Fact #1: Carapace is the single biggest boost in combat effectiveness.
- Carapace is the single most important upgrade in the game. It's chosen first in nearly every comp match, and provides the incredible benefit of changing TTK on a Skulk from 9 bullets to 13. Nothing else in the game comes close to providing that level of combat effectiveness.
Fact #2: Celerity's benefits against good marines are minimal.
-Good marines are going to be accurate at shooting skulks regardless of how fast they're moving. Moreover, the speed increase from celerity disappears after getting hit once. Celerity simply doesn't come close to the 30%+ effective HP boost that carapace provides.
Fact #3: Being egg locked isn't actually a thing with a competent commander and a few gorges.
-Alien teams only get egg locked in the following situations:
1.) Marines inside the base actively shooting eggs.
2.) Skulks suiciding at an insane rate.
Asking someone to go gorge (and someone will always go gorge) will prevent problem #1 in the vast majority of games. If marines still get into your base and stay there despite being gorged up, your team was going to lose regardless of what you did. Problem #2 is prevented by having carapace (less deaths/lost engagements), and by telling your skulks to hold points instead mindlessly rushing the marine main base. It takes a serious amount of (useless) main base suiciding to deplete eggs - even on a 24 player server. So long as your skulks are suiciding in useless positions, you won't suffer any serious egg lock problems.
Now please, stop perpetuating the cycle of suck. Go crag/carapace first. Thanks.
#1 - TTK increases and being used in competitive play don't make it absolutely better. Competitive play is a bit of a world apart from pub play. The few teams available play to their strengths and hopefully exploit opponents weaknesses.
#2 - The speed increase is useful for covering larger areas and covering ground faster; no wall jump required. This makes it easier to reach enemy res nodes. Competitive players may have little need for it, over other passive abilities, but it is useful for pubs.
#3 - If it doesn't work, then you would lose anyway, is not a good argument. If it was, then I could claim:
-Capping 6 RT first is the best strategy; more res. A competent team should be able to wall-jump and cover 6 nodes. If they can't, they were going to lose anyway, fact. As long as your skulk aren't being "useless", you'll keep all 6 nodes and get 3 hives in under 7 minutes.
I could go on and make up more strategies that can only be defended with "competent" players.
You initial argument centers around combat engagements. NS2 is more than small scale skirmishes. I think you need to prove your hypothesis with your arguments in your replies; saving 25-30 res from egg spawning and putting it toward a fast second hive and early hive support. I also think you should stop saying "I'm much better than you at this game on either side of it.", personal attacks don't help your argument.
NS2 is still young (least since release). As more teams form, we will see new ideas and new strategies. In my experience, there are very few absolutes, no matter how solid a cookie cutter strategy/build looks.
Hey, IAMKING, just wanted to drop you line and tell you that it doesn't mean that it will work either.
I just like how you addressed zero points and popped in a personal attack to boot!
I'm just pointing out that most aliens players suck at wall jumping. This reduces the obviousness of crag first as the always-winning-godking-strategy people make it out to be. The OP isn't wrong, it's just that nothing he says is even controversial. The whole post could be summed up as 'good teams are good'.
Now please, stop perpetuating the cycle of suck. Go crag/carapace first. Thanks.
Oh, we're talking about bad players? That's who we're talking about? And you're telling bad players what the best ones do to win? Seems you might get more traction here talking about how wall jumping is instrumental to the success of crag first then telling people how to execute wall jumps better instead of implying it's just the upgrade itself that accomplishes the goal of a win. (Which is obvious tripe.)
That is, if you had a point. This thread doesn't have one, unless that point is to troll people.
Fact #3: Being egg locked isn't actually a thing with a competent commander and a few gorges.
Oh...I guess that was the point of this thread after all.
you keep saying pugs, but i don't think it means what you think it means. i believe you're searching for "pub". pugs imply some sort of organization and are typically formed by competitive players.
I wish people got better at adapting to situations instead of following scripts. Make the choice based on map, starting location, and perceived team skill (crag is better for good lerks).
Ah King, your righteous anger will surely make us all see the error of our ways.
Obviously, if you go shift hive you're going to lose all the time right? Pub play doesn't bear that out, although competitive play might.
Competitive players already know what the OP is saying, and pub players are finding immense success with shift/crag. Ignoring reality just so you can be one of the elite is childish. I could understand your position a lot better if you were arguing against shade first or something but shift/crag works great in pub play and most pub players couldn't give less of a damn about competitive play.
Being told that you're doing it wrong for using a tremendously successful strategy is ludicrous. Even experienced pub commanders would consider crag first against a skilled match up with Marines, but how often does that happen in reality? About 40% of the time?
edit: if you really want to understand why shift is better, play an RTS.
See the post above mine. Top competition teams go crag first because it wins fights. Winning a fight straight up is far more valuable than losing a fight and trying to rush back marginally faster. Marginally faster noted on the sense that proper wall jumping skulks aren't that much slower than celerity skulks to begin with.
And again, was referenced in many posts above: spawning eggs early in the game should probably be avoided at all costs. Spending 5 res for 2 spawn eggs before dropping your second hive is awful. That's res that could have gone to useful things, like carapace, leap, adrenaline, and extra fade eggs in the crucial 6-10 minute timing window.
I guess all my experience is just invalid, then. Shifts help me control the map and my team. I start using them at like 3-4 minutes and keep using them all game long. I very, very rarely lose these games, even when my teammates are clearly outclassed and end the game with mostly negative KDRs.
If you just put a shift ten feet from your hive and spawn a couple eggs every few minutes, you're wasting a ton of potential.
Be Humble Enough.
Yes, you heard right. I don’t mean you have act and speak like Jesus, but I mean you have think that there is always something to learn and that there possibility that someone is better than you. You don’t have to admit it to anyone but yourself. Only way to improve is to be open-minded.
The absolute lack of humility and the abject, unwarranted disregard for other people that drips off you two is nauseating. With your combined game experience and acquired wisdom, you could teach and help other players to increase the quality of public play. Instead, however, you just insult and demean everyone else, and the way you both do it is, frankly, shameful. I personally think your attitudes will drive off new players, and I for one don't want that. I want NS2 to grow and the standard of play to improve all around. Why don't you?
If it's such a foregone conclusion that the 30% extra life carapace gives skulks is so important (presumably due to the fact that marines shoot so well that skulks need that extra 30% life in all games) why is it aliens win a glaringly higher percentage of games compared to marines?
In a setting where marines can all shoot well, your argument makes a lot of sense, but those occasions are at best found in 4/10 games currently.
In pubs shifts are invaluable. They give you a kind of power, you normally don't have in pub play: people go where you want. Why? because you just spawn them there.
Also it gives yout gorges at key locations infinite healspray and skulk support(=eggs). I agree that cara is better for actual fighting but with an unorganized pub team shuift is far supirior due to these "herding" abilities it gives you as khamm.
Also If you get a shift at you second hive normally at least one gorge will come by and heal up your hive so you get cara soon enough. You can even spawn a gorge egg at your building hive to force a gorge-heal on it.
I guess the OP has never seen a shift egg spawn used as a forward base to more easily secure locations in a 24 person server.
lol
See the problem is, the game isn't balanced around 24 person clusterfucks. Nobody in this thread is probably interested in a laggy 24 person game. 5 tickrates erryday
Right now the game is not balanced around any numbers of players, period.
Claiming anything else is just inflated elitism for the sake of not having to argue.
There are 24 player servers, most of them have decent performance, most of them are populated the majority of time.
As such 24 player servers, their balance and what happens on them actually matters.
I'm much better than you at this game on either side of it. Crag first is definitively better than the other options available in game right now, especially when up against competent players. A speed boost which goes away in combat (that doesn't mitigate damage vs competent marines), is dramatically inferior to the massive HP boost that carapace provides.
Leaving aside that completely stupid epeen bragging (Necro has been playing this game for longer than you probably know about it).
If your Skulks get massacred, because they are so heavily outclassed by the Marines, then no amount of Carapace is gonna change anything about it.
The best bet in that situation is to simply outspawn the Marines trough usage of Shifts. Sure you pay the price of t.res and bad k:d ratios for it.
But in the long run it's far more important to gain and secure round than having a team with all insane positive k:d ratios. It's not k:d ratios that win rounds, it's the last man standing.
The exact same strategy can be applied to marines and it gets applied on a daily basis. If your Marines are horribly outclassed you go for many IP's and push armor upgrades to increase staying power.
In a nutshell it's basically "zerging" your enemy to death and that work for Marines just as it does for Kharaa.
As a Commander you do not dictate the skill level of your teammates, you work with what you get and try to make it function. If you boil everything down to "the better aiming players win" than every tech option is equally viable.
working in competitive play doesn't mean it won't work in pub play
have you ever taken a formal logic class? the reasoning people like you have is embarassing
That logic part sounds nice and maybe you should heed your own advice?
There is a huge difference in player ability between regular public play and competitive.
A competitive team has way better coordination, they have the time to actually practice exotic and complicated strategies and they have the experience and knowledge of playing with each other for hundreds of hours.
Usually a whole lot of effort goes into planing out and explaining strategies with the team and practicing to apply them.
Thus making it all the more easier and far more likely to pull of complicated strategies that require a lot of coordination and timing. A strategy that might be a 100% win in an comp. setting with an well coordinated team could be impossible to pull of in a public setting simply because the required coordination and practice are simply not there/the strategy might be to complicated or long-winded to lay out in the heat of a running round.
In a competitive setting, depending on the enemy team, you can basically make anything work and often it's the "out of the ordinary" approaches that win the rounds and keep dominating how the game is played for a while, as opposed to the "cookie cutter" builds that everybody is using and expecting to be used.
PUB, PUG, or Pro... Shade is the way to Go.
If this weren't true, it wouldn't rhyme.
So please give me some of your time.
With Shade, the alien team can cloak the hive. No need to expand until the res come in to cloak every cyst. Each player can choose cloaking and walk along the map and monitor the marines... but NO attacking. The goal here is stealth. We want the marines to think that they are alone in an uninhabited mining plant in sector 3A-7. Eventually, the main forces will see no threat and leave. When we are at our strongest, we STRIKE!
This is why Shade is better than both Shift and Crag first. Shift and Crag are just asking for confrontation.
PUB, PUG, or Pro... Shade is the way to Go.
If this weren't true, it wouldn't rhyme.
So please give me some of your time.
With Shade, the alien team can cloak the hive. No need to expand until the res come in to cloak every cyst. Each player can choose cloaking and walk along the map and monitor the marines... but NO attacking. The goal here is stealth. We want the marines to think that they are alone in an uninhabited mining plant in sector 3A-7. Eventually, the main forces will see no threat and leave. When we are at our strongest, we STRIKE!
This is why Shade is better than both Shift and Crag first. Shift and Crag are just asking for confrontation.
I was kind of disappointed when the rest of your post didn't rhyme.
Leaving aside that completely stupid epeen bragging (Necro has been playing this game for longer than you probably know about it).
If your Skulks get massacred, because they are so heavily outclassed by the Marines, then no amount of Carapace is gonna change anything about it.
The best bet in that situation is to simply outspawn the Marines trough usage of Shifts. Sure you pay the price of t.res and bad k:d ratios for it.
But in the long run it's far more important to gain and secure round than having a team with all insane positive k:d ratios. It's not k:d ratios that win rounds, it's the last man standing.
The exact same strategy can be applied to marines and it gets applied on a daily basis. If your Marines are horribly outclassed you go for many IP's and push armor upgrades to increase staying power.
In a nutshell it's basically "zerging" your enemy to death and that work for Marines just as it does for Kharaa.
As a Commander you do not dictate the skill level of your teammates, you work with what you get and try to make it function. If you boil everything down to "the better aiming players win" than every tech option is equally viable.
Necro is clearly bad at the game if he's arguing against crag first. His length of playing just means that he's spent a really long time being bad.
As far as the rest of the post goes:
Spamming shift eggs in the early part of the game is probably one of the easiest ways to absolutely cripple an alien team. Doing so means that you're going to be greatly delaying your second hive, which means you'll be delaying vital upgrades like carapace, leap, and bilebomb until well over 9-10 minutes into the game. Aliens do not need to control large portions of the map in the early game to easily win. They certainly don't need to spam eggs to "zerg" marines down, when holding 3-4 RTs and getting a second hive (with early carapace) is far superior. And you can hold those 3 RTs/second hive simply by getting a handful of people to go gorge - nothing else is required in a pub format.
working in competitive play doesn't mean it won't work in pub play
have you ever taken a formal logic class? the reasoning people like you have is embarassing
That logic part sounds nice and maybe you should heed your own advice?
There is a huge difference in player ability between regular public play and competitive.
i never claimed that. reading comprehension 101. I was just arguing with the incredibly stupid logic that "it won't work in pub play because it works in comp play."
A competitive team has way better coordination, they have the time to actually practice exotic and complicated strategies and they have the experience and knowledge of playing with each other for hundreds of hours.
Usually a whole lot of effort goes into planing out and explaining strategies with the team and practicing to apply them.
Thus making it all the more easier and far more likely to pull of complicated strategies that require a lot of coordination and timing. A strategy that might be a 100% win in an comp. setting with an well coordinated team could be impossible to pull of in a public setting simply because the required coordination and practice are simply not there/the strategy might be to complicated or long-winded to lay out in the heat of a running round.
In a competitive setting, depending on the enemy team, you can basically make anything work and often it's the "out of the ordinary" approaches that win the rounds and keep dominating how the game is played for a while, as opposed to the "cookie cutter" builds that everybody is using and expecting to be used.
yah that's nice, but it has nothing to do with carapace first, which is not an "exotic strategy" nor does it take much coordination or practice to get benefits from
bottom line: carapace first works well for pub games, is better than celerity for all skill levels.
They should hardcorde it so Aliens ALWAYS have to go crag first. Obviously it is far superior to anything else and we certainly don't want lesser players to do the wrong thing do we?
Necro is clearly bad at the game if he's arguing against crag first. His length of playing just means that he's spent a really long time being bad.
Anyone who disagrees with you is clearly bad at the game?
Wow. That is some serious self stroking you are doing there.
Who is more ignorant? The man who makes blanket statements with no exceptions or the man who realizes the world is all just shades of grey?
The answer is obvious, as is which category you fall under.
There are plenty of things that have distinct, obvious answers with no shades of gray. Crag hive being categorically better than shift is (as of this patch) one of those things.
They should hardcorde it so Aliens ALWAYS have to go crag first. Obviously it is far superior to anything else and we certainly don't want lesser players to do the wrong thing do we?
As a serious answer to a sarcastic reply:
Carapace should probably be weakened by splitting the difference between base alien armor and cara currently. IE: Skulks would start with 20 armor and cara would increase to 30. That way, cara is more of an option rather than the necessity it is now.
Carapace first is definitely the way to go both economically and for combat effectiveness. To argue Shift is a viable opening is fine but with good Marines you are going to seriously pay for being 9 rounded skulks until the 2nd Hive goes up.
Shift Hive opening revolves around the lack of competence in players imo.
- You get Celerity for speed since you can't wall jump. (easy mechanic to learn)
- You make more Eggs (10Tres + 5 Tres per 2 Eggs) because your team is dieing way too much. (delays your 2nd Hive and other goals)
- You force players to spawn in a certain area. (because your team has bad map awareness and doesn't go where you want them) [not the only reason to use shift egg spawns as it can be nice for staging base rushes but once again could be done without forcing it]
I honestly don't feel like it's cost effective when you can just have players capable of doing easy things like pressing C to open their map, die less and using wall jump.
There are some plus sides and I won't list them all but just a few:
+ It allows you to build the 2nd Hive with Gorges with unlimited energy.
+ It gives Lerks unlimited energy in defending a hive.
+ It synergizes well as a 2nd Hive with the 2nd Hive abilities - Adrenaline and Blink so Fades can regain energy quickly in forward locations/Hives.
PUB, PUG, or Pro... Shade is the way to Go.
If this weren't true, it wouldn't rhyme.
So please give me some of your time.
With Shade, the alien team can cloak the hive. No need to expand until the res come in to cloak every cyst. Each player can choose cloaking and walk along the map and monitor the marines... but NO attacking. The goal here is stealth. We want the marines to think that they are alone in an uninhabited mining plant in sector 3A-7. Eventually, the main forces will see no threat and leave. When we are at our strongest, we STRIKE!
This is why Shade is better than both Shift and Crag first. Shift and Crag are just asking for confrontation.
What is sad is how many coms I have seen that think this actually is how it works...
Spamming shift eggs in the early part of the game is probably one of the easiest ways to absolutely cripple an alien team. Doing so means that you're going to be greatly delaying your second hive, which means you'll be delaying vital upgrades like carapace, leap, and bilebomb until well over 9-10 minutes into the game. Aliens do not need to control large portions of the map in the early game to easily win. They certainly don't need to spam eggs to "zerg" marines down, when holding 3-4 RTs and getting a second hive (with early carapace) is far superior. And you can hold those 3 RTs/second hive simply by getting a handful of people to go gorge - nothing else is required in a pub format.
If going shift first cripples the team, why don't I lose? Like, ever? I'm not trying to brag but I win 19/20 games as alien commander, and I play on lots of different servers with lots of different players of varying skill.
At this point I'm just gonna assume this guy is fucking with everyone.
If you're not just being a dick, for the love of god play a fucking RTS dude. You have no idea what wins games.
Spamming shift eggs in the early part of the game is probably one of the easiest ways to absolutely cripple an alien team. Doing so means that you're going to be greatly delaying your second hive, which means you'll be delaying vital upgrades like carapace, leap, and bilebomb until well over 9-10 minutes into the game. Aliens do not need to control large portions of the map in the early game to easily win. They certainly don't need to spam eggs to "zerg" marines down, when holding 3-4 RTs and getting a second hive (with early carapace) is far superior. And you can hold those 3 RTs/second hive simply by getting a handful of people to go gorge - nothing else is required in a pub format.
If going shift first cripples the team, why don't I lose? Like, ever? I'm not trying to brag but I win 19/20 games as alien commander, and I play on lots of different servers with lots of different players of varying skill.
At this point I'm just gonna assume this guy is fucking with everyone.
If you're not just being a dick, for the love of god play a fucking RTS dude. You have no idea what wins games.
lol
james earl jonos was a grandmaster player in sc2, as well as a longtime bw player
19/20 as alien commander would have to be mostly luck, since the alien comm does not have that kind of effect on the outcome of the game
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
Its pug.. most of the people wont be that good anyway.
Go for whatever tact you want, aslong as you are somewhat capable of pulling it off.
remember a ground rule...
If the enemy suspects & expects a standard tacting, you are already a step ahead with a different one.. (untill they realise, so do it well)
I think we can all agree that there is no absolute first build that should be coded into the game. Just as there is no absolute marine build order that should just be defaulted into the game. There may well be a "best" build order/hive evolve, in the sense that one may be most efficient or economical. But the entire purpose of the commander is to determine which one to go with.
In pub matches, doing the same thing over and over would just be boring. Lets mix it up and go shade first, see if we can make it work. Or lets do an arc rush! "Why?" "Because we can." Pub games are supposed to be fun. Sometimes a different strategy can be great fun.
What's more annoying than the "wrong" tech path is no upgrades until the 3rd hive. Now that is "terrible alien commanding."
From the purest standpoint, crag first is the best choice for the reasons the OP has stated (though stated rather abrasively) Given skulks that have basic map awareness, aren't throwing themselves into a meat grinder and have a basic understanding of walljump the advantages carapace give are greater than the other upgrades.
Honestly, this is less a problem with the other hive choices and more an issue with the ridiculous strength of the crag hive and more importantly carapace. Moving into the mid-late game without it is just too crippling. So if it isn't your first hive (which mathematically it should be) it has to be your second. It creates a boring linearity to the alien tech.
Relevant aside: I'd rather carapace become something more interesting like a max damage cap on a single hit (adjusted on a per lifeform basis) rather than the straight armor upgrade that it is currently. Actual scaling armor upgrades could then be teched on the hive instead and have their values determined on a per lifeform basis. This opens up more variety in chamber upgrades and allows proper adjustments of how quickly aliens die based on marine weapon upgrades. Not to mention the alien economy is a mess and could use more RELEVANT things to spend TRes on.
Comments
#1 - TTK increases and being used in competitive play don't make it absolutely better. Competitive play is a bit of a world apart from pub play. The few teams available play to their strengths and hopefully exploit opponents weaknesses.
#2 - The speed increase is useful for covering larger areas and covering ground faster; no wall jump required. This makes it easier to reach enemy res nodes. Competitive players may have little need for it, over other passive abilities, but it is useful for pubs.
#3 - If it doesn't work, then you would lose anyway, is not a good argument. If it was, then I could claim:
-Capping 6 RT first is the best strategy; more res. A competent team should be able to wall-jump and cover 6 nodes. If they can't, they were going to lose anyway, fact. As long as your skulk aren't being "useless", you'll keep all 6 nodes and get 3 hives in under 7 minutes.
I could go on and make up more strategies that can only be defended with "competent" players.
You initial argument centers around combat engagements. NS2 is more than small scale skirmishes. I think you need to prove your hypothesis with your arguments in your replies; saving 25-30 res from egg spawning and putting it toward a fast second hive and early hive support. I also think you should stop saying "I'm much better than you at this game on either side of it.", personal attacks don't help your argument.
NS2 is still young (least since release). As more teams form, we will see new ideas and new strategies. In my experience, there are very few absolutes, no matter how solid a cookie cutter strategy/build looks.
I just like how you addressed zero points and popped in a personal attack to boot!
I'm just pointing out that most aliens players suck at wall jumping. This reduces the obviousness of crag first as the always-winning-godking-strategy people make it out to be. The OP isn't wrong, it's just that nothing he says is even controversial. The whole post could be summed up as 'good teams are good'.
Oh, we're talking about bad players? That's who we're talking about? And you're telling bad players what the best ones do to win? Seems you might get more traction here talking about how wall jumping is instrumental to the success of crag first then telling people how to execute wall jumps better instead of implying it's just the upgrade itself that accomplishes the goal of a win. (Which is obvious tripe.)
That is, if you had a point. This thread doesn't have one, unless that point is to troll people.
Oh...I guess that was the point of this thread after all.
on a side note, personal attacks are warranted when you display remarkable stupidity
also, you apparently don't know what a troll is.
you keep saying pugs, but i don't think it means what you think it means. i believe you're searching for "pub". pugs imply some sort of organization and are typically formed by competitive players.
Obviously, if you go shift hive you're going to lose all the time right? Pub play doesn't bear that out, although competitive play might.
Competitive players already know what the OP is saying, and pub players are finding immense success with shift/crag. Ignoring reality just so you can be one of the elite is childish. I could understand your position a lot better if you were arguing against shade first or something but shift/crag works great in pub play and most pub players couldn't give less of a damn about competitive play.
Being told that you're doing it wrong for using a tremendously successful strategy is ludicrous. Even experienced pub commanders would consider crag first against a skilled match up with Marines, but how often does that happen in reality? About 40% of the time?
I guess all my experience is just invalid, then. Shifts help me control the map and my team. I start using them at like 3-4 minutes and keep using them all game long. I very, very rarely lose these games, even when my teammates are clearly outclassed and end the game with mostly negative KDRs.
If you just put a shift ten feet from your hive and spawn a couple eggs every few minutes, you're wasting a ton of potential.
Regardless of the topic, this is not true. Stop showing contempt for other users. I think Tane put it best (link here):
@IAMKING
@JAMESEARLJONOS
The absolute lack of humility and the abject, unwarranted disregard for other people that drips off you two is nauseating. With your combined game experience and acquired wisdom, you could teach and help other players to increase the quality of public play. Instead, however, you just insult and demean everyone else, and the way you both do it is, frankly, shameful. I personally think your attitudes will drive off new players, and I for one don't want that. I want NS2 to grow and the standard of play to improve all around. Why don't you?
Roo
In a setting where marines can all shoot well, your argument makes a lot of sense, but those occasions are at best found in 4/10 games currently.
Also it gives yout gorges at key locations infinite healspray and skulk support(=eggs). I agree that cara is better for actual fighting but with an unorganized pub team shuift is far supirior due to these "herding" abilities it gives you as khamm.
Also If you get a shift at you second hive normally at least one gorge will come by and heal up your hive so you get cara soon enough. You can even spawn a gorge egg at your building hive to force a gorge-heal on it.
Right now the game is not balanced around any numbers of players, period.
Claiming anything else is just inflated elitism for the sake of not having to argue.
There are 24 player servers, most of them have decent performance, most of them are populated the majority of time.
As such 24 player servers, their balance and what happens on them actually matters.
Leaving aside that completely stupid epeen bragging (Necro has been playing this game for longer than you probably know about it).
If your Skulks get massacred, because they are so heavily outclassed by the Marines, then no amount of Carapace is gonna change anything about it.
The best bet in that situation is to simply outspawn the Marines trough usage of Shifts. Sure you pay the price of t.res and bad k:d ratios for it.
But in the long run it's far more important to gain and secure round than having a team with all insane positive k:d ratios. It's not k:d ratios that win rounds, it's the last man standing.
The exact same strategy can be applied to marines and it gets applied on a daily basis. If your Marines are horribly outclassed you go for many IP's and push armor upgrades to increase staying power.
In a nutshell it's basically "zerging" your enemy to death and that work for Marines just as it does for Kharaa.
As a Commander you do not dictate the skill level of your teammates, you work with what you get and try to make it function. If you boil everything down to "the better aiming players win" than every tech option is equally viable.
That logic part sounds nice and maybe you should heed your own advice?
There is a huge difference in player ability between regular public play and competitive.
A competitive team has way better coordination, they have the time to actually practice exotic and complicated strategies and they have the experience and knowledge of playing with each other for hundreds of hours.
Usually a whole lot of effort goes into planing out and explaining strategies with the team and practicing to apply them.
Thus making it all the more easier and far more likely to pull of complicated strategies that require a lot of coordination and timing. A strategy that might be a 100% win in an comp. setting with an well coordinated team could be impossible to pull of in a public setting simply because the required coordination and practice are simply not there/the strategy might be to complicated or long-winded to lay out in the heat of a running round.
In a competitive setting, depending on the enemy team, you can basically make anything work and often it's the "out of the ordinary" approaches that win the rounds and keep dominating how the game is played for a while, as opposed to the "cookie cutter" builds that everybody is using and expecting to be used.
If this weren't true, it wouldn't rhyme.
So please give me some of your time.
With Shade, the alien team can cloak the hive. No need to expand until the res come in to cloak every cyst. Each player can choose cloaking and walk along the map and monitor the marines... but NO attacking. The goal here is stealth. We want the marines to think that they are alone in an uninhabited mining plant in sector 3A-7. Eventually, the main forces will see no threat and leave. When we are at our strongest, we STRIKE!
This is why Shade is better than both Shift and Crag first. Shift and Crag are just asking for confrontation.
I was kind of disappointed when the rest of your post didn't rhyme.
Some maps like cave are very shift-orientated because of their distance.
I guess i'm just saying some obvious things. It won't be guarnateed that shift first is best start, some maps want a crag start.
Necro is clearly bad at the game if he's arguing against crag first. His length of playing just means that he's spent a really long time being bad.
As far as the rest of the post goes:
Spamming shift eggs in the early part of the game is probably one of the easiest ways to absolutely cripple an alien team. Doing so means that you're going to be greatly delaying your second hive, which means you'll be delaying vital upgrades like carapace, leap, and bilebomb until well over 9-10 minutes into the game. Aliens do not need to control large portions of the map in the early game to easily win. They certainly don't need to spam eggs to "zerg" marines down, when holding 3-4 RTs and getting a second hive (with early carapace) is far superior. And you can hold those 3 RTs/second hive simply by getting a handful of people to go gorge - nothing else is required in a pub format.
bottom line: carapace first works well for pub games, is better than celerity for all skill levels.
Anyone who disagrees with you is clearly bad at the game?
Wow. That is some serious self stroking you are doing there.
Who is more ignorant? The man who makes blanket statements with no exceptions or the man who realizes the world is all just shades of grey?
The answer is obvious, as is which category you fall under.
There are plenty of things that have distinct, obvious answers with no shades of gray. Crag hive being categorically better than shift is (as of this patch) one of those things.
As a serious answer to a sarcastic reply:
Carapace should probably be weakened by splitting the difference between base alien armor and cara currently. IE: Skulks would start with 20 armor and cara would increase to 30. That way, cara is more of an option rather than the necessity it is now.
Shift Hive opening revolves around the lack of competence in players imo.
- You get Celerity for speed since you can't wall jump. (easy mechanic to learn)
- You make more Eggs (10Tres + 5 Tres per 2 Eggs) because your team is dieing way too much. (delays your 2nd Hive and other goals)
- You force players to spawn in a certain area. (because your team has bad map awareness and doesn't go where you want them) [not the only reason to use shift egg spawns as it can be nice for staging base rushes but once again could be done without forcing it]
I honestly don't feel like it's cost effective when you can just have players capable of doing easy things like pressing C to open their map, die less and using wall jump.
There are some plus sides and I won't list them all but just a few:
+ It allows you to build the 2nd Hive with Gorges with unlimited energy.
+ It gives Lerks unlimited energy in defending a hive.
+ It synergizes well as a 2nd Hive with the 2nd Hive abilities - Adrenaline and Blink so Fades can regain energy quickly in forward locations/Hives.
What is sad is how many coms I have seen that think this actually is how it works...
If going shift first cripples the team, why don't I lose? Like, ever? I'm not trying to brag but I win 19/20 games as alien commander, and I play on lots of different servers with lots of different players of varying skill.
At this point I'm just gonna assume this guy is fucking with everyone.
If you're not just being a dick, for the love of god play a fucking RTS dude. You have no idea what wins games.
james earl jonos was a grandmaster player in sc2, as well as a longtime bw player
19/20 as alien commander would have to be mostly luck, since the alien comm does not have that kind of effect on the outcome of the game
Go for whatever tact you want, aslong as you are somewhat capable of pulling it off.
remember a ground rule...
If the enemy suspects & expects a standard tacting, you are already a step ahead with a different one.. (untill they realise, so do it well)
In pub matches, doing the same thing over and over would just be boring. Lets mix it up and go shade first, see if we can make it work. Or lets do an arc rush! "Why?" "Because we can." Pub games are supposed to be fun. Sometimes a different strategy can be great fun.
What's more annoying than the "wrong" tech path is no upgrades until the 3rd hive. Now that is "terrible alien commanding."
Honestly, this is less a problem with the other hive choices and more an issue with the ridiculous strength of the crag hive and more importantly carapace. Moving into the mid-late game without it is just too crippling. So if it isn't your first hive (which mathematically it should be) it has to be your second. It creates a boring linearity to the alien tech.
Relevant aside: I'd rather carapace become something more interesting like a max damage cap on a single hit (adjusted on a per lifeform basis) rather than the straight armor upgrade that it is currently. Actual scaling armor upgrades could then be teched on the hive instead and have their values determined on a per lifeform basis. This opens up more variety in chamber upgrades and allows proper adjustments of how quickly aliens die based on marine weapon upgrades. Not to mention the alien economy is a mess and could use more RELEVANT things to spend TRes on.