Remove heavy tanks, and add more medium variants.

I believe it would be: the driver gets to control the main cannon and drive, any extra gunner gets to control the small cannons (like the cannon in the side of a factionist heavy

so that a one manned heavy is strong, but only at its best when manned with 2

not sure though, don't curse if i am wrong!

 

I read it blizzerd, and I agree. In my eyes we could buff Heavies a little, but have them a 3 person tank - the driver gets the cannon, a 2nd inf gets missiles and the 3rd gets the MG. I'm not sure if you'd want a separate heat bar for each, but if it worked like that, 3 people would be a great advantage.

This would make heavies more of a weapon platform, especially if they were slowed a little but mebbe given a larger scope for armour. It would mean that heavies would become hulking masses of devastation, that would be able to take down single mediums with ease, but fair rather worse against 3 mediums. If you factor in the fact that the tank driver will probably be a gren, and the gunners most likely engies, the heavy would have a high survivability, but if you factor in the fact that meds have 2 weapons (or more) wielded by one person it cancels out. Added to that, if you cap heavy speed at a max of 15 or 20, for 3-phase say, you really would have a large chance to take it down.

I also sorta agree with this. While we are bringing multi-manned heavies to the scene, we could remove them from the game. ATM infantry is on the level of mediums, not heavies so it leaves little issues with balancing to my mind. Rails and Nukes make the gameplay a little ridiculous atm, only really countered by one or the other, so you could yank those aswell, leaving only 2-slot cannons and ML's on the meds.

Ideally, if we could get the heavies back when we get things like the sidewinder and other vehicles that bring more versatility to combat, that would work pretty well. But the issue is always these things won't be coming soon, so to remove something large for a long time will make some people go insane.

Ofc, we could always expand the 2-slot repertoire by 2 or 3 more cannons and mebbe an ml or two and we'd be set up pretty well.

 

I like the idea of improving chassis that you have available, allowing greater configuration variations up to a certain point. Like increase the light tank cannon slot by 1, increase and/or add a new MG slot by 1, increase max weight by X amount, increase armor slot by 1 etc.

On the other hand it should then be slightly harder to get better chassis. Would then give the commander a choice of either aiming for better chassis or sticking with the ones that he already has and pimp it out a bit.

 

I think if you're going to do that then you need to do what I said about making them commander bought.

If you put that much firepower on (which you will need to do to make it necessitate three controllers) and make it slow (which you will need to do to make it possible to have a separate gunner) and make it up-armored (which you will need to do to compensate for the slowness and also to protect the three players) you will also need to make it expensive.

And the thing about expense is that the really expensive stuff needs to be decided by the commander, otherwise you could have a noob player wrecking the game for everyone.

 

That's true...and it might be more of a 'super heavy' scenario, but I actually don't think it'd be too much of a problem to have them commander built only..and then, for customisation, you just use a repair facility. Besides, 6 heavies would have pretty much the whole team on them, they should rather reflect the price of a 3-man investment.

 

Isn't the main problem to all this that the research tree is mostly directed towards tanks? Because of this the tanks are good in early game but dominating late game due to them getting stronger while everything else stays the same. This is also they main reason that a heavy can take out a whole base on it's own.

Imo, i think there should be more in the research tree that is directed at other things than tanks. Maybe uppgrade buildings hp (reduce respawn time for infratery in baracks), uppgrade stickie damage, or let grendiers use plasma/bio rpg?(i would love a HE mortar:p )

I completely agrees that nukes and rails are to powerful at the moment, however, if you could uppgrade infrantery at lest rails would have some reduced efficy.

I dont think the commander should have to choose betwen uppgraded tanks or uppgraded everything else, but make it so that uppgrades with small costs and short research time are scattered through the research tree, which improves buildings and infrantery.

What im trying to say is that i think empires should be slightly less focused on tanks wars and slightly more focused on everything else, which is (sadly) not the case at the moment.

 

To combat rail-heavies, I think 1-slot mininuke MLs for our Jeeps are in order...

 

I like the current chassis. People are just too dumb to figure out that you need 2 mediums cooperating to kill one heavy tank. This suits the resource cost ratio of the medium to heavy, you get more mediums for 5k than heavies for 5k.
Cooperation is key.

 

Congratulations, you won the prize for person most incapable of reading the thread properly.

 

show me the dual rail/he tank that cant hande two meds at once

 

/me puts Mayama in it.

 

....and I'll show you someone named Mayama driving a heavy... lol j/k

Lot of good ideas in here. Couple issues I'd like to argue for and against though.

I agree totally that heavies need to be perfected, but I don't believe they're totally worthless as they are.

As far as I'm concerned, heavies are close to balanced at the moment, but the best idea I liked was slowing their movement speed and turret swivel rate. That way the weapons still pack a punch, but the vehicle firing them isn't darting around like its engine is made out of ninja and superman body parts. But then you should actually allow for more armor, not much more, but a little more, as they won't be able to dodge as much. Because let's face it, even if that set-up would require the heavies to have an escort, support from mediums and infantry, doesn't mean you're going to get it.

The problems with rails and nukes as I see it, aren't that people rush them, or the power they have, but the spam, if someones complaining about rails or nukes its usually 'rail spam' or 'nuke spam'. To change this I think rails need to have their engine heating raised, or give them a reload time limit that is similar to the HE cannon but maybe a little longer,(like a second longer).

And nukes, also a spam weapon, has a 6/1 ammo reserve? am I right? Am I the only one who thinks these numbers are vice versa? I like Nukes should be 1/6, and take that 30 seconds or however long that super long clip reload for the nukes is, that should be the reload time in between the nukes, so the fire, have to wait 30 seconds, and then they get one more nuke, and then have to wait 30 seconds again. So they get maybe 7 shots total, if they aren't near an ammo box, and it takes forever to reload, making it a distance vs. building weapon, instead of a spam against tanks and/or buildings.

And while multi-user is an eventuality, I hope it isn't a co-operative experience, cause that would totally suck, communication or not.
I'm not arguing against a 'stand-alone' co-operative though. If the heavies remained with the main person driving and shooting the main weapons, and any passengers had access to additional 'commander holes' or additional weapons, that could function as additional 'effective' offence, that would be fine. So instead of Slot #1 #2 and #3, the slots would have names like Tank Owner, Gun Turret, Observation Turret, or something. And you have to factor in people lagging out, griefers, and the plain retarded, let alone anyone being able to shoot from a moving target in which they aren't controlling the movement, which is friggin difficult.

I heard someone mention infantry-guided guided-missiles. Which I thought would be an interesting aspect, if it can be coded or whatever.

But I was thinking that maybe you could give a special 'sticky' to scouts or grenadiers, which has like a 5 minute detonation delay, but while its active, any 'guided' missiles within like 100 foot radius, will auto-seek on any tanks with the sticky attached, but at an increased pace, like turret missile lock speed, while without the 'sticky' they would be 'guided' at normal upgraded missile speed.

And in addition to that, you could give one of the classes, or two of the classes, a special 'Jamming' ability maybe? Which jams missile locks from tanks, and missile turrets even, while balancing the homing and those crazily useless frenzy missile spam homing missiles that no one uses, to actual be fast enough, and guided enough, to hit something, and not so easy to dodge.

I wouldn't mind more kinds of mediums either, like the speed mediums, armor mediums, and gun mediums, that the one dude suggested, that kind of diversity would be tight, but somehow I can see people just going with gun mediums and learning how to survive in the really hairy situations, and trying to sneak their gun mediums somewhere vital so they can reek some havoc without needing speed meds or armor meds for support before taking something out.

and research into additional aspects of the game would be cool too, increased building hp and decreased spawn time like the one guy suggested,

I was thinking of stuff like being able to decrease building cost research, maybe even a 5 minute research timer for reduced cost on armor and/or engines and weapons. or a 5 minute research timer for reduced weight on armor and/or engine and armor(like 10%, or 5%, nothing extravagant, but totally worth the research time and cost),

Maybe even research that 'evolves' refinery output, and increases your resource by second by a small amount, maybe even making it independent of having any refineries, so you can still get res if you lose your refs.

There could even be some sort of Biology tree branch that involves genetically manipulating your teams biology, i.e., increased stamina, melee damage, run speed, health bonus, and still keep or remove the individual skills from the individual classes, but make them stackable, so double health bonus gives 160% total health or something, or make the researched one overrule the individual, so the individual can choose a different skill once its researched.

Anyways, I think thats enough to read for now, lataz.

 

Reading the whole thing would make my eyes hurt.

Usually 2/3 of the people who decide they want a tank on my team when I am commanding.

 

A competent rail heavy user will rape competend medium users.
The problem is the imense amount of damage that rails deal in seconds.

Well if you look at NF heavys, its possible to even kill them
with an afv cause they are so clumsy.

 

Congratulations, you won the second prize.

This isn't about how heavies are unbalanced, it's about how heavies are too powerful to be handled by one player.

The team's power should not rest in four or five players driving heavies, the team's power should rest in the team meaning the entire team should be required to play in order to win.

Ergo, mediums should be the most powerful single manned tank, and you shouldn't put any more power than a medium in the hands of one player. You can make a super tank with mutliple guns if you want, but you need to make it multiple player controlled, and each player should command about as much power as a medium if not less, and that includes the driver.

 

Then we should just replace heavies with the super heavy tank that DonMegel made a model for.

 

I have no problem with that as long as you distribute the firepower across as many players as possible, I'd say a driver with a machinegun pointing forward, a gunner using the main cannon, and a coax gunner for the BE, and for the NF have a driver with an MG pointing forward, and two large sponson gunners on either side with some crossover. You'd also need to make it commander bought because it would be too expensive otherwise.

Ideally though you'd have two main cannon turrets per tank, a driver MG, and at least one other MG ideally coax but possibly on the rear. I think having one driver, one main gunner, and one coax gunner might be a bit hard to balance the firepower with, unless you restrict the weapons on each segment so the main cannon can only be some heavy anti-structure or anti-tank specialised cannon, and the driver MG can only be a weak anti-infantry one, and the coax gun can only be either 50 cal or HE or something like that. But I think it would be easier to have a really big chassis, a couple of turrets (top mounted for BE and sponson mounted for NF) with smaller guns on each, that fits more with the multi-player controls and power balance. It also fits more with commander purchasing because he doesn't have to buy as many if you can put more players on each.

Make it bought by the commander and have it be slow and with lots of health, designed to support infantry by providing heavy firepower and cover in exchange for protection from sticky bombers and repairs.

That I'd have absolutely no problem with whatsoever, it keeps the force distributed and adds what I think is a new and fun gameplay element as an alternative to tank vs tank combat.

 

[Didnt read 3+ page thread]

Screw this, Heavies are JUST FINE.

Seems like chris wants to post a bunch of super-radical "Just change EVERITING" posts.

 

And that's what you get for not reading the thread.

 

nah chris just suggested to end those "WE HAVE HEAVYS, EVERYONE IN
AND NUKE THE HELL OUT OF THE ENEMY" 5 minutes and 10 heavys later
the game is over... and well thats boring, repetitive and stupid