I was going to post this in the arty thread in gameplay, but I figured it would get more discussion here. Apologies if my post contains callbacks to that thread, but these ideas came from reading people's posts inside it. (I'm not endorsing all these, just highlighting his post) flasche's post made me think of something along those lines that might bear some discussion at least. I know flasche gets a bit sweeping with changes and I think moving everything to the infantry, while I understand it, is a bit...I dunno doesn't fit the game. It fits a game, but probably not Empires. Anyway, it made me think about something else, which is time-based unlocking of tanks. It requires a lot of remodeling of the system (doesn't everything?), but what happens if you could give the infantry the ability to choose their *own* tank through a sort of 'reinforcement' system? Where a tank is requisitioned - say it takes 600 seconds to get a medium tank, and after that amount of time, the tank can be 'picked up' at a vehicle factory. Since researching requires only time these days, that wouldn't be so bad, but here comes the more advanced and tricky part. We base our research around timings. Okay, firstly, I'm going to focus only on tanks, since if we diverge it gets a little more complex - and my best ideas, ironically, have been ones that were simple and didn't take into account coding time etc. So, if we had a player who could requisition a medium tank after 900 seconds waiting time (yes that's different from above) to begin with, we could have a research option that instead of unlocking mediums, reduces the reinforcement time. So at default tech 0 = 900s, tech 1 = 600s, and tech 2 = 300s. (for those of you who want to calculate that, it's 15min, 10min and 5min) So with this system, you could start the game, choose a tank to requisition, and then start playing. 15 minutes later, you get your tank, and then as research increases and the game continues, you get to be able to unlock tanks faster. People joining wouldn't lose out, either. For lights, it would probably around 8mins/5mins/2mins. For heavies probably 20/12/8, the research costs balanced around that. I didn't mention research costs. They would probably have to be turned to resource based again, perhaps removing all time limitations to provide true freedom, with the time requirement instead on the player's end. No longer will they have to wait for the commander to unlock what they deem necessary for the situation, instead you can use the tank of your choice and play the way you want to. A side effect is it initiates a "penalty" that applies to the player instead of the team, which may help with suiciding tanks (not that that happens much these days), but also generally smoothing gameplay out a little more. Throwing in the rest of research here, well, it's probably good as it is now. Or perhaps even better as it was before - with both time and resources going into it. It's debatable whether or not we might need some boring standard medium/heavy variants for regular drops, I'll leave that to the discussion. People might also want to talk about whether a tank requisitioned costs anything. I would say, no. If you relate it to time and have the amount of time on a cost basis, that would probably be enough*. Again, it might be a good idea to still have the loadout weapons and armour cost resources, but have the base cost of a tank removed. *Though if you wanted to be a little trickier, you could have a "complete now" function that would cost res comparative to the time left. Hmm..my customary wall looks more like bullet points this time. Oh well. Anyway, what do people think?
you know you could tie the whole research tree into your system? i like it chassis time + per plate time + weapon time + engine time = time to build tank
No more light tank rushes, jeep rushes, apc spam. How sad. I mean this sounds really neat, but at the same time there is a couple of things I'm not so sure of. If vehicles don't cost money anymore that means there is a crap load left for buildings, I mean 60-70% of resources probably go into vehicles right now. Just think of the turret spam. Or worse, barrack spam. There is also a question of player pop to tanks. Imagine if everyone decides to get heavies right of the bat, all of a sudden you have 20 heavies on the field. Generally speaking there's only like 1 tank/apc for like 3 people, ignoring maps like money. I do think this is a really neat idea.... it is just hard to say how much this will change things with how empire currently runs. Reminds me science and industry a bit. I did like that actually, but when I see what maps people vote in(lets vote in money_cl after playing money, it will be great guyssssss) I am not so sure if democracy is the best, especially with how very important research is. Edit: How about something like players can pick the tank they want, the timer starts like you said, but instead of getting wages the points they earn reduce that timer to get the tank they want. I have no idea what this solves, but just an alternative to your idea which I do think is really neat.
To use your words, the idea fits a game, but probably not Empires. While that is a good premise, it doesn't really fit in with how I think Empires is and should be. Of course, I guess it's not my position to say what it should be, but I like it as it is (minus some balancing issues, the occasional bug, performance issues, and some little things here and there).
If this would work the way I think it would, I cannot help but feel like it would go against the RTS aspect of the game.
This sounds a lot like C&C: Renegade to me and some other pure FPS games wth bases. The RTS element would indeed be very much diminished.
Fucking this. People "suggest" stuff that conflict with design decisions. But that stuff isn't a suggestion! You have to work within the design rationale of the game. A public design document would alleviate this problem, but that would require a modicum of communications ability from our devs. Unfortunately, they are made up of coders, not project managers.
No, that would suck. A way around that would be to have tanks cost money if you didn't use the timer, or just have tech 2 versions reduced to 0 or 60 seconds for tier 1 chassis. (Just demonstrating one way around it). Research would cost money again, I think it would probably balance out a little more. At least, that's what we'd be trying to do. If the loadout still cost res, we'd probably bump those costs to significant amounts. Hmm...well generally speaking you'd expect the timer to account for this. So heavy tanks would be lots of time to begin with, but lesser chassis would be quick in comparison. They are good points though. That's fair enough :p I don't suppose you could elaborate on that? If it's not a good idea that's one thing, but I'm not sure exactly how the RTS element would be diminished. Is it because the commander should choose whether you get a vehicle or not, and what vehicle you get? Hmm...is it more a case of the commander should choose whether you get a heavy or a medium? To be fair, a substantial set of people now use personal res to fund their tanks, which is similar in one way to the time-based system. Though I guess what really binds them is what chassis the commander has available... Hmm...I guess the point of this thread is to think about how vehicles even work in Empires. Clearly not everyone gets one, and it ranges who does and when - some terrible at using them, some excellent. I also haven't seen people coordinating as much recently (though I'm playing less), but I've also been feeling like there are less people using tanks as utility vehicles in the main. There were a few versions where light chassis were overpowered, true, but are light tanks and AFV's falling out of fashion? I can't actually remember the last time someone drove a light tank at me ^_- Anyway, I guess I've just been feeling like there's something mechanically wrong with Empires for a while. Matches don't have that same sort of tension that they used to, and often if they're looking good they're over too soon. They also have a tendency to throw out one kind of tank (in addition to APC's), which makes vehicular combat seem kinda stale to me. The arty thread had a point, but I haven't even seen a game where arties have been necessary recently (apart from money, but that's a map thing). It's not so much about using all the vehicles, either, it's about people using what they like. After all this time, I'd rather use a BE medium over most tanks, and NF heavies are still designed with the broad sides of a barn. Why would I want to drive a whale into battle? So much of Empires just seems...not alive anymore, to me. I guess sometimes I read the threads and I come up with interesting but ultimately quite random suggestions. They're not going to change anything, because everything is actually all right. It's the people that aren't there. God, that's depressing. Actually, my point earlier was that vehicular combat is still streamlined. We don't actually need heavies. If you took them out of the game, nothing would really break. Similarly you could say the same about mediums, except in their case they don't break INFANTRY gameplay like heavies do. Think about that. Heavies are only needed to combat enemy heavies, really. But mediums and light tanks have a place in the default game. Light tanks go down too easily, but mediums have a chance against enemy firepower, and then if you have a stalemate or turtling, you'd break the siege with artillery. Maybe the problem is that heavy tanks don't really have a purpose in the main game. They kill a lot of infantry by default, which immediately raises them on a significant platform above players without vehicles - which is fine, but the problem is where generally the Heavy isn't a player upgrade in the same way as a medium is, it's actually a Devastator Tank that ends up being as effective against small units as a Sonic Tank - to put it in Dune terms. Maybe that's a better way to do it - have large splash damage weapons on one tank - preferably the mediums, and have the tank-destroying hardcore base damage weapons on another tank. That way you don't end up with a nuke platform, instead you have medium tanks which are devastating to smaller units, but easier to kill, and you have heavy tanks that are devastating to the bases and other tanks, but have higher armour to shrug off enemy infantry fire. Does that make more sense/seem like a better idea? That way we could have a situation where instead of just having three heavy tanks steamrolling (lets face it, you can only get 3 heavy tanks in one place anyway, without them getting into each other's way), you'd have a heavy being flanked by two mediums, or two heavies and medium for support. Or even a heavy being supported by infantry, because that's what they're there to guard against. tl;dr version (I don't blame you): Would mediums be better off as a splash damage tank and heavies as direct damage tank/base killers? So high dam vs infantry = easier to kill, high dam vs buildings = less lethal vs inf. Arty = siege breaker/base destroyer.
I know what you mean, this sounds like a good idea on paper, but there is several problem with that. One is you kinda remove one of empires neat ideas, vehicle customization. You can already change your tank to either be a effective tank killer, infantry killer, or building destroyer. It just not may seem like that because some weapons are a little too effective at doing both. Trickster says he's gonna fix it though so you should see more varied tanks next patch, along with more varied research. There is also the thing where vehicles can move fast enough that they can just squish infantry, regardless of tank size. I'll say this as a half decent gren, heavies are kind of easy to kill if you have at least one more gren shooting at the same tank with you. That whole teamplay/coordination thing. Compo heavies are kinda of a pain to kill though, I'll give you that. Mediums and lights can be killed by yourself if the tank driver isn't super competent. Also Trickster mentioned changing light tank costs so they can be fielded more often, even in the later game. I see mediums all the time, even if we have heavies researched because they just cost almost half as much.
Really? I see APCs throughout a match, but not mediums. I admit that I'm not looking out for this sort of thing.
I see mediums late game all the time on maps like canyon or crossroads where the res is a little short. In fact, I encourage my team to get mediums over heavies usually, telling only one or two people to get heavy tanks.
Mediums are pretty powerful when used in combination with other tanks and I don't feel as bad when I die for no good reason to a gren
I'm seeing more mediums lately. FN used nothing but reactive meds with one weapon on a match yesterday. It was interesting because four plates of reactive is as good as six plates of compo against normal damage.
The problem with idea like this chrono is that it will take quite a bit of time to make this work. Empires doesn't really have the manpower for game changing ideas like this one. So while it would be neat to test it out, that time is probably better spent refining and fixing what we already have. Especially with things like people not being able to start empires.
i agree. didnt say otherwise. i cant see it come to be done anytime ever. still stands, this is a great workflow boost, great for gameplay experiance, and is well worth to see how it goes... ]it prevents abuses of many kinds with a smart nice approach which also benefits gameplay freedom from other aspects. if this feature would exsist as i imagine it, i would never be sad about gameplay, i would be happier most times, and will get bored much less. ikalx have a working, rich mind
Is that a compliment? :eek: Be careful on these forums, my friend! :p To be honest, I don't know what can save Empires at this point. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just that we don't have people playing as much as they should...since they've had to deal with so much over the years. Or rather, get heartbroken a lot over a game they truly love. It's no one's fault really, it's just...sad. I actually think people would come back if they felt the game was still developing, though. Our devs do good work, but they have busy lives too, so...well, we'll see.
From what I heard over the past few months the main issues that make people not want to play empires is in no particular order: 1) Small amounth of players; leads to a snowball effect 2) Current crap research balance. Been there for a while, hardly anything has been done to adress that. 3) the fact that comunity is too stupid for its own good and votes money/district over every normal type map. Repetition is bad. Repetition of what most/some consider to be shite is even worse. It really sucks to see one of my favourite games go down, choking on its own filth.
