What do you think the commander vehicle should be?

If warning all of ya if ya fuck with the cv and change it to what spartacus suggest a lot of vets gun riot.

 

So true...

 

All of the above + the CV needs to look like fucking Godzilla.

I like the idea of buildings buffing the CV's health.

 

Here's an idea that legitimately discourages boomtanking!

And here's a counter that ruins the entire point!

Good job!

 

I seriously dont get what you guys are trying to do. We always complain about not being able to fight the snowball and now you fucking fight the way to counter the snowball ninjaing? You know how all of your negative arguments get countered? Kill spawning and teamwork but HEY GUYS EMPIRES DOESNT HAVE TEAMWORK AND KILLSPAWNING SO LETS TAILOR THE GAME TO FIT RETARDS.

Why build the game with the idea of not having teamwork instead of the idea of having teamwork. Its such a shitty mindset and noone is realizng it. Empires is empires cause when teamwork happens everyone gets this orgasmic feeling of coalition solidarity and much more but when it doesnt yall go crying about how shit is unfair as fuck. All of you should never ever become developers.

 

Not 100% sure what Paradox is saying, but I think I agree somewhat at least. Empires is vastly different now in that you need a squad of people (or near enough) working together to ninja a comm most of the time now, instead of before where you could do it solo.

Teamwork used to be built into the game in a strange and hacky way, and I think it's been legitimised somewhat more over the last couple of years. I don't actually think the CV is the problem, I still think it's down to something else. What that is, I couldn't tell you.

Don't forget, the reason the CV is a win condition is because it has the ability to spawn buildings - most saliently the barracks. It's like the construction yard in Dune2, without that, you're not going to be able to do anything. (Actually it's more like the mobile construction vehicle, but whatever).

I think if you don't have a barracks and every player is dead (including the commander) then the game ends too. Or at least that used to be the way it was, for a time. It might still be that way, it's just that we don't see it because even with CV chases there might be some infantryman skulking in wait, so even when the comm dies, he's not the last player.

If that isn't the case, though, it really should be again. And maybe more thought into that idea, with a look at the respawning/ticket system to make it viable.

 

Yeah, it's easy if you start making design decisions that destroy the spirit of the game.

Varying armor resistance based on distance from a building is ridiculous.

I'm reasonably sure JGF was joking.

 

Hmm....not that I'm a real advocate of this, but what about a dual nature CV? Where it can be deployed or changed into active mode?

 

I honestly don't know what the 'spirit of the game' is. I'm not sure anybody does.

I don't really know if JGF's suggestion is a good idea™ but I thought it was amusing that immediately after he made it ViroMan suggested an alternative that almost ignored the entire premise.

 

I think boomtanking is cool. It's an unintended dynamic to the game and lots of interesting and fun gameplay happens because of it.

 

It only takes 20 sticky grenades at the most to destroy a CV when throwing them directly at the front. If you have 1 scout, 3 riflemen and an engineer, that's ~6 grenades per player, keeping in mind that sticky stuns do damage too. I'm uncertain how many seconds the cycle time on a grenade is, but I'd estimate 2 seconds at the absolute most, so that's 12 seconds to throw enough grenades to kill a CV.

Now, it takes 10 seconds for a player to respawn. If the comm is quick on his feet yelling for killspawns the moment they have an indication that they're getting hit and you have a number of players with "kill" bound to a key, then I'd estimate 2 seconds for a responsive player to kill themselves. We can disregard barracks and class selection time because they can do that while waiting on the timer. We're also making the assumption that the team is squad hidden, so that there's no indicator they're near the CV until they break the hide.

So, by the time the first player has even *spawned*, it's already been 12 seconds. They have already lost.

We can push this a bit further. Lets say that the ninja's aren't perfect. 20 seconds from the first grenade to kill the CV. So now our respawning players have, at most, 8 seconds to get out of the barracks. Now lets say that players are paranoid and hit "kill" the moment the comm takes damage. We're hitting the point that latency becomes a significant factor, so I'll assuming 100ms of latency. So about 0.5 seconds for them to kill themselves from the moment the comm takes damage, still 10 seconds to spawn. 9.5 seconds for them to get out of the barracks and kill all of them.

That's still a painfully small amount of time which assumes that the ninja's are shit and the team getting ninja'd is perfect. If the CV at any distance from a spawn point or there's something between the CV and the barracks blocking the player's view, I can almost guarantee that most properly executed ninja's will fail simply because there's not enough time to stop them.

Teamwork is certainly important along with player skill. But then it's an equally valid argument that good teamwork should be able to counter good teamwork. The problem with ninja'ing is that, very often, you don't get the chance to counter with good teamwork because there's simply not enough time.

 

That is usually the sign that gamedesign is moving in the right direction.

I remember winning games without construction yard in Dune 2 and it was awesome. :D And that's pretty much the point, if you still have barracks, vehicle factories, refinaries and everything else, why should the game end only because the CV got destroyed? It just isn't intuitive and from a game design perspective it is just a way too hard punishment for losing one single entity. I would rather have it respawn for some time/ressource cost in the vf. Yes, i fucking hate rounds ending with people ninjaing the CV with 9 mines and squad arty.

 

damn I forgot to use my not serious glasses.

۞_۞

 

While I'm not disputing the numbers, consider the fact that we're talking about 5 people here. Even if you assumed the average Empires team has 16 players on it (it's probably less), that's 33% of the time. If you commit 1/3 of your team to attacking the enemy CV at close proximity, should it really take much longer than 12 seconds? And likewise, should you not be punished for allowing 1/3 of the enemy team next to your CV like that?

 

+ you as a commander failed cause ya didnt see a ninja come near you. New commanders dont check their surroundings often enough, whilst when I try to ninja more experienced comms like predator etc etc I never succeed in ninjaing cause they as a comm wont let me by just paying fucking attention.

 

Cmon, we both know it only takes one engy near the cv, not five people.

And you can give him a squad hide or two to get there.

It's not as hard as we're making it sound. It just takes intimate knowledge of numerous game mechanics that are obscure in common game play.