As a scout, I've directed a squad into an enemy with supporting fire while I gave them attack orders. Scout is a close-quarters/range specialist.
Ok your right, that was a poorly thought out post. What I meant was: Sabatoge with damage over time is annoying. A team totally can counter it, but those counters are boring. Build turrets (so you hear the pewpew if he decloaks), repair sabbed buildings, nade spam until you find the scout. Driving a jeep way off to all the ref points is even more boring, and they tend to die before you get there anyway. Hide encourages hiding. Sniper encourages sniping. Together they encourage sitting on a hill alone (or with a group) shooting people. That involves the scout sitting and doing nothing for a long time, and the victims spending alot of time running and spawning. It isnt fun, or teamworky but its actually a pretty good, hard to counter strategy, as long as your camping something that matters. Now that I think about it, a shotgun scout running around a sabbed barracks is going to be a beast. Still, its not exactly hard to do that with an SMG2 or a gren with mines. Without damage over time the scout will need teamwork to actually do anything with that barracks anyway. Rifleman are already counterable, at extreme range you need a HR/carbine but other then that you just shoot them. If a scout can kill rifleman at range, they can kill anything at range.
No it is not, because when a Scout shuffles up right next to your barracks while its under any sort of fire, he will keep repeatedly sabotaging it and the Engineers inside will have to keep on repairing it while pumping out 50% hp troops, and it's difficult to deal with that sort of thing when you're under fire.
That's the way it's supposed to work. The "while it's under any sort of fire" part is key -- if that's what's happening, then the scout is doing his intended job and is serving as part of a larger attack in coordination with his team. Endless barracks-sieges are dull. There's nothing wrong with scouts having the ability to break them. It's when they're running around behind your lines on their own horribly crippling you without working with their team at all that you have a problem.
With Sabotage, Scout can effectively cripple a defending team and outdo the attempts of up to three Engineers to repair the barracks. And all by himself. In this scenario, the Scout's effectiveness is multiplied. Again, Sabotage is far too easily done and far too difficult to counter in these circumstances. All the Scout has to do is press E for victory and Engineers futilely waste their charge repairing the building. But they cannot usually afford to go and look for me because they're all busy doing something.
Most classic maps don't have any flags to capture. And infantry combat rarely involves teamwork. As with Empires and as with most other games, players play according to their own initiative. There is nothing wrong with this. But when they go off on a tangent doing things like running to the battlefront with one-way jeeps alone, then we have something wrong with the system. If it were up to me, vehicle limit would be tied to a ratio of about 1 or 1:4 against the amount of players present on the team. Flags would be on EVERY classic map, and holding a certain majority of flags will gradually lead to victory. Ticket system would be remade or abolished entirely. Joining a game automatically puts you into a squad, and your spawn location is tied to the squad leader's, but retains the option to allow you to leave and form your own squad. Infantry re-spawn in waves, and comm has greater control over the direction of players, for example, being able to force spawn one squad periodically at a selected location. But this a pipe dream. On the balance of probability, none of these will go in because of the recalcitrance of developers or veteran players to change established game mechanics. Sudden Death, Sabotage, heavily nerfed Scout Rifles, are all more or less bandage fixes.
Let's get back to the Scout Shotgun discussion. Can this weapon be scripted in, and tried out? Combined with Hide, and whatever shenanigans you might be pulling, this could be useful. It is of MOST importance that the weapon is fun to use, and not a boring, abstract piece of shit that nobody ever knows what to make of (YES SCOUT RIFLE I AM LOOKING AT YOU!). Is the Scout Shotgun a fun weapon? How much rage does it cause? Can it be countered, by players with normal skill level? Can we script this in, try it out on a server, and then see what to make of it, since this kind of prolonged theoretical discussions are not getting us anywhere. Do a fucking test, see how it works. All involved testing personnell write a lab report, about the technical aspects of the new scout shotgun, and also write if it was fun to play with and play against. After that we start throwing shit around in the forums, as usual. Poke me on steam if you gonna test, I would like to help out.
As stated in my earlier post, this would be hard, because in order to test it, people need the scripts. Unfortunately, a lot of the average Empiers players don't frequent the forums, therefore a test would be inaccurate due to the high level of play in these test sessions.
Yes, It would be hard. But it would produce results that could be used in development, instead of our usual dismissal of ideas before we even try them. Would be a nice change from the typical whine about stuff on the forums that never leads anywhere. So who can make these scripts and host a server?
