- Tickets create stalemates and add to the slippery slope. A small skill disadvantage can be made up for by just spawning alot and fighting hard. We saw this in the ESG: BE was beating NF from the beginning, and seemed to be a little bit skill stacked. They were constantly pushing them back and BE had something like a 2:1 kill ratio. Yet, we just couldn't take down the second NF barracks at north because they spawned closer and fought hard. Their reward for fighting hard and spawning alot was running out of tickets and loosing by default. Yes, BE would have won anyway... but those arties scared the crap out of us and if there had been infantries to back them up we would have had a sweet battle until our heavies showed up. Anyway NF didn't need or deserve the disadvantage of having to run around as revive engis while we could be rifleman and just spawn if we died. - Tickets are a fairly arbitrary way to decide the game. Basically, it means whichever team has more revivers and less nubs that spawn wins. Revive is already powerful, it doesn't need strategic game deciding powers. - 200 tickets default on a 64 player server = 6.25 spawns per person. Ticket counts were obviously set back when empires servers generally had fairly low player counts. - I have a feeling APC spawn is going to be changed in such a way that it actually shows up most games. If I remember correctly, spawn APCs mostly drive around vomiting infantry into fortified enemy positions and then hit mines and blow up (TONS OF FUN, BTW). More tickets are going to be needed! I suggest just removing tickets at all from comm maps. Assuming that doesn't happen lets just 2x or 3x the default tickets. Stalemates are broken by: Heavies, APC spawn charges, arty, nukes, ranged arty and ninja raxes. Without ticket problems the game will last long enough for these to actually get researched and work.
This is largely a map decision, and I respectfully disagree. This suggestion has been brought up before, at least once. There are already few things a team can do when they have a technological disadvantage. The biggest one they can do is win with tickets, and I have seen this happen at least a dozen times. When a team is pressing and trying to take more territory, the generally die faster. This means this is one of the few current mechanics we have that 'prevents' the slippery-slope. Playing intelligently for an entire game isn't a 'dumb' way to decide who wins.
trying to win on tickets has always been a strategy for the losing side. if losing side has a decent number of revivers and the winning side is pushing hard on infantry, trying to win on tickets becomes an option. games like that usually happen if one side got a clear advantage over another and their comm spawned forward raxs like mad. Once the winning team gets tanks though, it becomes harder to pull it off.
no its not, basically winning on tickets is mostly when a win on another level is unobtainable (a deadlock) true, lots of teams have won a game they where losing by manipulating tickets, but if a team is winning they mostly lose less tickets then a losing team (commander maps, infantry maps often give the reverse due to rifleman with hmg camping the assaulted flag point etc )
I guess I was a bit harsh, winning by watching tickets, collecting squad points and having revivers isnt stupid at all. I just don't think games should be decided like that unless the game remains a stalemate even after stalemate breaking weapons show up (arties, Nukes, 50 cal, once these show up the game almost always ends fairly quickly). I think its alot more fun to play empires without worrying about how much you spawn. Big, messy infantry rushes seem more fun then teams holding back and avoiding death just because they are going to need the tickets later. Also, there is no real reason for the winning team to ever loose on tickets, except nubs and people being to lazy to stick together. You and I can revive eachother, farm squad points, and set up revive squads in addition to just conserving tickets. Nubs don't know how. In my experience most teams that lost on tickets lost while screaming at some nub to give up alpha squad lead so the last living engi can do revives. In many cases not even vets are willing to sit there for a minute or two while a revive engi tracks down their corpse. It just isn't a fun mechanic in many ways and I would much rather games be decided by teams throwing infantry and tank rushes at eachother. As for the slippery slope, the team with a higher K - D ratio and more revivers is usually the winning team in my experience. Tickets hurt the loosing team more because they cant afford to wait for revive or waste people as non combat rev engis. Then again, I have seen plentry of extremely aggressive teams burn through their tickets while failing to gain significant advantage. I guess at some point they should be punished for that, but I don't think they should loose or be forced to stop spawning.
I guess that most maps where created when there where arround 10-20 players per team. Now we have 20-30 player per team, so it's just logical to increase the tickets by 50% - 100%. Btw: Are tickets hardcoded in the map file?
I really should have done the math instead of looking at his numbers before I used that response... Ah well, I believe the problem is that I rarely play games above 48 man, and 10 deaths per person is actually fairly reasonable. Anything over 20 seems a bit extreme, and the game will likely last forever. Anything under 8 means that people will either not see much action or tickets will fail before proper end-game. I am thinking maybe we could split the difference, and have teams scale tickets based on number. When someone dies it takes away a ticket. When someone leaves or joins it recalculated based on the % change. Tickets start at players*14 for the side. That seem reasonable?
I also thought about something similar. But this would be to complecated when it comes to the last ticket.
It would be easy for it to round down then never increase above 0. There are a large number of solutions for that part.
"If you survive long enough to run out of ammo, you're probably doing it wrong." -Demented, sponsor of One-Man-Human-Wave-Attacks™ Inc.
map defined tickets should be "per player that joins the server before mapstart (not per team!, so if 64 players join the server, 50 oin NF 14 join BE and tickets are set to 10 in the map, each team gets 640 tickets)
