Slower heavies make for a better game

Just throwing my opinion in here once again: I'd also like to see slower turning turrets in general.

 

You know full well that can't be done without a total rework of how turrets track.

As for slower heavies, it's a possibility, but too slow and it'll just be silly. I'm looking forward to the point at which the commander can limit the amount of specific chassis on the field. Then we can make heavies much more expensive, much more powerful and allow the commander to control the production of them individually.

 

No I don't in fact, since I haven't had a look in the code yet.

 

That I know. What I meant is, that I just don't know how much work it would be.

 

I have an idea, and I think it's a good one...

What happens if we tune engines so that on heavy tanks it highly customises the tank. For instance, we make fast engines really heavy, slow engines lighter and mid-range engines at a middling weight.

It's a pain in the neck to balance, but the idea behind this would be you could get a faster, more dangerous tank that'd come at the expense of loadout. You'd have to compromise your armour or weapon loadout in order to take advantage of the speed. OR you'd have a behemoth that would run pretty slow but pack a megaton punch.

If we make the engines heavy, I think this would be possible. I think it's fine to say that the engine is heavier in a heavy tank than a medium without extra explanation, too.

 

Doing that in general isn't actually a bad idea Ikalx, it doesn't really have to be Heavy specific. I'm certainly not averse to ramping the weight of 3phase up either way, as well as lowering the speed a fraction.

As Flasche said, it's fairly obvious how it works at the moment. Anything different to that is going to be a new system. It's done in literally the most simple way possible currently.

I did have a system in my head whereby you'd have a circle in your screen. Moving the mouse about in that circle didn't move the turret (much), but allowed finer aiming up and down. Once you move it outside the circle, you don't have to move the mouse any further, it just moves at a set rate wherever you put the mouse.

Obviously limiting turret turn rate would be a good thing to have, but it's not something we can really do without an entirely new system. The last thing we want is people lifting their mouse up and dragging it repeatedly to turn the turret.

 

I said something awhile ago regarding tank speeds and armor.

 

Iam always thinking that making things more characteristic/specific will hurt the unorganised public games a lot. But would be very nice in organised games where it would bring a lot more strategic choices. Even though personally I would love to have things more like that, but I also think it could make games more difficult (especially public games). And considering the current ammounts of organisation in games, Iam just not sure what would it bring.

And because of this, Iam always not sure what to think.
Also because of my following point..

I always liked when tanks were more rare. So that you have a lots of infantry fighting while having few tanks. I liked it much more than the current "everybody gets a tank" style, also because currently it makes the tanks less special and simply having less impact on the game while also making fights less dynamic, more one sided (meaning, why go infantry when there is 10 heavy tanks fighting each other, everybody goes heavy, because they can and because you are pretty much useless as infantry).

This is one of the reasons why I love crossroads, because its much more infantry based map while still having few tanks generally.

A tank with infantry support can equal few tanks with no infantry support, while keeping its dynamics. Especially when this would be the case on both sides.

We pretty much had this some versions back when tanks/vehicles were very limited by the current res ammount and also by the vehicle limit. It even made resources and refineries much more valuable than now and to add to that even research got changed into only time dependant and I think that both cut a bit of spirit from empires, making things more one sided/less dynamic. (maybe a bit more public friendly/universal)

Making tanks less rare was a very big change in the empires gameplay, atleast for me.

Some time ago, tanks were an addition to the fight. Today the tanks/techs take over the whole game.

And why we no longer have rare vehicles?....
Because idiots camped the vf all the time. Is there any other reason?

There are so many changes based just on how the community/players behave/act.

 

Allow tanks to use one OR two slot engines? Ingenious!
1 Slot engines = half the speed/HP/Weight

 

That'd be nice, but a large maxspeed variance in a given chassis it very difficult to maintain handling across the entire spectrum because every engine has to use the same vehicle mass & transmission.

I think it's pretty clear that a "slow heavy" might be fun to try out.

But how do you transition from the current game to a game with slow heavies?

And just to define what that means to me - a slow heavy is basically arty that can fight on the front lines.

That's very different from the current heavy's purpose. These two vehicles will look identical to players. They likely will have the same name.

My nightmare would be having tons of players thinking that they are building main battle tanks when they are actually building something closer to arty.

We already bitch when everyone buys arty. This issue will certainly be more common.

One transition experiment might be to temporarily remove heavies. This sounds extreme, but if slow heavies work, then vehicle dynamics have to be able to work well without them since they will be rare.

 

Just have a look at how World of Tanks does it. It is basically two cursors. One moves with just the speed as it does now and always stays in the center of your screen. It allows you to look around just like in every other FPS or 3rd Person Shooter. The second is the current aim indicator for the turret, which is affected by the turret speed and tries to follow the real cursor as fast as it can.

I'm not saying that someone should go and implement it right away. But if we want to implement such a feature at some point, that's best solution I've seen so far.