Official Scout Thread Mrk II

5th class. Heck yes, why not? Most of the whines are about 1 class being overpowered, which happens because it fills too many important roles at the same time.

Somebody promote this man for thinking out of the box.

 

Yes, i'm not saying it's not underpowered, i'm saying the choices of what to give the scout split in 2 likely directions and a couple unlikely directions.

Each time someone wants to remake the scout someone goes "let's choose path 1", and half of the community agree, then someone else says "but what about choice 2?" and the other half of the community agree.

This creates a no-win, and no-progression scenario. The devs can't implement a thing because they'll alienate half the community over it, and every single scout thread gets left over the standoff.

We now have a shotgun coming in which makes the scout more combat-orientated, but we have discussions of giving them buildables and mines, and explosives and loads of other things that most people are split on. The idea of a 5th class is to create a winning scenario where the devs can actually choose one thing for the scout and implement it, without having to say the rest will never be in the game.

The alternative is for this community to agree on one thing, or a dev to make a decision disregarding half of it and get slated. No one's stepping up for the kind of abuse they got over 2.2.

 

Before making any changes to a class, consider how the changes affects the team as a whole. Some changes will undoubtedly attract more players to that class which might weaken the team considerably. Some examples:

A team consisting of only engineers could win a game against another team. The engineer is a strong class; He's got anti infantry weapons (SMG's and turrets), Building support equipment (Calculator), Anti vechicle equipment (Missile turret), anti building capability (Seismic grenades) and personal defense capabilities (walls) as well as a team support equipment (ammo boxes, radars and cameras)

A team consisting of only riflemen will be hard pressed to win against another team because they would have to e-build everything and they will have a hard time taking down enemy buildings.Thus riflemen fills a niche which is helping engineers and grenadiers get closer to the enemy by pushing at the front line and guarding other classes.

A team of only grenadiers could win (although unlikely) if they are lucky rushing the enemy comm with mortars and laying loads of 8 mines under him. However getting close to the enemy would be hard, grenadiers for the most part needs the support of both engineers and riflemen to do their job properly. Grenadiers are primarily an anti vehicle (RPG and Mines) / anti infantry class (Mortar)

This can be summarized as follows: Riflemen, engineers and grenadiers all support each other well when advancing on the enemy: Riflemen uses cover fire so grenadiers and engineers can advance. Grenadiers mortar infantry that is hiding behind walls and engineers are healing, building walls, dropping ammo and helping with the defense by setting up turrets.

What about a team of only scouts? First of all they would get crushed by a team of riflemen or engineers. Eventually they would also loose against the grenadiers since the scouts don't have a quick way of defeating the commander (except for throwing a hundred?! stickies on him) :D

So before setting out to make radical scout changes, thought must go into which role the class should assume. Right now a team is better off with maybe a maximum of 4 scouts per 32 players. And why's that? :

* Scouts are a bad defense class, you cannot defend a base with only Scouts. It ends in "epic fail, f*cking scunts!!@#!".
* Scouts are decent at the front line, if they have an SMG and are carrying smoke grenades, but they are still for the most part outgunned. The hide skill is mostly useless at the front line as well because crawling to the enemy turret farm takes too much time, and the more enemies that are around the higher the chance is that they will see you. Not to mention commander targets which makes your hide skill useless at that point. You're better off with increased accuracy or speed if you want to stay at the front line. Besides most of the time the engineers and the grenadiers can take down a turret farm before the Scout manages to get close.
* Scouts are good during base assaults thanks to their building sabotage skill; driving in with a full APC into the enemy base, unloading lots of Riflemen, Engineers and two Scouts while the tanks starts hammering the enemy buildings is gold worth. The base goes down in no time if the scouts get on with sabotage when the chaos ensues.
* Scouts are bad at scouting; the binoculars are mostly worthless and only annoys the team. They are good for tagging other hidden scouts though.
* Skilled scouts are good at annoying the other team by keeping engineer assets away from the front line by sabotaging enemy buildings. The problem here is that it takes way to long to get into that position because you have to crouch and crawl across the whole map. When you die you don't feel like going through 10 minutes of sneaking before you are useful to the team again, no matter how fun it is on a personal level.

So where do we want to take the Scout? His best fit at the moment is as base demolition support and resource denial for the enemy which i think is quite OK. Do we want the scout to do more scouting; Dropping radars, spying on the enemy team with binoculars but not actually denying the enemy of resources? (Ie, a class which does not to much fragging or building demolishing)

Do we want to make him a better rifeman at the frontline; Shotguns, SMG's and anti personnel mines? Do we make him a better building demolisher with timed explosives that he can deliver to the enemy base using the hide skill? Do we buff the Scout in all areas thus making him more attractive so more people play that class? If more people play as scout, how does it affect team balance? Should it be possible to replace all riflemen in a team with scouts instead without loosing too much of the combat ability? I think these are all important questions that needs to be considered before totally reworking the Scout class.

If the Scout is to change it should be gradually. I'd start with taking away the scoped rifle and replacing it with a shotgun and then tweak the building sabotage to only bleed a few building types instead of all. Then add minor changes to the binoculars; soft beep instead of radio spam and the ability to spot multiple targets. Maybe even reveal the amount of armor on spotted vehicles so that grenadiers knows where to focus their RPG fire. Make it possible to run hidden for short distances so that the trade off between speed and hide are less than what they are now.

 

Another brill idea in between the columns of text. Give armor detection for a tank that has been marked by binoculars.

 

This is essentially the point I was trying to get DonMegal to address, except I think a different solution would be better. This is why I think we need to take an entire version out to deal with the scout.

I think we need to have working classes for at least 6 different outlines for what the scout could be. From those, we can balance and refine, then finally choose one. When we get working models that everyone can actually play and say "Hey I think this is great/crap!". Rather than just adding 1 stop-gap change and than testing the other changes later.

Yes, there will be those who will be unsatisfied that theirs didn't make the final cut, but I feel that has a lot more to do with the current structure of empires development, than the scout in particular. At least there (hopefully) would have been working models, so people could actually disagree with the actual implementation.

 

I'd like a cloaking device, to replace the binoculars. It can even get a "melee" secondary fire, for those Predator fans out there.
With a small cloak capacity on that one the Scout players would still need to hide behind stuff inbetween cloaking, to recharge etc. Neotokyo has a similar setup, and it works well. You can't hide forever and go AFK with it.

Once again I'd like to suggest a rework of the sabotage. I want it to have a visual effect, similar to the engy build or ebuild when done. This for warning people around, that a scout is sabbing the base.

Why do people want a shotgun so bad? The SMGs that exist are all good, as-is.

 

The scout having the two SMG's makes it an engineer with different and less useful skills. Its dull and lazy. Empires needs more variety.

The scout with a shotgun and light assault rifle/SMG3 would work quite well imo.

 

That's a thought...although smg3 was crazy back in the day, Empires does need new weapons to distinguish the class over and above skills.

@Mashav, yeah we probably do need a version merely to tackle the scout.

I guess at this point we're still in the phase of wanting to see how much the shotgun will change things, and tweaking a few other things. Maybe afterwards we'll see just how useful it all is, and go to the drawing board with a clearer perspective.

 

I like it a lot, generally.
However:

Indications for everything that influences others will be required for both the scout himself and everyone who somehow gets some extra stuff because of him. This should be done so that even new players know what's going on. The effect of having a scout in the squad or simply close by should be obvious at all times.

This is the one thing that i really don't like. It's useless to overheat an abandoned vehicle, as it's ... abandoned. Overheating a vehicle that isn't abandoned is suicide, and simply said sabotaging a driving vehicle should not be encouraged in any way, anyway.

Can't he sabotage it in a way so that next time when an abandoned vehicle gets used it'll take some damage when the engine starts? Think of the primitive potato-in-exhaust-pipe.

Edit: oh i though this topic was new since ... an hour ago or something. You can forget about me reading all that.