Let's talk cysts
Darkomicron
Join Date: 2010-11-24 Member: 75256Members
Join Date: 2010-11-24 Member: 75256Members
<div class="IPBDescription">about the way it is now and what might be preferred!</div>Good day everyone ^.^
So, cysts! The way it currently works is; the alien commander spreads cysts (quite rapidly) and after a while these cysts spread the infestation which makes building resource towers and different structures possible for the alien commander. The cysts mature over time and get some more hp, but are clearly visible and easy to be taken out and easy to be replaced.
The thing that I noticed while playing as the Kham is that the cysts are very easily taken out by a small squad of marines, or even more frustrating, a single marine. This breaks the chain and everything beyond that point will be dying slowly. How to fix this? Put down a new cyst. But is that really what you want to do all the time?
The problem is that it's not fun as a Kham to keep your eye on cysts and resource towers ALL the time, you want to give your aliens directions, try to find gaps and giving them an edge in combat.
As a marine, you want to hunt down aliens, not stare at the ground chopping at a cyst all the time.
<b>
Possible solution:</b>
Make cysts cloaked and increase the cooldown of the ability to spawn them. This will slow down cyst spreading a little bit but make them harder to spot and kill. You could make an active room (so one with a power node) make cysts visible. That will make cysts in marine territory an easy target to kill. In the lategame flamethrowers/GL's will still devastate cysts and that's not problem, because this change was focused on removing the tedious process of finding the missing link and filling it as Kham and removing the marine's focus from the floor and switch it to killing aliens.
<i>Downside</i>: rooms without marine structures do not have a powernode and will not be able to show cysts. You also cannot activate this powernode because you cannot create structures on infestation. However, a scan could fix that problem if the cysts are cloaked.
Do you guys believe this element of the game (repairing/removing cyst chains) is indeed no fun, and do you like the solution I proposed? Let me know if you have a better idea! :)
Thanks for reading!
Darkomicron
So, cysts! The way it currently works is; the alien commander spreads cysts (quite rapidly) and after a while these cysts spread the infestation which makes building resource towers and different structures possible for the alien commander. The cysts mature over time and get some more hp, but are clearly visible and easy to be taken out and easy to be replaced.
The thing that I noticed while playing as the Kham is that the cysts are very easily taken out by a small squad of marines, or even more frustrating, a single marine. This breaks the chain and everything beyond that point will be dying slowly. How to fix this? Put down a new cyst. But is that really what you want to do all the time?
The problem is that it's not fun as a Kham to keep your eye on cysts and resource towers ALL the time, you want to give your aliens directions, try to find gaps and giving them an edge in combat.
As a marine, you want to hunt down aliens, not stare at the ground chopping at a cyst all the time.
<b>
Possible solution:</b>
Make cysts cloaked and increase the cooldown of the ability to spawn them. This will slow down cyst spreading a little bit but make them harder to spot and kill. You could make an active room (so one with a power node) make cysts visible. That will make cysts in marine territory an easy target to kill. In the lategame flamethrowers/GL's will still devastate cysts and that's not problem, because this change was focused on removing the tedious process of finding the missing link and filling it as Kham and removing the marine's focus from the floor and switch it to killing aliens.
<i>Downside</i>: rooms without marine structures do not have a powernode and will not be able to show cysts. You also cannot activate this powernode because you cannot create structures on infestation. However, a scan could fix that problem if the cysts are cloaked.
Do you guys believe this element of the game (repairing/removing cyst chains) is indeed no fun, and do you like the solution I proposed? Let me know if you have a better idea! :)
Thanks for reading!
Darkomicron
Comments
Yes, the flamethrower is in the lategame though and that's alright. Then aliens have mobile lerks and fades anyway and they should be able to keep up with the marines. But in the early/mid game it's so annoying if your cyst chains get killed all the time. If you make the cysts cloaked and you need a scan, then at least the marine commander is also occupied instead of a single marine taking away the attention of the Kham from battles just to create more cysts (which are easily denied as stated before).
Simply putting down cysts is boring, and for marines as well. It needs some more depth to it, which cloaking can provide in my opinion. (It's not worth going shade hive and placing shades all over the map just to cloak your infestation for rambo marines, too much of an investment).
Add to this that marines can just reprocess an extractor thats too far out of the way and you can break the cyst chain at any point to seriously annoy the commander (if he notices, some commanders dont) and the fact that hives are 40 res whilst CCs only 15 it makes me think that aliens are really a bit gimped in terms of expansion possibilities. If their going to leave teh cysts in I think that they should add a res cost to powernodes, so atleast aliens have a similar form of annoyance base harass early on. Oh and stop harvesters being paper thin (or make extractors easier to kill)
Seeing the alien cyst into your marine base is irritating to no end.
Having marines knock out key cysts early game is irritating and hugely disruptive.
Having to replace cysts after every attack because flamers nuke them all is annoying. You have to slowly watch the infestation grow back so you can reroot your whips.
Being annoyed by pathfinding errors where massive lag happens when placing cysts, or simply you cannot place them.
Then again, marines hate the power node system too. I just wish the cyst system was less aggressive, and more defensive. A clear line of where your territory was.
This is an option as well, of course... You can keep cysts as they are now and add that they are cloaked. But you cannot spread cysts into a room with an active powernode.
This will make killing cysts harder, you cannot abuse it by covering the whole map, and doesn't slow down alien expansion from what it is now.