The RC4 Developer Script discussion thread

With the new line of developer scripts, the aim has been to make research and tank combat more tactical. As such, we've tried our best to introduce as much variation between the engines and armours as we could. Not all of the changes may seem strictly logical, but it was all done in the name of variation.

Armours:
Plain - Is now slightly stronger.
Regen - Much lower HP than before, but a very, very fast Regeneration. Hit and run is highly effective. Regen is now GOOD against bio weapons.
Reactive - Much higher HP than before. Reactive is now BAD against bio weapons.
Absorbant - No longer the best armour. It does what it did before, but taking damage will now cool your tank, thus allowing you to use your tank in a "beserk" style.
Reflective - Unchanged. As always, the less direct the impact, the less damage you take. If the shell hits directly at 90 degrees, you take full damage. As the angle gets shallower, you take less damage.
Composite - Composite has lost a lot of HP, but now has effects from the other armours. It has a slow regen, will lower your heat when you take damage and will lower damage in the same way reflective does, based off the angle of impact.

Engines:
Standard - More horsepower than before.
Biodiesel - Unchanged. As before, it can drive whilst overheated.
3phase - Unchanged. As before, it is the fastest engine. It is not however, the engine with the most torque (fastest acceleration).
Gas Turbine - Gas Turbine is an average all-round engine, which gains more and more torque as your tank takes damage. Thus giving you greater acceleration and hill-climbing ability, the lower your tank's HP is.
Advanced Coolant - Coolant is now only the best engine for cooling whilst stationary. This makes it more of a "siege" engine. When you start moving, the cooling ability drops significantly. It does cool better than before whilst stationary.
Fission Reactor - The opposite of Coolant. Will cool faster whilst moving, poorer whilst stationary. It also has a very limited movement ability whilst overheated, much like biodiesel only considerably slower.

Weapons:
BioMG has a shorter length of bio effect.
50cal Heavy/Medium MG, Medium/Small Chaingun, DU Heavy/Medium MG all had their damage reduced by 20-30%.
Ranged and High Explosive Cannon both produce around 10-15% less heat per shot.
Rails and UML deal 20% less damage, and produce a bit more heat per shot.
BioML has had the length of the bio effect cut by 75%, with the damage increased to compensate for this.
Upgraded Grenades have a 25% larger explosion radius.


Tanks:
The Heavy and Medium have all lost around 20-25% HP from their hull.
The Command Vehicle has lost 40-50% HP from the hull.
LTs, AFVs and APCs should be quicker.

Miscellaneous:
In light of targets being re-added in the next patch, Autospot from buildings has been removed. Engineer Cameras and Radars will function as normal.


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Discussion can be posted in this thread. feedback, ideas, etc. These scripts have now been added to VIPER. I haven't done a changelog because numbers mean nothing to most people. If you want, you can download the scripts here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1034763/Pu...ide Developer Scripts RC4 Rev 2 04-09-2012.7z

And use gcfscape to extract your stock Empires install scripts (empires_scripts.gcf, then extract scripts) and use winmerge to diff them. These scripts might have a few references to carcass recycling which isn't in yet.

 

looking forward to testing it. initial impressions from reading, it looks like gas turbine is the engine to get. regen sounds like it would be a bitch to fight off when lets say there is an large apc rush

 

Might want to note that the comm armor has changed too.

Calling it now, HEMG Fission APC's.

 

Theory looks great, I love those ideas. Hopefully we can finally go back to the days of research and counter research rather than spamming Chem heavies. Thankyou. I hope every get stuck in to help balance things nicely.

I'm not sure UGL needs an AoE buff? Did the RoF or the clip reload speed change? It is already good all game.

 

can you still wombocombo paper light tanks?

 

Okay, I've played rc 3 alot and I noticed the bio op. RC4 you lowered regen hp which is fine since it didnt matter a lot anyway, my biggest concern is bio mg still basicly being strong, you didnt lower the attack dmg you lowered the lenght, but the lenght is honestly not the problem, the RoF is really high on bio mg and the reload time is minimum, so shortening the lenght doesnt really help a lot. And making reactive bad against bio isnt a very good idea either. Now it is basicly you go bio, cause bio mg is good against still everything cause everythng got weakend but bio didnt really. regen armor is still really good and eveyr other armor has been nerfed. So this basicly means, every game you go bio. I dont know how to get passed this problem but what you did here was certainly not solve it, it actually just made it worse, except for the everyone go chem thingy; now it's everyone go bio thingy.

 

The length of biomg is a problem as it often bugs out and stacks. In actual fact, BioMG and BioML damage is 0, due to a bug. Any damage you take is the effect of the first bio pain.

Reactive isn't that bad against Bio. It takes an extra 25% damage, with regen resisting an extra 25%.

Well, in the next patch the RoF and clip size got changed, but I can't do that server side. A few other changes are SVN only, like reactive being a bit lighter, BioMG having a smaller clip, HE CN firing faster. But those changes can't be done serverside without causing client inconsistencies, so generally speaking, I can only change stuff the player can't physically see, like damage, heat, HP, etc.

 

I'll bet you five bucks HEMG will tear right through regen. The trick to beating regen is a fuckton of burst damage. Once all the plates on one side are gone, it's dead.

 

duno... slap some absorbent, fusion engine, BML, and plasma and you got yer self a cooled harassment tank.

 

I like how armors now complement engines from other trees, for instance, regen will work good with fission reactor because it will be the fragile speedster, absorbent with gas turbine will make a tank a tank in RPG terms by trying to attract the most damage. It honestly adds a whole new level to the game now that everything has something special about it.

 

thing is if you go hemg, you'll probably have gone absorbant too, and absorbant is justoutright bad against BIO Mg.

edit if you go hemg you have advanced coolant if you have advanced coolant I'll have bio diesel and outrun you so yeah...
we're talking bout early game anyways.

 

I said HEMG Fission APC's earlier. You'll go Biodiesel but the only thing going for Biodiesel is that you can move while overheated, and it still has the second worst cooling in the game, so you can move but you can't fight back. So you'll still have to get a better engine later on, which will mean Coolant for sieges and Fission for chases. So unless your Bio APCs wipe the floor with the HEMG Fission APCs early on, you'll be wasting time getting another engine anyway. Depending on how well the armors work out, specifically Reactive's weight, I might hit up electric for that. Despite the +25% bio damage, the HP might make up for it, especially if Bio MG has taken a hit. Then I can grab some HE/UML > Mediums > Heavies > Rails. Which should be good if people don't get absorbent all the time anymore. Or Reflective if people can figure out how to use it, in which case I'll grab ER, Mediums, Heavies, Nukes.

Of course, this is all speculation and subject to change based off how the scripts run.

 

you're deadwrong here, an apc with only biodiesel and bio mg can constantly fire without overheating. Tanks cant but like I said I'm talking early game. In early game going bio tree is the best. You have good armor good engine and good weapons whilst if you want to get hemg you'll probably go chemistry armor engine weapons. Cause if you dont you'll go armor weapons engine and that engine being in physics and fision is going to take you a lot more time to get into mid game whilst the opponent can easily go into mid game cause bio is more viable than detouring into physics. and most strats involving bio mg and going mid game gets you into chem anyway to get mid and late game weapons.

your strat of going physics chem fails cause it costs too much time to do early game.

 

Bio won't work so well as a main force. It's great early game, I won't deny that. No one will have the damage output to get through the regen and the BioMG will tear through the small amount of armor. But once the mid-game comes along, you'll have to go into Chem or Physics to get ER, HE or UMLs. In other words, by starting with Bio, you're just delaying the detour. Once mid-game rolls around, I'll have more choices based off the evolving situation. And Bio engine will work well enough in the mid game, but you'll have no choice but to get another engine in the late game. It isn't hard to keep moving to get the bonus cooling from fission, plus it'll still have some movement while overheated. And Regen will get torn straight through. If I'm breaking it before it has a chance to regen, it becomes one of the worst armors in the game. So you'll still have to research another armor.

So I'll concede that Bio will be better early game, but sooner or later you'll have to get another engine and go into another tree for your weapons and get some better armor. Once the late game starts rolling around, I'll have the advantage and be pumping out good heavies before you can.

 

thing is you always do like I wrote in my reply. After you get your medium tanks you almost always detour into chemistry, but delaying the detour is better sinceyou can get your advantage early game, and when you are ahead you just get weapons and engine from chemistry.
so basicly you dont enlarge your advantage you have you stall it and then enlarge it. But if you dont have the advantage early game in empires, that's pretty deadly, although, not that deadly. In before everyone bitches about the latter.

 

But the net delay you take from going bio initially will be greater than mine in the longer term. If I go Fission and either Reactive or Reflective as my first armor, I'm set for the rest of the game. Especially on open maps, Biodiesel is still damn slow compared to Fission. Sooner or later, Bio diesel engine won't be able to cool fast enough for the heat output and Regen will get torn to shreds. You're still wasting the time in getting two different engines, still wasting time on getting two armors. Your early advantage isn't worth much if I'm running around in Fission APC's taking your refs back and getting better heavies while you're still getting an engine that won't overheat or an armor that doesn't get ripped straight off.

 

Huh, I might play again after these changes.

 

IMO Bio is a fine engine right now and with a little heat management, I find the cooling is sufficient all game for anything other than a duel HE/Ranged heavy. If you do overheat you can still roll which helps keep the nubs alive.

Upgraded MLs run pretty cool (I think it should be as hot as Cannon to be fair) as does bio mg so I'll be happy with a full bio NF heavy + Bio MG given the increase regen speed. If I were BE I would be more of the mind to still go straight Chem possibly physics - but breaking that chain to counter research an armour as soon as is necessary.

At any rate it is a nice discussion to have and I think that there is scope here to do alot more research based on map, income and situation than pure DPS.

I've never actually found BioMG to be that powerful. In a large tank skirmish I find it is much more useful to either throw a few rounds into ever tank I see and use it like a water cannon or if I'm 1v1 I'll save it till after I've emptied my other clips and use it to finish them off as it is very easy to be accurate even with a retreating enemy - rather than me having to follow in behind their retreat which might put me in a worse position and exposed to their reinforcements.

Edit: I like the way engines compliment weapons in this. I see tanks becoming more specialised in their roles and so I wouldn't be suprised to find different people sporting a mix of tech in the late game depending on play style and objective. Not so much a question of what is the best tank - but what is the best tank right now for what I intend to do.. I hope it encourages more tactical tank play with the need for seige tanks for example to be guarded by faster anti-armour configurations. Tanking is one of my favourite elements of Empires but squad tactics usually break down once everyone is in vehicles. For example you rarely see a squad of tanks sticking together with some engineers in seat 2.

 

I guess we should test the scripts and try to help balance them so we can have a patch. Which would be like the second coming.

 

Or the first coming...

Though yes, we should all play Empires all week and offer thoroughly usefull feedback here.