Role of the ARC
NurEinMensch
Join Date: 2003-02-26 Member: 14056Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2003-02-26 Member: 14056Members, Constellation
My understanding of the role of the ARC is that it should be a tool to deal with heavily entrenched alien positions by forcing the aliens to come out and attack them. But right now I see it mostly use as a surprise/mass attack to take out a hive within seconds. Aliens don't have much time to react to that and even if they spot it early there's not that much they can do because ARCs have so much hit points.
I think the damage of the ARC should be reduced, together with their hit points. At the same time the ARC range should be increased and more emphasize put on its ability to shoot through walls (rather than waltzing 6 ARCs directly into the hive room).
I think the damage of the ARC should be reduced, together with their hit points. At the same time the ARC range should be increased and more emphasize put on its ability to shoot through walls (rather than waltzing 6 ARCs directly into the hive room).
Comments
Noticing a lot of marine comms spamming CC's now stopping Aliens from getting hives up. And as they are only 15 res now if one goes down another is dropped soon enough.
Marine stuff is just too cheap now. No thought required any more and the sight of ARC's backed up with GL toting marines with jet packs after 10 minutes feels wrong.
Lots to love in 201 but the game seems to play on fast forward atm and tactics etc is a lot less needed and its all about Skulk rushes and SG rushes early game. Too many games are over within minutes.
A limit to how many ARC's are deployable at one time would maybe help. Say 2 on the field at any time and if one is destroyed another can be deployed. The sentries need something similar as I saw two servers crash last night as there was an insane amount of them spammed all over the map. Hydras too but as they are quite weak atm I dont know.
The games are becoming too fast and feel rushed. Aliens panicking to get that all important second hive if the predictable Skulk rush fails. I just hope its a marketing ploy to lure some sales during the PAX event and afterwards things might return to normal.
Halving the damage ARCs do (fixing a bug) but also halving their cost arguably created an ARC problem, as you have just as many damage-per-second-per-Tres coming out of a bunch of ARCs, but twice as many hit points to chew through.
ARCs role is not to stand inside the hiveroom. They should be more fragile and have more range so they work more like a siege weapon.
ARCS should also cost more than 10 if they get more range.
Why?
It behaved exactly like siege turrets in NS1:
<ul><li>Aliens can scout that you're deploying them and react</li><li>If they don't scout them in time, you put them on a clock. They have to match your ARCs' damage with gorge and crag healing, while trying to fight off the ARCs.</li><li>ARCs have limited range and attack slowly, so you have to target important things and make them count if you're against competent opponents who will push you out</li></ul>
They shouldn't be a tool for instantly nuking a room full of stuff worth 300 Tres. The should be for 'damage over time' the same way the new Lerk is.
What happens now?
<ul><li>ARCs deal damage so bloody fast that there's no reasonable way for the aliens to mitigate their damage, and no alien attacks (except for the onos' smash) can kill ARCs fast enough to remove them before they become cost effective. It's also not realistic to kill *every observatory* and prevent scans so that ARCs cannot fire.</li><li>It's brutally easy to be cost effective with them because they're cheaper than they used to be, but the cost of the structures they attack was not changed accordingly</li></ul>
I don't understand why ARCs were changed, and I'd really love to hear playtesters/developers explain the changes.
*edit* internetexplorer's idea of making them DoT is pretty sweet. I like it.
You mean my idea of returning them to the way they were?
Why?
It behaved exactly like siege turrets in NS1:
<ul><li>Aliens can scout that you're deploying them and react</li><li>If they don't scout them in time, you put them on a clock. They have to match your ARCs' damage with gorge and crag healing, while trying to fight off the ARCs.</li><li>ARCs have limited range and attack slowly, so you have to target important things and make them count if you're against competent opponents who will push you out</li></ul>
They shouldn't be a tool for instantly nuking a room full of stuff worth 300 Tres. The should be for 'damage over time' the same way the new Lerk is.
What happens now?
<ul><li>ARCs deal damage so bloody fast that there's no reasonable way for the aliens to mitigate their damage, and no alien attacks (except for the onos' smash) can kill ARCs fast enough to remove them before they become cost effective. It's also not realistic to kill *every observatory* and prevent scans so that ARCs cannot fire.</li><li>It's brutally easy to be cost effective with them because they're cheaper than they used to be, but the cost of the structures they attack was not changed accordingly</li></ul>
I don't understand why ARCs were changed, and I'd really love to hear playtesters/developers explain the changes.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Pretty sure the biggest problem with them is lacking a mid game counter. Lerk bile bomb, while more effective now, is nowhere near the structure raper it used to be. As a consequence, aliens have to frantically tear them down like an rt.
Mid game, if they spend all their res on arc, and manage to walk into your hive with little tech and you die, its your fault. Late game when res is floating on both sides, I agree, it gets outta hand.
Aliens strength is spread over a wide area with infestation and pure speed.
Marines should be a strong when doing single group pushes. At the moment it comes from a mass rush of whatever, ARC, SGs, JP, etc.
The style of a Marine assault is right, just needs to be strong at a more steady pace. Currently, Marine assaults get ripped to shreds if they are too slow and very powerful when spammed.
I would be nervous about increasing range much: You can already take out half of ore extraction from within crushing for example. I wouldn't want a situation where aliens had to hold all the rooms adjascent to all their hives just to protect their hives (let alone their extractors)
If you have to do this, it's a sign that the tradeoffs on them are not balanced properly!
No friendly fire on them doesn't help either as marines can simply grenade spam them.
ARC rush takes little planning but you have to sacrifice upgrades entirely, so its not like Marines are magically gifted ARC turrets. When an initial ARC rush fails or the ARCS kill only 1 hive, they are pretty setback on resources.
It's tied to a larger trait of all the robotics tech: they all do one thing that players can do, but they can't do anything else
<ul><li>ARCs - damage buildings</li><li>MACs - build/repair</li><li>Turrets - damage players/buildings</li></ul>
I think the base design ("mobile siege unit that shoots through walls and only hits buildings") is okay, and it's nice because it's relatively simple. It really just needs some numbers changed to be free of weirdness again.
or at least they can't deploy on infestation, so that cysts act as a deterrent/timesink?
I think a more interesting solution would be leaving the arcs as they are but make them unspammable. To give marines a reason to get map control aswell, what about tieing the number to com stations? So per default, you could have one arc. If you hold an additional position, you can get another one.
Some similar system would be tieing the arcs to the robitics factory, so basically one robotics factory can control one ARC at a time. This would allow for another counter strategy, if you can't take down ARC, but take down the robitiocs, the arc would go unpowered or something like that (unless there is another unused robotics which can take over).
Besides that, a normal solution could be to increase the cost again and decrease the damage, but then it's pretty much back to the situation we had a few builds ago.
Decreasing the splash sightly would be good aswell, but that would require good targeting systems.
As for the role of the arc, I think def killer should do. Kills def and allows marines to move in to do the final push on the hive.
Putting a cap on them is supposed to balance them...that's the point.
The problem with just increasing the price is it prevents arcs from being a viable strategy until you already have good map control. A cap keeps it as an option throughout the game (team 156's early arc vs skulk rush anyone?) without being overpowered.
It's a bit arbritrary but would be worth it I think - good point about tying them to cc's.
There can be many variations on how this idea would be implemented but the core idea is simple:
Delpoyed ARCs are easier to kill than undeployed ARCs.
The original thread, link below, talks about some of the ways this would affect ARC use and commander/team interaction with ARCs.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=114016" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...howtopic=114016</a>
Had a game yesterday. We saw 7 ARCs rolling to Elevator transfer. 1 Onos, 2 Fades and a few skulks went there as soon as they where set up to fire. After we killed 4 ARCs the other 3 made the final shots to kill the Hive. That was heavily unbalanced, Marines didn't even defend them and we had no chance.
In NS1 we had a Turret factory that could be killed to switch all Sieges off immediatly.
So maybe ARCs should have some kind of portable power station with them? Making them weaker would mean the com will make 15 instead of 7 and rush then.
I feel like this would be a decent solution if they wanted to avoid a cost adjustment or supply count limitation.
They already are, because they can't move when they're deployed.
I don't think we should start to add arbitrary rules when we've already seen balanced ARCs in previous builds and can simply return to that.
A - aliens had a thret of a group of marines, they didnt know if the marines were going to rush in or stay outside and seige -
B Siege was slower but safer because you didnt have to enter the hive IE a respawning area -
C Sieges took time to Build and you had to defend while buliding , creating a skilled invorment where team work was CRUCAL defending and building was key to winning the game
ALIens had to scout for marines setting up seiges and had time to react ,as the more players building the less covering YIN AND YANG very ballenced
- arcs kind of crush all this, theoretically you could arc rush a place with 0 marines if u got lucky and had tons of res to waste, they just auto kill and win the game for you
*ID almost like to see a marine have to drive A single arc so that they cant shoot their guns in addition to the Arc
or possibly have Arcs do 1/2 damage to the hive and full damage to oc's other structures due to the Hives Size
Maybe they could loose the tracking and shoot somwhere else maybe hitting friendly buildings causing damage.
- arcs kind of crush all this, theoretically you could arc rush a place with 0 marines if u got lucky and had tons of res to waste, they just auto kill and win the game for you<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I loved NS1 sieges because you could drop them secretly in vents and quietly ambush a hive.
Today on NS2_tram we were heading towards a loss, so I build approximately 10 arc turrets and killed Shipping hive in 1 shot, then killed repiair room in a few. Won the game. Hilarious.