So we have 2 weapons that are pretty bad - all around. Plasma MG and Plasma Cn both add a tremendous amount of heat to the user. Not only this, it seems the tradeoff heat-given-to-target doesn't compensate enough. Couple this with Plasma Cn's higher rate of fire, and you have a massive problem. Plasma MG is a fair bit more balanced. A direct no-damage add-heat-to-this-target weapon. Unfortunately it too suffers from the bad "self-heat" and "heat-to-target" tradeoff. First; These weapons are centered around one of the worst and limiting aspects of Empires: heat. These cripple tanks to being nothing more than an armoured car. Second; They do no damage. I can recall plenty of times I've funned around wtih a dual-plasma heavy on Vehicle training. I'd overheat the enemy, and continuously do so. It took wayy too many shots to kill him; I was usually killed by his return fire. Third; Its position in the research tree. It's preceded by Extended Range Cannon: a much better alternative. So, gentlemen, how do we rework plasma into a usable weapon? Well...the entire basis of plasma (heat) is faulted. Also, there are only two damage aspects for cannon not covered, which are high-damage low-rof high-heat, and low-damage high/med-rof no-heat. Same with machine gun. ER and HE have the medium-damage medium-rof and high/medium heat, and rail guns have low-damage high-rof and low-heat. So what do we do? Do we continue to focus plasma on heat? Should it be more damage-oriented? It's a shame that 1 out of our 4 cannons is a piece of chit.
focusing a weapon on heat is retarded. if it does higher heat to damage to the enemy than it does to you, the enemy will never be able to respond and slowly die if it does less heat to damage to the enemy than you and its primary goal is to overheat the enemy, then it's fucking useless.
Might want to change it so it increases the heat generated by shooting weapons. That way, the enemy can still move and shit but it will reduce the amount of shots he can pull off. Or maybe let it increase the cooldowns of weapons?
Look at it this way. You can have an open discussions where many ideas are presented equally, or we can let MOOtant personally revamp the weapon himself. Which do you choose? Just to toss some ideas out.. -Plasma could lower your heat capacity (the length of the bar), in that you overheat quicker. Plasma outputs the same heat as standard cannon. Same to the enemy. -Heat could be a continuous effect rather than a burst. Say an engine holds 100 heat, you add +1 heat ever 0.25 seconds for 2 seconds. Doesn't stack. This way being consistently hammered by plasma won't immobilize you in a second. -Plasma could damage hull directly in a percentage (to not be overpowered against lights and weak against heavies), possibly 5% for the cannon.
i'd choose mootant, he might on purpose (or by accident don't really understand how he works) make the weapon even better by having it fire segways or something. If you want a good plasma weapon, give it a bio effect on tanks and infantry, except it last say only 3 seconds cause it's just extremely hot liquids, not nanobots/green-semen.
Oh joy, this response again. (I figure, if Plasma isn't going to be moved to another tree, we should start a tradition.)
0yv47 is a guy called Oggi. I have known Oggi for quite a long time. Oggi isn't very smart, he's actually a bit slow. But fuck me, that's a brilliant idea Oggi. If we could somehow give Plasma a bio-effect, vs BUILDINGS, then that would be useful. A sort of burn effect on them. That could be the plasma niche. It would need code support, but that's an A++ fucking idea.
oh no don't do that can you imagine how annoying it would be? and it wouldn't actually serve to destroy many buildings, just force engineers to stare at a barracks with their calculator out and hold down mouse1 (kinda like they do already but worse)
Imho, plasma should stay heat based. Something like: Very Low/No Damage, Low Heat to self, High heat to enemy, High weight; That mean it would still suck to take out a tank BUT would make it a really nice support weapon. Bio/Plasma would be good; Ideal to take down the com or to support your allied heavy/med tanks. It would also mean you cant take 12312321 additional weapons to easily take everyone down unless you want a low-armor tank. At some point there were building-only weapons in the Tester version and I really, really hated that.
I had an amazing idea all spelled out about how plasma would work and fit a niche roll and be awesome. I'm to lazy to refind it so I'll just do a quick synopsis. Basically a shorter(than bio, maybe 8-10s) DOT weapon that would do less DPS than HE/Ranged but since you could stack the DOT on a few different tanks it would be worthwhile in 3v3+ or maybe even 2v2 tank battles to have 1 tank with the plasma cycle through the targets. So pretty much: 1- Fairly low initial damage but with good DOT making it ineffective against buildings/turrets. 2- Weaker than HE 1v1 but in multiple tank battles since you can cycle targets to get the DOT going on a few tanks its overall DPS would increase as the number of enemy tanks increased (limited eventually by ROF/heat) So you pretty much get a 2nd cannon worth researching after your main one.
Honestly, I think you should start by changing the engines so they all can still move (albeit very slowly) when overheated. The most frustrating aspect of heat as a weapon is that one player can't do anything. If a tank can at least crawl away, it's something. More inventive ideas for changing heat could also work. Also, Bio's DOT is buggy, I wouldn't recommend adding it to other weapons until that is fixed, and the idea of giving Plasma a DOT is not an idea at all, it's just borrowing from Bio in the hope that making something different will make it useful, which isn't Plasma's problem in the first place.
Pretty much everyone agrees heat is retarded and should just be removed. The only gameplay advantage that it adds is it allows for "burst" type weapon configurations which can be implemented with reload times with nearly identical functionality. OR ideally, heat should be weapon specific. As for it being a copy of bio more or less, yes it is, my idea was specifically designed as such to minimize the amount of work needed to be done while still making it unique compared to HE/Rail/Ranged.
Problem is, using bio modifier means it'll deal double damage to regen and 1.5x to plain, without code support.
And it doesn't work. Plasma was going to be tested to be somthing like that for 2.25b(d?), but this came up, and never got fixed.
Another idea that is "bio" related. Make plasma ignore the armor of a tank and damage the hull directly with DoT (but slowly). No idea whether it's OP, but it would be interesting to see how it works out.
