Playing The Long Game: How Risky Short Term Behavior is Sometimes the Best Way to Win

It was always the opposite for me. Nf can camp the 3rd flag forever, with turrets and ammo boxes. Holding the 3rd itself is hard as balls considering you can easily get screwed by a bunch of grenades.

 

I know I've said it before and it's a little unrelated now, but I think I kind of switched off now that I realise that not many people understand the idea that trading down is a bad thing. I almost always see people abandon a good base to a handful of enemies so that they can chase an elusive victory. Look, you have to take action, but two to three people in a base can preserve that entire area.

I'm sick and tired of people yelling "WE HAVE TO GO FOR THEM!" and I'm looking at a base being destroyed by three people. That's okay when it's 5vs5, but when it's 15vs15 or 20vs20, it's just not on. Recognise the value in a base and don't trade away the entire game just because you've wet your pants. You CAN have your cake and eat it too. You don't need a lot of people and you don't have to stop attacking, what you do need to notice is when you have nothing to return to.

Really, some people are just so blind in this game that it's amazing. They only realise that they've lost when their tank is destroyed and they find there's nowhere to spawn. Don't abandon what you've spent 20 minutes building, and don't trade down to a shitty second base that's hardly defensible. Just make sure there's a few people in your base when it's getting attacked. It's not that hard is it?

And don't all suicide back to base either. Tactics aren't binary, it's not all or nothing, especially in Empires. An extra hand after a certain point is often not as useful in one place as it is in another. One tank makes a very large difference when there are only a couple, but it doesn't make nearly as much of a difference when there are 5. It's simply not rational to choose the battle where you'll be least effective. And that applies to other things too - if you see 10 players pushing the fight to the enemy main, don't just go there, they probably don't need you! Go take down one of their refs or an ancillary base that only has a barracks. Even if they're all nubs on the front line, chances are they'll do all right and your action will give your team more of an advantage than joining them.

Yeah, not even gonna bother to end this post properly.

 

I find Ikalx post very interesting. I don't have a lot of experience with large match's but I find it curious that some guys are not selected to defend main from the start of the game. You know the enemy is going to have one squad rush main, normally catching the COM alone and screaming for people to respawn. Also the mindset in a push is that someone will respawn, keep pushing. When all think like that main is lost. The guys who I play with regularly know to respawn without hesitation when I yell since it takes less than a minute to destroy a whole base, 9 seconds of which are needed to respawn.

This is why many times I prefer not to put a forward VF in a second base since that leaves main unprotected by constant spawners. It's a trade off since a strong team can put higher pressure on the enemy main if there were a closer VF, but a smart player in that enemy main would never fight head to head. One squad should be getting out and trying to remove that pressure by applying their own pressure to the enemy main and if they had TWO mains, then it becomes easier. Even splitting that squad to have two guys in each main has more potential to do heavy damage - forcing their team to withdraw and defend.

One tactic I used when I knew enemy was going to jeep rush main was to ask my team to each drop their turrets on their way out of main, and the com can build them. NUBS tend to linger and build anyway and this leaves an initial protection rim that is free. I tell them to move those turrets to more effective places as needed, during which time I am replacing them as resources become available. A 15 player team dropping 15 turrets as they run out of main is all we need for defense against initial jeep or APC rush's. That also keeps us from wasting funds on an initial VF, and focus those resources on a radar for more research.

This is also why a COM needs a big red button - BROKEN ARROW. Everyone on the team is screamed at until the com removes the button press.

If this doesn't get your excitement up - then you need to take up knitting.
Fuck yeah Video

 

What really needs to happen is map tickets need to be balanced against com health so that teams have a tactical choice to be more/less aggressive, instead of now where you get so many tickets/com is so weak(relative to ticket count) that trying to kill the commander is the only viable option.

 

Lazybum, I think you kinda missed the point. I'm not saying someone should be at the base always, I'm saying the game is missing a section of people who can hear "I need a few people at main, we have an enemy group coming in" and be that force. I see a few people do it dedicatedly, and they are usually pretty kick ass, but aside from them, it's usually one newbie or fringe dude caught out in the base at the time. It's really annoying.

I think maybe it's because Empires is a game where it's not just about you, and some people seem real confused about that.

JustGoFly, I also want to say the point Lazybum makes is the reason we don't have people nominated to stay in base. Typically there comes a point where that person isn't really being of use any more, and would be better going from point to point in the field and just keeping an ear open. But you are right, often in a large match someone will stay with the com - sometimes that's because they've just had a tight game and want to relax and build, but pretty much always it's for protection too.

Two ML's and a MG are enough to soften an early APC rush. The enemy don't often expect it and as commander you can usually fill in against them. Most APCs have 2-3 people in them when it's early anyway, so that usually works. Except Canyon, that usually has massively filled APCs since it's hard to gain ground in that map.

As you know, asking everyone to build a turret on the way out is going to lose you a lot of ground in the short term and the long run will probably cost you the game, depending on the map. A lot rests on early game and can only really be equalised through player ability. Though I do wonder why so few grenadiers lay mines as they leave the base. I ALWAYS get returns from that. Of course, not that many grens spawn in the first place, so that may be one reason.

Lazybum, Empires isn't about area control, but it IS about area tactics, or should be. In an example of dustorm, the NW is always a highly contentious area, with low value but key strategic importance. You can't really defend a base there very well (I think the issue is vision and the amount of cleared ground that determines an area's defensive value), but it can be a very effective staging point and trump card if it's ignored for long enough (as it is fairly often).

In my view, a lot of the maps don't really understand area tactics very much, and players of Empires seem to balk at larger maps with good flow for no real reason - for instance emp_bush. Player count is an issue, sure, but that map demonstrates the ability people should have to fluctuate on the map. And the anonymity gained while exploring an area and setting up a base.

Great maps like Canyon actually have it wrong. In theory all Empires maps should have three routes from one side to another - 2 chokepoints and 1 free run. I think one of the custom maps showed this best - the one with the two bridges and the underpass, though it came to be regarded as slightly broken after a time - I think that was base placement.

But the point is...well maybe Canyon doesn't exactly have it wrong, but it should be an exception rather than a guideline. Dust, too, has it wrong (don't mistake me, these are great maps but not great templates), because of its lack of cover. The map with the oilrig in the middle (forest, I think it is?) was a good example of how to make a larger map traversable - for infantry (the main players of the game). It had too much forestation for Dust's purposes, but the placement of thickets and copses were quite inspired.

I think ideally, people should have the ability to somewhat hide their goings on from the enemy (isle-style), but have it still be easy for their base position to be deduced and attacked. With a lot of the default maps, areas tend to be more tightly designed to make up for the fact that there is no real reconnaissance needed. Often things get more streamlined to make up for the fact that an enemy does not need to be revealed or discovered or scouted. Actually, if you think about it, that's why things like APC rushes feature so much, because if you know someone is coming from one direction and can't slip past you, if you run up to them and punch them hard enough, you win. On the other hand, if they can get around you without you knowing and get into your home, then you're going to have to consider your actions a little more. Also seems the reason why scout would have been a class all on its own - since you'd actually need someone out there helping you find the enemy, while you both manoeuvre and skirmish across the battlefield.

Anyway, it's 5am and I've only made about 75% sense, I'm sure. So thank you, and goodnight :p

 

Ya the tactic I mentioned was not to slow the team down, similar to your asking for mines to be dropped - have team just drop turrets. And I did think I said the commander was to build the turrets or some shy nub.

I was thinking of mValley where you know the enemy is normally rushing for the north location. Even if they do a slow rush through the dam they will be in your base in a few minutes, and turrets will slow them for a short bit. Since on mValley there is really only enough money for one APC, the enemy would be very aggressive and decide on a quick win to rush main - but I see it happen occasionally. And five players spawning from the APC will quickly eliminate everything, and if they have a scout the COM can be caught - turrets may not even help, but they have given com time to abandon main and move north which we would have clearly taken since the other team rushed main early.

I find it interesting your statement that maps need three paths - two for vehicles and third for troops. The new money map does this with the top path for troops, and that was an improvement that added more troop fighting rather than just vehicles. Forest does this but vehicles can drive through. CrossRoads has a path for footmen which can bypass vehicle traffic, so that was a great improvement.

It does seem that many maps are designed to require vehicles. Cyclopean, DustStorm, Coast.

I know ground troops are strongest on first 2 of 3 phases of the game. Once you get to heavies they become fodder. A good gren can easily take out any other vehicle quickly.

It might be interesting to put a pathway through the mountain on the map that looks like a chick with her legs open. So there would be more troop fighting in a location other than the one center area. This map has water north that if you drive into your com vehicle drives quickly. A mod was made with ice - way to bright.

You should start a thread for new map makers to give them your formula for a great map.

 

Lazybum, it's totally a big population thing, but then Empires isn't a game that's supposed to really be played with much less than 20 people. The maps are large and the depth of gameplay can't really be realised with small numbers. Many things in Empires need a lot of people to truly come into play, which is why it's often so annoying when only a few people end the game. Conversely, the best games - if you're playing it like a game, rather than a sport where you just need to win - involve people working together to counter, outmanoeuvre and overwhelm an enemy. Even if it involves a squad going to take out the enemy commander, if the rest of the team steps up their defense in order to make that chance happen, it's a full team effort.

Regarding cover, I may have been a bit confusing there, for that I apologise. What I meant was Canyon has cover, but its downfall - as a template, not the actual map but a guideline to follow, is that it has only two paths really. This means the battle lines are drawn early and can only move with a concerted push. This is not necessarily a bad thing, just in general having a third path allows for more chance and flexibility. A third route that is not easy to lock down means it acts as a conduit for gameplay, enabling players to try different things to break through. Typically this kind of play is the most limited by tickets.

In contrast, having two paths that can be "locked down" - like money or slaughtered, less than Canyon, since the paths are wide and there IS a lot of tree cover, leads to more stale gameplay where inevitably the human errors of designing the map come into play. Like the fact that NF can bombard BE's 3rd ref with artillery, while BE cannot do the same. Don't get me wrong, I love slaughtered, but I was finally quite dismayed when that imbalance was pointed out to me. It meant as hard as people pushed, what would give wouldn't be man and machine, but rather the lay of the land.

Anyway, when I talk about cover I mean for infantry movement, small vehicle hiding and other such things. In dust, and this is a credit because we need open maps, those things don't largely have a place. This makes it bad as a template for our main idea of what a map should be, because it makes it both heavily dependent on population and heavily dependent on vehicles - if infantry can't move semi-freely from cover to cover, then they are at a huge risk as they navigate the map.

Forest is a good map, it has lots of cover but perhaps more than is necessary. The centrepiece can actually be interchanged with anything with the way the map works out. If it was a stronghold area where a base could be built that would again change the map into something we don't have much of either - similar to dust, but with the ability to ignore the centre and populate the outlying areas instead, to surround and destroy.

With my last paragraph I am getting at the point that with line of sight, surprise is much reduced. Some maps have too much line of sight, some have too little. Similarly, you want a main base to have the largest line of sight, and areas designed for ancillary use to be harder to spot from a distance. The difference is probably something that can be measured in one or two barracks lengths. This is where cover comes in, too, where the land can be altered to allow for a deeper area to hide buildings, and natural features like rocky formations and especially trees can be added to provide LoS blockage while also allowing for infantry tactics.

I'm not sure if that's getting too esoteric though.

Regarding two ML turrets and a MG, I've found it extremely helpful in the past, but armour values may have changed to negate it. Typically someone rushing quickly will be a "semi-vet" accompanied by a couple of usually overly enthusiastic rookies. If the APC is manned by someone experienced, however, it can be dangerous. However, if the base is defended by someone of moderate skill and the APC driver is backed up by rookies, two MLs and a MG is enough to allow that one person to stave off the attack. It fills in the gaps between the defenders first death with the attackers focusing on the MLs and MGs, while during his/her second life, they usually only have to contend with two enemies at 100% and 50% of life each. Focus is key here, usually the vet gets out of the APC first, but therefore is the first to die. If they let the others die first, then you have a problem.

Admittedly this is a scenario for early game rushes.

JustGoFly, in that case, the dropping of turrets is a cool idea. I like it. On the other hand though I'd expect the tactic to only yield 5 turrets on a regular map, since engies need them for cover as they assist on the front line.

Crossroads is a remarkable map, but it's way too tight for larger populations and slightly too long for smaller. I think most problems with that map could be addressed by widening the rock walls of the centre field as well as the gateways to the base. Unless it's changed (and it might have, since I even forgot about mvalley's dam) it was always a little too small for vehicles to manoeuvre properly. It's actually the map that made me give up commanding for quite a while, since...well, you get locked down in your base and can't do much about it if the enemy team is stronger. I.E. strength>wits on that map.

To be honest, I just like talking about Empires. The key thing as I see it is you don't have leeway with small populations to try interesting things in a game, since your buffer is tiny, and with large populations you can try better tactics. However, lots of people don't seem to grasp very basic ideas of checking the map and listening to the commander. This leads to bases being destroyed early and often which means we have many more desperate tactics out there, but we don't get into the more innovative stuff. Because if you're constantly being hounded and rebuilding, you have no leeway. You have to go direct so the enemy commits forces to defend themselves, and at that point it's down to whoever has the superior tech, and players.

Not sure if that all makes sense. I sometimes have a tendency to become somewhat difficult to understand if I'm not stating things strictly.

 

Perfectly clear and very interesting. I wish you'd play more. We have some guys in low pop games that have been learning how to command a team and they do have their regular players who enjoy playing with them. I know I have a handful of guys who join my team and I know what they like, I know their strengths and weaknesses and how to feed them. I like this and this is very different from higher population games.

On low pop games you HAVE to listen to the com and react quickly, and the commander has to drive a strategy or you get into stale mates and a lot of head to head fighting for hours. We don't breed the players that sneak into bases or crawl around the map since we can't afford the cost of one player being out of the attack. Usually it's about putting pressure on the enemy base and trying to keep the in the base while we research heavies.

The bad thing is I usually stick with what works, and that makes it fairly boring for me to command. I prefer to be on the field.

I've noticed that low pop games teach players to NOT FLANK the enemy. They won't leave a small squad to sneak into a base or work an empty path.
Mostly they brute force and out talent the enemy. It does make for some skilled grens, riflemen, and teaches engineers how to support a squad.

For instance on Crossroads we had the two teams fighting on one side for ten minutes. I finally told a new player to go the other way, and we built a rax in the enemy base. This caused the head to head fight weaken the enemy since they had to withdraw to combat the assumed threat. No one from our team spawned in that rax, but it enabled the head to head fight to break through to the enemy base since we were then stronger on that side.

So low pop games breed fodder for high population games. Those guys won't know that it is very worthwhile rushing a jeep into a base and damaging buildings to 30% then doing it four more times.

The biggest problem with the game now is more that BE heavies are much more powerful than NF heavies. If NF doesn't win by the time heavies come around they sure better do some jeep rushes or sneaks or they are at a disadvantage.

I would like to learn to develop maps. I would hope we could do a teleconference type training session from a map veteran some weekend. This would help the handful of guys willing to design maps to get to work. I like what RAGE map did with multiple levels, but not that it is so close to drive vehicles between the two bases. Normally a foot player, in the tower, is the reason you win or lose on that map but too many players get locked into pushing head to head - heavies until someone goes bankrupt and losing.

 

Dude.

Dude.

Dude.

That's more than 1000 words.

Dude.

 

JustGoFly, I might play a little more. The reason I stopped playing was it just made me angry to play, and I didn't really like the bile that was gathering in me. If a game isn't actually fun to play, or if it's more angering because of the people involved, there's really no point. That being said, it's better now, but I tend not to play as much because I'm not actually very good these days and sometimes I don't want to feel worthless. It's a bit of a shame, but for a long time I haven't really won gun battles. At least with larger population games I can make up for my lack of ability with the weapons (and how I like to approach infantry combat), but with smaller populations, if I get into a fight I'll probably die. And as that's usually just after I've built a refinery or something like that...it makes my contribution really rather useless.

As you say, low population games teach players not to flank the enemy. I agree with you that this is largely because they need to draw the enemy to them in order to feel secure about their own bases. If the enemy is attracted to the warriors on the front, they won't try to go around...which means the soldiers can just focus on the enemy in front of them.

It's one of the reasons APC's are such an effective distraction tactic. Since they act as a big flashing target possibly containing the entirety of the enemy team, it has to be dealt with. That's basically the thing with an APC - they're the only real mystery/decoy you can use in a low population game, and the only default thing built into the gameplay not the map. Every other vehicle is basically just a single person powerup, except for the jeep where you can actually see the enemy numbers and account for them.

I don't know that low population games breed fodder. They breed people who are familiar with the gameplay and who are adept at combat. They don't help people understand the depth of strategy available to them in larger games, but that's not really that difficult for someone who has become familiar with regular gameplay to grasp.

BE heavies have always been more powerful than NF heavies, except out in the open where typically more barrels of guided/homing missiles help NF. Whereas the more recoil orientated cannons put BE at a disadvantage.

Your point being?

Lazybum, every map shouldn't have three paths, you're right. There should be some maps that are just clashes and wars and knee-deep in the trench fights. There should be maps where you are forced to fight your hardest to move an inch, or claw at the enemy in order to maintain the line. There should be. It just should be around 20% or so. Not that I'm saying we have a lot of two-path maps, just that we have a less maps that use a more ideal setup. We have dual-route maps and big maps with lots of options, but with reduced ability to make a good base. We have many good maps, and many incredible mappers. But it does seem that the most efficient map style for empires seems just a little neglected.

You have a point about artillery, though when you say 'anymore' my experience of the game isn't really drawn from now so much as then. I think what affected me the most is slaughtered is actually one of my most favourite maps, but in actuality it's fairly broken. Still, it's one of the best maps to learn empires on for newbies.

Walls are very noticeable cover and do little to allow infantry to move undetected. On a map like Cyclopean things are fine since most troops are fairly camouflaged by the surroundings, but on dust they show up very clearly and can be hunted down easily. It would actually be quite interesting if we had a sort of camouflaged wall that would be able to be placed in smaller areas but provide more mysterious cover. Let's face it, most wall placements are looked on as an active enemy installation and dealt with accordingly. They're suspicious by nature, and hardly ever used with a view to increasing the ability to hide.

Walls are used as cover from fire, not from sight. That's my point. If we had something ridiculous like holographic trees that provided no barrier to vehicles or enemy fire, that would be more along the lines of what I'm talking about. Or rather, that's what I mean by cover.

You're right though, some places you should be highly noticeable, and in many maps you're relatively camouflaged by simple things like the colour of the land.

Regarding APC's...it's a different beast. It either seems to be a relatively well planned attack, or a slap-dash rush that is easily put down. In both cases I'm talking about fairly early on in the game, but one can be countered easily, the other can be slowed and defeated with the aid of only a couple of turrets. Later in the game, of course, neither of that is enough.

Heh, had to figure out how I came to be talking about this :p

 

I was bored and decided to skim through this entire thread while I was queueing for a Dota game. I've tried to reply to shit where I felt I could make a contribution.

I think the resist system came in like 2.2, so probably even earlier. Kylegar added it. There might have been a hardcoded reactive resist to stickies before that though, because I'm sure I heard that when I first started playing.

Idk, surely this is his 2nd year. Also, no offence to the guy, but a year or so of playing 5v5s and less isn't really the same as spending a couple of months playing in 10+v10+.

Only affects vehicles for some reason, not infantry.

As I said above, this is nothing to do with explosion force, as it doesn't affect infantry. I don't know whether it's hard coded with Empires or source, but either way it's not in the scripts. So yeah, I don't exactly know how knockback works with regard to bullets on infantry.

Arty is really strong, it's just that it costs a lot and your team tends to waste them.

Castle was made as one of the first "pretty" maps. It was right around the time all the Lost Coast materials became available, so Blight wanted a chance to make use of them. I don't really think gameplay was the top priority, it was more a case of seeing what source could do. At the time (before Omneh, Silk, Chris0132, Keef and John Shandy' all started mapping high end stuff), it was easily the best looking map by far. It is playable, but only just. Like I said, gameplay wasn't really the top priority with Castle.







I kind of got bored when everyone started textwalling, but after skimming, it seems like Lazybum and Ikalx both made my points. Empires isn't about territory control and it's also based around much higher playercounts than those we have currently. Even with 32 players on your team you don't have people statically defending an area unless it's under constant attack, you have a quick-response-force that you move around the map as people attack an area. That way, you get more "bang for your buck" when it comes to getting efficient use out of players.

I personally tend to tell a squad where I want them based, and which direction I want them to push from that position. That way, I generally tend to overlap things so that no-one should really be slipping through and attacking my shit without being in the firing line of one of my squads. For example:

Duststorm: If I own NF main and Ruins, then I'll have one squad based in Ruins, pushing BE main. One squad based in main, pushing North (to the North West of the map). My last squad I'll want going middle, but depending on which is taking more pressure of attack (NF main or Ruins), I'll have them deploy from that area to make sure they're caught in that advance.

It's just treating the map as a series of lanes and making sure you always have a push going down each one. The most important thing then, is breaking down the enemy's lanes. You have a smaller squad if possible (2-3 people) disrupting their lines of attack by sneaking down refs that they aren't covering properly, or just pulling their guys out of their advance into side-fights. You spread the enemy as thin as you possibly can. Not only does this mean that your main force has less resistance to overcome, but it also puts a huge strain on the enemy commander to try and organise his team when they're attempting to defend 5-6 fronts at once, instead of the standard 2-3. Stretch a team thin enough and eventually they'll just snap into chaos, all order will go and they'll have no direction any more, at which point you can just advance and take what you want with impunity because they don't really understand where you're even pushing any more.

To a limited extent, the same applies for chokepoint maps, though in a much more simple sense. You just lock up the chokes, advance and lock up as you go, make sure no-one gets behind you while simultaneously trying to get someone behind their lines. Once you do that, you create as much of a distraction behind their lines that the resistance gets small enough for you to overcome the chokepoints, at which point you just swarm them. Once that chokepoint is broke, it's not enough for you to just carry on pushing. You need to attack every single position of their base at the same time to break them, to disrupt their organisation. Once you do that, it's GG.

Oh, and I guess on an absolute final note, people get distracted by the CV too easily. Not only can it cause you to lose if you chase it and let it disrupt you, but even if you do catch it and win the game, was that really the satisfying win you wanted? I know it rarely was for me. I've let CVs go before just because I want a proper game, and I can definitely say that other players have done the same for me, for which I'm vastly appreciative of. If you get that 2nd chance, you stop taking the piss and get back to a proper game. That's something that Hobbes never really learnt.

 

In that man-marking is vastly superior to zonal-marking, which is a fucking retarded idea that allows players to try passing responsibility onto someone else, so no-one ends up doing the job required.

So yeah, you're right I guess.

 

in both disciplines the wages are too high!