New Commanders

ok but first give me my death laz0rs back.

 

No, not really. I mentioned it because I can only feel the very edges of an idea recently. Both with this and why games are so short, I feel like I'm scrabbling at the edge of a cliff but have no idea how to climb up. I put it out there, because I really don't know what the full idea is, just parts of it.

Also that last line is more in general. I know and you know you could be a better player surrounded by better players. Right now, you don't really have that impetus.

Just for the record, I'm agreeing with most of the rest of what you said, but this I have to disagree with. I feel like people will averagely gravitate to a certain level in comparison to what they're surrounded by. For instance, I'll be pretty crap surrounded by lamers, and I'll be surprisingly good surrounded by good players, but to get better in both cases I'd have to play dedicatedly and put in effort. Traditionally there isn't a real skill cap per se, just your natural level that you'd have to put time into to overcome.

 

You got troll lasers... is that not enough?

 

This.

I honestly don't understand why would people think there's a skill cap, especially when the said skill cap is really not surprisingly high.

 

To be fair, you have "only" 6~700 hours and your skill level is already pretty decent.

If you play Empires for "only" 2~3 hours every week, obviously you aren't going to improve a lot.

You walked through 0~70, now you are 70~80, it's not obvious.

But no, you are not supposed to waste your life here.

 

Less time than me, and yet better than me.

Such is life.

 

there is a skill cap. look at whammo

 

Time is merely one of many factors.
You are assuming people spent every minute trying really hard to improve their general skills, but they are not.

Let's put it this way, if you spent 500 hours jeeping&fucking around, you'd get good at jeeping but it's not helping your general skills.

Speaking of Whamo, he's still improving and he's a decent player.

Your skill level went from 0 to 70, and you are now crawling from 70 to 80.

 

I agree there is definitely a personal skill cap. You reach a point where your reflexes are as fast as they will get. Then as you get older the skill cap lowers for the most part.
there is also other things that will lower your skill cap. Like slow internet, slow CPU, and bad settings.

I also have to say that FN is great at training new people. I haven't seen it lately but years ago when we had full servers. He would take groups of like 6 new people to other servers and show them how to be better at killing.

 

Still better than me.

 

6~700 hours is pathetically low if you want to get good at anything, not just video games.

 

I duno...
700 hours of making knots and I think you could be a master at it.
700 hours could possibly get you a brown belt in karate.
700 hours at a shooting range could give you a significant improvement in aim. Cops do 15 hours a year of mandatory training.

http://www.policeone.com/Officer-Sa...ms-training-How-often-should-you-be-shooting/

 

Whammo has a skill I think everybody envies; after thousands of hours of Empires, with an average of 2-3 a day, he still has fun.

 

I think I'll post my opnion about current Empires gameplay and how it compares to previous versions, probably hopelessly slipping away into the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia as I do so. At the end, I'll describe what we are planning to do to mitigate the issues presented.

The very first Source versions of Empires were frantic. People had to learn everything, teams crashed en-masse and commanding wasn't about skill, it was about having the fastest computer so you could reconnect faster than the other comm (who also crashed) so you could go back to giving orders. Players defaulted to being given orders by the comm, because they had no clue where to go and what to do. It was a time of gleeful chaos, if you will. All kinds of tactics were tried out, seeing what sticks. Weapons were hilariously unbalanced: the HMG fired like the 2.12 BEAR with even more accuracy on the move. Games took between one and two hours, sometimes spanning into epic (and tiring!) 3 hour battles.

At around 1.05-1.073, the majority of the bugs were squashed and gameplay was stable. I spent a bunch of time balancing the infantry weapons. Most rounds took between 1-1.5 hours, often seeing the entire range of vehicle chassis and a lot of different research. Clans were at their peak.

The 1.08 Release Candidates were great, with Krenzo adding loads of features and further squashing bugs and crashes. People had gotten ridiculously skilled and the level of play was high. Still, the commander held the ropes tightly, issuing individual commands and informing their teammates what the next step of the plan was. But it was becoming clear that a group of elite players was able to overpower a more numerous enemy easily.

2.0 and further on was kinda wobbly in terms of infantry balance. In 2.2, I tried to change the weapons to focus on teamwork, because I felt that it was unfair that a single, highly-skilled player was able to mow down an entire squad. People didn't like it: it was the so-called peashooter version. I now know that there are better ways of encouraging teamwork and luckily am in a position to implement them. Then some other dude wanted to try his hand at infantry balance, which made them more deadly but still kind of "off". I don't remember anymore when Trickster took over infantry weapon balance, but 2.12 was arguably the most "balanced" in infantry scripts.

The feature well had began to dry up, tactics began to become set in stone. The unified vision of where this mod should go towards became fragmented. The Orange Box port definitely shook up the developer pool, and from then on, developers mostly came and went, but there weren't any groundbreaking changes to the game as they occurred in previous versions. Finetuning is what was happening. Something was being finetuned that I, personally, did not feel was finished yet and had no right to be in the finetuning stage.

Rounds continued to be played during this unending developer arrival and exodus and players honed their skills in ever more immaculate ways, finding out exactly what were the best tactics for what situation. Empires was becoming a Solved Game: step by step, players determined the optimal course of action to achieve victory in as short a timespan as possible. The game began to lose its more casual players as veterans mapped it out in a nearly mathematical fashion. The commanding was now done on the ground, by the players themselves, the commander being relegated to pushing buttons to research, dropping buildings and the occassional target. The average round time dissipated to 30 minutes, with an hour-long round being somewhat of a rarity. Development all but halted.

Time was available to think about the things wrong with Empires, which we did. We wrote things down in simple bullet-point lists, like flasche did some time ago. A crystal clear synthesis of what was wrong, felt "off", was underused. Solutions were proposed and discussed. After a long time, development started up again, mainly because our hand was forced with the Source SDK 2007 boot issues. The move to SDK 2013 offered a few code improvements and fun things that were not possible in the SDK 2007 version.

I played a few rounds with the rest of the devs when the first SDK 2013 release candidate was made public on Steam. I was surprised how fast rounds went. 20-40 minute rounds tops! I went through around 5 maps in under three hours. It was a lot of fun, but the gleeful franticness wasn't there anymore. Instead, it was replaced by an almost robotic execution of tactics. The extremely high level of play was what kept it fun: the slightest slip-up allowed you to gain or lose an area in an instant.

The key issues I personally detected are:

1. Round times have been pushed down to such low amounts that you miss out on half the game. The reason for this is that there are tactics that are superior to anything else and very troublesome to defend against.
2. The Commander is no longer seen as the guiding hand he was in previous games: players just do what they feel needs to be done, because they've practiced it (often literally) a thousand times. Newbies in the comm chair and on the ground find it hard to direct (veterans) or be directed (by veterans).
3. Newbies are often caught off guard by the more esoteric tactics to winning a round, like tank or APC rushes, Squad Hide, 9-mining, etc.
4. In mid to late game combat, the team with more resources (and thus more vehicles) wins. Infantry is mostly powerless with even Grenadiers requiring extraordinary skill or numbers to take down an enemy tank.
5. The Scout class could use a lot of love, it has been neglected since the beginning of the mod. If there is anything that can shake up gameplay, it's a scout revamp.
6. Turrets are too punishing towards infantry and too lenient towards late-game vehicles.
7. Veterans can prioritize enemies easily and hardly require any guidance. Newbie squad leaders struggle with the lacklustre options to direct their squad on the ground.

Plans to fix these issues:

1. The round times are the "franticness" indicators. A longer average round time indicates it isn't possible to end a round in under ten minutes due to a perfect execution of always-guaranteed tactics.
2. The Commander will be given powerful new tools to guide his team, setting markers at crucial checkpoints and a tactical minimap that shows how the battle is going in the entire map.
3. Either introduce hard counters to the tactics (Enhanced Senses now draws an outline around enemy players even when hidden) or teach players about the (common for us) tactics like APC rushing during the loading screen and in-game contextual hints. (Someone will ask: can I turn those off? Duh of course)
4. Add a lot of new tiered infantry skills aimed towards anti-vehicle combat. Each class gets at least such a tiered skill, with the Grenadier possibly getting more than one, allowing him to specialize in a real anti-tank unit.
5. This is already being rolled out, with the Scout shotgun having been added. The changed Scout Hide will definitely help mix combat up and break through frontlines, while Enhanced Senses will give Scouts the ability to call out nearby enemy infantry.
6. Diversify turrets. Not much detail on this yet.
7. Significantly improved (and fast!) squad lead targeting to be able to quickly point out important enemies.

What I really would like to do is add a bunch of franticness back into the game for both newbies and veterans. Pubstomping tactics will be rooted out and countered or removed, because it's frustrating for newbies. This will likely anger a lot of vets, but honestly, I've seen so many threads about people saying they're the absolute shit at this game that a nerf of their favourite tactics shouldn't deter or prevent them from still being the best players around. Stuff is going to change, and I'm pretty sure it'll be fun for everyone involved.

 

to add to the diversify turrets cant we make it so turrets have increased rof on tanks and lowered on infantry causesome stupid reason like infantry harder to track or some shit + let research affect turrets and mgs affect tanks when they get researched,

eg bio ml on turrets and bio mg

 

See you say this, but as far as I saw it was very mixed. Like you would have someone who knew how to utilise a squad and they'd be performing relatively well, but at the same time I've had incredible amounts of teammates who let things like APC's get passed for no reason. Who don't chase enemy infantry, who are just kinda like "what can they do?"...when they can take down the whole base >.<

And that's really behaviour I don't understand. If you were playing another team-based FPS, you would chase down someone who got past you, not let them go, right? Why not in Empires, when it could spell the end for your team???

 

This, so much this. Seriously, people just totally ignore vehicles going behind their lines, it's a serious issue. I'm hoping that with the new comm tools he can point it out to players that they seriously need to take care of this kind of thing, because even from the perspective of someone who does it a lot, it's just no fun now, you just drive into bases totally unopposed and just take it. It's like no-one even cares.

 

Really looking forward to better AV. Would help with taking out CV's faster. Also, plasma turrets?