Alpha 06
Ok so I'm up to the bit where you get the first artefact and currently the research order for artefact 1 is like this.
Artefact 1
However this order is slow and inefficient and doesn't really make a lot of sense, so I would rearrange the research order like this.
Artefact 1
This seems like a more logical order to me and might actually make doing the research a bit quicker since you can research things concurrently and you don’t have to go through so many steps to get it done, I don’t know about any one else but I hate being kept waiting unnecessarily.
Ok so my first issues with Alpha 06, I notice that upon getting the engine upgrade it does basically nothing as you can see below.
Without the engine upgrade
Viper & Bug
Wheels - 1.37, 1.37
Halftracks - 1.17, 1.17
Tracks - 0.98, 0.98
Cobra
Wheels - 1.37, 1.37
Halftracks - 1.17, 1.17
Tracks - 0.75, 0.63
With engine upgrade
Viper & Bug
Wheels - 1.37, 1.37
Halftracks - 1.17, 1.17
Tracks - 0.98, 0.98
Cobra
Wheels - 1.37, 1.37
Halftracks - 1.17, 1.17
Tracks - 0.78, 0.66
The only effect that the engine upgrade had was on the cobra body with tracks
Without the engine upgrade - 0.75, 0.63
With the engine upgrade - 0.78, 0.66
It should be noted that the values above are only for the body and the propulsion unit because I wanted to observe how the engine upgrade actually worked having said this however in most cases adding the turret doesn't actually change these values because the weight of most turrets is not actually sufficient to alter the vehicles speed anyway.
Now looking at this we can deduce 2 things.
1.) While the engine upgrade does work the effect is so tiny that it's meaningless.
2.) Instead of increasing the maximum possible speed for a given propulsion method which is what I would expect the engine upgrade to do the engine upgrade acts more like a weight modifier, effectively reducing the weight of a given vehicle so that it can move faster, however since most vehicles you can build at this point in the game already move at the maximum possible speed for there given propulsion method because there weight is not sufficient to affect there speed this basically renders the engine upgrades pointless.
So how do we fix this? Well there are 3 ways I can think of
1.) You could increase the maximum possible speed of all propulsion methods to say 10.0 but then increase the weight of each turret, body and propulsion unit so that total vehicle weight really does effect vehicle speed, this would mean that when the engine upgrade is applied you would actually see a difference as the engine upgrade would work to reduce the weight of the vehicle allowing it to achieve a higher speed.
Thus a machine gun on tracks would still be able to bomb along at like 150 miles per hour because it doesn't weigh very much but a very heavy turret like the heavy cannon would only be able to achieve say 60 miles per hour on the same chassis because it is so much heavier.
This I believe was pumpkins original design intention even if they didn’t necessarily pull it off for what ever reason.
The down side to this however is that it would require a fair amount of work to fix which is why it probably hasn’t been done and why things are set-up the way that they are currently.
2.) you could change how the engine upgrades work and make the engine upgrade increase the maximum speed of a given propulsion method the issue here however is three fold.
a.) Doing this runs the risk of making light vehicles too fast, especially since the weight of most turrets is not currently sufficient to influence the speed of the vehicle.
b.) Doing this still doesn't address the core issue, the fact that the weight of all components needs adjusting so total vehicle weight really does affect the vehicles speed.
c.) you would still be required to adjust the weight of all components to make total vehicle weight really affect the vehicles speed, and of course doing this would entail a fair amount of work having said that I believe that it is work that does need to be done.
I also believe this method could be interpreted as pumpkins original design intention since the only real change between method 1 and 2 is how you actually apply the speed increase, although this way has the virtue of being somewhat more intuitive than the current set up because the upgrade does what you intuitively expect it to do, it makes your various propulsion methods faster instead of acting more like a weight modifier and effectively making your vehicles lighter.
Although functionally method 1 and 2 do more or less the same thing I think this is probably the method we should go for, since it makes the engine upgrades do what you intuitively expect them to do.
3.) You could remove engine upgrades and component/vehicle weight all together and simply give each vehicle type a fixed speed which is how most other RTS games handle things the problem though is that most other RTS games don’t have the ability to design your own vehicles so doing that could be tricky as you would need to reclassify every possible vehicle design into 1 of 3 categories light, medium and heavy and I'm not sure that doing that would really work or even be possible and/or desirable more over it goes against the original design of the game.
Plus it’s a really crude, clumsy, overly simplistic and amateurish way to address this problem that in the long run may well do more harm then good.
Which brings me nicely to my second issue weight is at this point a largely redundant stat that in the vast majority of cases either doesn't affect the speed of a vehicle at all, and where it does have an affect it either feels more like a balancing bug
Case and point
Viper
Halftracks without the engine upgrade - 1.17, 1.17
Halftracks with the engine upgrade - 1.17, 1.17
Viper
Mortar
Halftracks without the engine upgrade - 0.84, 0.63
Halftracks with the engine upgrade - 0.88, 0.66
Personally I don’t know why mortars speed is reduced because it shouldn’t be, clearly the mortar turrets is to heavy.
Or the effect is so small that it doesn't really make a difference anyway
Case and point
Cobra
Tracks without the engine upgrade - 0.75, 0.63
Tracks with the engine upgrade - 0.78, 0.66
Cobra
Medium cannon
Tracks without the engine upgrade - 0.56, 0.47
Tracks with the engine upgrade - 0.59, 0.49
Which brings me nicely to my third issue tracked propulsion, while tracks are good in a defensive battle due to the fact that tracked vehicles are tougher, on an assault mission which comprises about 95% of the missions in the game they are to slow to be practically useful, especially on insane where time is of the essence and you don’t really have time to dilly dally around waiting for your vehicles to get where you need them to be, yes in certain limited cases tracked vehicles are useful on an assault for example punching through an opponents defence but the fact of the matter is there are faster ways to go about doing that with lighter vehicles which move faster and get the job done just as quick and often times will actually be finished before your tracked units even arrive at the destination, so I really think the maximum speed of tracks needs to be increased, but of course if you increase the speed of tracks then that also means that you have to increase the speed of the other propulsion methods by a similar amount so what I would do perhaps something like this.
Hover - 2.50
Wheels - 2.25,
Halftracks - 1.75
Tracks - 1.25
That's about as much as i have so far for alpha 06 i still need to try out the other weapons and see how they are after you tweaked them.