Hive is under attack!
frmehe
Join Date: 2012-07-08 Member: 153980Members
Join Date: 2012-07-08 Member: 153980Members
<div class="IPBDescription">@DEVELOPER DO SOMETHING PLEASE!</div>okay let's see, if the marine command station is under attack, what can marines do?
1. obsevatory with beacon = problem solved!
2. teleport through phasegate
3. 1 single exo sitting in base and defend it, it's enough to prevent aliens.
what can aliens do? aliens can do nothing if two exos or a lot of marines in a hive.
aliens can not change the spawn locations.
and thats the biggest problem of the game, marines can rush a hive, and no single alien can be at that point.
for aliens doing this is way harder.
1. marines have obs, which warn every marine
2. marine commander can scan and see if something come, yes he do it many times
3. marines can rebuild a command station for 15 resources.
4. if alien rush the base and the marines survived, everymarine can buy or get a welder by the commander.
while marines weld the command station in 10 seconds to 100%, aliens can do nothing.
crags are to slow, gorges are not possible because everyone has a diffrent lifeform and will lost his resources.
if you will talk about celerity, i will laugh bec. celerity is a joke!
compared to a phasegate which beam you in 1 second or a beacon which beam you too.
i don't say its impossible for aliens to do that, but this is a big balance problem!
tell me, how is this any balanced?
aliens can lost a hive very fast...
1. obsevatory with beacon = problem solved!
2. teleport through phasegate
3. 1 single exo sitting in base and defend it, it's enough to prevent aliens.
what can aliens do? aliens can do nothing if two exos or a lot of marines in a hive.
aliens can not change the spawn locations.
and thats the biggest problem of the game, marines can rush a hive, and no single alien can be at that point.
for aliens doing this is way harder.
1. marines have obs, which warn every marine
2. marine commander can scan and see if something come, yes he do it many times
3. marines can rebuild a command station for 15 resources.
4. if alien rush the base and the marines survived, everymarine can buy or get a welder by the commander.
while marines weld the command station in 10 seconds to 100%, aliens can do nothing.
crags are to slow, gorges are not possible because everyone has a diffrent lifeform and will lost his resources.
if you will talk about celerity, i will laugh bec. celerity is a joke!
compared to a phasegate which beam you in 1 second or a beacon which beam you too.
i don't say its impossible for aliens to do that, but this is a big balance problem!
tell me, how is this any balanced?
aliens can lost a hive very fast...
Comments
Aliens should have some type of "Beacon". It doesn't have to be identical to the way Beacon works, but there should be a way to return to the hive, or at least the ability to teleport from 1 hive to another like it was in NS1.
Aliens do have an advantage though over marines when it comes to getting from point A to point B thanks to ventilations. But some maps lack ventilation passages, and because the hive is so easy to kill, it will most likely die before you can get to the hive.
Maybe one of the solutions is to make aliens spawn faster when hive is taking damage, and make the aliens spawn at the hive that is being attacked.
Anyway, it's something to think about.
Ideally you would have picked that upgrade and then if the base got attacked and you're an onos on the other side of the map you could change to lerk, fly back to base quickly, change to onos, clear out base, change to gorge, heal base, change back to onos, continue doing whatever it is you were doing.
I really hope they put in some sort of hive warp like in NS1. But hey, in the meantime we can all play NS2:C I guess?
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Aliens should have some type of "Beacon". It doesn't have to be identical to the way Beacon works, but there should be a way to return to the hive, or at least the ability to teleport from 1 hive to another like it was in NS1.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Alien beacon or teleportation just does not fit with the asymmetry of the game. In my opinion the way to solve this problem is to make alien controlled territory more hostile by modifying infestation, gorges and the commander.
To counter that: marines are supposed to use scan and obs to see attack coming before it hits, giving THEM ample time to respond to it. They also have phasegates and emergency teleport to make responding to a problem much faster. Aliens don't even have any reliable way to tell their team to get back to base except chat. Khamm can't even set them a waypoint to hive that needs help or anything.
I personally wander off into what could be an undefended base and nom on the power node, then the commander chair. At best, I cripple a base single handedly and do almost as much damage as the group of Marines are doing. At worst, I get killed by a lone Marine or two(if I'm a Skulk or something). In the middle somewhere is triggering a beacon which either takes the whole attacking group of Marines out of the fight completely, or if they have an Exo or two attacking with that Marine group, beaconing strips the Exos of welders and backup since Exos can't be recalled via beacon.
I think this is a very good reason why Aliens should be very aggressive and keep Marines on the defense... which is odd because lifeforms like the Skulk and the Fade are supposed to rely on stealth.
Marines are not expected to build observatories all over the map to constantly see where the aliens are, and at 15 res, any team that would go broke quickly. Neither are they expected to constantly shell out for scans to watch for incoming aliens.
Aliens are, however, expected to use their cheap cloaked scout unit to watch for enemy attacks, and their constant free insight ability is designed to increase their map knowledge.
Lol... yes he can.
Noun:
Lack of equality or equivalence between parts or aspects of something; lack of symmetry.
The situation does frustrate me, but I think this might be the best summary.
I notice there seems to be a big problem with Drifters. Mainly; no one uses them.
There are times when you can fight players' lack of creativity, for instance warp everyone back to the marine home when nobody responds to "GETCHAASSBACKTOBASENOWGOGO". And if abilities are given to the players rather than the commander, then even if the commander doesn't think up some useful attack strategy, some player will ("Oh, hey, you Clogged that corridor, nice thinking Gorgey").
I keep hearing that drifters are crucial to the Alien team, and still plan to try them out next time I'm an Alien Commander. But if no one's using them, I feel like for the sake of new players, there could be a better effort to demonstrate their abilities. For random example: Once a new hive is successfully built, it automatically gets one free Drifter ("Hey, look, commander, a new unit! Try it out!").
Or, the Drifter has some level of variety added through the Cysts. For 1 resources, the Cyst is definitely good enough. Maybe as an alternative scouting method to that though, a fully-matured Cyst could evolve into a Cyst-Eye (1-5 res), which actually gets line of sight.
I think the problem with current game mechanics is that aliens are more often than not discouraged to defend their hive. When 3-4 skulks can chomp down an obs to prevent a beacon and wreck a tech power node in no time flat, base trading seems to be a highly encouraged tactic. Rather one dimensional when the best way to defend your hive is to force a beacon and not a feasible strategy unless aliens are on 3 base. On maps with only 4 tech points (Tram and Veil), aliens can't really afford to trade their second hive while marines can easily afford to lose their cc without much issue.
Then of course any good marine push will wreck eggs first on a Hive so you can't even spawn, nor do you want to spawn there as a newly hatched skulk without any evolutions just melt to marine firepower...not that they don't melt already even with ugprades. Any form of defenders advantage the aliens may have are hard countered by marines. Travel time? Forward phase gate. Defensive structures? Aliens have these? Shade? SCAN! SCAN! SCAN! or burninate everything with the flamethrower. I suppose there's the troll bone wall...like a tacky force field of the SC2 sentry except it can't be spammed. Would work better if it did but hey.
This would solve it very easy, allow all units except onos to use this "Nydus Canal" (similar to how exo's cant phase).
The asymetry would fall in place as well because its only hive to hive, rather than anywhere to anywhere like a phase.
I believe this solves this problem easily
Yes, this is the solution, we have suggested it a lot of times. BTW I think it'd be actually better to have all classes being able to teleport. Because right now we don't have high tech vs high tech, but high tech vs structures. When a base is rushed, the opposite team rushes the other base. When Exos and Onoses can't teleport, there will be very few fights of Onoses vs Exos, because in many situations it is just faster to rush the enemy's base as a counter. It will still be the case when all classes can teleport, but not as often.
PvP and not PvStructures was the goal all the time, but the decisions that have been made lead to the opposite.
EDIT: Plus, the slowest classes have to walk the longest ways. That's a little boring.
Aliens are organic, it would look very strange if they could do some sci-fi electrical looking teleport.
Now what you could do is give the alien commander an ability (10 res) that makes a big worm shoot up from the ground (like a nydus worm in sc2), then all of the alien players get sucked into tentacles and shot out of the worm. (a bio looking teleport)
Either that, or you could turn all nearby eggs into priority eggs that players spawn into first.
Aliens can't get a teleport as good as phase gates, they are too fast.
As far as I know alien waypointing doesn't work. I.e. if you click on an alien and right click on a location you want it to go, no such order is given. I could be wrong though, this is just what I was told when I tried to do just that.
The alien comm can however:
- ping the hive location on the map
- alert them over voice/text chat
It's a case of commanders having to learn to use drifters, which not many are doing right now (hell even I'm not doing it and I'm comm almost every match).
Once people have that mechanic down, they will lock down hive/map control much better.
I'd add more insight into it, but I'm not gonna waste anymore time trying to find a solution that ISNT Hive Teleportation considering UWE likes to deny reality in the name of "asymmetry."
I feel like we're repeating NS1 history.
NS1: Features go in (lerk spikes for example), people hate it (too OP way back then), eventually gets replaced/removed (NS1 Lerk no longer has spikes).
NS2: Features that were removed from NS1 go in (Discussions of babblers going. Really? That didn't work in NS1 when it got introduced). People hate it (Lerk Bile-Bomb), eventually gets replaced by NS1 feature.
The game isn't fun for aliens anyway once it degrades into Onos egging early on.
I don't want to have to wait for this game to get a "NS1 3.0" level of balance (which took YEARS.) But based from the stubbornness from UWE, it seems that way.
Whatever. Don't say I (and many others who agree with regards to NS1 features working well on this game) didn't say so.