Ability Research
Scatter
Join Date: 2012-09-02 Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
Join Date: 2012-09-02 Member: 157341Members, Squad Five Blue
I will jump straight in and say I do no really like the current method by which life form abilities obtained with the alien commander targeted research and biomass requirements. If I want to research leap it takes about 5 minutes at minimum to get a second hive, a level of biomass on each hive, a whip and the skulk upgrade research. By the time I actually get all this tech the team composition will be such that I have 2 less skulks in favour of lerks, and will also be approaching the time at which fades begin to appear. As a consequence, there is no point in getting leap as you are better off getting upgrades which will affect everyone.
*Team compositions dictate that only a small proportion of the team receives benefit from an ability thus making upgrades such as celerity more useful
*Overly complicated and requires too many steps which only serves as pointless busy work for alien com
*Lifeform balance more difficult when abilities appear occasionally rather than regularly due to lack of practice and life form scaling requirements
To remedy this abilities could either be automatically unlocked on completed hive construction like in ns1, or have abilities automatically unlocked with a certain biomass requirement. Both essentially remove the commanders choice as to which particular ability is to be researched in favour of a universal unlock, something we did for the upgrades in BT, where before the com would upgrade the shell to either crag or regen.
I had hoped to word this better but I am too tired atm
*Team compositions dictate that only a small proportion of the team receives benefit from an ability thus making upgrades such as celerity more useful
*Overly complicated and requires too many steps which only serves as pointless busy work for alien com
*Lifeform balance more difficult when abilities appear occasionally rather than regularly due to lack of practice and life form scaling requirements
To remedy this abilities could either be automatically unlocked on completed hive construction like in ns1, or have abilities automatically unlocked with a certain biomass requirement. Both essentially remove the commanders choice as to which particular ability is to be researched in favour of a universal unlock, something we did for the upgrades in BT, where before the com would upgrade the shell to either crag or regen.
I had hoped to word this better but I am too tired atm
Comments
Also I liked the old upgrade system as lifeform abilities were hive-dependent while things like cloak and carapace were still there even after hive is destroyed if it was acquired. The thing was that you had the critical upgrades with just 2 hives and the 3rd hive upgrades were generally less important.
Right now you get a new hive, push biomass, get the upgrade structure (like a whip) and research the upgrade. If either the structure pops, or the hive containing the needed biomass, newly spawned aliens will still not have the upgrades.
So we had a dying hive making us lose upgrades. Now we have a dying hive and a dying structure capable of making us lose upgrades. I fail to see how the current system is a buff.
Yes you can put more biomass in one hive, but there is no reason to keep that and ditch the needed upgrade structures.
I would not be surprised a big reason is that as the game progresses the khammander needs tres sinks which aliens normally dont have. There is no other way I can describe biomass then a artifical tres sink as the hp gain (or was it armour) while nice, is in no way up to its cost.
I very much like the changes BT brought in, but the problem is the current alien tech path promotes the use of hive upgrades over abilities. Why? 10 tres for hive type then 20 for each shell/spur/veil. By contrast, any useful ability on lower lifeforms requires a huge res sink. Look at leap for example, the minimum requirements are:
minimum 40 tres for biomass + 10 for the whip + 20 for the research on the whip + 40 second hive = 90 for leap.
And then you have to take into account the time it takes to research/grow all that stuff. By then, it is well into a game and you'll want to be having most of your players utilise higher lifeforms. Currently there is almost no use for a 2nd hive other than to hold map control and use it as a healing point. Why bother dropping it when i can defend my res with 1000x crags whips and mucous spam.
Will leap always be destined to be that thing you get when jetpacks come out and when you lose your fades? Why not open up the tech path options for alien commander - let them spend their tres on other options besides pve if they choose to. At the moment, one of the hardest choices for a commander is which of the following is do i go:
A) crag
C) shade - and really it's only A) or
The short term solutions in my mind, would be to try one of the following:
1. Reduce the tres cost and/or research time of said upgrades, keeping the current tech path system
2. Move the alien abilities research onto a new structure to act as an alien arms lab, eliminating the need to build a crag/whip/shift/shade to research. Combine with solution 1.
3. Have them auto unlock on complete 2nd/3rd hive completion
Some abilities like stab and vortex will still never get used, but at least it will make others like leap a viable mid game option instead of being reactionary.
Also - gorge webs in any game ever please? #leapbefore20min #usefulfadeabilities
Alternatively, commanders should have a choice, either whip & crag spam (raze style) or spend on getting your lifeform upgrades that actually do something. Apart from UMBRA & BILE theres no real need or help to get anything else & the tres sink to get any 2nd upgrades make them almost unviable. 90 for leap. 80 for bile? what's umbra like 110? That is F K N huge.
I was trying to communicate in a way that people would understand nezz :P - don't worry it's not contagious.
But, what I never liked was clustering the research of abilities. I understand why this particular change was made though, yet it seems to me that is has backfired more than it has done good. I think the original goal of grouping all the lifeform abilities was to increase the appearance of certain abilities that were before not researched very often (because they were not as useful as other abilities). So grouping them together would mean if one of the "better" abilities was researched, some of the "lesser" abilities would be unlocked as well, increasing their overall appearance.
However, from my experience, because of the high costs and intially low return on investment (if you want to get just one particular ability you basically have to "pay" for extra stuff you won't use any time soon) it feels like this change has actually reduced the frequency at which abilities are researched in it's entirety, making some of the previously more common abilities even less common now. Skulk, lerk, fade and onos upgrades tend to be researched really late in the game, if researched at all, because at the moment it pays off more to invest in extra whip/crag farms which have an immediate effect on the game.
I think uncoupling the research, and thus enabling the research of individual abilities again would have a bigger benefit. Sure, some abilities will be less commonly researched, but it's still more preferable to what we have now, and it might convince commanders to spend some more tres on getting those specific abilities they need instead of just dumping it into more PVE stuff.
"Biomass research times +20 seconds"
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"Added Evolution chamber which hosts the life form upgrades" from Sewlek's Balance Beta (which is gone now)
nuf said