I've made my thoughts clear on what I think about things like 3 slot weapons and the heavy tank/medium tank balance. I'm going to put this all in one thread to show what should be done to make it work. In short, I aim to make heavy tanks not an upgrade but an alternative. For a simple list this is what should be done. Heavy tanks have their plates reduced to 4 a side, but keep the hull health. Have heavy tanks max weight reduced by 90, this puts it at the same weight as mediums. Heavy tank's base cost reduced to 500-600 a tank. Mediums are to have access to 3 slot weapons. Mediums are to have have their base cost increased to 500 a tank. Research for mediums and heavy tanks are set to 225 seconds. Advanced chassis is removed, this way it takes the same time to get either tank. Nuke research time should be doubled to 360 seconds. By losing some weight and possible plates heavy tanks lose the durability that makes fighting them awful and makes them less of an upgrade to mediums. Giving medium access to 3 slot weapons lets commanders get whatever weapons they want for their team to accomplish whatever it is they want to do without having to wait for heavy tanks. Players get to choose which tank they like to play, a slow tank that has a ton of firepower or a faster tank that can take and give an equal amount of punishment. I think it's alright for heavy tanks to keep their hull hp, they are bigger targets after all. Research time and cost is spread out to make it more obvious that each tank has a similar value. Considering heavy tanks aren't a direct upgrade and can't take a huge amount of punishment like before it makes sense to make the cost less. Mediums had a slight increase in power by being able to use 3 slot weapons, so it makes sense for them to cost a bit more. Nukes have a research time increase because I feel they are an endgame weapon and they completely invalidate turrets once they get researched. The one sticking part is how nf faction tanks are treated. Currently heavies and mediums both have an extra plate of armor on each side and 80 extra weight compared to their be counter parts. Honestly I do think it's been kinda working out alright, so it might not break anything to keep those faction bonuses, though for some reason they are also 100 res cheaper then be and that doesn't feel right to me. So I would say make them the same cost as be. I would kinda like it for them to cost an extra 50 res considering the extra hp, but they really should at least cost the same. Ah, I can see someone thinking heavies won't be worth it at all considering meds can use nukes and such. I'd like to point out that heavy tanks have I think a 40% increased cooling over the other engines, so heavy tanks really will be better at laying on the pressure and will do a much better job at destroying bases and what not.
Bro don't get me wrong my medium design overheats like a bitch but it has insane DPS even without 3 slot weaponry, this would make it even more viable (with some tweaks, but not too many) and me and Steve would be happy, happy people, but I'm not so sure about the general community.
Yes, I know how strong a medium is. A heavy can still have an advantage in certain situations, especially long range ones.
I'm...not really with you on this, Lazybum. I guess I just don't agree with the main point - I don't think heavies should be a side upgrade. I would rather see them as more specialised units with powerful abilities but downsides that make for interesting playstyles. I agree that they're way overpowered though, and actually I think an interesting thing to do would be to bring mediums more in line with lights, and then heavies closer to what meds are. Lights have never really been great anti-tank/anti-building vehicles but if you could equip them with heavier weapons they can be beastly. Imo, that's what we should make mediums, have them be a bit stronger, but largely more dangerous because of their arsenal. Then we could bring the heavies more into the medium zone. For most of the time lights have existed as a completely separate entity, and mediums and heavies overlap. If we brought them a bit closer to lights, not only would we reduce the behemoth scaling of heavies, but we'd have vehicles overall being more fun to play and play against. That's just my opinion though...but I've always felt it's been a bit of a waste that lights are written off almost immediately because meds are 2-3x as powerful, and heavies much, much more. When heavies are like 1.5x a med atm. The added weapons are enough to count a medium as twice as good as a light (just see mkII's for reference) but we give them additional armour as well. Lose a bulk of that, and do the same to heavies, and you can bring everything back down. For example, if it's like this atm: Light Tank - 20, Medium Tank - 60, Heavy Tank - 90. We could change that to: Light Tank - 20, Medium Tank - 40 (advanced weapons/slightly better health), Heavy Tank - 60 (more & better weapons, slightly higher health, and slower).
Isn't that what it is? I feel like I'm missing something here. Like compare the afv to the be med. Afv has 3 plates and is faster, the be med is a bit slower and has more armor and more weapons just like you described. Here, let me just give my 2 cents on the problems with making chassis too different. It boils down to strength vs cost. You can't make things terrible expensive because if it's too specialized like arty it quickly loses the game without any way for people to have just 1 or 2 of it. In regards the heavy tanks it's has quite a bit more oomph to it then the medium. Not as much as it used to, you are right about that, but enough to warrant it costing more then a medium. It still hurts when someone loses the tank though, more so then a medium. Still, it needs to cost more, the more health and defense a tank has the more value it will end up having due to simply living longer and getting more done. There's no maintenance fees in empires, so there's no downside to keeping things going. Speaking of costs and such, a med nf med is only 50 more res then a light and a be med is 200 more then a afv. I still don't get that one. I bring all that up because I feel costs of tanks should be cheap enough for players to get tanks when they want to, but not extreme enough to either get flak from the rest of the team from losing a super expensive unit and possibly preventing others from getting tanks too. Making the med and heavy tanks more of side grades gives people options without messing with things like op units or expensive mistakes. The heavy and medium do have different playstyles I feel, look at how ddd thinks this is a good thing for med drivers. People who just want to tear stuff apart from a bit of a distance will rather go with the heavy tank. It still has dual cannons/missiles depending on faction, it still has way better cooling. It's just bigger and slower. It's all about tradeoffs. To be honest I was seriously thinking of suggesting heavy tanks only get 3 plates of armor and keep all the extra weight they have so they could max out on weapon and plates but it wouldn't be as much as a medium, but considering how most of armors are weight and hp wise it wouldn't be that much of a nerf in defense, making them to still better then meds.
What if you just added a research for LTs/AFVs and one for Mediums which lowers the base cost of each substantially. Means you open up a whole new avenue of strategy for using quantity over quality when it comes to how you want your team to use vehicles. You'll see more Mediums but Heavies will still be viable because they're strong. You'll also see more LTs/AFVs into the midgame. It'll extend the useful life of both the vehicle classes further into the game. You don't even need to rebalance them to be honest, this would probably work with current balance right now.
I don't know for sure. My gut feeling was that 2-slot weapons were vastly superior to 1-slot weapons, and that's more what I was getting at. The way I was trying to articulate the difference was that lights are fairly ineffective at much except anti-tier 1, whereas meds are effective against everything and heavies ditto to a greater level. I really wanted to use a venn diagram (hey, first time for everything) and just have a circle to the side representing lights and then two interlaced representing meds and heavies. I feel like that gap between lights vs meds and heavies, should be a little closer. All the rest of the stuff I was saying is pretty close to what you were saying but just enough different that I seem insane trying to explain. I want to make clear that I'm with you on making things cheaper and less behemoth-like though. I dunno, I think the fact that in your side-grade the tanks wouldn't be too different is what doesn't really appeal to me. To be honest, that's what doesn't appeal to me as-is, which is why I don't often drive heavies when I drive. They're just not that fun. Sure you can dominate with them, but I guess I never liked being on the receiving end of a nuke - as a player - so I don't really like that myself.
The base cost of a nf light is 150, afv is 100. The base cost of a nf med is 200, the base cost of a be med is 300. Your idea sounds nice for sure, but it's kinda case of how much lower can you go? Most of the cost for both of them is on the weapons and armor, for the most part the cost is the same as weight so if you consider a be med having 380 free weight that's where quite a bit of it's cost comes from. It's even worse for nf meds, they have an extra 80 over be which means they have 460 free weight, that's 230% more then it's base cost. What I'm getting at is that for what you want to work you either have to rebalance the cost of meds and possibly by extension heavies to have a higher base cost or make the price cut affect the entire production of the chassis. There is a couple of slight concerns though, there's quite a few maps where 60-70% of the team ends up in heavy tanks, I don't exactly see this type of research being used in such maps. Maybe for the losing team it's a good idea, they get cheaper meds and lights instead of heavies, but I'm rather used to at some point even if it's just a few heavy tanks them massacring a bunch of meds. Still it would be neat to try, but like I said I think it would have to reduce the cost of the entire tank not just the base because they are pretty cheap as is. @Ikalx: Sounds like you want mkII lights back. I had very short chance to play with them, so I can't comment too much how good they were. Most people seem to agree that strapping on a slot 2 weapon on a light was too much though, but balance is different in a few ways now so maybe that might not be the case. I will say that what would probably be best and was one of the last things spart did was put in some slot 1 weapons that get researched. I know several people showed interest in that idea, but it still won't make them compete with heavy tanks I feel, just not make them super useless. I wouldn't know how to make tanks completely different though. I did try out something, you can see the results over here. The problem is that I had to change a ton of things to get it to work right, tanks all had their own specific weapons, none of being able to use 1 or 2 slot weapons on a heavy for instance. There isn't built in support for that though, we can't make chassis specific weapons. So I don't know how someone can really make unique tanks. I mean sure, you can make 4 or 6 slot weapons or whatever and play with weights on new chassis types, but you will quickly hit some limits there and I'm not convinced it's entirely worth it if you want to keep parts of what we have at the same time.
That's not what I was saying at all :eek: Nevermind then...I can't explain it much simpler than I have, so either I'm totally off or I just can't explain it right. The part about making tanks unique, though, only applies to the heavy. I wouldn't want it across the board, and the medium is a great example of a balanced, fun vehicle. What I'd like for heavies instead is if they could be something different entirely, like a great tank but with heavy downsides to their use. The problem with that, of course, is we don't have many interesting limitations to tank combat apart from speed and heat, and both of those aren't fun to play with.
No, now that you said that I think I know exactly what your getting at. To me there's 2 reasons why a medium vastly outclasses a light. It has access to weapons that do more consistent damage, bio ml and homing for example, and it's weapons produce less heat so it can fire and stay in the fight longer. Something I know I have trouble with and others do is getting all the damage a light can do on target, if you keep moving around like you are supposed to with a light it's actually rather hard to hit another target that's also moving, especially when a light's weapons are much more inaccurate then 2 slot weapons. It might seem like tier 1 is only good against tier 1 but that's simply because tier one doesn't have the hp to take too many hits, so it can actually die to those few shots from lights. The damage difference between lights and mediums isn't actually that great, std cannon only does 10 less damage then ranged, that's it. Std mls do less damage then the researchable missiles, but it does have less heat and is very light so it's been an easy weapon to spam when you want. Actually on that note one thing to help lights be not as poop against meds and what not but not become op like mkII is to put another 1 slot ml on it. 2 std mls can be pretty decent, comparable to uml but without the accuracy. That heat thing I mentioned is pretty big though. One problem I've had with lights is that because I'm constantly moving constantly firing heat quickly maxes out, and once you're there you ability to deal with threats quickly diminishes. Mediums don''t have this problem as bad because they have more weapons that can deal with multiple problems better, hecannon and bio ml for example, and all their cannons will produce less heat then std cannon, the main thing you tend to fire all the time. On that note I wonder if it would be a good idea for lights to have access to 2 slot mgs, beyond 50 cal most of them don't really make you super hot but do nice but not excessive damage, not to mention that it's easier for you to get more damage on target with mgs. The best way to make the heavy something you would like is limiting how fast the turret moves. This way lights, which should have instant turret movement like now, and meds, which can be a tad slower then lights, can simply out maneuver heavies getting into their backside and flanking them using their superior speed. So now you have a tank that really does have great firepower but with a trade off that less crappy to deal with. Mostly because clever players can turn their tank to help counter the slower turret movement, which would make for an interesting play style.
I had a feeling someone had rebalanced std cannon to be not crappy any more. It's a really good move tbh, though in my head I still think about them as they used to be, rather than how they are. Maybe std needs more in the rof department in trade for damage. So instead of packing more punch, it raises its dps. Then we could give it a bunch of extra clips (or one big clip) to make sure ammo isn't a problem and lower the heat a little. This is probably the chassis where you want to be able to fire quickly rather than powerfully. I kind of like the idea of a 2-slot MG, but I feel if that were implemented lights would be on a different level. Maybe that's one thing that advanced tank unlocks could actually be used for, since at the beginning of the game it'd still be pretty powerful. Although I guess I'm ignoring the fact that you'd need to research the weapon first to equip it...maybe that would work. I dunno about another ML slot. I just don't know how effective they are, so I can't comment. Limiting turret movement has always sounded like a good idea, it's just that it seems hard to implement..?
I agree that limiting turret movement would give us more leeway to differentiate mediums from heavies, and it should be implemented to test this. This is how World of Tanks balances mediums, heavies and lights, actually. We could learn a lot from World of Tanks, which manages to balances lights, mediums, heavies, tank destroyers and artillery all at once. To put it simply, they've managed to introduce tank destroyers to the mix by adding specific weak spots which are hard to hit, and artillery / lights because your view range is much more limited than in Empires, and so it helps a lot to have both a good artillery in the back, and a good light scouting around on the frontline. About making lights more powerful; I really loved it when NF lights had a 2-slot ML and BE afvs had a 2-slot cannon. I think that would be the best way to bring tier1 back into the game.
That would be great if you could do that, most of the time when it comes up it's a case of "this is kinda hard to do" for whatever reason. Or was it couldn't be agreed on how exactly to do it? The 2 slot stuff is bad though. Spike as you know has some stuff in the pipeline and I really think it will help. Maybe not make them on par with a heavy sure, but still possibly help people in certain circumstances go against meds. If that's not enough I did suggest something that wouldn't break balance, but spike's weapon variety should be tried first.
