The Grenadier shouldn't have an RPG AND a Mortar

Exactly.

Like I said above: The mortar's supporters are treating this like TF2; all they care about is going out and playing deathmatch with their favorite class, racking up as many kills as possible while ignoring the comm.

Sure, if the grenadier was intended to go around fighting deathmatches against the other two classes, it would be balanced as it is. But Empires is not a deathmatch game. Infantry classes should not be equal against each other; players should not be encouraged to engage in pointless infantry fights that don't help their team.

Empires is both an RTS and a FPS; and as an RTS unit, the grenadier is simply, completely broken. It has no weak points, and it has several sharp strengths, which are going to increase even more when the RPG is improved and seismic-spam is nerfed (leaving mortars as the best infantry anti-structure weapons.) Expecting it to also be able to deathmatch against other infantry on even ground, on top of all that, is silly.

If I was having problems deathmatching against grenadiers, I wouldn't be saying "make them weaker than other classes", now would I? I'd be arguing that they're overpowered in deathmatches. But what I'm arguing against is the idea of deathmatching grenadiers. I don't think grenadiers should be a deathmatch class, and I don't think Empires should be a game balanced around the idea of encouraging deathmatches between infantry.

 

What I understand from witnessing you in game is you are a beast with this weapon. I've eaten more of your shells then I'd like to admit. At this point You are a master of a weapon that these people want to change. Your protest is perfectly understand able. However it is also greedy.

I say add 20% to the splash radious, lower its accuracy to 6ft of target at 40ft. and drop 10% damage.
Lets see how that plays out.

 

That's what it comes down to. grapehead cares a lot about personal skill, and I can get that; I can understand it, even. Personal skill will always play a major role in the game; there's no saving a totally incompetent team.

But if you have a good comm, I strongly believe that listening to the comm should be at least as important as your own personal skill with your weapons, if not moreso. Having moderately good players who listen to everything their expert comm says should be worth much, much more (and should easily defeat) a team consisting of elite highly-skilled players (at least, skilled with their weapons) who mostly ignore their own expert comm to do their own thing. The game should not be decided by who is better at the mortar; it should be decided by what team works together better, and which comm gives them better plans to carry out.

That's why I think the mortar would be much better as a 'support' weapon than as a 'deathmatch' one; I do not think the game should allow you to use bad strategy, or to ignore your team's strategy, and then use your own personal skill to make up for it.

 

Thats simply not true.

We can make a forumvote if the community think that dubee, communism
or me (to list the gren players here) are teamplayers or not.

Oh and because you (the make the mortar act like a real mortar people)
say it is silly as it is doesnt make it silly its just your opinion.

The fast and comical gameplay of empires is alot closer to tf2 as
to full spectrum warrior or whatever uber realistic fps you choose.

 

If it's like TF2, what would you say if I suggested increasing the speed of demoman grenades, making them explode on contact, and doing nothing to nerf him to compensate.

Sure a sniper or other high powered damage class can kill it, but it is still by far the most useful general class in the game, just because a heavy or a pyro or a sniper can do better in some situations and a soldier has greater range, and an engineer can build teleports and dispensers, it would still make the demoman unbalanced.

If TF2 is a paragon of successful design then making classes strong in some situations and weak in others is a good thing, rather than having generalised classes, which is what the mortar makes the grenadier.

 

Yes I'm good at using it but I'm defending it because I know it so well.. I understand that its not overpowered because its pretty much the only weapon I use.. It seems like everyone trying to remove it never uses it.

The arguments are all here already so all I can say is to talk to a dev. If you think you can make this mod "instantly understandable" or basically noob proof then you should have mootants job.

 

Would be nice of the mortar did have a higher splash.
Make the thing deal around 75 damage for the splash close, to a lower 20 for a farther range, and 105 damage if you get hit by the mortar.
Deals an extra 60% damage to buildings/tanks.
Make a set up time of a second.

Does that sound around reasonable?

 

Tell me you spent the same amount of time thinking about that.

Currently, a second is roughly how long it takes before the mortar can fire.

 

A second is alot, i would consider half a second.
If you want to remove duck/jumps half a second
is enough.
Since when did hiting mouce1 take A SECOND ?!?!?

 

Tell me you spent the same amount of time thinking about that.

Currently, a ducking is roughly all it takes before the mortar can fire.

 

a couple points:

ive seen the same corner cutting with the mortar in this game as with the bazooka in Day of Defeat, the zook requires you to shoulder it with a right-click before firing it, which slows your move speed to a slow snail pace, people who are experienced at this know that if you keep it shouldered you can reload it while its shouldered, and when its done reloading, it promptly returns to your shoulder

where you can cut corners on this is that before the graphics actually show the bazooka is back on your shoulder, you can fire the weapon, and hit reload again, which means that technically the shouldered 'mode' is activated in between reloads, but doesnt slow your speed at all since your firing inside of a couple milliseconds and reloading again

i think that something similar like this applies to the mortar on empires, because i have seen individuals not even crouch, and yet still fire a mortar and hit me(while appearing to be standing), i can understand that theyre probably just hitting the crouch button too fast for graphics to register it,

i dont want to base my argument on any conflict with realism, cause its a video game, and doesnt need to be real, or close to it,

so anyways, i think it was Chris, proposed that they might make it more artillery-like, which i can visual and having it so that the shells go more upwards directionally, before coming down, basically making the weapon actually require a minimum noticable arc, instead of the subtle minimum arc that it currently has, which non-grenadiers arent too fond of.

my second point

so that funky looking crosshair for the mortar is a range finder? what does each box count for in feet? ive just been shooting from the hip all this time and been doing mediocre, which is fine by me when i use it.

my third point

theres gotta be a little more personal skill interest involved then you might admit to, involving whether your a scout or a grenadier, personally i've tried to focus my involvement around engineer or rifleman, and i've heard theyre going to change damage output by weapons in the new 2.2 or w/e, reducing riflemen in particular,

i recognize that i might have to completely relearn my best classes, but I'm not too concerned, as I have about 50 games with different styles of gameplay or control settings that require me to relearn them if i ever want to play them

 

Crouching takes roughly a second.

Crouching takes roughly a second. So that means it's roughly a second before you're able to use the mortar.

 

Firsoff I hit the attack button bevor I crouch so I fire in the first millisecond
crouch mode. Going prone takes about a second not crouch. A second is
a very long time in a fast video game.

 

No, it's only ABOUT a second....


IMO, the RPG should not be this wonderful anti-everything weapon, so at the least, an anti-tank (AT) and an anti-personel (AP) should be a choice. As it stands, they do the same thing (or we have anti-tank rounds with really good splash). Granted, getting hit in the face with either should kill you.

Also, if these weapons are the same one, story-wise, shouldn't the ammo be the same, meaning running out of rockets is also running out of mortar rounds, or at least you'd need to reload your mortar after firing your rocket?

 

I believe the mortar should work like a mortar, and not like a grenade launcher. This makes it a lot more like a support weapon for helping your team, empires is a team game.

 

I mentioned this in another thread, but...

Another advantage to turning the mortar into a longer-range support weapon instead of a close-to-mid-range weapon is that it will make scouts more useful. At the moment, most mortar-users simply ignore scout tags, since chances are they can see the people they're shooting at anyway.

It would be nice if scout tagging for mortars actually worked the way it was intended to. Making the suggested changes to the mortar might have a shot at that.

(Also, maybe give grenadiers arty feedback for free, or at least the part that works with scout targeting? Right now, if you're a scout trying to cooperate with a gren, you just kind of have to cross your fingers and hope they have arty feedback. Give grens some other kind of feedback when they hit a marked target with mortar, or something.)

 

http://forums.empiresmod.com/showthread.php?t=7167

just implement this

 

Put it in suggestions.
Minus the model.

 

What about:
Cut mortar damage in half
Doubble ammo
Cut reload time in half.

No more intanthit-kills that was making people angry, without acctually nerfing the mortar. This would also make it useful for bombarding an area.

 

The problem with the mortar isn't that the instakills; the problem is that it's mostly a medium- to close-range weapon effective against absolutely everything.

This is bad because:

* It is extremely unintuitive. 'Mortar' means long range support fire by definition -- a close range mortar is like a long-range shotgun or a pistol that only hurts tanks. It doesn't need to be a totally realistic mortar, no, but weapons should, in general, match what you intuitively expect from their names -- a newbie should be able to look at their loadout and immediately get a general sense of how it works, how to use it, and so on. Making the mortar effective at mid to close range as a personal-defense weapon -- basically, making it something that's best used as a grenade or rocket launcher in other games -- is bad because it turns the weapon into a 'secret trick'; the game's mechanics should be as transparent as possible, with a weapon's primary purpose immediately obvious, not hidden in an unintuitive name. A newbie who looks at their loadout, says "Oh, I have a mortar and an RPG! I'll use the RPG for close-range ambushes, and the mortar for long range support!" should not be punished for doing that, since it's the logical way to use them; but right now that newbie would be punished, because the effective way to use those two weapons is bizarrely reversed.

* It discourages players from working together. For the most part, a rifleman needs help to handle structures; a scout needs help to handle tanks; and even an engineer needs help to handle a tank unless they've already built their turret. A grenadier, though, needs no help for anything as long as they have ammo (and with ammo upgrade, the mortar can hold a lot of ammo.)

* It screws up the balance between the infantry classes. Because the grenadier is so effective against buildings at medium range, the scout's sabotage is mostly a waste of time (you could slaughter turrets with mortar much more easily anyway); because the grenadier is effective against infantry, the rifleman has to rely on an overdone effectiveness against tanks. It isn't the only infantry issue by a long shot, but it's one of the major ones.

The problem with the mortar is not that it's too good at one specific thing -- not one hit kills or anything like that -- the problem is that it's not bad at anything. Every other infantry weapon in the game has significant limitations, since that encourages infantry to cooperate and work together with each other and their vehicle support. The mortar, though, was accidentally made too effective against infantry, especially at close range.

I would say that any proposed mortar fix should be aimed at solving those two problems -- it should be less effective at close range, and it should have at least one type of target (structures, infantry, tanks, take your pick) that it is mostly ineffective against.