What's the funnest thing in Empires?

NIGGA I CAN TELL YOU THIS, LISTENING TO WHAT ACTIVE PLAYERS WANT AFTER YEARS OF BROKEN GAME MECHANICS SELECTED FOR ONLY THE MOST RETARDED TROLLS AND ASSHOLES TO REMAIN ACTIVE, IS A TERRIBLE WAY TO DESIGN A GAME.

 

I never said I particularly agree with it. I think the game does need to be less forgiving in some areas, but the power of 9mine back then was way over that line. It was pretty absurd the amount of damage one guy could do.

On the other hand, like Ikalx said, the mentality was different. People were a lot more vigilant. People learnt the hard way. I mean, if we go back to talking about boomtanking in this thread, the shit Hobbes does wouldn't fly back then. Any CV within range was punished with a stun nearly 100% of the time. Only people who were really fucking good at boomtanking like Sonecha and Opie could get away with that stuff. I speak as someone who tried, and died from being stunned many many times. I learnt the hard way, and I cut that shit out.

The problem is, you can't just re-learn the playerbase that stuff. We were in a really special spot where the playerbase had been built up over time and was pretty dedicated, so they learnt about these tactics as they developed one by one. That playerbase is gone, that knowledge is gone, and to suddenly re-introduce a lot of this hardcore stuff would destroy the game. Vets who knew about this stuff would have free reign to win the game at will almost every single round. I've been in that situation before. It's cool at first but it becomes really tiresome really quickly, and above all, it kills the server population. It's simply not viable to bring hardcore stuff back in unless we had the population to take it. There simply aren't enough players around to learnt the counters.

 

Any kind of defense should be able to be circumvented. Automated defensive measures are a means to delay, not stop, the offense.

Listening to rookie designers is much better...

That's how we get a class that's useful about 5% of the time, but fucking gamebreakingly useful during that period.

Game design is hard.

Don't we already have that?

Granted, I get that this shit isn't black and white. We're always going to have some amount of win-via-experience bullshit.

The big one is the classic ninja. Think about what it takes to pull off a typical ninja:

• Switching squad leads
• Intentionally killing yourself, often multiple times
• Using (and knowing) squad lead powers
• Complete knowledge of every visually identical grenade in the game
• Extensive knowledge of the most underused class in the game

That's a lot of shit to learn and none of it is easy to learn. When you know all of that shit and you can use it at the speed necessary to pull off a ninja, is there really anything major that a non-commander player needs to know?

 

Removing the CV isen't how you improve empires, it's how you kill it.

 

Considering that it's the active players that tend to have a better view of the current gameplay situation, it's only natural to give their views higher weight because of an implicit assumption that their views will be at least slightly more informed.

I think Lazybum said it right though, people just get burnt out. I personally can't stick with most games for more than three days at most. Out of all the games I've played, less than 1% I've played for more than a week. Empires is one of two games that I've managed to play for over two years, and the only one that's multiplayer.

I would love to have some of those old players back, but if we build it, would they come? That's the important question for me; I'm more interested in catering to the players that play instead of the ones that might decide to play if possibly drastic changes happen. Whenever a game changes to try and either get new players to join or old players to return, there's a major risk of alienating the current playerbase and a major risk of it not being good enough to keep either the new players or returning old players. I'd have almost no qualms about making Empires be essentially as it was in it's golden days with some new features and a lot of new fixes, but because I believe that it's the players the make the game good, I highly doubt that any drastic measure would increase the playerbase and would only serve to cut it down even more.

And for the record, I don't make the changes to the game simply because I like them myself most of the time; I would definitely prefer a game that makes screwing up a lot of painful, but the realities of the situation make changes such as that simply a bad idea. So many people suggest drastic changes to the game that overhaul the entire thing and throw it in a different direction than where it is now, and although it may be a game that might be good, overhauls that drastically change fundamental parts of the game instead of trying to improve what's already there will tend to drive off more players than draw in. Anyone who's seen a favorite game of theirs die off because the developers decided to make some sudden drastic changes to draw in new players knows what it's like.

 

Have you guys ever considered something like a "game mode"?

Some way to easily let something other than the map control certain things like:

• available research
• starting research
• available chassis (e.g. less than the defaults)
• available vehicle weapons (e.g. less than the defaults)
• available classes
• available loadout options
• asymmetrical tickets
• asymmetrical team size limits
• available buildings
• starting buildings
• available skills
• starting skill slots
• presence of other "innate" mechanics:
  • mg turrets
  • ml turrets
  • cameras
  • radars
  • sabotage
  • dual turrets/cameras
  • ammo boxes
  • ammo box cooldown
  • etc

Admittedly, this is tremendously risky. It's easy to implement this kind of thing in a way that would confuse the fuck out of players.

And yet, it would allow you to say, "we're playing this canyon match with jeeps only because canyon's infantry combat is fucking five-star."

But it could easily lead to lazy balancing. Money back in ~2010 would probably always have arty disabled. District would probably lose grenades on most matches.

Even more troublesome, we'd see more "minigame" like gameplay. How fun with eastborough be with only one class and only melee for combat? What about shotguns only on district? Or ranged rifle and no tanks on dust storm?

But the biggest gain would be "classic" modes with extra chassis like Mk2s and other modifications to mimic old versions.

It'd also be difficult to administer. How do you decide which game mode to pick? It'd probably be simplest to just tie that to a version of the map. Perhaps you could do a game mode after a map has been created without having to completely recompile everything and what not?

This also sounds like a sizable undertaking.

 

@imspartacus

if we had more servers and a much larger playerbase you would no doubt see that. it would be cool once and then lame forever after.

 

I would never argue that the current player count proves the dysfunctionality of current Empires design, even with a perfect 2.0 release the player numbers would have roughly developed the same way. Player numbers wouldn't suddenly rise by the thousands if you implemented all my suggestions and yes it would drive most of the current vets away.

I'm just interested in Empires game design as a purely academic discussion, what are the incentives, payoffs and trade-offs in the game and what impact do they have on a player's behaviour and participation. Ninjaing for example, has the highest possible payoff for the attacker - he wins the game, it is only limited by high skill and experience requirements while defending against a ninja isn't nearly as fun or as exciting as going on the offensive.

Empires in a way has the problem of many open source projects, they are built, maintained and used by a handful of hardcore nerds that think their use cases represent all that is and don't understand why mainstream users shun their software.

If your main goal is to design for the current active player base then letting the CV respawn in a VF is obviously not what you would want. Actually for this scenario I suggest that you halve the CV's hitpoints, so Trickster gets more successful ninjas, give the CV a death laser so Hobbes has more fun boomtanking and let the commander sacrifice players on his team to heal the CV so vets can abuse random newbies even more.

 

Seems incompatible with empires server politics.
You'd end up with servers only utilising one game mode ever, the owners and his lackeys most favourite one.
Any attempt at disccusion would be met with the usual "you're welcome not to play" deal, as per empires' usual "mine word is final" feudal bullshit.

 

Standing toe to toe with a rushing tank, firing RPG, killing the tank, then sidesteppping the carcass just in time...

 

Most fun thing in Empires? Long games with battle lines going back and forth slowly but steadily. Then, holding the fort for as long as you can, carefully preparing for one final outlash. Check out the story "The Little Heavy That Could" in section Commanding Tips in the Empires Manual (it's in the empires install folder under 'manual') for one of the most exhilirating endings to a round of Empires I've ever played.

 

There was quite a while when this wasn't really true. Every man and his dog boomtanked, and badly, so much so that there were only a handful of commanders who would give people a decent game. I've played through a lot of boomtankers, and heck, I was there when people like Opie made Krenzo think stickies were a good idea.

Understand, though, and this is a general point, that I'm not saying that we should bring back all those things. I AM saying that if it's better with Hobbes risking himself, there's something wrong. EXCEPT, now that you've clarified that basically the population is very small, and you need single pathway maps to compensate for it. Because Hobbes draws the action to one place, it feels like you're actually playing Empires, rather than stretched thin with only a few people around.

These are the points I'm trying to make, really. If something is awesome, sometimes it's necessary to know why, and also to try and figure out if we can improve that aspect.

My own self, I believe a lot of the 'oomph' from Empires has been removed, but really through no one's fault. Aspects of the game have improved, but in many ways it's harder for people to have fun, I feel. If we're also going to have low-pop games as the regular endeavour, we need to think about a way of enhancing that experience.

 

Kind of like heroin