Rushes - Counters for aliens?
hephophap
asdasd Join Date: 2014-04-08 Member: 195258Members
asdasd Join Date: 2014-04-08 Member: 195258Members
So, lets say your obs picks up multiple lifeforms on your radar.
Depending on how confident you are with the marines in base, you may beacon or not.
Then your marines can purchases
A) Pulse nades to cut the bile effectiveness of roughly the WHOLE push in half
Spam some nades in the general direction of where they come from to kill it off completely
C) Use flamethrowers to cut the effectiveness in half of bile and gas
Chances of survival with an observant comm: 90%
Then you go alien and you see a Jetpack rush coming. You're well on 7 biomass, 2 bases, all upgrades, but the push comes anyway.
Your comm spots it, he bonewalls, aliens pull back and yet the hive goes down in 2 seconds, no one can touch the jetpacks and half the team dies due to random GLs.
What can you do?
A) Bonewall
Web (lol)
C) hope your players are extremely good and theirs are shit.
Chance of surival: 20%.
Bottomline, Aliens have no good counter vs. jetpack rushes. You can see them coming, you can prep all you want, but you can't stop it.
The least thing that could be done is to make webs free. I don't see why they have to be this expensive.
Depending on how confident you are with the marines in base, you may beacon or not.
Then your marines can purchases
A) Pulse nades to cut the bile effectiveness of roughly the WHOLE push in half
Spam some nades in the general direction of where they come from to kill it off completelyC) Use flamethrowers to cut the effectiveness in half of bile and gas
Chances of survival with an observant comm: 90%
Then you go alien and you see a Jetpack rush coming. You're well on 7 biomass, 2 bases, all upgrades, but the push comes anyway.
Your comm spots it, he bonewalls, aliens pull back and yet the hive goes down in 2 seconds, no one can touch the jetpacks and half the team dies due to random GLs.
What can you do?
A) Bonewall
Web (lol)C) hope your players are extremely good and theirs are shit.
Chance of surival: 20%.
Bottomline, Aliens have no good counter vs. jetpack rushes. You can see them coming, you can prep all you want, but you can't stop it.
The least thing that could be done is to make webs free. I don't see why they have to be this expensive.
Comments
Marines always should have less bases then aliens or you are already losing (as aliens).
Jetpack rush == 15pres, and like 80 tres for proto, AA and research.
Your statistics are bullshit btw, why do you even bother?
Anyway, ns2 is an assymetrical game. There are other ways to counter a strat, than to defend. I.e. counter attacks.
I have never done any of that after a beacon because of a bile rush. Let's be honest: After a beacon you need one or two seonds to understand where in the room the beacon put you. Then you need at least 5 seconds to spot the armory and buy those nades or a flamethrower (lol) and then you need to spot where those gorges are biling from. By the time all that is done your cc and/or ips, armslab, power, proto are already down as well...
Another thing is: A bilerush is a last all in for an alien team very close to loosing (without any other lifeforms or pres to evolve again) and almost never succeedes if the marine comm is not completley stupid.
Killing a hive with a well coordinated marine team with jeatpacks, shotguns and gls is a valid strat to kill a hive and is a lot of the times no last all in. If it is no all in it is just the marines deciding to end the game by killing hives and stop blocking lanes, recapping and pressuring harcesters. If it is an all in I would assume the aliens to be far ahead (otherwise it's not an all in) and have multiple fades, lerks and hives. It should be an easy task for thoese highly upgraded lifeforms to kill a good number of jetpacks. So even when losing the hive losing all the jetpacks and weapons should waste more pres for the marines making it very easy to defend another rush on the next hives. And a far ahead alien team normally has the tres to redrop a killed hive while the marines try to kill the other hives.
As Rines one time we lost whole mapcontrol in early game cause we failed so our com made a JP Rush. Problem was only with Weapon1/Armor1... So 8 Rines are rushing to the hive, 3 died on the way, 2 at the entrance, 3 left... And those were not able to kill the Hive.
As Alien u can rush much earlier (Biomass 3 and Bile) and Players only pay 8-10 PRes.
As Marine u can only rush with W2/A2, Advanced Armory, ProtoLab, JP. This takes a lot more time and TRes. And JP/GL 35 PRes. So why shoud this Hive survive?... How do you want to end games when a Hive does not die with such a huge amount of spent Res? ^^
If you know you can't react in time because the whole team is out of position, then the rush gives you time to take down something more valuable than a hive elsewhere. Hives may seem expensive, but losing one isn't that big of an issue. In your situation, with 3 hives up, any decent Alien Commander will have shifted out upgrade chambers in time.
The strategic response to a hive rush which you - due to which reasons ever - can't defend, because you're out of position/don't have any lifeforms to deal with it, is not to run back across the whole map to watch the hive go down and die to grenade. Take down 2-3 RTs in that time and you've hurt the marine resources more than they hurt yours.
~Luchs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
If you are fast enough, you either destroy their base, have them beacon before your hive goes down, or in the best case scenario, both.
What can you do?
A) Bonewall
C) hope your players are extremely good and theirs are ****.
D) Counter base rush
E) Sack sub, ensure cargo and pipe are safe, destroy all marine res, fake rush control to force beacon and simultaneously destroy sub
You want some more options?
F) Don't play on 24 person servers where this strategy is most effective
stereotyping
Aliens' strength is "spread" combat: massive damage to undefended targets with possibility to hit multiple targets or rapidly change targets.
Marine push is countered by attacking undefended places. (to force marines to play "spread" game)
Excessive alien map control is countered by marine push to key locations. (to force aliens to play "linear" game)
BTW, when aliens have the whole map except marine base, the game becomes completely linear and sometimes difficult to end.
Marines rushing cargo? Dont wait for them to get into cargo and start flying around, engage them in the corridors where you have the advantage of mobility and corners.
Also, to add further perspective-
Marines get perhaps 3 well-defined points in a (presumably relatively even) game where the tech alone gives them enough of an advantage to push down a hive-
- shotguns come up (shotgun rush)
- w2/a2 (w2 kills hives fast enough; a2 means fades dont 2-swipe you)
- jetpacks (you can fly, also GLs)
If the marines dont successfully take advantage of any of these points, they most likely lose a lot of map control and/or PRES and the aliens gain a huge advantage provided they still have life forms.
Aliens, however, have bile bomb available within the first few minutes and can rush at any point from there on, and it costs 8 pres per player to use this, which is roughly half the price of a shotgun or GL. Conversely, it's much harder to sneak half a team of gorges into a base than simply fly in with jetpacks.
Don't forget it takes just 1 rifle clip to kill a gorge.
And yet again, while gorges can rush at any point- there are times when you must, and times when you shouldn't.
Also FYI bonewall is actually great for splitting large groups of marines into smaller, more vulnerable groups of marines.
You WANT to force them to beacon to save your hive. If they don't beacon, you get to finish the arms lab/power. If power is out, you'll basically win (or force them into a relocate which is super expensive for marines). If arms lab goes down, suddenly marines are easy kills and if you still have life forms up (which you should otherwise you deserve to lose) they can clean up JP's and expensive guns. Boom marines lose PRES. During all of this chaos, you should also be able to get one of their forward phase gates down so they lose map control.
This entire time the alien khamm needs to immediately start aggressively expanding and if possible, drop another hive, because the next move for marines might just be a rush on the other hive, and if true, their bases are easy killings.
Funnily enough that's more or less how I deal with a lot of jetpackers, rather than playing marine-on-a-stick and getting kited into being an easy kill :P But I know what you meant