We're dealing with players that will field a paper med with a single ml in the money endgame. I'm really hesitant to accept that such a noob can quickly learn coolant/fission, but I'll admit that I have no more evidence than you to support either position. I only have speculation. I would expect a driver to quickly learn the quirks of coolant if it overheats while they are simply driving. However, coolant is only properly researched in maps where mobility isn't as important. In the cases where coolant is used, you're less likely to overheat due to driving because you aren't driving as much. You're more likely to encounter an enemy while your heat meter is only partially filled. In that more complicated case, I would expect a driver to attribute to something that the enemy did before he attributes it to his engine. In fact, perhaps the enemy did cause the final bit of heat that overheated tank and coolant only made the driver more prone to being overheated.
Sounds like you really just have a beef with some of the engines/armours, rather than actually how the research is laid out. I can understand not liking fission or coolant - though fission is apparently not working well atm and is going to be changed. It seems like you're (now) saying that...basically your team is dumb and you'd rather have a standard mkII that would replace standard so your team doesn't fail..?
There is an easy fix to the paper heavy problem, build the tanks yourself. Spike used to do that and it resulted in the entire team driving identical, best-you-can-get tanks or crying how bad Spike was for doing something for them. Guess what he did about the second group? He ignored them. Also, try driving something else than APCs. Changing your point of view might give you different conclusions to some issues, or at least give more credibility in engine/armour discussions
Paper tanks should be avoided by having the default pattern taking the first non-default item researched. Com researches coolant, turbo, regen, absorbent, HE. Default should auto select coolant, regen, HE.
The commander should actually be able to choose the default himself. But without a doubt, you've hit the nail on the head there. It would also be good if the next time you tried to build a tank, it made it really clear that new research was available.
or remove paper armor and paper engine as ONE engine and ONE armor becomes avail, at least you will force noobs to learn how to place the items on their tank before going click click, drive, dead
It's pretty jarring how awful coolant is for most pub situations. Although, I don't know why any com would research it before heavies. It should never be your first engine.
I think coolant/fission serve an important role, but I would usually prefer a "dumbed down" coolant/fission that has less extreme cooling/heating properties. I'm not asking for a buff, just a more average engine. It would be easier for pub players to use. Trickster has plainly said that the extremeness of those engines is intentional in order to make coms pull their hair out every time they consider researching them. He's right, that effect is achieved. It's just that inexperienced players suffer and coms with inexperienced players would be crazy to research those engines. I hate acting this way because I never liked it when fuckheads told me to play more, but it feels like you don't play pubs enough, especially in the cv. I can't think of a reason for you to question the skill of the majority of empires players otherwise. I apologize for being a prick. Given a shitty team, most of the extreme options are inadequate because their downsides are too great. Maybe I want an engine like coolant, but I don't like that it can't cool itself while moving. I would be willing to give up some of its impressive stationary cooling ability to get a little mobile cooling ability. That's the engine that noobs can use. That's the engine that will get researched in a pub (i.e. most empires matches).
You're right and I do see turbine more now that coolant and fission are basically worthless. However, when I com for pubs it's biology (and eventually nukes) for small maps and electrical (then chem weapons) for big open maps. Pub research is boring because pubbers can only deal with boring. Even nukes are a pain sometimes.
Seriously coolant is NOT as bad as people say it is... fucking learn to coast a bit while driving and you will not heat at all. You can get cooling levels as good as fussion with a bit of care driving. Sure you won't be going at max speed but, your unloading your ammo nearly as fast and can really unload when you stop. Speaking of coasting... the tanks shouldn't auto apply brakes when you let off the gas. They decelerate way to fast for letting off the gas. IF I wanted to slow down I would use back or hand brake. fucking watch this... for how a tank drives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5XUQ2beGfM See that part where it stops... fucking stops faster then a car can. It stops in 1 1/2 its length... no fucking car could do that right?
You say fucking way too fucking much and it's fucking annoying as fuck. On a more serious note, though, coolant is terrible. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'd rather have standard engine over coolant, but considering that coolant is slower than every upgraded engine in the game, with the possible exception of biodiesel (I haven't really played 2.41 at all), and the fact that you are seriously suggesting drifting to cool down whilst pursuing a tank, using coolant makes no sense. If you're familiar at all with Dota, I imagine coolant tanks to be somewhat like Ursa, with the ability to output massive amounts of damage whilst stationary, except that Ursa in Dota has an ability to slow his enemy, and can pick up move speed items; even then, he's still pretty useless in higher level play (or so I am told). Coolant tanks, however, drive really slowly and overheat whilst moving. If you can kite a coolant tank, there is no way you should ever die to one. I would honestly suggest that coolant be given a speed buff, because as the current iteration of the engine stands, it's absolutely useless both in pubs and (probably) higher level play.
I can understand that. Perhaps a 1 split for mobile/stationary cooling would be better. It wasn't a question in the way you thought it was. The question mark was for clarification on whether I understood what you were saying right. Saying your team is dumb in Empires goes with the territory, but if you said your team was dumb and you wanted x,y,z, then we could clearly have a case for what FN says and removing vehicle customization. Really, removing most Empires elements, because a lot of them are a little difficult to grasp or slightly obscure in execution. I'm not against catering to an average, i'm just saying... the game has lost almost 3-5 layers of complication just by doing a couple of things. It's really not so complex now, except if you think someone can't drag and drop a weapon/engine/armour into their vehicle. Which admittedly does happen to about 1/4 of the team, usually. However, the last game I played was only a day or two ago, and I did comm, and my team was pretty excellent. In the games I play, that happens to me a fair bit recently, as well as "noob excellence" which is people who don't know the game, but perform adequately and with a modicum of intelligence, and can function. So, while I understand there's a lot of dummies out there, I don't know if it's quite as prevalent as you make it seem. Then again, you're right, I haven't played a lot recently.
