At the moment the best tactic is always to mindless spamming refs at any location they can be build. They repay themself so fast that it is always a winning tactc. My suggestion is to add more variety of tactic to empires and also give the losing team a greater chance of comeback. For every ref beoynd the first that you team have, the cost of building refs will be increased by 100 res. The first ref you place will cost the normal 200 res. The second one will cost 300 For a team with 5 refs their next ref will cost 700 res. Ofc the cost decrease whenever one of your refs get destroyed. Pros: Add more varitey to strategies. Gives losing teams a greater chance of comeback. Discourage mindless ref spamming, you acctually have to defend what you have captured. Cons Winning team may become over-cautious leading to stale mates and drawn out fights with winning team turtling. Might encourage turtling.
Well it does make the 2x refs more important. I wouldnt go so extreme as 100 extra res though, that's a fuckload of res. 25 or 50 would do it.
Of course the numbers will be set during playtesting (assuming this suggestion gets throught) but i di think that a ref should be quite an investment, seeing as they are the most important structures in the game.
So what does this do... - After both teams have their refineries up, losing a refinery will be a lot more expensive. You're still going to have to replant it so you can get more resources, unless you're nearing end-game, but it will be a greater economic loss, equivalent to losing your radar or the VF. - Emp_Money's first stages are going to be almost entirely infantry with 1 or 2 vehicles, as commanders will save up to afford their 7th and 8th ridiculously expensive refinery. (Maybe less so in other maps, but it will be most obvious in Money.) - Losing teams inevitably have weaker economies. The greater cost to resources as you have to rebuild your economy is just going to break a losing team's bank and give the previously winning team a stronger chance of stopping the comeback. @Empty Good point about the 2x refs. Wait... A good point from Empty? #!@*+
I think a better solution would be to "even out" the resources as you have more refs. There is a name for what I'm thinking of, but I cant remember it. For each extra ref, you loose .5 res a second. Or some other formula to basically add a cap to how many resources you can actually accumulate.
[Veering slightly off-topic] Warcraft 3 had something like that, but I think slightly better, with their 'Upkeep' system. It'd be equivalent to reducing your income based on having more vehicles. Though, it was hated anyway.
This is more of a map design thing though. Tanks are necessary on most maps. Refineries are necessary to build tanks and research better tanks. If tanks weren't absolutely necessary on a map with resources, this wouldnt be a problem. Problem is that people like tanks. See where I'm going with this?
What my "formula" would try to accomplish is reduceing the res advantage the winning team has. IE you have 2x the number of refs, but only are earning 1.5x the amount of res. We then could increese the gobal amount of resources so even the looseing team can pump out vehciles, at a greater rate, tho still less then the winning team.
Why does the losing team need to be able to compete with the winning team? If a team is obviously losing, they should lose. now, if empires had a com map that wasn't focused on tank combat, or had tank combat, but not everywhere, that would solve more problems than this would. right now, tanks are required to hold most anything.
I really don't like being referred to like that. I say a lot of good points, and have a lot of good ideas. It's just there's a lot of bad counterparts.
No. There's no need to do that because getting (or getting back) refs later in the game gets more difficult with time.
Because the problem, as i see it, is that the team that caps the most refs in the eraly begining will gain more res to get more/better tanks, which will result in them capping even more refs and eventually wining. It feels like matches are decided in the first 10 minutes unless the teams are very even. Even if the losing team manage to retake some refs, the winning team will already have such a economical adventage that they can use their superior tanks to just take it back straigt away. I want commanders to think twice before placing a ref, as it would be an investment that repaid itself over time assuming you have the force to defend it. Placing a ref in the middle of enemy territory where a ninja engineer have maneged to sneak to should not be a valid tactic, refs should only be placed in locations where you clearly have controll. Refs hp might have to be raised to balance it thou.
I'm pretty sure that commanders with at least two functioning brain cells prefer not to put refineries in the middle of enemy territory next to ninja engineers. This shouldn't even be an issue unless the other team is so oblivious they can't tell whose refineries are whose. Putting a barracks down, however....
I like this idea, I was like "DOH! Why didn't I think about something like this in the past years to suggest it. It is a problem that If a team has a commander that doesn't rush losses, this was addressed in 2.2 and it's fixed. But If a commander won't drop a front line barracks for the team, or the team manages to loose it, its not hard to say which team is going to dominate the rest of the game. I think that it is a problem that the rest of the game is decided by the first attack wave, both teams should have a "grace period" of 3 wave, the game should not be decided before that. And their should still be a chance of getting some map control back. I mean lets look at Unreal Tournament, as long as you have map control you dominate the enemies, but If you are unlucky or the enemy is better you can loose the map control and the enemy has map control. Fighting about map control can be a lot of fun. Now in Empires that happens too, something like base swapping or gaining some refineries back. But its really hard. I think the game mechanics should encourage this fighting about map control. BUT without making the game slower. Now this suggestion does that, but I think its still not enough. Having to pay 200 res or even 700 res for a ref is not that much, because If you already have 6 refineries, your income will be high enough to not worry too much about a refinery. I think that refineries are too strong, they can hold too much fire and they take too long to build. Make them more vulnerable and add a higher penalty if you lose a ref. something like a gas explosion that damages all buildings around it would be nice too, so you can't make defense fortresses for them. But I'm not so sure about higher ref costs if you already have many refineries, that could slow down the game and I don't think thats desirable.
All(or most) objections to this suggestion has assumed you want to build a refinary at EVERY ref point in the map. I was thinkin, how do traditional rts games work? Why dont you harvest resources from every single rescource point on the map? The answear is: You have to spread out your troops so much that it will weaken your general defence, making you weak to single, consentrated blows. You also have to spend rescources on workers to maintain your income. How does empire differ from this then? Well, to begin with, in empires you always aim for the buildings first, then the enemy units, which is directly related to the fact that infrantery can spawn without cost, on a timer that is not affected by other players waiting to spawn. Losing units wont affect a team unless it becomes a ticket figth. The best way to solve this would be to somehow force the enemy team to clear out all units before heading for the buildings. The fact that most atacks are aimed at the buildings make so much harder to defend something. Also, since you dont have to spend your res on workers to maintain your income there really isn't any downside with alot of refs. Maybe the maximum tank limit should somehow be linked with the current number of refs? More refs = lower maximum tank limit? I think empires would benefit from if it wasn't the best strategy to take every single ref in the map, but rather just as many as you could defend.
The rest of your post makes sense. But in every RTS game I've played, you do harvest every single resource point on the map. The only exception I can think of is Starcraft. Those SCV armies can eat up some food!
Warcraft: Why dont you build a great hall/haunted goldmine/townhall at every gold mine? Age of empires: Why dont you gather gold/stone from every single gold/stone pile on the map?? You do harvet ofc harvet rescoures from all places where there are rescources. But not from all of them at the same time. The main reason empires work like this is because the refs are a drop-and-forget thing, there are no workers needed to maintain them.
1. Yes, that's the idea, so you have to actually protect your refineries rather than just spam them, the more refineries you have the harder this is, so it favors the losing team. 2. 'It breaks money' is not an argument. 3. Losing teams find it easier to rebuild than winning teams find it to expand. If you want you could make the scale closer to doubling, the first refinery is free, the second costs fifty, the third a hundred and fifty, the fourth three hundred, the fifth six hundred, the sixth one thousand two hundred. If you have six refineries that's almost certainly total map control, and the idea is that's supposed to be a lot harder to achieve with this, ensuring there's at least one refinery for the losing team to capture and also that destroying a winning team's refineries is a powerful tactic to beat them back. Personally I'd have it be set in a config entitiy in the map, as different maps might need different balancing, and also have a per-node price multiplier which would be displayed to the commander when he looks at the node, possibly also team dependant, so the NF base node could be cheaper for the NF but very expensive for the BE.
