I think cysts have a bit too much health for their cost, and their starting health is too high.
Killing them with the axe seems like a cool mechanic: a marine has to crouch and remain statinary for a time which makes them pretty vulnerable. Unfortunately it doesn't match up with the pacing of the rest of the game. That risk and time is not proportional to the cost for aliens to replace it.
Killing them with the rifle or pistol is mainly frustrating because of the amount of ammo they soak up. It's not so bad if you're near an armoury but it's definately not cost effective to ask the commander for ammo.
I haven't seen for myself the way the flamethrower works as described above, so I'll make sure to check that out. It is a late game thing though.
I used secondary pistol fire to take out a newly formed cyst recently and it took more than 1 clip. I think the problem was that it was gaining health from its self-build fast enough to offset the pistol dps. Maybe the pistol isn't appropriate for taking out mature cysts but I think it should be easer and cheaper to take out newly formed ones. Perhaps they should stop auto-building if they took damage in the last x seconds.
Removing cysts will cause alot of other problems. Then alien com would be able to drop anything anywhere, which would be kinda bad.
I think its wonderful that Zups and Laama are trying this out. And besides, game is actually more enjoyable knowing you can kill cysts even mid game, and not having to face the problem of being denied your close RTs at the 5 min mark as rine. It made the game utterly completely unplayable. Cyst spam might still be a problem late game, but its less of a problem. And less a of a problem is better than big of a problem. And besides, lets try this out, see how it works. Cheers Zups and Lamma
Lower hp feels pretty good. I'm not sure about invisible cysts though, that sounds like a huge buff, how much cost a scan again ?
I don't like infestation in general, but simply removing cysts won't work, you will not have cysts spam late game but whips and crags spam. A solution would be to get back drifters, or to allow the gorge to drop patches of infestation, so a player is required to build but he doesn't need to press E for two minutes.
I think the way to go about annoying mechanics like infestation is to make them having the least effect possible on the gameplay, so you can ignore them for the most part. So remove any buff or nerfs on infestation, and allow marines to build on it. It's like how power nodes were tweaked, they are very fast to build and rebuild, so that you can pretty much ignore them once built.
I think making cysts more expensive, weaker and invisible is exactly what needs to be done. I love the mental image where a squad of marines is in an infested corridor asking for scans. Of course a nearby obs would provide detection as well. But I see two problems: 1) cysts are always on the floor and not on the walls or cealing so spotting them with random firing is not very hard and 2) invisible cysts could be even more of a pain when used to deny marine rts.
Comments
Killing them with the axe seems like a cool mechanic: a marine has to crouch and remain statinary for a time which makes them pretty vulnerable. Unfortunately it doesn't match up with the pacing of the rest of the game. That risk and time is not proportional to the cost for aliens to replace it.
Killing them with the rifle or pistol is mainly frustrating because of the amount of ammo they soak up. It's not so bad if you're near an armoury but it's definately not cost effective to ask the commander for ammo.
I haven't seen for myself the way the flamethrower works as described above, so I'll make sure to check that out. It is a late game thing though.
I used secondary pistol fire to take out a newly formed cyst recently and it took more than 1 clip. I think the problem was that it was gaining health from its self-build fast enough to offset the pistol dps. Maybe the pistol isn't appropriate for taking out mature cysts but I think it should be easer and cheaper to take out newly formed ones. Perhaps they should stop auto-building if they took damage in the last x seconds.
I think its wonderful that Zups and Laama are trying this out. And besides, game is actually more enjoyable knowing you can kill cysts even mid game, and not having to face the problem of being denied your close RTs at the 5 min mark as rine. It made the game utterly completely unplayable. Cyst spam might still be a problem late game, but its less of a problem. And less a of a problem is better than big of a problem. And besides, lets try this out, see how it works. Cheers Zups and Lamma
I don't like infestation in general, but simply removing cysts won't work, you will not have cysts spam late game but whips and crags spam. A solution would be to get back drifters, or to allow the gorge to drop patches of infestation, so a player is required to build but he doesn't need to press E for two minutes.
I think the way to go about annoying mechanics like infestation is to make them having the least effect possible on the gameplay, so you can ignore them for the most part. So remove any buff or nerfs on infestation, and allow marines to build on it.
It's like how power nodes were tweaked, they are very fast to build and rebuild, so that you can pretty much ignore them once built.