Passive Rank Upgrades - do devs even read this?

Engineers have +2 walls every upgrade + 2 turrets/2 surveillance tools at 40 rank points

Suggestion:

Grenadiers have 4 mines maximum placement at spawn, 6 at 10 rank points, then 8, then 10 - (I never understand why the number of mines you can pick up with ammo upgrade is 10, even if 2 mines are simply wasted)

Rifleman:

They have 10% dmg reduction as "Armor". 10 rank points, give them 10+5=15% reduction. At 20, give them 15+5 = 20%. Then 25% and at 40 - 30% reduction.

Scout:

Already has quicker hide.

At 40 squad points:

Rifleman - double the ammo of the clip for primary/secondary weapon only.
Grenadier - drop all the remaining mines in inventory
Scout - increase dmg of scout rifle to 40 (actually, increase dmg of weapons
by 33%)

 

I thought that was removed.

 

There have been some suggestions about this before, but it didn't get anywhere.

Can't find thread.

I think it ended with people arguing that there shouldn't be any passive infantry skills at all.

 

It's absolute horseshit how those who play better aren't rewarded.

The reason I made this thread is for the mines for grenadier.

You should only be able to 8mine the enemy com (or ninja for that matter) if you actually took your time and earned those rank points. That way the matches will not be ended as quickly as they could, and everyone will know that in order to ninja, they need to get some kills and help their team first.

 

i do like this here would be my version

riflemen - basiccally same as yours; 0-9pts: 17% dmg redux. 10-19pts: 20%, keep going up by 3 every time the tens diget goes up (maxes at 29% at 50 pts)

gren - i think they need to scale the most to stay effective late game but not rape early game; mines just like you said 4, 6, 8, 10, and maxes at 12 when 50 points are reached. PLUS they can hold 1 more max RPG round every 10 points (goes up to 2/rank with ammo upgrade)

engi - the focus on the engi should be the engi tool; either +10% recharge speed per rank up to 50 points, OR 10% to max calculator ammo (adds a whole new bar on lvl 50)

scout - i refuse to make any comments on scout balance/usage until the new version comes out so no comment

NOTE: all numerical values (except for rank point numbers) are variable and are not meant to be balanced as is. in other words, if you have a problem with this attack the general idea or the things about the classes that should be changed, not the numbers them selves.

 

scouts currently/used to have decreased hide times and decreased sab times I thought. Not sure anymore, but those 2 things are scout things and should be what the scout gets.

Engy is fine with their rank stuff. Having repair/revive/and turret upgrade skills at 40 points is powerful enough as is.

I think gren should get the mines, but also get a 25% increase in the range of their mine detection. As it doubles as rocket/grenade/any other player owned mobile explosive object detector, it think this would make the skill actually somewhat useful, rather than having the detection be the size of the vehicle you are driving. It's always good to know that you are going to hit a mine and there is nothing you can do about it.

 

This has been suggested before, and my feelings are the same as they were then:

The only purpose to rank upgrades is to encourage players to do things that help their team, and to add an overall fun sense of 'accomplishment'. Rank ups should not, beyond that, be valuable. The bonuses they grant should be as minor and insignificant as we can get away with while still achieving those goals.

There are several reasons for this. First, rank points should never be a primary goal for the game. You should not be able to win in Empires by accumulating rank points; if you could, that would encourage people to 'grind' points -- having the comm build useless walls you can earn points for constructing, focusing on killing the weakest members of the enemy team or going on pointless, mindless suicide charges instead of focusing on the people who it's most important to take out, defending/endlessly repairing structures that aren't worth defending because you can accumulate points while doing it, and so on. These are not good things.

If points are worth too much, then players are encouraged to spend time focusing on MMORPG-style grinding for themselves, rather than on viewing the larger picture of what helps their team.

I would rather see the engineer and scout benefits removed than see any of the suggested things. In particular, anything that directly benefits you in infantry combat strikes me as a terrible idea. The deciding factors in an infantry fight should be who has the better overall organization and strategy -- who has more support, who ambushes who, and so on.

You should not be able to win because you spent more time grinding walls, or repairing a doomed Rax when you could have been doing something more useful.

Those who play better are rewarded. If your team plays better, you will get more res, will have better research, and will be able to afford better tanks. Empires is a team game; if you are only playing well on your own, you are not playing well, and you don't deserve any reward. If you are playing well with the rest of your team, you should share your reward with the rest of your team; it shouldn't be some magic superpower that only you get.

That is horrible. Your vision of a perfect Empires game is 'grind enemy soldiers in one section of the map until you've earned your Level 7 Game Ending Technique', then go someplace else and magically end the game with it?

I mean, I can't even find the right words to express how wrong this suggestion is. Empire's gameplay is supposed to be strategic. It is an FPS + RTS. It isn't an FPS + MMORPG. The primary reward for playing well is in the achievement of your goals -- that is to say, if you blow up an enemy rax, or capture a ref, or claim a key area of the map, your reward is that that advances your Comm's larger strategic plan to win the game.

Your suggestion would basically blow Empires to hell. Suddenly, it no longer matters what you're doing as long as you're earning points, because once you win enough points to get the Win Game ability, you win. Seriously, do you actively hate strategy and planning or something? I find it hard to interpret your suggestion any other way. The fact that you tried to twist it into 'teamwork' is particularly offensive. What you suggested would not encourage teamwork; what you suggested was actively, aggressively hostile to the idea of teamwork. Seriously, I cannot recall such an anti-teamwork suggestion, ever -- if you had said "HEY GUYS LET'S REMOVE TEAMWORK FROM EMPIRES, I HATE HAVING TO WORK WITH MY TEAM", it could not have been more blatant.

The reason why teamwork is important in Empires is because, in theory, people have to work together to achieve goals -- they cooperate to take down raxes, to capture key areas at once, to focus offense and defense so they win overall, not just in terms of statistical kills earned. If earning points were more important than achieving goals, then the need for overall teamwork would be minimal, because you wouldn't actually have to win (you'd just have to keep your Kills Per Second up.) All you have to do is charge mindlessly at the enemy -- you'll die, but you'll rack up kills quickly, too, even if you're not actually achieving anything. Then you earn the WinGame ability and win the game.

Under your suggestion, the absurd importance that you place on points would lead to large numbers of people on both teams ignoring the comm, ignoring refs and raxes, ignoring everything else so they can just run forward and play team deathmatch with the other team until one side has earned enough kills to auto-win. To me, that is the very opposite of what Empires is all about.

Seriously, while I agree that letting people single-handedly ninja is bad for the game overall, the solution is to simply remove those things completely. The answer is not to make you grind your points for a little bit before you get the "single-handedly win the game" ability.

 

sucks for anyone who crashes or joins halfway through ext ext

Its already annoying enough not having access to skills.

 

+1, what he said.
Bonuses to infantry is already given if you are good, you get more skills unlock, what's wrong with that? Also we should add infantry research tree to upgrade infantry, not upgrade infantry by encouraging team death match. By getting upgradeable infantry research people would be more encourage to take refineries and take down enemy buildings, sence then maybe the commander gets money to upgrade infantry.

 

Tbh, the statement "players who play better aren't rewarded", is incorrect. Those who play better are rewarded by unlocking more skills. You can't tell me that a rifleman with accuracy, speed and health upgrades won't have a much easier time dealing with enemy infantry than without them. Can you?

I think making a thread for one reason and disguising it as another isn't really helpful. Right now ninja's can be completely negated with the defusal skill, so I can't see how you could still have a problem with them...

 

What if every class could get something special after reaching the commander rank (over 100)?

Engineer - 3 turrets?
Grenadier - 9 mining/something else
Scout - Hide when standing?
Rifleman - 8 sticky bombs/something else

This would make long games more special. I think there's nothing special about long lasting games and there should propably be something.

 

Passive scaling of ability by rank sounds ok, but I'd only allow it to the extent that it's perfectly balanced across classes. I also think it shouldn't be a linear scale, but instead an exponential scale, so the big rewards don't come untill late in the game. Like EMP_Recruit said, it'd suck for players that enter late in the game.

I don't like the idea of giving engineers 3 turrets at only 40 points; Consider what a big difference that is if they take the turret upgrade skill. The current two turrets they get for clearing 80 or whatever it is, is generous. The ability to upgrade turrets to level 2 at an earlier points level *might* be fair.

Also I think increasing ammo loadouts is relatively benign, and won't have a big game-play difference on grenadiers since they usually don't lone wolf. They usually travel with some kind of eng/apc combo or stay near base. Rifleman+stickies+ammo increases will be a little unbalancing in some terrain, against vehicles.

I think the OP suggestion for Scouts is perfect and might fix the scout rifle issues. At least no effective snipers will arise until a large number of points arise. But still there will be the opportunity to sniper in the second half of the game. That should please the majority of players.

I think if the devs do go with a passive upgrade system then they should avoid overlapping coverage with the skill system. E.g. take out the extra ammo skill if ammo will increase with rank.


EDIT: Anyways, the effects of a passive system could be worked into the active skill systems, by just making two tiers of skills. One set can be chosen from the start. The other set of skills (more powerful ones, like say a true sniping ability for the scout) might not be chosen untill the player has like 50 points or such.

 

This idea I like - maybe make them different, but sounds good. It's sort of like AMLA from wesnoth.

However, the idea of giving people with more points EVEN MORE upgrdes is unfair. It encourage grinding for points, which is bad, and gives the most skilled players even more advantage, which is blantantly hugely unfair opn newbies, and people who join half way through.

I seriously dislike this basically: your rewards for levelling up are your achievements, and you don't need any more than that.

 

I knew somebody would post this, and here's the answer. If you have 40 rank points, you can choose 4 skills, however anybody with any amount of rank points can choose the same skills that you have, even if it's only 1 of them. This is ridiculous in itself.

Also to the guy whose name starts with A. I'm not going to bother to read what you said, I just skimmed through.

Empires is not what the developers had created this game for. You can ramble on what you want, but the end result is, 3 good players deciding to rush the enemy com with 3 vehicles and winning. Empires is not about teamwork, you shall never get your whole team too cooperate unless it's a scrim. You do not know this, because you never take the commander seat, and get frustrated at how fucking stupid your team can be. 1 player should be perfectly able to kill the enemy com by himself AFTER HE HELPS his own team. I don't know what the hell you were talking about, but by your logic, the skills that are in the game shouldn't have been there in the first place. After all, it's a "teamplay game right?".

 

Engineers already have 2 turrets. And the upgrades that most skilled players get are very very minimal. If you played empires "the way it's supposed to be played" you would know that it is the player that rushes to the front and listens to commander that gets the most rank points, not the one who build the buildings from the commander.

I have a feeling that most of you are just saying this because you do not get 40 rank points quickly enough, that's why you want everybody to stay at your level. Instead of "farming for points" you should try helping your team once, maybe then you shall see how quickly you can get points.

 

You did not understand what I said. I didn't say increase in ammo, in ammo CLIP. (How much you can fire without reloading)

 

The suggestion was to give engies 3 turrets at the commander rank.

That's 100+ points.

If you don't like 1 player being able to end the game cause they have more skills or whatever, remove arty strike. 1 squad working together can end the game or demolish an enemy base within seconds with arty strike. If more people worked as squads, and use that, it would be about 10 seconds to destroy a barracks, then VF, then radar. If people played as a team, this game would be very different.

 

I'll take your post apart.