Gorges get telepathic control over the Bait Ball
CrushaK
Join Date: 2012-11-05 Member: 167195Members, NS2 Playtester
Join Date: 2012-11-05 Member: 167195Members, NS2 Playtester
The problem with the Bait Ball is that it doesn't fly really far and is slow. Being able to charge it would be a first step to make it better.
But there may be an even more interesting alternative:
Let the Gorge be able to still control the Bait Ball as long as the player is still holding the Primary Fire key down. Moving the mouse then would add some velocity to the Bait Ball in the respective direction: MouseUp increases velocity in the direction away from the Gorge. MouseDown gets the Bait Ball closer to the Gorge again. MouseLeft and MouseRight move it to the respective sides.
The Ball can be adjusted in flight to accelerate or hit marines who try to dodge it, as well as keep rolling around on the ground after it landed. Babblers will keep following the Ball as it moves around.
You may limit the control to a certain range away from the Gorge, so it can't send Babbler armies blindly around the map from the base. Requiring LoS to the Ball in order to control it might be another way to limit it, but the intuitiveness of that would need to be tested. Being able to roll the Ball over short distances around a corner would be nice as well after all.
You might even consider to let the Ball attach to marines as with a direct hit if it rolls against them on the ground (in which case you could allow marines to shoot the Ball into pieces before it reaches them to deny such behavior).
But there may be an even more interesting alternative:
Let the Gorge be able to still control the Bait Ball as long as the player is still holding the Primary Fire key down. Moving the mouse then would add some velocity to the Bait Ball in the respective direction: MouseUp increases velocity in the direction away from the Gorge. MouseDown gets the Bait Ball closer to the Gorge again. MouseLeft and MouseRight move it to the respective sides.
The Ball can be adjusted in flight to accelerate or hit marines who try to dodge it, as well as keep rolling around on the ground after it landed. Babblers will keep following the Ball as it moves around.
You may limit the control to a certain range away from the Gorge, so it can't send Babbler armies blindly around the map from the base. Requiring LoS to the Ball in order to control it might be another way to limit it, but the intuitiveness of that would need to be tested. Being able to roll the Ball over short distances around a corner would be nice as well after all.
You might even consider to let the Ball attach to marines as with a direct hit if it rolls against them on the ground (in which case you could allow marines to shoot the Ball into pieces before it reaches them to deny such behavior).
Comments
If you attach it to spit, you would mark a target and the things could go towards it as a goal, even far away (many 'hops' required). This would be problematic in combat as you need to hit the marine directly else the babblers would go towards a target in the background (i.e. a wall). If you hit once, you wouldn't want to spit anymore for fear of losing the hard-to-hit target, thus you would practically lose the abilty to spit in combat, and your spit is likely to be more effective than the babblers in the first place...
So yes attach it to healspray. Heal spray and they all make one large leap forward, attacking whatever is in front or and certainly anything that has been damaged. Something about spewing healspray and having all your babblers stream over your shoulders past your camera just sounds appealing. To get the babblers to attach to you, use the 'heal me' bind ('q'). Once they're on you, you should still be able to shoot them off.
And ffs please get rid of the lifespan. There's an emotional loss of ownership if you know they are going to die, and for me are drastically less fun.
A possible workaround to make things more accessible would be to quickly switch into the Babbler Egg build mode by pressing the USE key when having the Bait Ball selected. It's not like there is much other use for the USE key on the alien side except for entering the Hive, so this rebind would help Gorges a bit and makes the spawning less intrusive.
You are turning this into a general Bait Ball topic, though. This one is about the suggestion in the OP, i.e. the added functionality [the current one is still retained by simply not holding down the primary fire then, so you can still throw an uncontrolled Bait Ball as usual] of giving the Gorge some minion control similar to how games like Overlord or Pikmin handle it: you hold down a button to move the target marker around in an area around you and your minions will go there and perform context-sensitive actions based on stuff that is close to the target marker as they move. Just that the target marker is visible in this case and needs to be refired after you let go of it once.
Or EVEN have the bait ball weapon select branch out to another set of orders for babblers to follow wherever the bait ball lands, like "attach" for aliens AND structures, "ambush" to get them to jump and cling to the walls/ ceilings in the immediate vicinity and await LOS with a marine to jump out and attack, or "follow" to get them to follow an alien into enermy territory whereupon they will just start attacking whatever they see first.
Just throwing ideas out there. A telepathic bait ball as described in the OP would be kind of cool too but the extremely limited use of babblers would still remain.
Kharaa are super intelligent IMHO. I mean they are trying to exterminate us, the most conniving/smelly/backstabbing/aggressor/polluting creatures that have stepped into this universe :P
Yes, but in today's world, common sense requires a great amount of intelligence to understand and implement
Nuh-uh! Aliens dumb, humans superior.
I really want to highlight this little gem, as it strikes exactly the chord that I feel when playing gorge. You want your babies to stay alive when you're gorging; stay alive, or die fighting.
As for the rest, I agree that the bait ball is a bit clunky, but there's too many problems with attaching the pheromones to Spit/healspray. If you heal a fellow alien, you instantly lose your babblers because they attach.
If one of those two, go for spit. The only way this would work, i.m.o., is when they would go for a marine that you hit and stay on him until you hit another marine/structure/alien. If you hit the wall, they stay on target. If there is no target, they just follow.
I'm not sure if that's viable though, I can immediately come up with downsides, such as not being able to direct them forward, or have them guard something.
This means WAR... Wait just one minute here, so this is how it started!