There are a few relatively simple solutions to the commander interference problem:
-Instead of 'team res' command chairs themselves gain a form of 'personal' team res (kind of like their energy)
-Commanders have a toggle button to 'disable other commanders from using your stuff'. This will make it so that no commander can use another commander's MACs or structures etc. They would also not be able to draw team resources from a command chair which is currently occupied.
I don't necessarily want to see this have to happen but it might be the only way to stop this issue. Right now if a random player decides he wants to hop in a comm chair and spend all of the team's resources he can.
<!--quoteo(post=1834790:date=Feb 24 2011, 02:23 PM:name=Thaldarin)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Thaldarin @ Feb 24 2011, 02:23 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1834790"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Post count doesn't mean qualitypost, take yourself as an example.
The idea of an alien commander is perfectly legitimate for balance. It didn't make sense to me when playing NS1 that one team had it and one team never.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I gave the OP the appropriate response to his "actual" question. If he were asking from an account that was not created <u>ten seconds</u> before the post was written, then i would have seen the OP as acting sincere, despite the controversial question, and would of responded with a "qualitypost". But asking such a question, in such a way, is akin to opening a new "Remove Flamethrowers" post every week. Odds are the OP is being subversive.
<!--quoteo(post=1834818:date=Feb 25 2011, 07:49 AM:name=luns)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (luns @ Feb 25 2011, 07:49 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1834818"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I think gorge and commander working like this. these aren't final ideas but work in progress, the idea is to bring commander and gorge into union, and make commanding far different than marine commanding, as it should be.
-commander depends on the gorge to drop chambers -gorge depends on the commander to drop hives (commander upgrades hives also) -gorge depends on commander to upgrade his chambers (enhance chambers abilities and give out alien upgrades) -the gorge and commander can both drop RTs, but the commander upgrades the RTs to increase production -commander can drop whips only
bile bomb needs to return to the gorge as an ability, here how it can work:
bile bomb can be used to destroy marine builds, and spread infestation. Since bile bomb creates big splash its good way to spread infestation, and since infestation harms marine buildings, once dropped on them it would start to grow and rapidly cause damage. This makes two abilities into one, the current ugly circle to drop infestation as gorge now needs to go, it isn't good and it isn't "alien enough" ability.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This I like...as I have said a few times the role of an alien comm needs to be different. The key to the above is that it also allows the alien comm to be more involved in the FPS side of the game.
I think most of hte grumbles are coming from people who enjoyed playing as aliens and are finding the new comm role too much like the marines comm and that the gorge (who was a much loved favourite) is totally gimped.
I think exploring the above as a solution would go a long way to silencing the critics.
The bile bomb being a way to spread temporary DI is gold...it makes sense and to have it slowly chew away (very slow rate of damage) on marine structures seems logical.
I will agree that multiple commanders is not a good idea. At first I supported it, because it would seemingly allow new players to learn the ropes in a less intensive environment. That problem can just be fixed by making learning to command easier - not only through clever interface/input design, but also say, a single-player offline campaign (tutorial). Now, other than some highly organised games where you have say, a commander per squad, multiple commanding is generally just not effective.
However, I see no problem with alien commanding. A lot of people against it (people who are like "two different races shouldn't play exactly the same") seem to have never played an RTS in the last 2 decades. In most RTSs, despite the huge differences in race, playing each race does have the same basic core functionality - and this is generally through a common resource model (including population), common restraints (the map limits, the population limit), a common view style, and common unit commanding mechanisms (the same hotkeys and mouse-clicks will do the same things on any race). The more similar the mechanisms (for example, you could go further and add super units/heroes to either side, or the concept of tiers/ages), the easier it is to balance.
To be fair, though, you could just scrap the alien commander and give the gorge that responsibility and the ability to spend TRes instead... Then it would be much more similar to NS, but the resource model on each team is both the same (You have a class (commander/gorge) that spends TRes). The gorge thus becomes a mobile "commander". The only problem then is the upgrading mechanism - but you might simply add another menu for the gorge, or allow the gorge to "use" an upgradable building, and upgrade it. Overhead team coordination is also missing - and some see this as a benefit (people who want NS1 re-skinned) and some see this as a detriment (people who need someone holding their hand and telling them where to go). And obviously, there is a disadvantage for the alien team in that the gorge can't be in two places at once, while an alien commander can - the same people see this as a benefit or detriment.
I think dual commanders are a great idea. Imagine a 16v16 game. If I am the only commander I have to care about 15 marines who are yelling for medpacks or ammo, I have to build the base and have my eyes everywhere on the map. That is too much. Now imagine this. two different squats are lead by two different commanders (and maybe they are talking in two different TS3 channels)... It would be way more effective.
And I think that hivemind is way different from human commander.
As a human commander I give waypoints, give medpacks, drop buildings for my marines to build and stick the whole time with them and keep ordering them around. Once in a while I send a lonely MAC to a res-node to ninja build a RT, but thats it.
As a hivemind I just tell my aliens what I want them to do (i.e. at Tram: "please go over double-res to marinestart and harass 'em!") and let em go. After that I start building, placing infestation, teching up and do my own thing. Of course, I support the aliens by placing crags and so on. Once in a while I tell the aliens if something is under attack (and by how many with which arms, or gather them in a room and send them to marine base all together. Thats it.
Same way you handle multiple commanders. Evolving into a gorge just gives you a ticket to spend TRes. But TRes can only be spent on TEAM expenses, i.e. structures. The mechanic sorts itself out. It is very possible to have a team of nothing but gorges (but why?), resources would not be split between them, they would just take from a common pool; essentially it'd be first come, first serve. Same as NS, basically, except that now, personal and team resources are split. So gorges don't take a higher proportion of overall team res, they take ALL the res and it is "shared" between them (or rather, it is a pool and people take from it at will); but this is fine because every player has an independent personal res pool for PERSONAL expenses - independent because if you have 1 tower and 6 players, or 1 tower and 12 players, each player is still going to be receiving the same amount of res. What does this mean for balance? For two teams of equal numbers of players, and equal numbers of resource towers: Each team will gain resources at the same rate, and each team will be able to obtain higher technologies and structures when available, equally. Each player will gain resources at the same rate, and each player will be able to obtain higher classes when available, equally. In NS1, this was not the case, hence the unbalance for non-6v6. Hell, with this resource model you could scrap MARINE commander if you added some sort of building class.
Before you bring up griefers, griefers are a hazard under any circumstances. How did NS1 deal with it? How does any game deal with it? It's a fact of life, like famine and disease and internet trolls.
Your criticism of the alien commander focused on the problem of multiple commanders. Allow me to quote you:
"I will agree that multiple commanders is not a good idea. [...] Now, other than some highly organised games where you have say, a commander per squad, multiple commanding is generally just not effective."
Your approach, tasking gorges with the job of the commander, does not address the problem you pointed out. In fact it makes it worse. You can have only as many commanders as you have hives, but you can always have as many gorges as you have players on the alien team.
I think we are also missing the point of what team res really was in NS1. Team res was actually personal commander res. Since there was always only 1 commander, that was assured. The commander of course would use it on the team or waste it and ruin the game but could always be preemptively vote-kicked if people where concerned when he first hopped in.
<i>Team res in NS2 is much different</i>. Right now it is more like <i>shared commander res</i>. What if in NS1 the aliens had to share resources instead of having the pool which would distribute evenly across the alien players? Even forget that, what if all of the gorges shares resources? Most likely they will all be fighting over who builds first etc or maybe some moron who wants to spam OCs instead of getting the first chambers.
This is why I strongly feel it might just be a better idea to have comm chairs / hives behave like the NS1 aliens / NS2 personal res. Each chair gets its own share of the res from the team res pool. If there is only 1 comm chair it receives the full team res as it comes in. If there are two+ chairs it splits across them. An unoccupied chair can have res 'drawn' from it but occupied ones cannot be interfered with. No longer will comms be fighting with each other (I see this very often right now actually).
Also a toggle button to prevent other comms from using the macs you have spawn from your chair or structures you have built.
-or-
<i>It might even help if a commander is allowed to close/lock unoccupied command chairs which will only open back up when that commander gets out or unlocks the chair again. That could be another potential solution without adding all of the extra stuff like personal comm chair / hive res and blocking commander interference.</i> This would actually be a bit of a 'cleaner' solution, at least easier to implement.
Don't really see a much better way to deal with the issue other than these restrictions which I think many would be welcomed to avoid the extremely common annoyance of noobs hopping in unoccupied chairs and spamming sentries etc when they should have been building extractors or something else actually needed at the moment.
<!--quoteo(post=1834796:date=Feb 24 2011, 08:05 PM:name=Flayra)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Flayra @ Feb 24 2011, 08:05 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1834796"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I feel like I've answered this a few times before but the summary is this:
The resource model from NS1 didn't scale for large and small groups of players. It only worked well for 6v6. This has to do with the asymmetric nature of the aliens not having a commander and having a Gorge instead. I've thought long and hard about this. The best way I thought this could be fixed was to add an alien commander.
The trick is making sure the two commanders still play totally differently (which is one reason why you aren't microing and healing your teammates, not giving waypoints, etc). In my mind, that's being totally true to "NS". The alien commander role is still evolving though so who knows what else he'll have to distinguish him.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
+1 on this Flayra, I can see where you are coming from with this. I like the fact that the alien commander can't control squads. In my mind, that adds a difference between the sides.
As I said before, the aliens have more of a freewill when it comes to commanders as the commanders can't order them about. But the marines are more organised.
The only thing I would like to see is that gorge to have more of an impact on the team and the commander. I think that the Drifter can build VERY slowly and the gorges have to help them. That way, the gorge can say "Place a resource tower here commander" and then the commander does and the gorge gasses all over it :D
This is basically the same as NS1 like this. The only difference there is, is that the commander has to place the structures not the gorge. If you have a good commander who RESPONDS well then it is good.
1 thing I have to say though is about Multiple commanders. I don't mind it that much if the Aliens have multiple commanders but I do not think it is right for the marines to have multiple commanders. This I would like to see be removed.
Also, to prevent hassle I think that drifters should be tied to the Hive they were created from. For example: I am in Hive 1. I create 3 drifters and the person in Hive 2 cannot control as they are tied to that hive etc. If I leave the hive then the other commanders can take control of the drifters until someone gets back into that hive.
Basically, I am in Hive 1. I have 3 drifters. I cannot use the drifters created at hive 3 because someone is in there. When they leave that hive though I can take control of the drifters but if someone enters that hive again I lose control of them.
<!--quoteo(post=1834948:date=Feb 25 2011, 04:34 PM:name=Lazer)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Lazer @ Feb 25 2011, 04:34 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1834948"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->This is why I strongly feel it might just be a better idea to have comm chairs / hives behave like the NS1 aliens / NS2 personal res. Each chair gets its own share of the res from the team res pool. If there is only 1 comm chair it receives the full team res as it comes in. If there are two+ chairs it splits across them. An unoccupied chair can have res 'drawn' from it but occupied ones cannot be interfered with. No longer will comms be fighting with each other (I see this very often right now actually).<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That wouldn't work very well. The total team res would be distributed across several command stations and not available to either commander. For example CS 1 has 10 res, and CS 2 has 10 res. Now the commander (or one of the commanders) needs to build something that costs 20 res. While enough res total is available, neither commander can actually spend it to build the necessary structure/upgrade. One way around that would be to transfer res from one CS to the others, but that would be cumbersome and if it needs to be done a lot you may as well have a shared pool to begin with.
I still can't believe, choose not to believe, that they did this.
If I even try to form a conceptual model of NS2 in my mind it's so painful to think of how much it ruined the formula that I put it out of my mind entirely.
I don't get the "res scale" excuse, as it was 16v16, not 6v6, public servers that thrived strongest during ALL of NS's lifespan. It didn't seem like the gorges had problems overcoming the "scaling" you're talking about. It seems like an abstract mathematical solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist in the real world of people playing the game.
<!--quoteo(post=1834943:date=Feb 25 2011, 09:31 PM:name=NurEinMensch)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (NurEinMensch @ Feb 25 2011, 09:31 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1834943"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Your criticism of the alien commander focused on the problem of multiple commanders. Allow me to quote you:
"I will agree that multiple commanders is not a good idea. [...] Now, other than some highly organised games where you have say, a commander per squad, multiple commanding is generally just not effective."
Your approach, tasking gorges with the job of the commander, does not address the problem you pointed out. In fact it makes it worse. You can have only as many commanders as you have hives, but you can always have as many gorges as you have players on the alien team.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> I actually have no problem with alien commander. I've stated this. However, some (many?) people do, and I'm just showing how an NS1-like "asymmetric" gorge-builder approach would still be balanced using the current resource model. I've also stated other problems, that you have not mentioned, with actually using this approach. The problem you stated was: - There is "no" limit to the number of gorges The problems we've both stated/implied are: - Gorges can step on one another's toes - Griefers / Stupid expenses The problems I've additionally stated are: - There is no overhead team coordination - Gorges can't be in two places at once But <u>all these problems existed in NS1</u>, but <b>were not seen as problems</b>. Arguably, if it worked well enough in NS1 with gorges as a builder class, then it can work in NS2 - except that now the resource model is inherently balanced for all #vs# games.
One problem that is exclusive to the current "team pool" resource model + multiple commanders/gorges, is that it is very much first-come, first-serve. The likelihood of stepping on one another's toes is higher - assuming a lot of people go gorge/commander, anyway.
But if it were up to me, I would have 1 commander max per team, on both teams.
@Lazer (most recent post): I have to disagree with you completely. I think the current pool system is far less cumbersome and far more easily balanced than the split-distribution system. We already know about the problems with balancing a split-distribution system, effectively "team has sufficient funds, but each buyer has insufficient funds", based on NS1's alien team. Edit: Beaten to the punch by NurEinMesch.
One approach that has been discussed to tackle the problems with multiple commanding, is to have each secondary Hive/CC locked by default. A player could walk up to a locked Hive/CC, "use" it, and it would send a request to the current commander to unlock it, and he could allow or disallow it. Or he could simply unlock it ahead of time. <b>This would be ideal, because</b>: in an organised game, or in a game with players that trust one another and communicate well, you could have multiple commanders and know that each commander is not going to step on one another's toes - but in a less-organised game, the primary commander would simply never unlock the secondary Hives/CCs.
I'm all on board with the alien commander. One of the best parts about it IMO is how much more exposure it gives to the commanding role - there's twice as much demand for comms now, which means more people getting practice and more people being able and willing to do it(and more fun playing aliens for people who prefer to do it). I think the best part about NS 1.0 that went missing later on was the single gorge res model, things felt less team-oriented when that went away.
I still don't like the idea of multiple commanders though, it still seems like sort of a "just because" feature to me with lots of griefing potential and wasted manpower with very little benefit. How do you get enough resources to support two commanders? Which one of them do players listen to, especially for marines? NS just isn't a micro-heavy RTS game and there shouldn't be more than one person can handle for the comm to do.
At this stage i have not been able to really enjoy the game that much because of lag/performance problems but its been getting better recently. But if i think about the times on ns1 playing as the kharaa and ended up in a team where 1 person was saying to do this and others were saying to do something diffrent it ended up in complete disorganisation. Where the marines always had one person calling the shots if someone started to do his own thing most of the time he would just die. So it was easier as a marine to get your act together and move together. Now dont get me wrong i played plenty of games as kharaa where we dominated the marines but most wins from my experience seemed to go to the marines in ns1.
I cant see the problem in having a commander on the kharaa side to direct its players in the right direction. I would say let uwe experiment with the game at this stage ns1 was and still is a very unique game but ns2 should not be a copy put in a nicer jacket. With the all the tech now out on the market its time for ns evolve.
Comments
-Instead of 'team res' command chairs themselves gain a form of 'personal' team res (kind of like their energy)
-Commanders have a toggle button to 'disable other commanders from using your stuff'. This will make it so that no commander can use another commander's MACs or structures etc. They would also not be able to draw team resources from a command chair which is currently occupied.
I don't necessarily want to see this have to happen but it might be the only way to stop this issue. Right now if a random player decides he wants to hop in a comm chair and spend all of the team's resources he can.
The idea of an alien commander is perfectly legitimate for balance. It didn't make sense to me when playing NS1 that one team had it and one team never.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I gave the OP the appropriate response to his "actual" question. If he were asking from an account that was not created <u>ten seconds</u> before the post was written, then i would have seen the OP as acting sincere, despite the controversial question, and would of responded with a "qualitypost". But asking such a question, in such a way, is akin to opening a new "Remove Flamethrowers" post every week. Odds are the OP is being subversive.
-commander depends on the gorge to drop chambers
-gorge depends on the commander to drop hives (commander upgrades hives also)
-gorge depends on commander to upgrade his chambers (enhance chambers abilities and give out alien upgrades)
-the gorge and commander can both drop RTs, but the commander upgrades the RTs to increase production
-commander can drop whips only
bile bomb needs to return to the gorge as an ability, here how it can work:
bile bomb can be used to destroy marine builds, and spread infestation. Since bile bomb creates big splash its good way to spread infestation, and since infestation harms marine buildings, once dropped on them it would start to grow and rapidly cause damage. This makes two abilities into one, the current ugly circle to drop infestation as gorge now needs to go, it isn't good and it isn't "alien enough" ability.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This I like...as I have said a few times the role of an alien comm needs to be different.
The key to the above is that it also allows the alien comm to be more involved in the FPS side of the game.
I think most of hte grumbles are coming from people who enjoyed playing as aliens and are finding the new comm role too much like the marines comm and that the gorge (who was a much loved favourite) is totally gimped.
I think exploring the above as a solution would go a long way to silencing the critics.
The bile bomb being a way to spread temporary DI is gold...it makes sense and to have it slowly chew away (very slow rate of damage) on marine structures seems logical.
However, I see no problem with alien commanding. A lot of people against it (people who are like "two different races shouldn't play exactly the same") seem to have never played an RTS in the last 2 decades. In most RTSs, despite the huge differences in race, playing each race does have the same basic core functionality - and this is generally through a common resource model (including population), common restraints (the map limits, the population limit), a common view style, and common unit commanding mechanisms (the same hotkeys and mouse-clicks will do the same things on any race). The more similar the mechanisms (for example, you could go further and add super units/heroes to either side, or the concept of tiers/ages), the easier it is to balance.
To be fair, though, you could just scrap the alien commander and give the gorge that responsibility and the ability to spend TRes instead... Then it would be much more similar to NS, but the resource model on each team is both the same (You have a class (commander/gorge) that spends TRes). The gorge thus becomes a mobile "commander". The only problem then is the upgrading mechanism - but you might simply add another menu for the gorge, or allow the gorge to "use" an upgradable building, and upgrade it. Overhead team coordination is also missing - and some see this as a benefit (people who want NS1 re-skinned) and some see this as a detriment (people who need someone holding their hand and telling them where to go). And obviously, there is a disadvantage for the alien team in that the gorge can't be in two places at once, while an alien commander can - the same people see this as a benefit or detriment.
I think dual commanders are a great idea.
Imagine a 16v16 game.
If I am the only commander I have to care about 15 marines who are yelling for medpacks or ammo, I have to build the base and have my eyes everywhere on the map.
That is too much.
Now imagine this.
two different squats are lead by two different commanders (and maybe they are talking in two different TS3 channels)... It would be way more effective.
And I think that hivemind is way different from human commander.
As a human commander I give waypoints, give medpacks, drop buildings for my marines to build and stick the whole time with them and keep ordering them around. Once in a while I send a lonely MAC to a res-node to ninja build a RT, but thats it.
As a hivemind I just tell my aliens what I want them to do (i.e. at Tram: "please go over double-res to marinestart and harass 'em!") and let em go. After that I start building, placing infestation, teching up and do my own thing. Of course, I support the aliens by placing crags and so on. Once in a while I tell the aliens if something is under attack (and by how many with which arms, or gather them in a room and send them to marine base all together. Thats it.
It is very possible to have a team of nothing but gorges (but why?), resources would not be split between them, they would just take from a common pool; essentially it'd be first come, first serve.
Same as NS, basically, except that now, personal and team resources are split. So gorges don't take a higher proportion of overall team res, they take ALL the res and it is "shared" between them (or rather, it is a pool and people take from it at will); but this is fine because every player has an independent personal res pool for PERSONAL expenses - independent because if you have 1 tower and 6 players, or 1 tower and 12 players, each player is still going to be receiving the same amount of res.
What does this mean for balance?
For two teams of equal numbers of players, and equal numbers of resource towers:
Each team will gain resources at the same rate, and each team will be able to obtain higher technologies and structures when available, equally.
Each player will gain resources at the same rate, and each player will be able to obtain higher classes when available, equally.
In NS1, this was not the case, hence the unbalance for non-6v6.
Hell, with this resource model you could scrap MARINE commander if you added some sort of building class.
Before you bring up griefers, griefers are a hazard under any circumstances. How did NS1 deal with it? How does any game deal with it? It's a fact of life, like famine and disease and internet trolls.
"I will agree that multiple commanders is not a good idea. [...] Now, other than some highly organised games where you have say, a commander per squad, multiple commanding is generally just not effective."
Your approach, tasking gorges with the job of the commander, does not address the problem you pointed out. In fact it makes it worse. You can have only as many commanders as you have hives, but you can always have as many gorges as you have players on the alien team.
<i>Team res in NS2 is much different</i>. Right now it is more like <i>shared commander res</i>. What if in NS1 the aliens had to share resources instead of having the pool which would distribute evenly across the alien players? Even forget that, what if all of the gorges shares resources? Most likely they will all be fighting over who builds first etc or maybe some moron who wants to spam OCs instead of getting the first chambers.
This is why I strongly feel it might just be a better idea to have comm chairs / hives behave like the NS1 aliens / NS2 personal res. Each chair gets its own share of the res from the team res pool. If there is only 1 comm chair it receives the full team res as it comes in. If there are two+ chairs it splits across them. An unoccupied chair can have res 'drawn' from it but occupied ones cannot be interfered with. No longer will comms be fighting with each other (I see this very often right now actually).
Also a toggle button to prevent other comms from using the macs you have spawn from your chair or structures you have built.
-or-
<i>It might even help if a commander is allowed to close/lock unoccupied command chairs which will only open back up when that commander gets out or unlocks the chair again. That could be another potential solution without adding all of the extra stuff like personal comm chair / hive res and blocking commander interference.</i> This would actually be a bit of a 'cleaner' solution, at least easier to implement.
Don't really see a much better way to deal with the issue other than these restrictions which I think many would be welcomed to avoid the extremely common annoyance of noobs hopping in unoccupied chairs and spamming sentries etc when they should have been building extractors or something else actually needed at the moment.
The resource model from NS1 didn't scale for large and small groups of players. It only worked well for 6v6. This has to do with the asymmetric nature of the aliens not having a commander and having a Gorge instead. I've thought long and hard about this. The best way I thought this could be fixed was to add an alien commander.
The trick is making sure the two commanders still play totally differently (which is one reason why you aren't microing and healing your teammates, not giving waypoints, etc). In my mind, that's being totally true to "NS". The alien commander role is still evolving though so who knows what else he'll have to distinguish him.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
+1 on this Flayra, I can see where you are coming from with this. I like the fact that the alien commander can't control squads. In my mind, that adds a difference between the sides.
As I said before, the aliens have more of a freewill when it comes to commanders as the commanders can't order them about. But the marines are more organised.
The only thing I would like to see is that gorge to have more of an impact on the team and the commander. I think that the Drifter can build VERY slowly and the gorges have to help them. That way, the gorge can say
"Place a resource tower here commander" and then the commander does and the gorge gasses all over it :D
This is basically the same as NS1 like this. The only difference there is, is that the commander has to place the structures not the gorge. If you have a good commander who RESPONDS well then it is good.
1 thing I have to say though is about Multiple commanders. I don't mind it that much if the Aliens have multiple commanders but I do not think it is right for the marines to have multiple commanders. This I would like to see be removed.
Also, to prevent hassle I think that drifters should be tied to the Hive they were created from. For example: I am in Hive 1. I create 3 drifters and the person in Hive 2 cannot control as they are tied to that hive etc.
If I leave the hive then the other commanders can take control of the drifters until someone gets back into that hive.
Basically, I am in Hive 1. I have 3 drifters. I cannot use the drifters created at hive 3 because someone is in there. When they leave that hive though I can take control of the drifters but if someone enters that hive again I lose control of them.
If you understand?
That wouldn't work very well. The total team res would be distributed across several command stations and not available to either commander. For example CS 1 has 10 res, and CS 2 has 10 res. Now the commander (or one of the commanders) needs to build something that costs 20 res. While enough res total is available, neither commander can actually spend it to build the necessary structure/upgrade. One way around that would be to transfer res from one CS to the others, but that would be cumbersome and if it needs to be done a lot you may as well have a shared pool to begin with.
If I even try to form a conceptual model of NS2 in my mind it's so painful to think of how much it ruined the formula that I put it out of my mind entirely.
I don't get the "res scale" excuse, as it was 16v16, not 6v6, public servers that thrived strongest during ALL of NS's lifespan. It didn't seem like the gorges had problems overcoming the "scaling" you're talking about. It seems like an abstract mathematical solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist in the real world of people playing the game.
"I will agree that multiple commanders is not a good idea. [...] Now, other than some highly organised games where you have say, a commander per squad, multiple commanding is generally just not effective."
Your approach, tasking gorges with the job of the commander, does not address the problem you pointed out. In fact it makes it worse. You can have only as many commanders as you have hives, but you can always have as many gorges as you have players on the alien team.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I actually have no problem with alien commander. I've stated this.
However, some (many?) people do, and I'm just showing how an NS1-like "asymmetric" gorge-builder approach would still be balanced using the current resource model.
I've also stated other problems, that you have not mentioned, with actually using this approach.
The problem you stated was:
- There is "no" limit to the number of gorges
The problems we've both stated/implied are:
- Gorges can step on one another's toes
- Griefers / Stupid expenses
The problems I've additionally stated are:
- There is no overhead team coordination
- Gorges can't be in two places at once
But <u>all these problems existed in NS1</u>, but <b>were not seen as problems</b>.
Arguably, if it worked well enough in NS1 with gorges as a builder class, then it can work in NS2 - except that now the resource model is inherently balanced for all #vs# games.
One problem that is exclusive to the current "team pool" resource model + multiple commanders/gorges, is that it is very much first-come, first-serve. The likelihood of stepping on one another's toes is higher - assuming a lot of people go gorge/commander, anyway.
But if it were up to me, I would have 1 commander max per team, on both teams.
@Lazer (most recent post): I have to disagree with you completely. I think the current pool system is far less cumbersome and far more easily balanced than the split-distribution system. We already know about the problems with balancing a split-distribution system, effectively "team has sufficient funds, but each buyer has insufficient funds", based on NS1's alien team. Edit: Beaten to the punch by NurEinMesch.
One approach that has been discussed to tackle the problems with multiple commanding, is to have each secondary Hive/CC locked by default. A player could walk up to a locked Hive/CC, "use" it, and it would send a request to the current commander to unlock it, and he could allow or disallow it. Or he could simply unlock it ahead of time. <b>This would be ideal, because</b>: in an organised game, or in a game with players that trust one another and communicate well, you could have multiple commanders and know that each commander is not going to step on one another's toes - but in a less-organised game, the primary commander would simply never unlock the secondary Hives/CCs.
I still don't like the idea of multiple commanders though, it still seems like sort of a "just because" feature to me with lots of griefing potential and wasted manpower with very little benefit. How do you get enough resources to support two commanders? Which one of them do players listen to, especially for marines? NS just isn't a micro-heavy RTS game and there shouldn't be more than one person can handle for the comm to do.
I cant see the problem in having a commander on the kharaa side to direct its players in the right direction. I would say let uwe experiment with the game at this stage ns1 was and still is a very unique game but ns2 should not be a copy put in a nicer jacket. With the all the tech now out on the market its time for ns evolve.
Greetz