather than do some weird restricting stuff.
9 out of 10 matches you have at least one (and usually a few more) people who simply refuse to listen to the comm. That wouldn't be a big deal except that all it takes is one noob wasting tickets/suiciding tanks/being generally useless to ruin the game for the rest of team. Unless some type of personal resource/ticket system is incorporated I support any suggestion that gives the comm more control over his team.
Then why have a commander if he's nothing more than a glorified squad leader? As I see it either the commander needs to be able to have a greater control over his team or we remove the position altogether.
Because the devs can't program an AI to do all the boring things like place buildings, we need a trained monkey to do that, but you don't give trained monkeys the keys to the launch button. The commander in NS only really drops buildings and researches, and I think the game is much better for it. Oh and he also drops health, ammo, weapons and sensor pings, but those are easy, you just spam them like empires does attack orders, and in NS2 they're removing the need for the comm to drop weapons so the comm will have even less to do, which can only improve the game for everybody else.
The issue isn't people not wanting to do boring tasks. Its that people do counter-productive tasks. If I research arty, then 9 people get arties, the other team can then overwhelm us because no one is building tanks to protect the arties. Basically, I view newb actions like this as a form of pseudo-greifing because they are ruining the game for everyone else on their team. Kicks/bans are inappropriate because the newb usually doesn't know that they are hurting the team, but there needs to be a mechanism to prevent their action. Giving the commander more control is the only effective way I see of doing this.
Give the com the option to make research active or inactive AFTER it has been researched. basically, once something has finished research, enable a pop up menu to list, with radio buttons or check boxes, a list of researched items. By unchecking the box, the com can effectively give the emp_unresearch the desired item, making it not show up for anyone else. This would also make placing lvl 2 turrets rather than lvl 3 turrets possible, or restricting a specific tank. This would, however, not allow the com to restrict plain armor and plain engine, unless those were added to the research list, but populate the list upon map start.
To your reply, I refer to this Metalsmith. The fact is that people who have no idea what the hell they're doing will take up valuable team resources and vehicle slots to create something that may be utterly useless. One example is of course, a plain armour heavy with a single plate at the rear .
wha...? The idea of being able to unresearch armor types would be ideal, mainly because it can be made into it's own tab, which is out of the way. It would only have to be opened and changed if absolutely necessary. A com could grief by turning all the options off? well, yeah, he could also drive into a lake, or into the enemy base or sit in VF, lock the vf, etc etc. Don't be so naive as to think that either you have to be a com to grief or that the number of ways that it's possible to grief limits the amount of people that will grief. If someone is going to grief, they will grief in some way. The number of ways to grief in empires is staggering. That should not be an excuse NOT to implement something.
I'm not focusing on griefing, I'm focusing on gross incompetence. You can disable weapon and armour types all you want, but you cannot prevent some complete idiot from wasting all your resources and vehicle slots on one-way jeeps or poorly-armoured heavies.
