I personally find ARCs to be quite annoying on lower populous servers. If the Marines have the resources for them, the tactic of sending in ARCs to one Hive, while the Marine squad goes off into a different direction to shoot down the Hive, is something the aliens cannot do. Whips moving out also need infestation to root, which severely lowers the effectiveness of this. Combine that with ranged firepower of marines...
Marines can basically create a damage sponch that can go anywhere and if left alone, will destroy your base. Forcing the aliens to split up their fighting force or deal with the loss of one base.
The old Siege Cannons we're a local area lockdown, still having loads more PVP interaction. instead of this PVE/PVP split. Now it can be said that the ARC trains are a valid tactic, I find it a bit troublesome on lower populous servers (12p/18p)
The time honored tradition of beating a dead horse on this: make it so marines have to deploy ARCs. The disconnect between players and ARCs has always bothered me.
What is to stop jerk-ass players from deploying them randomly en-route to the location you want them to be?
I'd rather see them become a marine-controlled turret when deployed, with a view similar to that of the Farsight XR-20
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The time honored tradition of beating a dead horse on this: make it so marines have to deploy ARCs. The disconnect between players and ARCs has always bothered me.
At the risk of being hated by everyone: create an ARC battery which functions almost identically to the sentry battery.
One ARC battery per room, with no limit on the number of ARCs you can produce and move around.
Cannot be dropped on infestation, just like any structure.
One ARC battery can power up to 3 ARCs. An ARC can only be deployed when in range of an ARC battery, and only if that ARC battery currently has fewer than 3 ARCs deployed in its radius.
Losing an ARC battery powers down all ARCs attached to it immediately, interrupting mid fire.
Increase ARC health by approximately 30%. The health of an ARC battery should be around 2 to 2.5 times the health of a sentry battery.
"Powered down" ARCs do not automatically undeploy. Instead, they remain in their vulnerable deployed state until the commander manually undeploys them.
The gameplay impacts I envision for a change like this:
1. Promote ARCing from multiple locations. No hard limit means as many ARCs as you like, but you are going to need a creative way of powering more than 3.
2. Two viable targets for aliens during an ARC siege. Either use bile bomb to attack all ARCs similtaneously, and from moderate range, or use focused, single target attacks to power the ARCs down.
3. A more frantic marine sieging experience. The relative weakness of the ARC battery would make it an attractive (and somewhat easy) target, but only a temporary solution. Marines would be constantly defending the siege, and constantly being forced to quickly get new ARC batteries up, as old ones are destroyed. This would artificially lengthen sieges, as much progress could be undone by a temporary lapse in ARC shots.
4. The health of ARCs would make them more "permanent" fixtures (no more 10 strong trains that are sent in and destroyed in a few seconds). After a failed ARC attempt, a marine team may very well be left with 3 ARCs, but no reliable way of powering them up.
P.S. Mother of God how I hate all of you "limit plz limit this limit that" people. Please go make some other game boring.
There is limit on how many hydras and clogs you can have. There is limit on how many crag healings stack. There are limits on how many rt's and techpoints you can build in the map.. etc
Not having any limits just leads to brute force tactics. On public matches and sometimes in comp games too when the late game enters stalemate situation you often see huge arc train that can quickly swing the balance the other way.
Of course you can bile bomb arcs more or less quickly, but the usual arc places are highly covered (eg East Wing or Bar, but Bar isn't possible anymore, when I remember correctly), and hard to reach for Gorges.
As suggestion: Make ARCs less strong (lower HP). And a limit would be nice, e.g. max 4 for <16slots and max 8 for <24slots.
As suggestion: Make ARCs less strong (lower HP). And a limit would be nice, e.g. max 4 for <16slots and max 8 for <24slots.
Limiting their numbers and lowering their health would be too big a nerf all at once I think.
If you introduce a limit, and increase their health, it means that both teams require more sustained effort to pull it off/ repel the attack, which means more deliberate actions and less quick fix tactics.
Comments
So you liked the 20+ strong MAC/Drifter mobs?
Hmmm, you must be the first person I've come across that felt that way.
I'd rather see them become a marine-controlled turret when deployed, with a view similar to that of the Farsight XR-20
At the risk of being hated by everyone: create an ARC battery which functions almost identically to the sentry battery.
One ARC battery per room, with no limit on the number of ARCs you can produce and move around.
Cannot be dropped on infestation, just like any structure.
One ARC battery can power up to 3 ARCs. An ARC can only be deployed when in range of an ARC battery, and only if that ARC battery currently has fewer than 3 ARCs deployed in its radius.
Losing an ARC battery powers down all ARCs attached to it immediately, interrupting mid fire.
Increase ARC health by approximately 30%. The health of an ARC battery should be around 2 to 2.5 times the health of a sentry battery.
"Powered down" ARCs do not automatically undeploy. Instead, they remain in their vulnerable deployed state until the commander manually undeploys them.
The gameplay impacts I envision for a change like this:
1. Promote ARCing from multiple locations. No hard limit means as many ARCs as you like, but you are going to need a creative way of powering more than 3.
2. Two viable targets for aliens during an ARC siege. Either use bile bomb to attack all ARCs similtaneously, and from moderate range, or use focused, single target attacks to power the ARCs down.
3. A more frantic marine sieging experience. The relative weakness of the ARC battery would make it an attractive (and somewhat easy) target, but only a temporary solution. Marines would be constantly defending the siege, and constantly being forced to quickly get new ARC batteries up, as old ones are destroyed. This would artificially lengthen sieges, as much progress could be undone by a temporary lapse in ARC shots.
4. The health of ARCs would make them more "permanent" fixtures (no more 10 strong trains that are sent in and destroyed in a few seconds). After a failed ARC attempt, a marine team may very well be left with 3 ARCs, but no reliable way of powering them up.
There is limit on how many hydras and clogs you can have. There is limit on how many crag healings stack. There are limits on how many rt's and techpoints you can build in the map.. etc
Not having any limits just leads to brute force tactics. On public matches and sometimes in comp games too when the late game enters stalemate situation you often see huge arc train that can quickly swing the balance the other way.
As suggestion: Make ARCs less strong (lower HP). And a limit would be nice, e.g. max 4 for <16slots and max 8 for <24slots.
It's simply unbalanced on low-slot servers.
Limiting their numbers and lowering their health would be too big a nerf all at once I think.
If you introduce a limit, and increase their health, it means that both teams require more sustained effort to pull it off/ repel the attack, which means more deliberate actions and less quick fix tactics.