Every other week there's a suggestion thread about a potential wage system fix. You guys have little issue explaining the problems with wages, but I want to know the good stuff. What is the ultimate goal/purpose of the wage system? Does the current implementation of the wage system accomplish anything towards that purpose?
the purpose is to make buying tanks not that dependend on team-resources. isnt this evident? it also works ... a bit too well. we will see what diminishing returns will bring. but if i may criticise something. i think the share should be equal and reflect team performance, rather then the individual one. theres things which are relevant to the team but dont get you many points, why should you be punished. or the ranking system is flawed, but these things are hard to judge for the computer. also a positive sideeffect would be that its also getting easier for newbies to get tanks. and they need them most as they still have to figure out what to do with them. also a wasted tank bought with wages does hurt a team way less.
I don't like wages. Just saying. I wouldn't mind a more diverse skill system where different skills cost different amounts so players almost choose their skills via points with what they've earnt. Late game they can have a really good mix of advanced skills, but early game they can make sure of the more basic ones. But I don't like the interaction with resources they have, it takes the RTS element out of the game too much in my opinion, and just causes more segregation on the field.
but you gotta buy tanks somehow? i cant believe the idea behind empires should be, "research to a certain item and then buy as many of it as possible and overrun the enemy or die trying". its not starcraft, players aint zerglings. you do that on high level play, ok i undestand and it pays off, but this sort of things drive the casual players away. i think you shouldnt promote such things more by design, those strategies work out on themselfs - you put anything on one card and either lose or win. but thats not what the average player, who only wants to invest limited time, maybe only hop onto a server for 30minutes, expects from a game. if you want a broader playerbase you need to let players play what they expect the game to be and not how youd expect a highly organized team to play it. to guess what players would want to do in your own perception of the game is the art i assume. or i might have misunderstood your last sentence.
Through the team resources, not wages. Everyone shares the same pool and the commander needs more tools to manage it, with more balanced vehicle restriction.
i edited my post in between and answered to that already. i really should reread another ten times before i click. i edit my posts too often ... :S
I'd love to see the comm able to restrict certain chassis. It would make Artillery much better because then you can only have a few select players have it instead of either everyone gets it, no one gets anything, or the comm having to make every vehicle himself.
but wouldnt it be better, in the "its easier and fairer"-meaning, to restrict arties right away - i mean by design/codewise? i cant think of a single situation where it would be good to have more then a couple (3-5). btw, this brings me to - i think it would generally not be so bad to quality assure class and vehicle diversity by limits.
btw, maybe declare what Wages actually are for people that joined recently. I've heard "What do wages do?" (AFAIK theres no hint what wages are in empires... although it is kind of obvious what it is) far more often than "HOW 2 BUEILD NUKE TAENKS" (which is another issue but thats bc of the GUI which is getting fixed).
See, that was pretty much what I was thinking. If you get wages from points and it is impossible to make a completely fair point system, then wages can never be fairly distributed. The extremist in me would say that the entire wage system should be scraped (along with any player-performance-for-res system), but there might be something salvageable.
^ ^ ^they are pretty good for keeping comms from screaming at you for building jeeps, which was a bannable offense back before you started playing spartacus.
It disconnects money from map control, before wages map control was the only way to win, if you didn't have map control you lost. This is still generally the case, but wages do help balance it out a bit by having a team that is good at fighting gain more money from it. Of course, as a team that is good at fighting would also gain more map control, it doesn't work quite as well as it could, but y'know. I do like that it means I personally get to buy tanks without having to camp the VF, but you could achieve that goal by simply giving all players say 5% of the overall res income to their personal account. I suppose the best thing wages do is they make people possibly inclined to base bitch, or do other menial tasks that need doing, in order to get a tank. Which is useful in making the game work but is again an imperfect solution, better to get rid of the menial tasks than try to bribe people to do them.
not really... if they can't afford heavy tanks but are still holding their own... they eventually will be able to afford heavy tanks. The wages system does favor the turtle strategy though. If your down to your main (territory wise)... turtle and use your player wages that you get from owning people trying to break your turtle, to buy tanks. <--- I don't suggest it, im just saying its do-able.
If you can hold your own without heavy tanks, why can't you afford heavy tanks? You started out on equal footing, why didn't you take more territory at the start and dominate entirely? That's the problem, fighting = land = money = winning. Wages just add fighting = land + money = money = winning.
It kinda looks like a lot of people didn't get it, to me... Wages, sure, do disconnect the players from team res, but it was primarily a way to make sure that people are rewarded for playing well. It is because so much of the time you would get new tech, then 15 newbies (or n00bs, rather) would use the vehicles and get them destroyed instantly - crippling the team in one blow. At least with wages, you don't always have people clambering up to get vehicles and waiting in the vf all the time, and you don't have the case that critical team members have (or choose) to wait around for 6 minutes just to get the res for a decent tank - where comms restrict in some favourism, because they just want the tanks to go to people who can use them. Don't tell me you've forgotten that already... To be honest, res needs to be toned down a bit, but actually if we end up having research decoupled from res, then we'd have a way where res could simply be for buildings and wages could be adapted where they were the only way to buy vehicles. You could rework actually most of the system... of course, then if you had aircraft (in that mythical era) you could at that point have aircraft tie into team res and tanks take just wages, which would make an interesting diversity in the field - where aircraft were a critical resource and expense, but tanks were commonplace and fielded by the troops. Or...did I just go off-topic wildly? Suffice to say, wages are actually pretty good though they need a hard polishing to work properly with the game and the current resource structure. There's a thought...different resource nodes. All right, i'll shut up already.
I play every class in every role and I rarely finish a round with less than 30 points, rev engy, rifleman, gren, sab scout and even base bitch are all lucrative.
how many years do you play this now empty? would be kinda sad if you dont manage to average at 30 pts ... ... but what exactly does this say? my point was that, if you go somewhere and wall it off with your engi walls, this might delay a tankrush (or even a single tank) and tip the whole game to your advantage, but you dont get a single point. or you are the idiot that goes for that one refinary far away from the combat but still to dangerous for your comm to get there. or if you have been drivin the apc which carried the players which took out a complete front. ofc you get some points, but less then those who you carried. or you buy a jeep and go after the scunt, while the others dig it out infront the enemies base. or ... think about the game as if you wouldnt have played this for 5-6years(?) ... thats highly speculative - the enemy which controlls the full map will just be able to rebuild each heavy without much of an impact on their res-pool. the 40res you get per tank doesnt make up for this ...
i think commanders are dumb so i like to be rewarded by my own performance i save up wages for a jeep then i ollies out to do whatever i want, since commanders in pubs are terributt. typically i earn enough for at least three more jeeps, so i keep doing it. wages = mobility summary team performance is manifested in research and territory squad performance is manifested in squad skills player performance is manifested in buying bomb ass jeeps the effect of wages is negligible because any tank worth anything costs at least 400-500 res which is a fair amount of points
400 res is 20points. nothing impossible to already archieve midgame. one round ive bought 2 compo heavies with wages alone ...
