Ok to this I have to replay. Now, I HATE unchaned chambers, so I will take the time to explain why I hate it.
First off, it increases the importance of holding a 2nd hive. With unchained chambers the 2nd hive becomes the breaking point of the game much more so than it is right now. Right now, when they aliens get a 2nd hive, they can drop a 2nd upgrade. When they hive died, they still have that upgrade, and have some chance to recapture the hive. With unchianed, as soon as you lose the 2nd hive, you are stuck back at 1 upgrade, which makes a very frustrating endgame for the aliens. Even more than it already is.
The second reason is sensory. Sensory is VERY powerfull, and is only balanced with teh fact that you cant get regen if you get sens. When combined with the option to have all the other chambers as well, it becomes too powerfull. You cannot sneak a phase anywhere because skulks are either invisible so you dont know if you are safe, or they have scent of fear and will track you down. Now, if the aliens want to go the sensory route im all for that, however, giving them DCs as well is rediculous. That allows them to have both fades and skulks. It makes playing as a marine very frustrating, especially when the comm is anything less that spectacular and doesnt scan everywhere his marines go.
I played quite a few unchained games on TacticalGamer. I hated every single on of them. It totally changed NS, and not for the better. Playing as marines where the most frustrating thing I have ever experienced, and losing a hive as an alien was a deathblow with a very frustrating 15 minutes while they take down the last hive.
If they want to balance the game, all they need to do is remove regen and make it a hive ability. Small regen at hive 1, medium regen at hive 2, and big regen at hive 3. Then invent some new upgrade for the defense chamber. Or something similar to this.
It sounds more like you lost every single game than that the plugin was unbalanced.
And since the vast majority who try unchained servers keep on playing on that server, it would seem like the game really does become better than the devs have made it. The devs are not omnipotent. Occasionally they make mistakes, or bad decisions. Acid rocket anyone?(both 1.0x and 3.0) Whether unchained is a mistake or bad decision is something else. But people <i>can</i> make the game better/more fun than the devs sometimes.
And you do with chained? I'm sorry, but I've never seen two upgrade types make a larger difference than second hive ability. And besides, losing a hive is pretty much as bad as losing your upgraded armory for the marines. It'll take quite some time to recover, and if you don't have that time... well, you're screwed. Although marines can occasionally pick up the heavy weaponry from their fallen comrades, so it's not as bad.
Coming back from losing your second hive is about as hard for aliens as it is for marines to come back from 3 hives.
<!--QuoteBegin-Lord Chambers+Aug 26 2004, 04:13 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Lord Chambers @ Aug 26 2004, 04:13 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Unchained chambers means what? <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> unchained chambers means that you can turn classic into combat and make that game suck to
<!--QuoteBegin-Avenger-X+Aug 29 2004, 03:20 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Avenger-X @ Aug 29 2004, 03:20 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> <!--QuoteBegin-Lord Chambers+Aug 26 2004, 04:13 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Lord Chambers @ Aug 26 2004, 04:13 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Unchained chambers means what? <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> unchained chambers means that you can turn classic into combat and make that game suck to <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> Elaborate. How does, instead of chaining one type of chamber to each hive, allowing for a natural glass-cieling (read: resource constraints, building priority) which makes it rare to see three of each type of chamber before the second hive is built, and leaving the upgrade structure <i>exactly how it is</i> make unchained Classic like Combat?
<!--QuoteBegin-Swift Idiot+Aug 29 2004, 10:43 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Swift Idiot @ Aug 29 2004, 10:43 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Oh yeah. Umm. Unchained chamber servers are another sign that the gamers think they can make a better game than the devs. Awesome job.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd--> This game is in <b>beta.</b> We are all <b>playtesters</b> now. We have something of a responsibility to tell the devs what works and what doesn't, because the devs are not supervising all the testing and the testers like they were pre 3.0 beta. Fact is, the strict build order on chambers doesn't work well, because the aliens follow a totally predictable pattern. Simply unchaining them and altering nothing else may not be the answer, but it certainly gives the aliens more than one way to play the game, 'cause let's face it, DMS is pretty much all you can do right now. Here's why:
First hive, skulks are wimps. They take 5-7 LMG bullets last time I checked to keel over, and those things fire fairly fast and fairly straight, making killing a skulk trivial at range and fairly simple in CQB. That means they need some sort of defensive upgrade if they want to get close enough to use their bite and not die. Now, regen is a lovely upgrade, but when you have 70 health and you die in the first salvo of bullets, you're not regenerating anything at all 'cause you're dead. Redemption doesn't save you anything but a little bit of time - skulks are free and you can always respawn with one. For gorges, every little bit of armour helps you not just keel over and die, giving you time to run or fight back. Ergo, carapace is your best chance of survival, so your gorges drop a defense chamber or 3 and you go on with the game.
Now, along comes Hive 2. With hive 2 comes the res and abilities to make Lerk, Fade and Onos viable choices for the aliens. Now, if you've played lerk before, you know that flying takes energy and sustained flying makes it hard to swoop in, bite and get out before you die, so Adrenaline is probably the one essential upgrade for this alien. Fade is similar - blink (how I would love to see a *working* 1.04 teleport blink again, but alas) takes a LOT of energy, as does sustained swiping and metabolizing, so adrenaline basically allows you to attack without breaking down halfway through, making it mostly essential. Onos, again, needs energy to sustain an attack pattern of any kind, so adren makes the most sense. Celerity is all well and good for lerks and skulks, but being fast doesn't help if you can only bite a couple of times before you have to leave battle, especially if that energy you're missing is required for you to run away. Silence: yippee, they can't hear you coming. They probably have motion tracking at this point anyways, and only the Lerk and Skulk are fast enough to attack unseen in the short time in which they're both unseen and unheard.
Here's hive 3. There's one chamber left, with 3 upgrades to pick from. Focus is a good one if you're a bite-sniper like I am - it lets you pick marines off without having to stop in battle to bite and bite and bite some more. Fades are excellent with focus - claw-swipes are 2-hit kills, and at this point no single marine can kill you fast enough to not die himself, especially if you're a skilled blinker. Onos makes good use of it as well - only the gorge receives no benefit from it. Scent of Fear is motion tracking without the motion, which is strategically handy but not the direct enhancement that some people want from their upgrades. Finally, cloaking, which is really only useful in the light-combat skulk-populated early-to-mid game and not the assaults and waves of the mid to late game. This chamber is better off used in the early game, but since you need the other 2 just to play, you can't use it first or second; it has to be third by process of elimination.
Here's what I suggest: Do whatever you need to do to make it balanced, but unchain the chambers. Give the aliens more than one game to play. It'd be a lot more fun that way.
<!--QuoteBegin--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->QUOTE (Avenger-X @ Aug 29 2004, 03:20 PM) QUOTE (Lord Chambers @ Aug 26 2004, 04:13 PM) Unchained chambers means what?
unchained chambers means that you can turn classic into combat and make that game suck to
Elaborate. How does, instead of chaining one type of chamber to each hive, allowing for a natural glass-cieling (read: resource constraints, building priority) which makes it rare to see three of each type of chamber before the second hive is built, and leaving the upgrade structure exactly how it is make unchained Classic like Combat? <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I doubt he is able to find valid arguments for his statement, so don't expect any. I guess he either has never played unchained or was a victim of early sensory skulks.
To the statement that sensory is only balanced because it means not having regen:
Wrong!
Do you remember version 2.00? EVERYONE dropped sensory first for about three weeks after the game was released. And then all of a sudden, everyone collectively switched back to DMS. This was before any, ANY patches were made. Do you remember why?
Because the sensory first strategy was COUNTERABLE. By key placement of observatories, cloaking became worthless, and there was nothing else really worthwhile that sensory offered. Combined with a 2-hive lockdown, aliens were toast. Even if it forces marines to place one observatory for every sensory aliens place, causing massive resource drain... the resources spent by the marines are worth more than the resources spent by the aliens. The aliens now have ZERO benefit from theiir chambers, while the marines gain MANY benefits... more obs energy, garaunteed motion tracking, motion tracking for the commander without even having to research it... AND it leads naturally into the hive-lockdown strategy, since building observatories means you're likely to get early phasegates.
So now we have a situation that the aliens have been smacked down utterly. They can't build anything but sensories, and those sensory chambers offer them NO advantage whatsoever.
Compare that to a defense chamber. The only counter to THAT is weapon upgrades, and even then, defensive upgrades are STILL useful, as they increase longevity even under increased fire, and the chambers themselves are VERY useful (for WoLs, or forewards bases, or for healing the hive) and the upgrade can be used for helping to break ANY base. Consider if marines could place a simple, low cost structure that would NULLIFY regen, or NULLIFY carapace. Would people still want to build defensive chambers first? I would say no. They wouldn't. They'd all switch to Movement Chambers first, unless movements also had a building that would nullify the upgrade. At which point the aliens have no good upgrades at all, and will lose EVERY SINGLE GAME.
With unchained chambers, of which I support wholeheartedly, sensories in the early game mean that marines can still counter them, rendering them worthless, and then aliens can still survive. OR the marines can choose to NOT render them worthless, spending resources on other strategies, allowing the cloaking to work, forcing marines to stay in groups and keep an eye and ear out at all times. It works, and it's fun. Wyzcrack's server statistics (unchained) also show an oddity in the NS world: <b>Perfect Win/Loss Balance</b> with a 5% margin of error. Where else can you find this?
You forget the most important thing. It just isnt fun.
Instead of unchaining the chambers they should instead focus on making all the cambers usefull, without the marines being able to totally eliminate their usefullness by building a cheap building.
I find it more fun being a skulk on unchained - it means I can take upgrades that are suited to skulks, rather than having to forego them until hive 2. Why is it more fun to have less options?
As for making all chambers equally viable, well, it's a nice enough dream. Until that happens, though, I'll stick with unchained.
Personally, I love unchained as both lifeforms. As a marine, I generally command, and having to be wary of sensory and silence early on has really given the old feeling of anticipation and strategy back to me. It requires changin your strategy a little, and trying new ideas and tactics. I personally love the fact I'm winning less games on unchained servers than normal, gives me some challenge. As a alien, I absolutely love the diversity of gameplay. I usually gorge for a node and a sens in an unbuilt hive area. It is amazingly fun to sit in the corner of a hive room, let marines, come in, build node, PG, and walk around the room while the hive is building. Or to just skulk the whole game with SoF and kill those pesky rambos trying to get a PG up by a hive.
Unchained doesn't mean that a 2nd hive is the end all. I've seen comebacks on unchained more often than normal servers. It just requires new strategies and teamwork, something I feel aliens have been lacking since the introduction of the game-deciding fade.
I've read the thread now, and let me just say this first... Overall, I like unchained chambers as a direction of movement, though I am no longer presently playing unchained servers. To elaborate:
_Plugin_Pros_ * Prevents one gorge from **** everyone off (though I strongly disagree with the assessment that that gorge dropping scs will doom the entire team necessarily). * Allows a doomed alien team some chance to mess around. * Allows 1-hive skulks to be as frightening as possible due to the range of abilities. * Makes the comm's job a lot more interesting (some would say frustrating, I say interesting).
_Plugin_Cons_ * Makes mediocre comms impossible to deal with. You need phenoms or better, because of having to simultaneously deal with cloakers, focus, regen, silence... * Doesn't work well at all on servers without a strong regular base of some sort, or at least decent lurkers. First, groups of newbies will tend to get distracted by the chambers. Second, mediocre marines versus 1 or 2 smart aliens are completely shutdown (note: not good, smart) by unreachable sensory chambers, until the comm spends the 20 res on an obs at that location, which is quite an expensive proposition. * It has retooled the strats to such a degree that we're no longer testing 3.0B4 at all; it's a new deal all together. Say what you'd like about the gameplay now, I'm pretty sure you can't say it's the same (at least 90% of my games on TG begin with at least one sensory now, which means I have to counter with at least an obs, maybe motion). It's more or less still about as balanced, imho, but we're not testing the same deal at all.
That last point is my clincher... I feel I've seen enough of Unchained to make an assessment, namely that it's a direction I would like to see NS move in. However, at the moment, there are a wealth of issues to deal with, strategies to balance, and until the devs make that change, I would very much regret seeing too many servers run the plugin. The additional difficulties with needing a strong playerbase of regulars means that, while servers like TG will do fine, most servers will struggle badly with Unchained.
I'd like to see a tweaked unchaining of the chambers sometime. If I recall, it was discussed before (2.0?). Something a lot of people would enjoy, no doubt. It just needs to be carefully considered, in more depth than the plugin presently addresses.
<!--QuoteBegin-Spazmatic+Aug 31 2004, 06:12 AM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Spazmatic @ Aug 31 2004, 06:12 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> I've read the thread now, and let me just say this first... Overall, I like unchained chambers as a direction of movement, though I am no longer presently playing unchained servers. To elaborate:
_Plugin_Pros_ * Prevents one gorge from **** everyone off (though I strongly disagree with the assessment that that gorge dropping scs will doom the entire team necessarily). * Allows a doomed alien team some chance to mess around. * Allows 1-hive skulks to be as frightening as possible due to the range of abilities. * Makes the comm's job a lot more interesting (some would say frustrating, I say interesting).
_Plugin_Cons_ * Makes mediocre comms impossible to deal with. You need phenoms or better, because of having to simultaneously deal with cloakers, focus, regen, silence... * Doesn't work well at all on servers without a strong regular base of some sort, or at least decent lurkers. First, groups of newbies will tend to get distracted by the chambers. Second, mediocre marines versus 1 or 2 smart aliens are completely shutdown (note: not good, smart) by unreachable sensory chambers, until the comm spends the 20 res on an obs at that location, which is quite an expensive proposition. * It has retooled the strats to such a degree that we're no longer testing 3.0B4 at all; it's a new deal all together. Say what you'd like about the gameplay now, I'm pretty sure you can't say it's the same (at least 90% of my games on TG begin with at least one sensory now, which means I have to counter with at least an obs, maybe motion). It's more or less still about as balanced, imho, but we're not testing the same deal at all.
That last point is my clincher... I feel I've seen enough of Unchained to make an assessment, namely that it's a direction I would like to see NS move in. However, at the moment, there are a wealth of issues to deal with, strategies to balance, and until the devs make that change, I would very much regret seeing too many servers run the plugin. The additional difficulties with needing a strong playerbase of regulars means that, while servers like TG will do fine, most servers will struggle badly with Unchained.
I'd like to see a tweaked unchaining of the chambers sometime. If I recall, it was discussed before (2.0?). Something a lot of people would enjoy, no doubt. It just needs to be carefully considered, in more depth than the plugin presently addresses. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd--> Well-put.
I see mostly praise for Unchained Chambers in this post, and would care to address what problems you have with it, of which the two most prominent appear to be the difficulty of its proper use (by both teams), and the issue of version discrepency that this plugin effectively causes.
Consider this: While, yes, we have been given 3.0 Beta 4a so as to playtest <i>it</i>, and not a plugin-spawned variant, aren't those servers with the Unchained plugin effectively playtesting that? The main cause for campaign is to convince those of higher authority in the NS project that this idea should be implemented, and the only way to prove that is by testing. As a bonus, it doubles up with the role of normal playtesting for official features: It can help reveal gameplay and balance problems, allowing it to be intelligently tweaked. Furthermore, this can be conducted without affecting the original version, so if any mistakes are made, those who don't (yet <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->) want to play Unchained are unaffected.
And with the difficulty of adjusting to it, well isn't that just another thing that is revealed by playtesting, that perhaps had ought to be addressed (though, in fact, probably not)? Besides which, everyone serious will adjust, given time.
Comments
First off, it increases the importance of holding a 2nd hive. With unchained chambers the 2nd hive becomes the breaking point of the game much more so than it is right now. Right now, when they aliens get a 2nd hive, they can drop a 2nd upgrade. When they hive died, they still have that upgrade, and have some chance to recapture the hive. With unchianed, as soon as you lose the 2nd hive, you are stuck back at 1 upgrade, which makes a very frustrating endgame for the aliens. Even more than it already is.
The second reason is sensory. Sensory is VERY powerfull, and is only balanced with teh fact that you cant get regen if you get sens. When combined with the option to have all the other chambers as well, it becomes too powerfull. You cannot sneak a phase anywhere because skulks are either invisible so you dont know if you are safe, or they have scent of fear and will track you down. Now, if the aliens want to go the sensory route im all for that, however, giving them DCs as well is rediculous. That allows them to have both fades and skulks. It makes playing as a marine very frustrating, especially when the comm is anything less that spectacular and doesnt scan everywhere his marines go.
I played quite a few unchained games on TacticalGamer. I hated every single on of them. It totally changed NS, and not for the better. Playing as marines where the most frustrating thing I have ever experienced, and losing a hive as an alien was a deathblow with a very frustrating 15 minutes while they take down the last hive.
If they want to balance the game, all they need to do is remove regen and make it a hive ability. Small regen at hive 1, medium regen at hive 2, and big regen at hive 3. Then invent some new upgrade for the defense chamber. Or something similar to this.
And since the vast majority who try unchained servers keep on playing on that server, it would seem like the game really does become better than the devs have made it. The devs are not omnipotent. Occasionally they make mistakes, or bad decisions. Acid rocket anyone?(both 1.0x and 3.0)
Whether unchained is a mistake or bad decision is something else. But people <i>can</i> make the game better/more fun than the devs sometimes.
Coming back from losing your second hive is about as hard for aliens as it is for marines to come back from 3 hives.
unchained chambers means that you can turn classic into combat and make that game suck to
unchained chambers means that you can turn classic into combat and make that game suck to <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Elaborate. How does, instead of chaining one type of chamber to each hive, allowing for a natural glass-cieling (read: resource constraints, building priority) which makes it rare to see three of each type of chamber before the second hive is built, and leaving the upgrade structure <i>exactly how it is</i> make unchained Classic like Combat?
This game is in <b>beta.</b> We are all <b>playtesters</b> now. We have something of a responsibility to tell the devs what works and what doesn't, because the devs are not supervising all the testing and the testers like they were pre 3.0 beta. Fact is, the strict build order on chambers doesn't work well, because the aliens follow a totally predictable pattern. Simply unchaining them and altering nothing else may not be the answer, but it certainly gives the aliens more than one way to play the game, 'cause let's face it, DMS is pretty much all you can do right now. Here's why:
First hive, skulks are wimps. They take 5-7 LMG bullets last time I checked to keel over, and those things fire fairly fast and fairly straight, making killing a skulk trivial at range and fairly simple in CQB. That means they need some sort of defensive upgrade if they want to get close enough to use their bite and not die. Now, regen is a lovely upgrade, but when you have 70 health and you die in the first salvo of bullets, you're not regenerating anything at all 'cause you're dead. Redemption doesn't save you anything but a little bit of time - skulks are free and you can always respawn with one. For gorges, every little bit of armour helps you not just keel over and die, giving you time to run or fight back. Ergo, carapace is your best chance of survival, so your gorges drop a defense chamber or 3 and you go on with the game.
Now, along comes Hive 2. With hive 2 comes the res and abilities to make Lerk, Fade and Onos viable choices for the aliens. Now, if you've played lerk before, you know that flying takes energy and sustained flying makes it hard to swoop in, bite and get out before you die, so Adrenaline is probably the one essential upgrade for this alien. Fade is similar - blink (how I would love to see a *working* 1.04 teleport blink again, but alas) takes a LOT of energy, as does sustained swiping and metabolizing, so adrenaline basically allows you to attack without breaking down halfway through, making it mostly essential. Onos, again, needs energy to sustain an attack pattern of any kind, so adren makes the most sense. Celerity is all well and good for lerks and skulks, but being fast doesn't help if you can only bite a couple of times before you have to leave battle, especially if that energy you're missing is required for you to run away. Silence: yippee, they can't hear you coming. They probably have motion tracking at this point anyways, and only the Lerk and Skulk are fast enough to attack unseen in the short time in which they're both unseen and unheard.
Here's hive 3. There's one chamber left, with 3 upgrades to pick from. Focus is a good one if you're a bite-sniper like I am - it lets you pick marines off without having to stop in battle to bite and bite and bite some more. Fades are excellent with focus - claw-swipes are 2-hit kills, and at this point no single marine can kill you fast enough to not die himself, especially if you're a skilled blinker. Onos makes good use of it as well - only the gorge receives no benefit from it. Scent of Fear is motion tracking without the motion, which is strategically handy but not the direct enhancement that some people want from their upgrades. Finally, cloaking, which is really only useful in the light-combat skulk-populated early-to-mid game and not the assaults and waves of the mid to late game. This chamber is better off used in the early game, but since you need the other 2 just to play, you can't use it first or second; it has to be third by process of elimination.
Here's what I suggest: Do whatever you need to do to make it balanced, but unchain the chambers. Give the aliens more than one game to play. It'd be a lot more fun that way.
QUOTE (Lord Chambers @ Aug 26 2004, 04:13 PM)
Unchained chambers means what?
unchained chambers means that you can turn classic into combat and make that game suck to
Elaborate. How does, instead of chaining one type of chamber to each hive, allowing for a natural glass-cieling (read: resource constraints, building priority) which makes it rare to see three of each type of chamber before the second hive is built, and leaving the upgrade structure exactly how it is make unchained Classic like Combat? <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I doubt he is able to find valid arguments for his statement, so don't expect any.
I guess he either has never played unchained or was a victim of early sensory skulks.
Wrong!
Do you remember version 2.00? EVERYONE dropped sensory first for about three weeks after the game was released. And then all of a sudden, everyone collectively switched back to DMS. This was before any, ANY patches were made. Do you remember why?
Because the sensory first strategy was COUNTERABLE. By key placement of observatories, cloaking became worthless, and there was nothing else really worthwhile that sensory offered. Combined with a 2-hive lockdown, aliens were toast. Even if it forces marines to place one observatory for every sensory aliens place, causing massive resource drain... the resources spent by the marines are worth more than the resources spent by the aliens. The aliens now have ZERO benefit from theiir chambers, while the marines gain MANY benefits... more obs energy, garaunteed motion tracking, motion tracking for the commander without even having to research it... AND it leads naturally into the hive-lockdown strategy, since building observatories means you're likely to get early phasegates.
So now we have a situation that the aliens have been smacked down utterly. They can't build anything but sensories, and those sensory chambers offer them NO advantage whatsoever.
Compare that to a defense chamber. The only counter to THAT is weapon upgrades, and even then, defensive upgrades are STILL useful, as they increase longevity even under increased fire, and the chambers themselves are VERY useful (for WoLs, or forewards bases, or for healing the hive) and the upgrade can be used for helping to break ANY base. Consider if marines could place a simple, low cost structure that would NULLIFY regen, or NULLIFY carapace. Would people still want to build defensive chambers first? I would say no. They wouldn't. They'd all switch to Movement Chambers first, unless movements also had a building that would nullify the upgrade. At which point the aliens have no good upgrades at all, and will lose EVERY SINGLE GAME.
With unchained chambers, of which I support wholeheartedly, sensories in the early game mean that marines can still counter them, rendering them worthless, and then aliens can still survive. OR the marines can choose to NOT render them worthless, spending resources on other strategies, allowing the cloaking to work, forcing marines to stay in groups and keep an eye and ear out at all times. It works, and it's fun. Wyzcrack's server statistics (unchained) also show an oddity in the NS world: <b>Perfect Win/Loss Balance</b> with a 5% margin of error. Where else can you find this?
Instead of unchaining the chambers they should instead focus on making all the cambers usefull, without the marines being able to totally eliminate their usefullness by building a cheap building.
As for making all chambers equally viable, well, it's a nice enough dream. Until that happens, though, I'll stick with unchained.
Unchained doesn't mean that a 2nd hive is the end all. I've seen comebacks on unchained more often than normal servers. It just requires new strategies and teamwork, something I feel aliens have been lacking since the introduction of the game-deciding fade.
_Plugin_Pros_
* Prevents one gorge from **** everyone off (though I strongly disagree with the assessment that that gorge dropping scs will doom the entire team necessarily).
* Allows a doomed alien team some chance to mess around.
* Allows 1-hive skulks to be as frightening as possible due to the range of abilities.
* Makes the comm's job a lot more interesting (some would say frustrating, I say interesting).
_Plugin_Cons_
* Makes mediocre comms impossible to deal with. You need phenoms or better, because of having to simultaneously deal with cloakers, focus, regen, silence...
* Doesn't work well at all on servers without a strong regular base of some sort, or at least decent lurkers. First, groups of newbies will tend to get distracted by the chambers. Second, mediocre marines versus 1 or 2 smart aliens are completely shutdown (note: not good, smart) by unreachable sensory chambers, until the comm spends the 20 res on an obs at that location, which is quite an expensive proposition.
* It has retooled the strats to such a degree that we're no longer testing 3.0B4 at all; it's a new deal all together. Say what you'd like about the gameplay now, I'm pretty sure you can't say it's the same (at least 90% of my games on TG begin with at least one sensory now, which means I have to counter with at least an obs, maybe motion). It's more or less still about as balanced, imho, but we're not testing the same deal at all.
That last point is my clincher... I feel I've seen enough of Unchained to make an assessment, namely that it's a direction I would like to see NS move in. However, at the moment, there are a wealth of issues to deal with, strategies to balance, and until the devs make that change, I would very much regret seeing too many servers run the plugin. The additional difficulties with needing a strong playerbase of regulars means that, while servers like TG will do fine, most servers will struggle badly with Unchained.
I'd like to see a tweaked unchaining of the chambers sometime. If I recall, it was discussed before (2.0?). Something a lot of people would enjoy, no doubt. It just needs to be carefully considered, in more depth than the plugin presently addresses.
_Plugin_Pros_
* Prevents one gorge from **** everyone off (though I strongly disagree with the assessment that that gorge dropping scs will doom the entire team necessarily).
* Allows a doomed alien team some chance to mess around.
* Allows 1-hive skulks to be as frightening as possible due to the range of abilities.
* Makes the comm's job a lot more interesting (some would say frustrating, I say interesting).
_Plugin_Cons_
* Makes mediocre comms impossible to deal with. You need phenoms or better, because of having to simultaneously deal with cloakers, focus, regen, silence...
* Doesn't work well at all on servers without a strong regular base of some sort, or at least decent lurkers. First, groups of newbies will tend to get distracted by the chambers. Second, mediocre marines versus 1 or 2 smart aliens are completely shutdown (note: not good, smart) by unreachable sensory chambers, until the comm spends the 20 res on an obs at that location, which is quite an expensive proposition.
* It has retooled the strats to such a degree that we're no longer testing 3.0B4 at all; it's a new deal all together. Say what you'd like about the gameplay now, I'm pretty sure you can't say it's the same (at least 90% of my games on TG begin with at least one sensory now, which means I have to counter with at least an obs, maybe motion). It's more or less still about as balanced, imho, but we're not testing the same deal at all.
That last point is my clincher... I feel I've seen enough of Unchained to make an assessment, namely that it's a direction I would like to see NS move in. However, at the moment, there are a wealth of issues to deal with, strategies to balance, and until the devs make that change, I would very much regret seeing too many servers run the plugin. The additional difficulties with needing a strong playerbase of regulars means that, while servers like TG will do fine, most servers will struggle badly with Unchained.
I'd like to see a tweaked unchaining of the chambers sometime. If I recall, it was discussed before (2.0?). Something a lot of people would enjoy, no doubt. It just needs to be carefully considered, in more depth than the plugin presently addresses. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well-put.
I see mostly praise for Unchained Chambers in this post, and would care to address what problems you have with it, of which the two most prominent appear to be the difficulty of its proper use (by both teams), and the issue of version discrepency that this plugin effectively causes.
Consider this: While, yes, we have been given 3.0 Beta 4a so as to playtest <i>it</i>, and not a plugin-spawned variant, aren't those servers with the Unchained plugin effectively playtesting that? The main cause for campaign is to convince those of higher authority in the NS project that this idea should be implemented, and the only way to prove that is by testing. As a bonus, it doubles up with the role of normal playtesting for official features: It can help reveal gameplay and balance problems, allowing it to be intelligently tweaked. Furthermore, this can be conducted without affecting the original version, so if any mistakes are made, those who don't (yet <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif' /><!--endemo-->) want to play Unchained are unaffected.
And with the difficulty of adjusting to it, well isn't that just another thing that is revealed by playtesting, that perhaps had ought to be addressed (though, in fact, probably not)? Besides which, everyone serious will adjust, given time.