999 res - energy bottleneck for aliens

DizzyOne

Hi, I want to keep this short as I don't yet grasp the gameplay good enough to make a proper judgement. I'm also not sure whether this has been mentioned before.

I was just in a game that took about 2 hours, it was basically a very long stalemates, where aliens had 3 hives most of the time, and marines had 2 bases.

From what I noticed, it seemed that the marine team wasn't very adept at the game, or atleast their commander wasn't, and the aliens were very uncoordinated, causing the game to go on endlessly.

The thing I want to mention is that as the alien commander I noticed that the energy you receive to build drifters was a severe bottleneck to our progress. I've seen others mention this, where after the 2nd hive, the resources are simply spent on building crags and whips all over the place. However, after about an hour, we reached a point where we had 999 res, and were unable to make any real progress, the creep would be removed just as easily as we built it, and our towers would be destroyed quicker than we could rebuild them. This resulted in absolutely no progress for 1 hour of game time.

While this game is by no means a showcase of NS2 gameplay, I do believe it showcased an appropriate extreme situation of the severity of hive energy becoming a bottleneck.

I tried to improve the quality of the post, but I just couldn't, I hope I conveyed the message properly :P

Quovatis

I'd like to see a building queue added so you can produce drifters more efficiently. That's my bottleneck in late games. I can't produce drifters and build stuff with them fast enough to keep up with the res flow. Then after I do that, I find the last 4 drifters I sent got stuck on something and nothing was done. :( Alien commanders need something else to spend res on in the late game than just spamming crags and whips. To address the energy problem, perhaps add an expensive hive upgrade that would generate energy faster so infestation and drifters can be produced more often.

gorge.ous

Kind of the same thing with marines where we had a stalemate, both teams were kind of unorganized but aliens had max res and didn't know what to do with it (except going fade and lerk again and again and spaming crags and whips) and marine commander lacked ressources (as almost anybody did) for med packs/ammo to allow marines to advance as fades just riped through any advance we tried without but couldn't get through due to marines + a lot of sentries.

The res-flow and usage of ressources surely need some more tweaking but thats hard to tell when not feature complete,

Shrike3O

I'm thinking the addition of the Onos will help with breaking sieges. It might be useful to have some sort of large scale, generalized alien upgrades for late game (a few hundred resources apiece, maybe), giving across-the-board benefits to all players... bonus health, bonus damage, increased energy/health/armor regen rates, faster movement, increased Croach range from hives/pustules (not all of these at once, just one per upgrade :) )... generally useful stuff that would allow them to compete with sentry farms and the heavily armed marines parked behind them.

At a high price, those kinds of upgrades aren't something you'd see early game, and their individual effects might not be worth a strategy involving saving up early-game to try and get them earlier than usual. What it might accomplish, though, is giving the aliens a late-game advantage that lets them make that push into heavily-held territory in a game they should, in theory, already be winning. The trick is balancing it so that it doesn't make a closely-fought game suddenly slide in favor of the aliens.