what are the roles of the different infantry weapons?

No, but I do believe that the class you're thinking of is the engineer.

 

He's right, but that's just "a truth".

First, average Gren are just players better than average Rifle, I agree with you.
But why do we have more good players choosing Gren in the first place?

Second, the skill required for Gren to kill infantry decently is still A BIT too low.
Considering the fact that even if you are the best rifleman, there's still nothing much you can do against building/vehicles.
But you only have to be "decent" to kill inf "decently" as Gren. If you are top Gren, you pretty much *rape* Inf as good as top Rifleman, while you possess the ability to rape other shits.
When I am fighting against the same decent player while he's playing as a "decent" Gren, he isn't posing much smaller threat than if he's playing as a "decent" Rifleman.

So, again. Rifleman is still superior at killing Inf, for more than half cases. But this superiority isn't so great that it's competitive against Gren/Engi's diversity.
Gren basically can replace Rifleman without much loss of anti-inf ability.

Anyway, I don't think this whole thing is a serious issue/seriously unbalanced. So I am only suggesting minor nerfs.
And if you think we don't need to nerf it, then okay, I am fine with terminating the discussion here.

 

In low-pop games, it's basically:

Support well as a scout (1% of players can do this)-->Your team wins due to the enemy team not being able to divert manpower to keep repairing all their stuff.

Support poorly as a scout (i.e. using the scout rifle a lot)-->You screw over your team.

 

Best players play Gren because Gren is just more interesting than Rifle. Rifleman, despite the fun you can have with it, is still a staple of most games these days. Grenadier just offers something a bit different, much like Engy. I can play Rifleman quite proficiently but I do find it kind of boring.

 

Grenadier is fun. There's nothing more to it. It's an immensely fun and gratifying class to play. Every shot you land with the mortar feels infinitely more satisfying than 10 kills you can pull off with a rifle. There really isn't anything else to it, it's that simple.

 

Grenadier is simply the most effective "omni class". Other classes are hard-countered by something (riflemen countered by buildings, engineers by vehicles, scouts by everything) but the grenadier mortar is the only weapon that does decent damage to possibly everything, albeit not as effectively as more specialized weapons.

In pubs, therefore, the better players end up playing grenadier, because they know that they can't trust their team. Otherwise, we'd have clans comprised solely of good grenadiers and no good engineers/riflemen, which is obviously far from the truth. The whole "get a vehicle" thing is only tangentially related to the reason as to why good players like to play grenadier so much.

Plus getting a kill with the mortar is more satisfying than getting a kill with any bullet weapon (other than maybe the NFHR or BEAR, simply because those weapon still suck pretty bad), and successfully sniping with the RPG is one of the best feelings you can get in this game.

 

Maybe it's just me but I get the opposite feeling from gren, it's just so boring to walk around instant killing people when they have no/a very small amount of time to react.

 

Yeah I don't know how I justify it but in my head I always think of gren weapons as cheap shots and don't have any fun with them, but with scout or stickying infantry I don't. Maybe it is just the skill difference.

 

No offense, some of you make some excellent points, bu you sound like every weapon shoul be nerfed at long range so people would start going into closer combat a lot more. Becouse it's not only about scout rifles really, yes it's the most ineffective way to say at range, but what do you guys say about riflemen shooting up people at long range? BEAR is un-bear-able to go against on maps where there's some higher gound. People still don't push if they play long-ranged rifles.

As far as rifleman vs. gren in inf combat, I think the problem is not in who deals more damage, I think it's about approach. I, for instance, have played more TF2 in my life, than I've played COD. Therfore I'm way more used to indirect weapons (e.g. demoman in tf2). And the main difference, that I see between a rifleman and the gren is, that rifleman can only fight infintry at direct combat and he excells at it, while gren can fight infintry at non-direct combat. When it comes to empires, there's actually a lot of cases, where indirect combat (and explosions) beats direct combat. That's why in many cases gren beats riflemen.

Becouse riflemen are bad at indirect combat, I feel they're simply left out many times. Like somebody said just before (sry, I can't remember who you were), if an engi places a wall, a riflemen can do nothing. BUT rifleme do have a way of indirect combat. Their explosive grenades. I went to play rifleman a bit more a couple of days ago just to test out how effective those were. I was surprised, really. By two things: 1. How awesome their grenades can be, if used properly. 2. How difficult it was to use them properly.

Honestly, in HL2, I loved grenades and becouse this is a HL2 mod, I expected them to be something like the ones from the original game. The onlything that really bothered me was, how long the fuse was. Most of the times, when I threw a grenade at infintry, even at the largest range, thay just saw it sidestepped and avoided it completly. So, what I'm proposing is: make the fuse last less time. That way, the grenades can become en effective anti Inf. weapon again and rifles can be good at indirect combat too.

 

You know you can cook the grenade, right?

Personally, I play gren instead of rifleman because I can't aim worth two shits with a gun. In particular, it's also why I prefer to play as NF, because the shotgun pistol means I don't have to hit their body exactly.

The tradeoff is that I'm absolutely useless at longer ranges though. There's been many times as a gren when there's a player from a good distance who can kill me easily with their weapon, but I can't hit them worth shit. I could try RPG sniping them, but I can't aim any better with that than with a rifle.

In my experience, the combat is also about the range as much as the skill level. A longer range makes it harder to aim the mortar, gives it a longer traveling time and gives the enemy more time to move, which is the mortar's main weakness. It can also be long enough for gren to be useless at combat, while everyone else can still shoot him. But at shorter ranges, gren becomes more powerful because the mortar can become impossible to dodge in time, making the skill of the gren at aiming the mortar itself matter more. And then at near-melee ranges, it becomes complicated to predict because the gren has to deal with the splash damage of their own mortar.