Why are there stalemates
Asraniel
Join Date: 2002-06-03 Member: 724Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Retired Community Developer
Join Date: 2002-06-03 Member: 724Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester, Retired Community Developer
There is a interesting thread about why marines lose. So i wanted to make one about why there are hour long stalemates.
From my observation, most games end like this right now.
The game starts fairly balanced, marines push, aliens push etc.
Then aliens get a second hive up, get fades before marines have flamethrowers and the marines lose all the stuff they had outside their base
Now the stalemate begins. Marines have one base with one RT and begin to turtle. The aliens on the other hand take over the rest of the map and have all hives.
I'm wondering why the marines can survive in this situation for hours (until one team decides to leave the server).
I think this are the problems:
-Marine weapons too cheap, they should not be able to afford every weapon with one restower
-Weapon pickup: when a marine dies while defending the base, he can usually pick up the weapon he lost himself, making problem 1 worse
-Fades are very bad against structures
And of course the missing tier 3 units. But even without all that tech, marines on 1 base should not be able to hold against aliens on 4 bases with all RTs.
Any thoughts?
From my observation, most games end like this right now.
The game starts fairly balanced, marines push, aliens push etc.
Then aliens get a second hive up, get fades before marines have flamethrowers and the marines lose all the stuff they had outside their base
Now the stalemate begins. Marines have one base with one RT and begin to turtle. The aliens on the other hand take over the rest of the map and have all hives.
I'm wondering why the marines can survive in this situation for hours (until one team decides to leave the server).
I think this are the problems:
-Marine weapons too cheap, they should not be able to afford every weapon with one restower
-Weapon pickup: when a marine dies while defending the base, he can usually pick up the weapon he lost himself, making problem 1 worse
-Fades are very bad against structures
And of course the missing tier 3 units. But even without all that tech, marines on 1 base should not be able to hold against aliens on 4 bases with all RTs.
Any thoughts?
Comments
I agree with what your saying here, the games can end tho they just take a really long time.
Maybe marines need to get flamethrower or GL a bit earlier to avoid alien taking over all base due to fade early game advantage, but on the other hand if marines do a good job at harassing potential hive locations this scenario shouldn't happen.
It goes two ways i think because a couple good marines with a GL can seriously mess up alien hives quickly.
Guess we have to wait for T3 ^^
He has to gather all aliens up in vent or flight and let em attack together. A gorge (or 2) with bilebomb some fades, maybe a lerk.. and a skulk. the skulk is essential to destroy the IPs.
In addition he has to drop pustules all over the marine base to distract the turrets. They will start to fire at the pustules but do only pathetic damage to 'em.
The gorges will stay around the corner and overheal, then wait for their attack to recharge. They then go around the corner and strafe while attacking only the sentries that block access to powernodes, power packs, or IPs.
Fades meanwhile will go up to eat sentry fire and kill grenade launchers. If they get hit by flamethrowers, they should retreat near the gorges, as flamethrowers can't do squat against the alien forward area without exposing themselves.
Once the gorges kill the powernode, the commander can help by placing cysts everywhere in the marine base, and the gorges can create insane hydra positions during the downtime.
It will actually be a lot better when whips get the bombard ability as the aliens will gain a much needed use for the excess team res they always have.
<ol type='1'><li>Forced full team marine teamwork
That is, when you only MS, the entire marine side is essentially forced to work together. For example, even though aliens are op, its still hard for them to overcome 6 marines constantly working together in a 6v6.</li><li>Alien team not working together
Quite simply, aliens don't need to work together to win, so many pub alien teams don't. However, it takes teamwork to overcome turtling right now, which is why you occasionally see an organized alien team able to end these type of stalemates.</li><li>Lack of hard penalty for losing expansions
Expanding is important for marines (more res, better location, etc), but there is no hard penalty for not doing so or losing your expansion. In a traditional RTS, the hard penalty would be losing all access to resources (because resources in any given area are limited). The same could be done in NS2, but I don't think it will work as well because there are too few res nodes on each map. For example, summit has 9 res nodes, which is the almost the smallest number of res locations on a SC1/2 map (counting the crystal locations of the maps <a href="http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Maps#1v1" target="_blank">here</a>, the smallest I found was about 8 for a melee (1v1) map). Instead, I think you can get the same effect by tying upgrades to tech nodes (like needing a 2nd hive for fades and skulk leap). The key is to create a serious setback in a core gameplay function when you lose an expansion (traditional RTS = res, NS2 = tech). However, you'd have to do some serious balancing in other aspects before implementing this, or it would just make aliens even more op</li></ol>
The end.
Not enough people know how to bile bomb. Overheal yourself, making sure that yellow bar fully encircles the red bar, then recharge, then peek around the corner and bile bomb the outer cluster of sentries. If you lose health too fast, then find the danger sentry that's not getting hit by your bomb and focus on that instead. Once you get to double digit health, sit back and overheal again, then repeat. If a mac comes, switch to primary weapon and kill it. Depend on your team to take out grenade launchers, and place hydras with your res earned from killing sentries to take out flamethrowers. If marines build arcs, attack the arcs and take advantage of the fact that they let up on sentry farming.
That's true, but its more of a soft, rather than hard, penalty. Marines can limp along for quite a long time with just one RT, which goes to show that losing expansions is crippling but not lethal. Compare that to SC1/2, where if you lose an expansion, and you have no more resources in your main base, its basically gameover.
With the loss of players as it becomes more apparent that your side is losing badly, I don't think the community has explored the full extent of the endgame comeback options.
They can limp along at their main base for a while but they can't get the expqansion back, which they need to be able to move out further into the level, so they are going to lose, one way or another.
But this:
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Weapon pickup: when a marine dies while defending the base, he can usually pick up the weapon he lost himself, making problem 1 worse<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Is a horrible idea in my opinion(to take it out of the game that is).
All it does is mean I have to spend more money so my teammates can use my guns, just make them cheaper so they can afford them as well, the point of the armroy is that it gives us freedom of choice, why take it away by forcing everyone to scrounge off everyone else?
wat