Revamp of Hive Upgrade Structure
Champlo0
Join Date: 2012-04-17 Member: 150617Members
Join Date: 2012-04-17 Member: 150617Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Upgrades 2.0</div>So I got to thinking about how to make upgrades more versatile for aliens. This goes out in an effort to solve two problems that I see:
-Minute TRes costs for aliens
-No tech decisions for aliens (always crag every time)
-"Nerf" cara by buffing everything else
So to skip any intro here is my idea;
Let's have a tiered system that hives can use and differentiate between different levels of upgrades. Here's the guts:
There would be 5 ranks for each upgrade. For each rank you must mature an upgrade structure (shell, etc.) and buy a tech point in the hive menu.
For each tech point you invest it would cost 10x, x being the amount of tech points the hive currently has invested (yes this means the first upgrade is free aside from the 10 tres cost for the upgrade structure), giving incentive to get earlier hives for cheaper upgrades (I'd forsee something like offtech hives and primary tech hives). However, we remove upgrading hives into any particular sort of crag or shade hive, which removes 20 Tres cost initially for getting the upgrade.
You branch off based on the type of structure you build - if you build shells, you can get cara or regen tech points, if you build veils you can get camo or silence points. If you lose the hive with the invested points, you lose the tech; if you lose the upgrade you just lose access to the highest, most recent tech researched, so if you lose a veil and you have camo 1 and silence 1 but you got camo second then you lose access to camo. If you want to regain it you have to rebuild another mature upgrade structure. All you need to buy the actual tech is for the upgrade structure to be there and be mature, so you can just get another if you lose an upgrade structure.
This creates a situation where commanders must immediately start thinking about maturing upgrades and spending TRes more thoughtfully.
Now, the main details are what each rank contains for aliens. Here's what I propose, starting with carapace path
<b>Carapace</b>
<ul><li>Carapace 1: Allows skulks to obtain carapace at 60% of what carapace currently is</li><li>Carapace 2: Gives full carapace to Skulks, Lerks, and Gorges</li><li>Carapace 3: Gives alien buildings a passive carapace buff of 15% bonus armor that takes one minute to regenerate once destroyed.</li><li>Carapace 4: Gives Fades carapace</li><li>Carapace 5: Gives Onos carapace. Gives all lifeforms an ultra-carapace that takes 1 minute to regenerate and gives 15% stronger carapace.</li></ul>
<b>Regen</b>
<ul><li>Regen 1: Gives alien buildings 15% hastened maturity times. Gives all lifeforms 20% accelerated healing (Default heal, not regen).</li><li>Regen 2: Enables the regen upgrade on Skulks, Lerks, and Gorges. Gives Gorges 10% more effective heal and 10% energy regen buff. Aliens evolve 20% faster.</li><li>Regen 3: Alien structures regenerate 15% faster. Enables Fade regen</li><li>Regen 4: Enables Onos regen. 10% hastened maturity times.</li><li>Regen 5: Hypertabolism: If an alien has regen and loses all of its armor it goes into a super metabolic state where it maintains an active state of regeneration for five seconds. Being on fire gives this ability only 60% effectiveness.</li></ul>
<b>Silence</b>
<ul><li>Silence 1: Gives skulks silence when normally running.</li><li>Silence 2: Gives Gorges and Lerks silence All life forms have reduced footstep sounds by 40%.</li><li>Silence 3: Gives skulks silence all the time. Gives Fades silence</li><li>Silence 4: Give Onos silence</li><li>Silence 5: Killer Instinct: For every kill that is made in a six second period alien life forms trigger a killer instinct that metabolizes them, increasing their damage to marines by 15% for every kill.</li></ul>
<b>Camouflage</b>
<ul><li>Camouflage 1: Skulks, Lerks, and Gorges gain camouflage upgrades</li><li>Camouflage 2: Shades can be built. Aliens cannot be picked up on the outer edges of radars* (about 75% decreased radius)</li><li>Camouflage 3: Fades gain camouflage. Illusions receive 25% health instead of 10%</li><li>Camouflage 4: Onos gain camouflage. Aliens cannot be picked up at 65% of radars* radius.</li><li>Camouflage 5: Antiphase Spores: While on infestation alien players and structures do not appear on marine radars*. If an alien with camouflage uncloaks it gains a temporary attack boost speed of 30%. Aliens with camouflage can move at normal speeds (no skulks jumping, shadowstepping, etc.).</li></ul>
<i>* Radar refers to scans and observatory vision</i>
Now, I don't have any idea of what shift hive will bring. Whatever it brings, I'm sure it could be powerful and adjusted accordingly. Every upgrade path has passive abilities that are gained without actually using the upgrade for the most part. I left carapace mostly unchanged because I feel that it is strong enough as its own tech path. Evolutions I felt were much less useful I gave buffs to. Every evolution path has a final ability unlocked at T5.
Now, obviously everything could be subject to more TRes changes, abilities could be tweaked but the idea remains. Give aliens a TRes sink through the upgrade system and revamp the system to divert from the always crag style of gameplay so often witnessed.
I understand this system sounds complex and is a big changes but I believe the changes would result in much deeper gameplay for the alien commander.
-Minute TRes costs for aliens
-No tech decisions for aliens (always crag every time)
-"Nerf" cara by buffing everything else
So to skip any intro here is my idea;
Let's have a tiered system that hives can use and differentiate between different levels of upgrades. Here's the guts:
There would be 5 ranks for each upgrade. For each rank you must mature an upgrade structure (shell, etc.) and buy a tech point in the hive menu.
For each tech point you invest it would cost 10x, x being the amount of tech points the hive currently has invested (yes this means the first upgrade is free aside from the 10 tres cost for the upgrade structure), giving incentive to get earlier hives for cheaper upgrades (I'd forsee something like offtech hives and primary tech hives). However, we remove upgrading hives into any particular sort of crag or shade hive, which removes 20 Tres cost initially for getting the upgrade.
You branch off based on the type of structure you build - if you build shells, you can get cara or regen tech points, if you build veils you can get camo or silence points. If you lose the hive with the invested points, you lose the tech; if you lose the upgrade you just lose access to the highest, most recent tech researched, so if you lose a veil and you have camo 1 and silence 1 but you got camo second then you lose access to camo. If you want to regain it you have to rebuild another mature upgrade structure. All you need to buy the actual tech is for the upgrade structure to be there and be mature, so you can just get another if you lose an upgrade structure.
This creates a situation where commanders must immediately start thinking about maturing upgrades and spending TRes more thoughtfully.
Now, the main details are what each rank contains for aliens. Here's what I propose, starting with carapace path
<b>Carapace</b>
<ul><li>Carapace 1: Allows skulks to obtain carapace at 60% of what carapace currently is</li><li>Carapace 2: Gives full carapace to Skulks, Lerks, and Gorges</li><li>Carapace 3: Gives alien buildings a passive carapace buff of 15% bonus armor that takes one minute to regenerate once destroyed.</li><li>Carapace 4: Gives Fades carapace</li><li>Carapace 5: Gives Onos carapace. Gives all lifeforms an ultra-carapace that takes 1 minute to regenerate and gives 15% stronger carapace.</li></ul>
<b>Regen</b>
<ul><li>Regen 1: Gives alien buildings 15% hastened maturity times. Gives all lifeforms 20% accelerated healing (Default heal, not regen).</li><li>Regen 2: Enables the regen upgrade on Skulks, Lerks, and Gorges. Gives Gorges 10% more effective heal and 10% energy regen buff. Aliens evolve 20% faster.</li><li>Regen 3: Alien structures regenerate 15% faster. Enables Fade regen</li><li>Regen 4: Enables Onos regen. 10% hastened maturity times.</li><li>Regen 5: Hypertabolism: If an alien has regen and loses all of its armor it goes into a super metabolic state where it maintains an active state of regeneration for five seconds. Being on fire gives this ability only 60% effectiveness.</li></ul>
<b>Silence</b>
<ul><li>Silence 1: Gives skulks silence when normally running.</li><li>Silence 2: Gives Gorges and Lerks silence All life forms have reduced footstep sounds by 40%.</li><li>Silence 3: Gives skulks silence all the time. Gives Fades silence</li><li>Silence 4: Give Onos silence</li><li>Silence 5: Killer Instinct: For every kill that is made in a six second period alien life forms trigger a killer instinct that metabolizes them, increasing their damage to marines by 15% for every kill.</li></ul>
<b>Camouflage</b>
<ul><li>Camouflage 1: Skulks, Lerks, and Gorges gain camouflage upgrades</li><li>Camouflage 2: Shades can be built. Aliens cannot be picked up on the outer edges of radars* (about 75% decreased radius)</li><li>Camouflage 3: Fades gain camouflage. Illusions receive 25% health instead of 10%</li><li>Camouflage 4: Onos gain camouflage. Aliens cannot be picked up at 65% of radars* radius.</li><li>Camouflage 5: Antiphase Spores: While on infestation alien players and structures do not appear on marine radars*. If an alien with camouflage uncloaks it gains a temporary attack boost speed of 30%. Aliens with camouflage can move at normal speeds (no skulks jumping, shadowstepping, etc.).</li></ul>
<i>* Radar refers to scans and observatory vision</i>
Now, I don't have any idea of what shift hive will bring. Whatever it brings, I'm sure it could be powerful and adjusted accordingly. Every upgrade path has passive abilities that are gained without actually using the upgrade for the most part. I left carapace mostly unchanged because I feel that it is strong enough as its own tech path. Evolutions I felt were much less useful I gave buffs to. Every evolution path has a final ability unlocked at T5.
Now, obviously everything could be subject to more TRes changes, abilities could be tweaked but the idea remains. Give aliens a TRes sink through the upgrade system and revamp the system to divert from the always crag style of gameplay so often witnessed.
I understand this system sounds complex and is a big changes but I believe the changes would result in much deeper gameplay for the alien commander.
Comments
<b>Deal breakers first:</b>
<ul><li>Any sort of upgrade which is only provided to part of the team.</li><li>Requiring multiple structures to provide a single upgrade.</li><li>Overly complicated - especially with each structure working differently.</li></ul>
<b>Really cool stuff:</b>
<ul><li>Partial upgrades over time (I've never really liked the removal of multiple chambers from a few builds back).</li><li>Overall team effects which work to counter Marine abilities.</li><li>Kharaan structure buffs from upgrades.</li><li>Super-Abilities gained by having max upgrades.</li></ul>
I don't know if I agree with not specializing the hives.. with Augmentation now being an upgrade, there is already hardly any reason to have a second hive right off (if any). By making it so you can have any upgrade with one hive, further guts that reason. Plus if you're still planning on Hive's providing additional upgrade 'slots', then it wouldn't make much sense to allow all upgrades with no real way to use them.
I think I'd prefer to see the tiers stay at 3 instead of making it 5, it looks a bit stretched anyway - working this way it'd stay linked to the hive to keep the res cost the same. Here are my tweaks to your system:
<!--coloro:#F5DEB3--><span style="color:#F5DEB3"><!--/coloro--><b>Carapace</b>
<ul><li>Carapace 1: All lifeforms can gain carapace at 50% of what it currently is</li><li>Carapace 2: All lifeforms can gain full carapace</li><li>Carapace 3: Gives all structures, and allows all lifeforms to gain ultra-carapace that limits the max damage of a single attack at 50 hit points, and takes 2 minutes to regenerate (or can be healed sooner).</li></ul>
As you can see, I tweaked the ultra-carapace a bit. This is essentially what the dev's gave the Clogs to prevent grenades from eating them apart. This would give a one time off use to alien players and structures as well, it would also assist with the first shotgun hit. Also increased the regen time a bit, one minute seemed a little too generous.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
<!--coloro:#FFC0CB--><span style="color:#FFC0CB"><!--/coloro--><b>Regen</b>
<ul><li>Regen 1: All lifeforms can gain 50% of the current Regen value, and 20% accelerated healing (Default heal, not regen).</li><li>Regen 2: All lifeforms can gain 100% of the current Regen value, also increases infestation healing by 100%</li><li>Regen 3: Gives alien buildings 15% hastened maturity times, also provides Hypertabolism: If an alien has regen and loses all of its armor it goes into a super metabolic state where it maintains an active state of regeneration for five seconds. Being on fire denies this ability.</li></ul>
The hastened maturity is an excellent touch, but needs to be at the end of the tech - otherwise everyone would get this one ability every time (especially since it doesn't require players to select it). I would also suggest having the Hypertabolism simply not work when on fire - makes the flamethrower that much more effective.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
<!--coloro:#ADD8E6--><span style="color:#ADD8E6"><!--/coloro--><b>Silence</b>
<ul><li>Silence 1: All life forms can gain reduced footstep and attack sounds by 50%.</li><li>Silence 2: All life forms can gain reduced footstep and attack sounds by 100%.</li><li>Silence 3: Reduces the sounds of kharaan structures by 100%. Also provides Killer Instinct: After a kill, a Kharaa with this ability will enter into a state of 15% increased damage for six seconds. The damage buff doesn't stack, but will start again with each additional kill.</li></ul>
Again I tweaked your super ability, just seemed a bit too generous.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
<!--coloro:#DDA0DD--><span style="color:#DDA0DD"><!--/coloro--><b>Camouflage</b>
<ul><li>Camouflage 1: Reduces Marine Blip distance by 10%. All lifeforms can gain Camouflage which takes 5 seconds to activate.</li><li>Camouflage 2: Reduces Marine Blip distance by 35%. Camouflage activation time reduced to 2 seconds.</li><li>Camouflage 3: Reduces Marine Blip distance by 60%. Antiphase Spores: While on infestation alien players and structures do not appear on marine radars*. If an alien with camouflage uncloaks it gains a 6 second attack boost speed of 30%. Aliens with camouflage can move at normal speeds (no skulks jumping, shadowstepping, etc.).</li></ul>
Shades being built only after the 2nd upgrade really hurts this system. Especially since the Shade structure is (or was.. back when cloaking worked on players) the key to using this build.<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
There's something else I don't quite understand about your system, did you mean for every Kharaan player to automatically get these abilities whenever the khaam researches them - or are they still selected individually by the players? I changed all your wording to lean toward the latter, but I wanted to make sure.
And one thing I don't like about my own adjustments is that the Silence ability doesn't provide any other functionality. The only thought I could come up with would be to combine Silence and Camouflage, but then an entire new ability would be needed and I couldn't come up with one on the spot.
Shells, Veils, and whatever Shift hives have for upgrades would be separate from any hive upgrade. For each matured upgrade structure you have (shell, veil, etc.) you gain the ability to invest 1 point to the respective tech tree (crag, shade, shift) for any hive. For every point you invest in a hive the cost of investing goes up by 10 TRes with the first point costing 0 TRes.
There are no limits to how many points you can invest however after you get about 3 upgrades constructing a second hive will be cheaper if you're not focusing on one path. Thus the intention is for one hive to be a hive with a wide area of investment across multiple upgrades while another hive would have one tech path to reduce costs. The overall goal is to give more strategy to tech paths.
To clarify, some upgrades have global passives in my original idea. For example, silence 2 says all life forms which denotes that you do not have to possess the upgrade for its global passive to be active. Camouflage also contains this for its blip reduction and so does regen. The idea behind these global passives is that you have the option to branching out to a certain tech across multiple upgrade paths, even with a single hive.
I also didn't want flamethrowers to be a hard-counter to regen which is why I only wanted it to reduce its effectiveness rather than limit it entirely.
I also acknowledge the oddity of the silence and camouflage upgrades. They're very niche and I tried to expand their usage by differentiating their distribution towards life forms; I believe skulks benefit from silence much more than any other life form hence I put it at the beginning of the tech path to make it more of an early game powerhouse that you might rush for your first tech which is another goal I sought to achieve when making the idea. Back to silence and camo, I think camo needs to allow aliens to move around faster with it on. Silence also just isn't that good on anything other than a skulk in my opinion; I'd opt for some sort of buff to it like giving a small benefit to damage when attacking a marine's back but that complexes me because it would be extremely powerful especially for things like fades.
Overall I wanted the super-abilities to be a very heavy investment that required a lot of planning and a strong end-game strategy for the aliens. I wanted the techs earlier in the trees to have stronger early game implications so that spreading out your techs would be a viable strategy.
As per the removal of exclusiveness of each upgrade to a hive, this was done early on in my thought process. The reason you definitely want multiple hives more so with my idea is because of the equation I mentioned earlier that I think you might have missed. Every upgrade or tech point or whatever you wish to call it you invest into an individual hive it costs 10x with X being the amount of upgrades currently invested that hive. That means it costs 0-10-20-30-40 to go straight down one tech path, and you can't flip around either; you can't research cara 3 at one hive then cara 4 at the other hive without getting cara 1-3 first at the second hive. This also means that if you try to get even more techs after finishing a tree it's going to cost 50-60-70-80-90 TRes for the sixth through tenth upgrades. If you get a second hive, however, it will only cost 0-10-20-30-40.
I hope that clears things up and responded adequately to your questions and suggestions. I'd also concur with some of your suggestions and proceedingly change them if this idea were further developed like putting shade at the beginning of camo.