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Weapons & Class Restrictions


In vanilla ET (Et with no mods, a.k.a. "etmain"), there is just one setting for restricting heavy weapons like the Panzerfaust and Field Operative's support fire - g_heavyWeaponRestriction. All the mods I can think of, however, have significantly expanded the controls for server admins to be able to tune much more finely. This is one of the best features of these mods.

  • ETMain
  • ETPro
  • Other Options (ETAdmin_Mod)

    ETMain: g_heavyWeaponRestriction

    As the name suggests this cvar (setting) is used to limit heavy weapons like Panzers and flamers, but also artillery.

    100 (percent) is default. For soldier weapons it refers to the percentage of the team that can select EACH heavy weapon. e.g., if you set it to 20, and in the game there are up to 10 players on a team, each side could then have up to two panzerfausts, two flamers, two mg42's and two mortars. If the team has no flamers, this does not allow them to take any additional Panzers. It is important to note that the percentage is based on the team size, that is half of g_maxclients, and not the actual number of players currently playing on the team. Beware, for heavyweapons this setting is always rounded up, even a tiny fraction is taken to allow one more whole heavy weapon to be taken.

    The Field Ops use of Artillery is also restricted, but is on a per-minuite basis and takes into account the number of players on the team, the limit is irrelevant to the number of Field Ops! The calculation is something like the following: (thanks in part to Ben & Rain.)

    2(g_heavyweaponrestriction * teamsize)

    = max number of artillery per team per minuite [capped at 6]

    so, if g_heavyweaponrestriction is 20, there are 10 on the team, and there are 3 field ops (or however many), between them they can set off
    2(0.2*10)= 4 artillery per min
    Note that regardless of whatever g_heavyweaponrestriciton is set to, and the number of players, there is a fixed maximum of 6.

    So we've worked out how many artillery can be set up per minuite, which is all most people need to know. If you're wondering how this "minuite" is calculated (think about it), read the next paragraph.

    The counter starts at 0, and there are 6000msec in a minuite. Every time a player sets off an artillery, 6000/m is added to the counter, and the counter will start counting back down to 0 (m = support fire restriction per min). Once the counter reaches 6000, no more artillery can be fired until it has counted down to under 6000. Since of course the counter never goes below 0, this means in any given minuite there cant be more than m artillery set off, but note fractions do apply - an m of 2.5 will be rounded UP to 3 in the first minuite, but since the leftover msec is carried over, there will be only 2 allowed in the next minuite. Hence on average there can only be 2.5 artillery every minuite. It also means that once the counter has exceeded the cap, you dont have to wait a full minuite for it to count down, in order to fire artillery again.

    However. There are "Oddities" (to be kind) in the system. First of all, the above is all well in theory but you try and test it on your own PC, combined with g_ltchargetime 10. You will notice that regardless of setting, you can immediately unleash 3 artillery and then only 1 more every 30seconds after that - two if you wait 60 seconds instead. Plug that into the formula and you have to assume that either its completely wrong (and hence so is a SD programmer - probably the one that made it, plus two eminent ET mod authors) or, that theres a minimum setting of 2 per min, and still the initial 3 is a gremlin or something. There is also an exception when it is set to 0, and this is what is really annoying.

    The most stupid thing is also the most blatantly stupid and annoying thing. One of those things that make you poke your head up and wonder "wtf did they do that for?". When g_heavyweaponrestriction is at 0, for some unfathomable reason this means zero restriction for artillery, and zero allowed soldier heavyweapons. This not only goes against the apparent method of the setting, but also against all logic - it seems obvious that any server not wanting any heavyweapons is also not wanting any artillery spammage, much less having it rain down as much as possible. You cant even use something silly like 0.000001, since there is still this apparent minimum of 2 for arty, and anyway this will be rounded up to allow one of each heavyweapon class.

    Stupid.

    An alternative way to reduce the amount of artillery spammage could be to increase the time needed to recharge the Field Op's bar. This would base it per Field Op rather than per team, but would have a side-effect of lessening the amount of ammo paks they could distribute. The cvar is g_LTchargeTime, which defaults to 40000 (40 seconds). Further, using certain mods such as Shrubet and ETPro can be set to change the recharge behaviour when a player suicides with /kill, so players cannot so easily fire artillery, /kill to respawn with full bar then repeat the process.


    ETPro

    set g_heavyWeaponRestriction 20
    set b_stickycharge 2
    set b_maxmines "10"
    set team_maxriflegrenades "2"
    set team_maxFlamers "1"
    set team_maxMG42s "2"
    set team_maxMortars "1"
    set team_maxPanzers "1"

    Now we're talkin'! Most of these settings are self-explanatory, team_maxWeapon means teams can only have that many of that weapon each, and its the same deal for b_maxmines. The above settings are not default by the way, they are the ones running on my stopwatch server.

    In ETPro, g_heavyWeaponRestriction only controls the Field Operative's support fire. Both artillery and air strikes are controlled with this cvar in the same way as it does in etmain.

    b_stickycharge is not a heavyweapon restriction per se, but the effect of it is mostly to tone down the heavy fire spam. If b_StickyCharge is set to 1, players' power bar is not refilled if the player self-kills, instead it continues to refill at the normal rate. If set to 2, the same thing happens regardless of how the player dies. 0 is same as etmain, everytime a player dies their powerbar is completely refilled. The problem with this is that player's can then self-kill (/kill) every time the spawn clock is low in order to get a refill, so they can rain down more spam.


    Other Options

    If you want to have more control to restrict classes (e.g. medics or snipers), you can have a look at the ETAdmin_Mod, which is actually a server script that can run alongside ETPro or Shrub mods, in addition to running on vanilla ET. Note ETAdmin_Mod requires a Linux server running Pearl.

    I'm not sure what features ShrubET offers with respect to class restrictions, the mod seems to be dead and it's manual is AWOL.


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