research is fucking confusing

bio's better!

 

yes bio is good but i think all the engines are good just as long as you can drive i dont know why people complain about some engines

 

What Spoike said.
Except Fission. I want my damn Fission engine back

 

If you're pursuing a tank with Coolant, you're doing it wrong. It couldn't be less suited for that.

Fission will get fixed and Coolant will get buffed to cool more. Viroman, on this very rare occasion is right. Once you learn to use Coolant properly, it stops sucking. If we're going to have this situation where I can't add anything into the game that requires more than 5 minutes to learn, then we may as well just call it a day.

 

Because most noobs can't drive?

 

Even if a responsible com gets coolant as a secondary engine for larger tanks, it still has a tremendous downside that no other engine shares.

Until players get a "this is a siege engine, try to stay still dipshit" message plastered across their screen when they build a coolant tank, then the problem isn't fixed. All other tanks benefit from movement. It's absurd to expect noobs to simply "know" that this one engine changes everything they previously knew about tank mobility.

This sounds like a minor quirk that should be easy enough to explain to a team in thirty seconds. But when you're also explaining that "rax" is shorthand for barracks and the scout class is hard to play without experience and squad support, explaining coolant becomes a pipe dream. Sometimes I wish there was an elegant way for the com to customize everyone's tanks, as fn mentioned. It would be one less thing for noobs to worry about.

EDIT If we ever get the stick out of our asses and add more engines, it would be excellent to bring back the old coolant engine and rename the current coolant to "siege engine." The same downside that makes the engine awful happens to be the heart and soul of the engine. It would be a damn shame to see it completely removed. A name change sounds petty, but that might be just what it needs to survive long term.

 

Mobility is huge, though, in tank versus tank combat. If you can't pursue enemy tanks, or even run away from them, your tank may as well be useless.

Admittedly, I haven't played in a relatively long time, but I'm assuming that fission and coolant have relatively equal cooling whilst moving and stationary, respectively. If this is indeed the case, considering that fission is faster than advanced coolant, what exactly does coolant have going for it? (Other than the fact that fission is supposedly bugged).

Also, I tend to find that if you're besieging the enemy, you're already winning so much anyways; regardless, biodiesel is generally far more apt for the purpose, as it allows tanks to keep their mobility regardless of their heat levels.

 

I think trickster wants the chemistry engine to be the opposite of biodiesel. That is, while biodiesel can deal with a lot of heat and still move but not fire, coolant can deal with a lot of heat and still fire but not move. Obviously a tank couldn't be permitted to fire freely while overheated in the stationary position (a true biodiesel opposite), else it becomes a turret next to armories and ammo boxes.

The current coolant engine has a place in empires and I would be sad to see it go. It's just that it's a small niche and forcing coms to stress out when deciding to pursue it causes them to abandon it all together. It's not that it doesn't cool fast enough while stationary. The "good" part is really really good. But to balance that, the bad part has to be really really bad. Coms won't normally risk their drivers getting struck by that "bad" part.

 

Actually, I want it to be the opposite of Fission.

 

This actually makes sense, as currently no engine is doing what old coolant did, is it?

 

Nope, but classic coolant (like classic coke, amirite?) was a relatively average engine. It had great cooling, but suffered in every other area in a predictable way. It was basically an average engine, but with "more bars" on cooling and "fewer bars" on everything else. Trickster has already said that empires engines shouldn't be able to reduce down to a simple "cooling 8/10, speed 3/10, etc" system. I definitely disagree, but that's his stance as I understand it.

 

Coolant doesn't need buffed. It's already balanced, more or less. It's just that it's balanced by pairing a tremendous advantage to a tremendous disadvantage. If you're skillful about it, you can plan to avoid most of the disadvantage and reap the advantage. But as I've mentioned like a dozen times, most players on empires servers today are unable to manage that disadvantage and there's a significant chance that they can fuck up (as well as a reasonable, but still too low, chance that they can excel).

 

What's the horrible problem with having the old coolant and the current coolant? Make the glacier engine come after the (old) coolant engine in the research tree, maybe? The old coolant is still different enough from other engines, but the current one is a specialized engine that's only really effective for certain situations.

 

If you really want to make noobs stop in place while using the coolant, you could just add warning messages on their screen (not too flashy ofc.) that says something like: "Reaching critical heat levels! Decreasing weapon usage necessary. System shutdown immediate."

Ofc. every engine should have different types of mesasges telling the driver what to do to cool the engine most effectively. This shouldn't be too hard to implement. Then again this is an extreme way of replying to the problem, so this might be total rubbish as well.

Also, another solution to the coolant engine problem could be weapon blocking while on the move, but I think this idea is even worse x.x

 

Trickster has posted a whole lot about it earlier in the thread. It didn't convince me, but it might sway you.

The tl;dr is that is there are only a handful of engines, then its easy to set up significant differences between them. When you're imagining the perfect engine for the current situation, odds are that it'll be somewhere between two engines. Trickster likes that it's really fucking stressful to decide which awful engine is the closest to the one you really want. If we had more engines, then it would be easier to find an engine that is close to the theoretical engine that you really want.

My counter boiled down to pointing out that the com has already made his strategic decision when he mentally chooses that theoretical "perfect engine for the job" and it's unfun to make him go a step further to choose amongst a bunch of engines that don't even resemble the engine that he actually wants.

 

Thank you, but if specifically the change I mentioned was the only one made to the research tree, does anyone have an objection to that change? Also, would it be possible to experiment with this kind of small change?

 

Small changes? Experimentation?

You sound like me. We should date.