In Starcraft research was done at separate buildings, rather than one building. Natural Selection also does this. I propose that Empires implement a similar concept. Armory - infantry upgrades Vehicle Factory - chassis and engine upgrades Radar - vehicle weapon and turret upgrades Edit: To clear any misconception - You could not use 2 armories to do double research. 1 armory would give you access to infantry specific techs, and each armory beyond the first would not effect the research. This would apply to the other buildings as well. I think this would speed up gameplay a lot. It would give a team with more resources more opportunities to invest it, and it would allow people to get to the fun techs faster. This is also the only way you could implement infantry research. Otherwise, no one would research something like improved rifles over high explosive shells. So with this method, you could have both. Imagine having an infantry tech that allows engies to decon walls almost instantly to break open a turtled base, then providing rifleman with cluster grenades to back them up. What about SAM batteries to fend off the new aircraft or the addition of a .50 cal for the AFV gunner seat to encourage teamwork? Oh, the enemy has focused primarily on infantry techs and their RPGs are mauling your tanks? Switch your heavy tank loadout from armor peircing rounds to napalm rockets to thin out their ranks. There's a huge realm of possiblilities that the current tech tree barely touches. Above all, things are just too slow right now. My real question is, why don't we do something similar to this already? Is it too complicated to code and balance? What is the plan for the tech tree in the future anyway?
I agree with splitting infantry and tank research, but I don't think armory is the building to do it. It is way too cheap and expendable. The radar allows research because it is big expensive and a high priority target. You would need another building for the research meaning you need a modeler . I don't think armor and engine should be split because that would just make tank research go way too fast.
What we need is a simple tier system and buildings that depend on other buildings; i e, building a radar enables Tier 2 research. Reaching Tier 2 enables you to field a new "Research Lab" building which enables research of other things, like upgraded infantry ammunition, improved body amour, better accuracy, etc. It should be high priced (3000-4000+) but have average health so that the team at a disadvantage could take it out with a coordinated effort.
I think that we should keep the existing tree left in the radar, but infantry research should be separately available from an infantry research building, that cost around 500 credits, making it a early game gamble to put resources in. And there we could have loads of stuff, like cluster bombs for rifle men, upgraded damage rpgs, homing rpgs, engineer alwyas place lvl2 or lvl 3 turrets. I am against an tier system, it hamper counters and strategy by artificially cutting down the amount of choices you can make. Besides we already got a semi tier system. It is called advance chassis, you need engine and armour first or you get paper medium tanks. I don't think we need to speed up vehicle research, it's fine.
I like the idea of splitting the infantry research to something cheaper, but I'm not sure that it's really needed game-balance wise. Splitting the tech tree would in general let people get to their favorite strategy faster, but I don't have any gripes against the status quo.
But if we made infantry research separate we could add tons of new things for the infantry, right now we can't, sence every commander would research tank stuff first, sence we only have on research tree.
New infantry goodies would be cool, but I don't think it really requires splitting the tree and creating new buildings to do that. And I disagree with you. About 1/3 the time a Commander will go for HE mg APCs with advanced deployment. What might be a good arguement for splitting the tree and creating a separate infantry research building (like an infantry headquarters or something) would be for the Commander to delegate that kind of research to other player. Someone who could be like assistant com and research the infantry tree, and maybe help out with micromanagment com duties like wall hacks, etc..
Thats APC rush and none of the upgrade you mentioned directly makes infantry more powerfull. We should get a new infantry research building but commander controlled, and also wallhack should be removed, stupid thing anyways.
I just had another thought. The com's research would greatly impact the number of each class on the com's team if there were too many specific class researches.It is always good a have some of each class, however if there where upgrades such as clusterbombs, or advanced marksmenship for riflemen, people may look at engineer and see no upgrades for them, so the team has a stacked number of riflemen. I think it would be best to have a lot of general upgrades such as team speed, armor attack, and maybe you can have something like upgraded grenades that would allow all the classes to have a choice for a better grenade ( ie: cluster bombs for riflemen, flying third eye camera sorta like in ETQW for scout, fission grenades for engies, makes cracks in the ground to damage buildings, not nuclear fission lol, invisible mines detected by grenadiers for grenadiers)
just throw in a new branch for infantry research (but keep rockets where they are). nano-engineering for BE and genetics for NF and keep them general upgrades (more hp, can hold more ammo, faster stamina regen, etc)
I like this idea alot, though I don't see myself clicking on the vehicle factory and then going "research". Maybe in the research tab of the comm view, it'll have the different research brances (vehicle, upgrades, infantry). If the case, it would be perfect. You'll get some pretty mad Bio MG apc rushes though.
I like this idea, but I don't want armories to become spammable research structures. Perhaps Armories as we know them now could be replaced with bunkers, that have ammo and health as well as greater defensive capability (perhaps make them integrate seemlessly with walls), and a larger building costing around 300 res could fulfill the role of a research structure, complete with racks of guns and ammo, and possibly another role as the only place infantry can obtain researched weaponry.
what if one could upgrade a barracks, as if one would spawn from the upgraded barracks the chosen upgrade is added to the players statistics
This idea has potential, but it should probably be offered IN ADDITION TO what we have already we can call it the modern gametype
