With 2.0 out we get to see Empires in a way we've never gotten to before, with full servers, and people. Now, during the 1.08 testing there would be instances where both teams on normal "commander vs commander" maps would pull each other down to no reinforcements and sit around for what seems like forever. I think that fun is a very important factor of the game, heck, ANY game. When I started playing 2.0 the thing that worried me was the lack of an increased point count. And as a direct result, the games became shorter and the often boring and uneventful standoffs would occur, and the server population would plummet (in one case from a full 40 person server to 12 people.) Basically, such standoffs are not exactly fun. I'll admit that such high risk standoffs or "epic last stands" can in fact be quite fun, but in my experience they just tend to go nowhere until somebody ninjas the comm (I'm looking at you, Bob the Builder.) What I would like to see to make games go more smoothly is to avoid these situations, but still make such epic last stands possible. So here's some various ideas of mine on how to make the gameplay flow better. 1: Tie the respawn tickets to number of players on the "active" teams How this would work would differ from map to map, but canyon with 40 people would obviously have more tickets than canyon with 20. 2: Provide ways to get more respawn tickets. This would basically turn respawn tickets into a contestable resource, perhaps connecting the income of tickets to holding more territory (discouraging turtling) So in practice, tickets at the start of the game would start out low, but while getting refineries would provide the commander with the resources to get vehicles and buildings, perhaps building barracks or some other method would provide the commander with more available infantry. 3: Bring in an "emergency reinforcements system" This idea less coming from other games entirely but from the squad system currently in empires. How about the commander got points like squadleaders did, and could activate certain powers? Like a radar scan on a selected area, calling in more reinforcement tickets, erecting an anti artillery shield of sorts, the possibilities are endless. This idea could allow for even more direct involvement of the commander in a battle.
The first idea is ok, don't really like the other two. A similar thing is already done with the resource flow.
wasn't number one discussed in another thread somewhere? Or maybe i mentioned it and am just crazy. At any rate, i think the consensus was variable tickets would be very difficult for mappers to balance, or something.... can't remember. 3 is possible with engineers and engie SL power, so maybe i could see the com doing it. I know i heard rumors and rumblings about more commander abilities, who knows, maybe that's on the table. As for 2, seems really hard to balance. idk, i'm apathetic about it.
We can't tie tickets to res or map control as tickets are one of the few things that a loosing team can hope to hold out for. If it wasn't bad enough that your team is producing less and crappier tanks than the enemy then now your team can't even spawn? this game is NOT about pounding people into the ground and urinating on the corpse.
Why have tickets at all? If you just want a way for the map to end after a certain length of time, have a fixed timer of 20 minutes per round.
A timer should certainly begin when it gets to 1:1 or if one team gets down to 1 reinforcement left. Something to end the game when it's clearly over.
I LOVE maps with low ticket counts... There have been instances where the map was one because the attackers wasted too much tickets trying to take out the turtling team; those game I love... At the end everyone seems to agree with "gg's" going around... Tickets give another layer to Empires; where you just dont have to watch resources but also tickets; get too low and you lost. This gives the lesser team a chance to win; and to some extent promote turtling (Every gameplay style should be incouraged). If anything I would say some maps have pretty large ticket amounts, and the game is over before they even hit 100
