Nano would be next to useless in that situation, since it effects are much more limited versus medpacks. Aliens can control marine positioning in combat quite easily, and by doing so are able to pull marines away from meds, or cause the comm to waste many more than are needed. Theres alot more to fighting medpack spam then just running in and swiping - you can bait and force combat where you want it in the room as an alien - all of which are tatics to counter medspam which requires all of the commanders focus - if you can keep a comm focused over a single area for an extended period, your making other areas much more vulnerable around the map. The balance of medspam was always that it required all of the comms attention, was extremely resource intensive, and was by no means a guarantee of victory.
Hmmm, good points, as there is definitely a trade-off between attention (e.g. med accuracy) and resource wastage (from unused medpacks). I'm not questioning that nano would effectively get rid of that dynamic, so much as how much influence aliens actually have in altering that trade-off. For example, if alien movement forced someone like Scrajm to spend an extra 1s focused on a group of marines he's medpacking, that would be a pretty negligible burden on his attention. However, if it was at 10s or longer, that would be a pretty serious impact.
I don't know in-depth about NS2, but in NS1 you can always do something with a second of extra. I can listen out for baserushes because one sideof the map is open, I can listen for alien res nodes, I can prepare medding another group by hovering above them or I can check for gorge building a hive to nail down the exact deadline for killing the hive. One of the more interesting things of commanding is finding the optimal ways of being in the right place at the right time, NS has kind of unique twist to it compared to any actual RTS games.
Also, it's a world of difference how your marines position and how your medpacking works with them. It's a completely different thing to medpack marines positioned all over Cargo hive room in Veil than it is to medpack a single squad packed up in the same room. With a tightly packed squad you can medpack them all, but they also get hit hard with things like spore and umbra.
There's also loads of other stuff why medpacks are good:
There's HP math with all kinds of attacks combining and how you medpack against them. Armorless marines drop to 70 HP from one spit, so you're forced to decide whether you waste loads of res on medpacking every time the marine drops below the 75 hp skulk bite threshold or whether you medpack more sparingly after every 2 spits. Similar HP math also goes with spore and such.
The medpacks scale in many ways: The heavier alien commitment, the heavier medpack commitment needs to be. Because of the varying medpacking cost, the best commanders stand out as the ones who are able to judge situations best and pay the necessary amount of medpacks when they're worth it. This is one of the big difference makers during a game: A good commander has seemingly infinite pool of res whereas a bad commander is missing an upgrade at a critical moment or loses the map control because of the lack of medpacking.
I feel oftentimes things like this were quite underappreciated in NS1, partitially because you could simply force your way to victory through superior FPS performance on the field and partitially because spectating a commander never really worked in NS1 ( No ingame spec for comm view, HLTV demos had no comm viewpoint or visible teamres for marines, the commanderviewpoint demos were bugged up to a point where you got a headache ). Nevertheless, things like this are the ones that allowed me as a commander to enjoy my stuff even when the round wasn't going to new places in terms of strategy and leadership.
As far as I can tell, nanoshield loses or dumbs down almost all this finesse involved with medpacking. It just gets thrown at a marine that's going to take punishment, but after that there's no difference in when and how you execute it.
If you have links to any good videos (NS1/2) that gives a good example of how this trade-off works in practice, that would be great. I might be able to draw out some data (e.g. # of medpacks dropped/wasted, comm attention on marines, etc) that would help estimate the magnitude of the effect.
Any proper scientific data is probably pretty hard to get because most good matches are HLTV demos which record no commander actions clearly. There are a few commander ineye demos, but I doubt they're worth that much without the team ventrilo and loads of first hand commander experience to guess what and why the commander is doing. In general smart medpacking is a pretty context sensitive thing, so I doubt any simple statistics are going to get you far.
Enzyme does double damage??????? you better go back and check your math lol.
Enzyme doubles your attack speed, therefore doubling your damage. Math is fine, thanks.
Important variable you missed, the alien actually has to hit the marine. He can have enzyme and wiff every bite effectively doing zero damage. If you were to add the stipulation of the alien having 100% accuracy holding down mouse 1 and compare it over specified time intervals then yes, we can say it doubles damage. Without that extra restriction however, using enzyme in a practical way, it does not in any way double damage. Honestly, against most competent marines, enzyme isn't going to be worth the effort and risk of losing a drifter. It excels more at rushing down structures where you can reasonably have 100% hit rate.
Where as with nanoshield, regardless of the actions of the marine and for the duration, he always has 50% damage reduction. Let's also not forget that enzyme requires a drifter to move and expose itself to use thus giving marines a way to get rid of the source. Where as with marines, as long as a second comm chair exists, the hand of god can place it where ever it is needed and the aliens just have to deal with it. Saying it is a direct counter is over simplifying the situation.
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You can't agree with someone without insulting them.
Also, it's a world of difference how your marines position and how your medpacking works with them. It's a completely different thing to medpack marines positioned all over Cargo hive room in Veil than it is to medpack a single squad packed up in the same room. With a tightly packed squad you can medpack them all, but they also get hit hard with things like spore and umbra.
There's also loads of other stuff why medpacks are good:
There's HP math with all kinds of attacks combining and how you medpack against them. Armorless marines drop to 70 HP from one spit, so you're forced to decide whether you waste loads of res on medpacking every time the marine drops below the 75 hp skulk bite threshold or whether you medpack more sparingly after every 2 spits. Similar HP math also goes with spore and such.
The medpacks scale in many ways: The heavier alien commitment, the heavier medpack commitment needs to be. Because of the varying medpacking cost, the best commanders stand out as the ones who are able to judge situations best and pay the necessary amount of medpacks when they're worth it. This is one of the big difference makers during a game: A good commander has seemingly infinite pool of res whereas a bad commander is missing an upgrade at a critical moment or loses the map control because of the lack of medpacking.
I feel oftentimes things like this were quite underappreciated in NS1, partitially because you could simply force your way to victory through superior FPS performance on the field and partitially because spectating a commander never really worked in NS1 ( No ingame spec for comm view, HLTV demos had no comm viewpoint or visible teamres for marines, the commanderviewpoint demos were bugged up to a point where you got a headache ). Nevertheless, things like this are the ones that allowed me as a commander to enjoy my stuff even when the round wasn't going to new places in terms of strategy and leadership.
As far as I can tell, nanoshield loses or dumbs down almost all this finesse involved with medpacking. It just gets thrown at a marine that's going to take punishment, but after that there's no difference in when and how you execute it.
Any proper scientific data is probably pretty hard to get because most good matches are HLTV demos which record no commander actions clearly. There are a few commander ineye demos, but I doubt they're worth that much without the team ventrilo and loads of first hand commander experience to guess what and why the commander is doing. In general smart medpacking is a pretty context sensitive thing, so I doubt any simple statistics are going to get you far.
Enzyme doubles your attack speed, therefore doubling your damage. Math is fine, thanks.
Important variable you missed, the alien actually has to hit the marine. He can have enzyme and wiff every bite effectively doing zero damage. If you were to add the stipulation of the alien having 100% accuracy holding down mouse 1 and compare it over specified time intervals then yes, we can say it doubles damage. Without that extra restriction however, using enzyme in a practical way, it does not in any way double damage. Honestly, against most competent marines, enzyme isn't going to be worth the effort and risk of losing a drifter. It excels more at rushing down structures where you can reasonably have 100% hit rate.
Where as with nanoshield, regardless of the actions of the marine and for the duration, he always has 50% damage reduction. Let's also not forget that enzyme requires a drifter to move and expose itself to use thus giving marines a way to get rid of the source. Where as with marines, as long as a second comm chair exists, the hand of god can place it where ever it is needed and the aliens just have to deal with it. Saying it is a direct counter is over simplifying the situation.
Also that. I'll leave my post as is because looking partially dumb is what all the cool kids do.
I dont think Enzyme comes even close to doubling your attack speed.