New Tech Tree Testing (Keto/Robo scripts)

I bloody despise double-posting, but whatever. Better than a new topic.

Its that time again, the time for testing.

This friday at 6PM Eastern. 11PM GMT.

Changes include:

HEMG nerf
MG nerf
General price reductions for weaker and less useful weapons.
Slight change in vehicle physics.
3-Phase is now high-acceleration
Fission is now the fastest engine
Numerous other slight tweaks.


The next version will be out after midnight thursday (eastern). I appreciate any feedback people find appropriate before the next version.

 

Sweet. I can probably show up again.

 

Does bio diesel still break the sound barrier?

 

errr.... bio diesel wasn't specifically changed, nor should it be that fast.

Anyway, all light engines have had a slight reduction in speed to be slightly more manageable. Players could not handle the energies involved.

Recent vehicle handling changes have also made for reduced acceleration with the heavier vehicles.

 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2114836/Test.rar

New scripts version up. Substantial changes.

Playtest tomorrow, 18 hours from now.

 

Password for the server

I would like to participate in the test. Is the server password still the same? :confused:

 

pass should still be 'robotek'

 

Playtest delayed 1 hour.

 

I joined last night testing and here are some comments:

About the testing:

The good: We got to test some of the script applications and some weapons

The bad: Resources were really slow so research would take for ever and we could only sample a very tiny fraction of the research tree.

The ugly: Not enough people, resources took for ever and I really do not feel like walking for 20 minutes chasing refineries when the objective is to test the script.

Recommendation for future testing:

PEOPLE Come and do testing! also we need an active admin or somehow tweak the server so we can get more resources and actually test the research tree and not just walk around chasing refineries and dodging trigger happy enemy scouts.

About the script:

The good: A lot of customization and work has gone into the script. I am seriously impressed on how much we can change from empires. This has a lot of potential specially now that the developers jumped the ship.

The bad: Its complicated. It took me some time and a lot of reading to get used to the regular empires research tree and this script contains a whole new and more complicated tree. If this is released to mass population it will create a lot of ??? and confusion. Also the documentation is minimal (just the weapons description in the vehicle configuration window) so when you are doing the research you dont know what are you going to get.

The ugly: From the few games that we got some basic research done, i can tell that the tree is still unbalanced (BE heavy tanks with dual nukes that will destroy all your armor and 75% of your tank health in a single shot. ) However, it is still very difficult to pinpoint all the tree short comings due to the massive size of the tree.

Whenever a new version of empires gets released, everybody goes to a learning curve process to identify what are the strengths, weakness and exploits and this takes time (just a few months ago we started experimenting with plasma-bio heavies in 2.24) so its very difficult to draw exact conclusions from just 3 hours of game play.

Recommendation: Set a dedicated server so we can keep doing testing and see what works and what does not. (also set it with a lot of resources. If we want to do testing lets do that and not go building freaking refs for half an hour; if i want to play empires i will just go to the main server instead...).

 

well, in robotecs defence, logically you make documentation "after" testing it on people, because only then you know what people struggle with to understand

also this is the only way to prevent making the documentation a couple times over because of changing concepts and rebalancings


also i want to test but cant find a "latest version"

 

I assume you mean NF heavy tanks with dual nukes. Additionally, the team that had them lost. You might have noticed that those dual-nuke tanks had reduced armor, generally lost in encounters, and had trouble destroying turrets.

There may well be imbalances, but I can confidently say that the nukes are not unrealistically good. They were just extremely threatening.

The main problem with the testing is that we kept expecting more people to turn out who did not. The resources were kept low because we expected them to come, which would have brought the resources up to the proper levels.

How much description do you feel I should add, I can pretty trivially add more, but after a certain point people will stop caring.

Again, what exactly about the tree is unbalanced other than the extremely threatening weapons? With dual nukes we were losing battles against medium tanks. Largely that was because homing salvo needed to be decreased in power, but were there other imbalances that were readily apparent?

Again, nukes might be too good, but that isn't because they brought heavies to red in a double shot, they would be too good if this enabled the team to win afterwards. That didn't seem to be the case.



Edit: Also, I am reasonably sure that the link for the scripts hasn't changed. It gets updated periodically, but should still remain the same link.

 

Yes, NF... However, I dont want to pick on any specific weapon at this moment with the limited testing that we did.

Well... from the limited time that I was exposed (but as i said before, I dont want to pick on anything before looking better at how everything fits in the big picture) I noticed:

Advanced coolant engine: it was just marginally better reducing the heat than electric motor. I could fire 3 rail shots before getting overheated with electric and 4 shoots with advanced coolant. This is all driving with engineer using the cooling engine skill.

ML turrets: take 25 seconds to build with the building upgrade engineer skill. This is more than a single charge of the calculator. During the game someone explained that this is because they were actually better at fighting tanks but that did not seem to be the case.

MG turrets: take 8 seconds to build... So I could build a lvl3 turret in about 16 seconds. This was actually good for me because i could place it in front of enemy rax and killed it really easy but is seemed overpowered somehow.

Sounds: Some weapons would emit no sound when firing. Like the Jabaline [something something name] and others.

Enemy com died for no apparent reason: In one of the matches it seemed that the enemy com died.?.?

Hmm, I think that we just need to test it more so we can get used to it better and have a better diagnostic. Is it possible to have it in a permanent server (still with the password) so we could go at our leisure and test specific components? (I am willing to do that.)