First of all: All additional armors and engines have been removed for now. Reasons: A. Scaling up armor and engine is not the way to go, it does not work. If you give a team upgraded version of the armors you pretty much negate all the tier 1-2 weapons and balance them towards tier 3 weapons. This way you drag out the game even longer. In addition to that those high tier armors are were just lousy copies of the earlier ones without any new strenghts or weaknesses. (Yea okay, supercharged 3phase had the weakness of being fucking uncontrollable and would need 1 month of tweaking :x) B. Also the armors I made did not have the seperation between tank/inf/building damage in mind and did not include the resist system that is being worked on. As soon as these changes are accomodated for there can be armors with unique resists, to counter, for example anti vehicle mgs very good. Jeph: The first tiers of every tree don't take long. You sure lose some time and money if you decide to switch tiers but you still got access to tier 1 mechanical which is an allrounder tier (light weapons --> you got 10 weight left on your tank? Take a light mg even if you can't fit another plate!) Also all tree-wide counters are "soft counters" (this meaning that you are not instantly fucked). Again, if you use mechanical your tanks are cheaper, just get more out. You also will have the needed research money for another tree faster if you choose so. In addition to that every tree is planned to have a variety of weapons, not ALL of them can be countered by electrical techs, the enemy just has an edge over you if your team mates don't know what weapons to take yet. Give information on whether I run a public test? Uh, didn't find any server, so no. If you wanted to know something else I didn't get it. Kolaris: Yes, no matter what tree you research you should get a decent amount of weaponry to choose from. This way every tree is overpowered and will be taken into consideration for research. About balancing it: The idea behind it is that only individual weapons need to be adjusted a bit up or down. (mostly up) But this will NOT affect research in general (if it does, change costs/time for trees, give the weaker tree a new nice weapon) In the current system if you make plasma cannon the best weapon after a while everyone will research it in favor to everything else = game broken. If you nerf it no one will bother doing the endless research towards it = game also broken. Current system = broken. My rule of thumb: If its in tier 3 it's endgame and the weapon deserves to be "overpowered". Aslong as all trees have equally overpowered weapons I dun care. Anyways, these weapons and their values are based around existing weapons. Tier 1: bit weaker than now but with unique twists. Tier 2: Bread and butter, atleast as good as all researches we have now. Tier 3: More specialized and boomy. Also I can't say anything about long time plans, thats dizzys job. I just make scriptsets like these in 3 nights :x
I played this in tank war style, and it could really be the furture. Couple of points though, bio weaponry seemed really underpowered, you pump shitloads into them and nothing happens. You might have overdone the whole 'no armour for arties' thing a bit too. also, there are soooo many weapons it's crazy. This'll really confuzzle most people who aren't used to it. it confuzzled me...
Don't understimate the DoT. I threw a Bio Bomb arty shell into the middle of a BE base I had constructed, and everything was still taking damage like 45 seconds later. I was going to say that Mechanical's stuff doesn't really fit together at all. On one hand you have a pretty expensive Composite Armor thats real perk is fitting on more heavy weapons...except all Mechanica's weapons are light weights to begin with. But apparently the Armor's being removed so no big.
Yea bio has support weapons. Bio arty for example is such a support weapon. You fire 4-5 shots all around the enemy lines. The more enemies you touch with the bio effect the better. Then you fuck off for a minute and start all over again. Enemy engineers will become massively pissed (bio effect = they can't sprint = easy targets for your team) Enemy buildings drop in HP presenting targets for your tanks and infantry. However I buffed the bio cannons in tier 2 and 3 (+10 dmg) for more "direct damage" because I can see that not everyone will grasp the psychological warfare concept of bio :D . These are weapons with very short bio duration times (like 3 ticks) but good bio damage. Let's not jump to conclusion about the worthyness of bio, and in fact, the scripts as a whole until there can be tests. About composite not fitting mechanical, yeaaa I think dizzy would agree that this is a big flaw in my scripts. However think of it this way: You are free to research every armor you like no matter which tree they are in. Nothing stops you from researching mechanical weapon + regen armor. In fact the whole system is geared towards being able to research what armor you like. Also note, mech weapons lack high end punching power but cost less. So composite armor (costing much but weighing less) enables you to use the maximum amount of weapons possible + maximum amount of armor possible. About armor and weapon costs I made a rough calculation of where we are now and where I think we should go with them: HAVE A CAKE http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/534848/tank costs.jpg
yeah i always though that it is a bit strange that armor is the only thing that makes a tank expensive atm
Would anyone be interested in getting a test game up for this? I am thinking of giving two sides a strict cash amount and instant research for the purposes of testing, see how the different branches work out with diversification.
Drag, do what Weedy did and make an altered-empires like setup, that way these can co-exist peacefully For the record, altered empires worked by copying your empires installation to an EmpiresAU folder and then pasting the custom files over the old ones. The 2 copies of Empires ran side by side and either could be launched like a normal game of Empires.
