This specific change deals with the marine pickup cooldown of medpacks, not the commander drop cooldown. Originally it is around 0.53 seconds. Without checking wouldn't know the exact delay between bites, but i'm pretty sure landing two hits in 0.5 seconds is unlikely and depends a lot on having your bites offset correctly to the medpacks landing/
Actually as far as I can tell, the timing doesnt matter because a single bite does more damage than a single medpack can heal.
A typical Scenario-
Marine has full health, no armour
Skulk bites for 75dmg - marine on 25 hp
Medpack heals for 50 hp - marine has 75hp
Skulk bites for 75 dmg - marine dead
this is why you need to med marines twice per single skulk bite if you're going to med spam them to keep them alive in an otherwise-lost engagement. If a skulk hits 2 consecutive bites (not hard as long as you're not holding mouse1 and praying to yaweh) the marine is gone. Dead.
Typically as a marine comm you'll med after the first bite- if the skulk misses his next bite you have enough time to get in one more med to bring him back to full HP. Skulks have to miss a LOT of potential bites to be able to medspam to keep the marine alive for long. Its actually one of the best-balanced parts of marine-skulk-marinecomm dynamics
It's funny how this mechanic is only really visible as a marine comm (where I noticed it, while medding/ realising mindless medspam is a futile waste of res), but knowledge of it is super important to increasing your kill potential as skulk
It's funny how this mechanic is only really visible as a marine comm (where I noticed it, while medding/ realising mindless medspam is a futile waste of res), but knowledge of it is super important to increasing your kill potential as skulk
There is a lot of this in game. A lot of unadvertised stuff as well, like enzyme boosting alien hit cones. @_@
Good to get this on the table though, now we're getting to the meat (teehee) of it and improve upon the original change!
Edit: So basically rines can absorb 1 extra bite at 0.5 seconds of medpacking, and then one every second after that.
With the change you have 1s to 1 bite kill the marine, 2s for 2 bite, etc. So that /might/ be a bit too long. It might just counter excellent medpack plopping comms. I suspect most comms don't drop fast or precise enough for the vanilla cooldown. Do you personally find it hard to land medpacks on rhines?
Would be good to know the time from click to bite (hit), and then from that bite to the next bite under ideal conditions. Might just be enough to increase the cooldown by less ms to improve player perception of medpacking.
Good to get this on the table though, now we're getting to the meat (teehee) of it and improve upon the original change!
Edit: So basically rines can absorb 1 extra bite at 0.5 seconds of medpacking, and then one every second after that.
With the change you have 1s to 1 bite kill the marine, 2s for 2 bite, etc. So that /might/ be a bit too long. It might just counter excellent medpack plopping comms. I suspect most comms don't drop fast or precise enough for the vanilla cooldown. Do you personally find it hard to land medpacks on rhines?
Would be good to know the time from click to bite (hit), and then from that bite to the next bite under ideal conditions. Might just be enough to increase the cooldown by less ms to improve player perception of medpacking.
It's as simple as "if a marine has no armour, 2 consecutive bites will kill him no matter what"
I actually like this mechanic as it means you need to land bites to get a kill. lol.
As a comm, it means you need to pay attention to the marines health bar - after the first bite, med, then if the marine is still alive after half a second (pay attention to the position of the skulk and the marine to better predict whether he will be), med again to bring him to full health. The timing is not hard to get used to. I really don't think it needs balancing - it's actually impossible to "medspam" against a skulk that can land 2 fast bites.
How to get 2 fast bites as skulk? Stop jumping for a second.
However (and this is something I'd like to see played around with), medding marines can be a hassle sometimes, either due to walls or the weird way you have to position the cursor on the marine (the feedback from hovering the cursor over the marine makes it look like your cursor is somewhere it's not. Or something. It's weird trust me lol).
And obviously walls/ other geometry getting in the way. Is there not an easy way to script so medpack drop location ignores vertical or near-vertical surfaces? I hate having to reposition my comm view directly over the marine because I cant med him through the wall that I cant even see anyway. At least, thats how things seem to work at the moment.
If that can't be done, maybe some fiddling with marine-med-hitboxes or, as I said, the marine-med-mouseover feedback could be done. When I get home I'll have a little fiddle and see if I can actually determine what goes on rather than spewing words and concepts forth from my fallible memory as I am current doing.
Wait, now it's making more sense.
Looked it up, skulk bite is 0.45 seconds, 75 dam, so they can get it done, assuming they chain two bites and disregarding latency weirdness or battle situations. Marine can pump out ~9 bullets for each medpack extension so maybe that's the origin of frustration. Rhines can jump out of range much easier in vanilla making consecutive biting really hard. The jumping change probably makes it a lot easier to chain two bites that far in so no reason to keep this change for skulks.
fade is 0.65 seconds, 70 dam vs marine. What is your experience there as a comm? Looks like even fades landing two swipes can be medspammed out of a kill. 100->30->80->10->60->-10. So 3 perfect hits?
Lerk should have no trouble killing a medspammer rhine, 0.3 seconds, base 60 dam for bite.
Edit: Reacting to your other comment, the plan was to give players a better one on one chance to counter medpacks, and give comms better utility by having the medpacks less finicky to deploy. Only got to the first bit obviously, since the second takes a bit more work.
Yup, technically fades have a slightly harder time against medspam. But it's also much easier to hit marines. And also, it's because of this that you should still be working with other teammates. Also, this mechanic is another way by which skulks aren't redundant for any particular task in the later stages of the game.
This is why when we get bumrushed by a couple of fades and some skulks as a group, I'll more often than not shoot the SKULKS first. They do just as much/ more damage than a fade but they go down much easier. If a fade is SSing to avoid focused gun fire, even one or two against 3+ marines can have a hard time out DPSing the comm meds without their skulky friends. (of course fades can just attack the same target to gain double DPS and win, but this is sometimes hard to coordinate.
It's really a beautiful and well-balanced mechanic and I love it.
@kmg perception of whether game mechanics are broken/bad is apparently completely arbitrary, especially in NS2 it seems. coming from a guy trying to 'fix' descent' you should understand this.... If the common perception is that something is bad or doesn't feel right that it needs fixing. The SCC mapping community we run has been made up of many NS2 long time players. When everyone is complaining about the same things then you have to listen. These tweaks aren't based off one mans whim, but the collective moaning off many different people over years of playing the game.
The name was only thought about for a few seconds its completely trivial to us. These small tweaks are easy changes to make our Sunday games more exciting and get us into the swing of fiddling with things. Many of our old regulars have become fed up with the game and very rarely play it anymore. the mod is more of an experimental platform for us to try new stuff for our own enjoyment, inject something new into the thing and bring some of the old timers back.
I gave up that project because there wasn't enough of a consensus about decent being broken. My original perception of there being consensus was influenced by the specific group of people I played with and didn't accurately reflect majority gameplay. The change I was proposing would end up being detrimental to the greater good. Please bear this in mind when thinking about how you talk about this project.
I gave up that project because there wasn't enough of a consensus about decent being broken. My original perception of there being consensus was influenced by the specific group of people I played with and didn't accurately reflect majority gameplay. The change I was proposing would end up being detrimental to the greater good. Please bear this in mind when thinking about how you talk about this project.
I'm certain if this mod will thrive if it has its place, and wither if it doesn't. Nice jab back at howser though.
@kmg you're right! experimenting with game design is going to destroy NS2 as we know it! lets just continue to pointless argue on the forums because that's achieved so much already.
If you believe in an idea, the best thing to do is go ahead and test it... worry about the consensus of opinion from people who have actually tried it. You don't stop just because a few people show indifference before you even start or disagree without even testing it
@kmg you're right! experimenting with game design is going to destroy NS2 as we know it! lets just continue to pointless argue on the forums because that's achieved so much already.
If you believe in an idea, the best thing to do is go ahead and test it... worry about the consensus of opinion from people who have actually tried it. You don't stop just because a few people show indifference before you even start or disagree without even testing it
soooooooo defensive. i'm not saying stop working on your mod, i'm saying that you're presenting it to the community in a way that is either poorly thought out or belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the game. if your goal wasn't to rile people up then you shouldn't have come in here making blanket statements about ns2 being broken and how you're gonna fix it. compmod doesn't even make arrogant claims like that.
Why not allow Exos to grab Gorges and get Dual Sholder Mounted BileBomb launchers and make the aliens feel that pain? While we're at it, why not let the exo get a Nerve Gas Dispenser to make aliens stay away (rear mounted between the legs ofc, must spend Pres on CanOfBeans before getting in the Exo to make it work though)
Neway, does enzyme rly do the increased cone or am I a dumbass that can't understand sarcasm (when I'm always sarcastic)?
It's in the code, no clue how significant the increase is though, or if it compensates for something else. As far as I can tell it increases the scale of the hit detection boxes. Only slightly for some species, quite a lot for others.
I have played competitive ns2 and found it not very fun, that is just me. I am solely a pub player. I really like your intentions of making ns2 more fun. I can't wait to see what this turns out to be in a few months as you guys refine. I just hope things don't stray to far and become unbalanced.
SewlekThe programmer previously known as SchimmelJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16247Members, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Developer
i think "fun" is too unspecified term, to be used as a basis for a mod. you cant really make it more "fun", because tastes differ so much. for some people, fun is all about challenge, for others it means a game where you can play in a more casual way (less punishing game mechanics, like faster respawn, overall more health, slower speed, bunch of new gimmick features etc), and for others it means an excessive amount of options and hard counters.
so im not really sure what your goal here is? for whom do you want the game be more fun? if its for casual players, i would go ahead and name the mod "casual ns2" and focus on make the game be overall way more forgiving (reduce the skill gaps by alot). but it would be the wrong forum here to advertise such a mod, im sure it would get a lot of negative feedback a few of your changes already go into that direction, but some dont make much sense to me and put the mod into an identity crisis.
just my 2 cents, wish you good luck with it anyway!
When i coin the term 'fun' personally, i just mean removing frustration or adding/changing features that improve the 'feel' of the game regardless of the quantifiable balance implications. I use the term fun and feel because the changes in this mod are based off our personal opinions and experiences; not numbers or high level game design theory... I wouldn't say our approach is dumbed down or casual but rather loose and experimental but certainly arbitrary. :P
For example I think the shooting mechanics in NS2 are seriously undeveloped (not a dig at anyone just my opinion) I would say make them on par with other modern shooters ;with proper feedback and effects with out being OTT (Exactly like L4D then!) But I am sure a huge number of people would argue about balance, the effects on marines aim etc etc. My position is frankly I don't really care, I'd rather just experiment basing changes off the fact I know other games do shooting a lot better... then seeing what the effects on balance were. Good thing Daan and flat stopped me pushing that forward.
Again this mod was just intended to be a platform to try ideas we have for improving the game for ourselves. In hindsight we should of started off by adding more left field changes we're considering. That probably would of provoked a different reaction from the wider community. It was never meant to please anyone other than ourselves and the people we play with, thats our market. Anyone else enjoying it is a bonus.
Comments
I think I need to sit down a cry for a bit...
I miss Devour.
I'm sure the combat guys will backport it eventually
A typical Scenario-
Marine has full health, no armour
Skulk bites for 75dmg - marine on 25 hp
Medpack heals for 50 hp - marine has 75hp
Skulk bites for 75 dmg - marine dead
this is why you need to med marines twice per single skulk bite if you're going to med spam them to keep them alive in an otherwise-lost engagement. If a skulk hits 2 consecutive bites (not hard as long as you're not holding mouse1 and praying to yaweh) the marine is gone. Dead.
Typically as a marine comm you'll med after the first bite- if the skulk misses his next bite you have enough time to get in one more med to bring him back to full HP. Skulks have to miss a LOT of potential bites to be able to medspam to keep the marine alive for long. Its actually one of the best-balanced parts of marine-skulk-marinecomm dynamics
There is a lot of this in game. A lot of unadvertised stuff as well, like enzyme boosting alien hit cones. @_@
Good to get this on the table though, now we're getting to the meat (teehee) of it and improve upon the original change!
Edit: So basically rines can absorb 1 extra bite at 0.5 seconds of medpacking, and then one every second after that.
With the change you have 1s to 1 bite kill the marine, 2s for 2 bite, etc. So that /might/ be a bit too long. It might just counter excellent medpack plopping comms. I suspect most comms don't drop fast or precise enough for the vanilla cooldown. Do you personally find it hard to land medpacks on rhines?
Would be good to know the time from click to bite (hit), and then from that bite to the next bite under ideal conditions. Might just be enough to increase the cooldown by less ms to improve player perception of medpacking.
The jumping change seems be enough to tick of that frustration box anyway. We'll see.
It's as simple as "if a marine has no armour, 2 consecutive bites will kill him no matter what"
I actually like this mechanic as it means you need to land bites to get a kill. lol.
As a comm, it means you need to pay attention to the marines health bar - after the first bite, med, then if the marine is still alive after half a second (pay attention to the position of the skulk and the marine to better predict whether he will be), med again to bring him to full health. The timing is not hard to get used to. I really don't think it needs balancing - it's actually impossible to "medspam" against a skulk that can land 2 fast bites.
How to get 2 fast bites as skulk? Stop jumping for a second.
However (and this is something I'd like to see played around with), medding marines can be a hassle sometimes, either due to walls or the weird way you have to position the cursor on the marine (the feedback from hovering the cursor over the marine makes it look like your cursor is somewhere it's not. Or something. It's weird trust me lol).
And obviously walls/ other geometry getting in the way. Is there not an easy way to script so medpack drop location ignores vertical or near-vertical surfaces? I hate having to reposition my comm view directly over the marine because I cant med him through the wall that I cant even see anyway. At least, thats how things seem to work at the moment.
If that can't be done, maybe some fiddling with marine-med-hitboxes or, as I said, the marine-med-mouseover feedback could be done. When I get home I'll have a little fiddle and see if I can actually determine what goes on rather than spewing words and concepts forth from my fallible memory as I am current doing.
Looked it up, skulk bite is 0.45 seconds, 75 dam, so they can get it done, assuming they chain two bites and disregarding latency weirdness or battle situations. Marine can pump out ~9 bullets for each medpack extension so maybe that's the origin of frustration. Rhines can jump out of range much easier in vanilla making consecutive biting really hard. The jumping change probably makes it a lot easier to chain two bites that far in so no reason to keep this change for skulks.
fade is 0.65 seconds, 70 dam vs marine. What is your experience there as a comm? Looks like even fades landing two swipes can be medspammed out of a kill. 100->30->80->10->60->-10. So 3 perfect hits?
Lerk should have no trouble killing a medspammer rhine, 0.3 seconds, base 60 dam for bite.
Edit: Reacting to your other comment, the plan was to give players a better one on one chance to counter medpacks, and give comms better utility by having the medpacks less finicky to deploy. Only got to the first bit obviously, since the second takes a bit more work.
This is why when we get bumrushed by a couple of fades and some skulks as a group, I'll more often than not shoot the SKULKS first. They do just as much/ more damage than a fade but they go down much easier. If a fade is SSing to avoid focused gun fire, even one or two against 3+ marines can have a hard time out DPSing the comm meds without their skulky friends. (of course fades can just attack the same target to gain double DPS and win, but this is sometimes hard to coordinate.
It's really a beautiful and well-balanced mechanic and I love it.
18:55 - Howser: sorry daan
18:55 - Howser: flats gonna be doing the programming now
:C *hands the keys to @Flaterectomy *
I gave up that project because there wasn't enough of a consensus about decent being broken. My original perception of there being consensus was influenced by the specific group of people I played with and didn't accurately reflect majority gameplay. The change I was proposing would end up being detrimental to the greater good. Please bear this in mind when thinking about how you talk about this project.
I'm certain if this mod will thrive if it has its place, and wither if it doesn't. Nice jab back at howser though.
If you believe in an idea, the best thing to do is go ahead and test it... worry about the consensus of opinion from people who have actually tried it. You don't stop just because a few people show indifference before you even start or disagree without even testing it
soooooooo defensive. i'm not saying stop working on your mod, i'm saying that you're presenting it to the community in a way that is either poorly thought out or belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the game. if your goal wasn't to rile people up then you shouldn't have come in here making blanket statements about ns2 being broken and how you're gonna fix it. compmod doesn't even make arrogant claims like that.
I like the 100 kill explosion. Fireworks need to be in order.
And obviously making the onos devour and become alien mechs.
Overall, I see no future complaints :-p
It's in the code, no clue how significant the increase is though, or if it compensates for something else. As far as I can tell it increases the scale of the hit detection boxes. Only slightly for some species, quite a lot for others.
It's in the compmod changelogs / wishlist.
If you guys are looking for some really fun ideas, may I refer you to the onos mount. https://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/131562/onos-mount/p1
so im not really sure what your goal here is? for whom do you want the game be more fun? if its for casual players, i would go ahead and name the mod "casual ns2" and focus on make the game be overall way more forgiving (reduce the skill gaps by alot). but it would be the wrong forum here to advertise such a mod, im sure it would get a lot of negative feedback
just my 2 cents, wish you good luck with it anyway!
For example I think the shooting mechanics in NS2 are seriously undeveloped (not a dig at anyone just my opinion) I would say make them on par with other modern shooters ;with proper feedback and effects with out being OTT (Exactly like L4D then!) But I am sure a huge number of people would argue about balance, the effects on marines aim etc etc. My position is frankly I don't really care, I'd rather just experiment basing changes off the fact I know other games do shooting a lot better... then seeing what the effects on balance were. Good thing Daan and flat stopped me pushing that forward.
Again this mod was just intended to be a platform to try ideas we have for improving the game for ourselves. In hindsight we should of started off by adding more left field changes we're considering. That probably would of provoked a different reaction from the wider community. It was never meant to please anyone other than ourselves and the people we play with, thats our market. Anyone else enjoying it is a bonus.