Mid to End Game, Little Variety
Perfectblue
Join Date: 2012-11-09 Member: 168864Members
Join Date: 2012-11-09 Member: 168864Members
Comments
But yes, more variety is desperately needed *yesterday*, Destroid nailed it in his post.
just thought that i let you all know you can have onos within 6min even if aliens have only 3 harvesters, so it's not endgame unit in anyway ( using common sense ), it's also possible to have one in 4mins or even 3mins if aliens dominate earlygame ( have 50% of harvesters in the map ).
sorry, i just couldn't resist posting here this same issue.... seemed just so fitting because this guy said he wonders how he sees onos in 12mins when that's actually late - mid game.
When players start getting better and comms learn not to put down a bunch of whips and turrets before they even has res towers, the games will get better. For the time being though, if you have a comm that drops a robotics lab and you don't have at least 5 towers and armor and weapons 2, eject him for a better game.
If your commander doesn't do a boring lazy strategy and actually barks orders over the comm things can change a hell of a lot from game to game between minute mark 1 to 20. Between 20-30 you can tell if it's going to be a slugfest or if someone is going to win.
don't look at it from the perspective of time, but from the perspective of technologies
like aliens with 5-6 upgrades and onos is already at endgame, even if it's only 10 minutes in
^ this. A game over 30-40 minutes was an incredibly long, exhausting game during the beta. It still is. Most games during the late beta were 15-20 minutes at most, even on 20-24 people servers. I played a game over an hour just once during the beta (I think it was an hour and a half actually), and we took screenshots, thinking that it was insanely long.
Then the game got released and the "hour and a half game" was the norm the first week... :-)
The same can be said of poor match ups.
The trick is being able to recognize the difference.
there is only
1. early game (no onos, no exos)
2. end game (onos spam, exos spam).
of if you call that 4 minutes onos the starting of mid game, fine.
That sounds about right unfortunately.
the only problem is that unless you have brazillion of rts, where fades would come up 7 minutes into the game, fades usually come up 10~11 minutes where you could just save up another 25 res for an onos which does not get 3 shots and do a lot more with the stomp instead of vortex. nor the fade is going to stop the exo train. a 3-minute fade is not quite useful at all.
Shotguns are Early game - Late game for Marines. Their all in 1 weapon. Does everything you need.
Pretty much this. Not that Flamethrowers and GL's don't have their place, but in general a shotgun is all you really <i>need</i> to get the job done.
Onos/Exo spam is generally the fault of a commander that doesn't believe in getting anything other than Onos eggs, then they might think about Carapace as the only upgrade they're likely to buy that round. Everyone else is expected to either Gorge, or go play hide-and-go-#&%$-yourself. That, or new players that save P.Res because they're scared of dying and think the Onos is invulnerable. Most of these Onos are the only reason anyone could legitimately call it 'spam', because they die. Constantly. Which ultimately undermines the whole 'fast Onos' strategy by rather a lot when talking about unorganized pub play where everyone doesn't know each other already. (Hyperbole in places, but it can legitimately feel that way with some commanders.)
Thankfully, I usually command and I don't use fast Onos strategy at all. Yet I continue to win. Not every time, but almost every time. And those matches are <i>fun</i> for everyone on my team because I don't ignore their favorite life form to play, that they are probably legitimately good with.
Also, the relative skill of commanders will make a very big difference on how challenging a given match is. If you're against a Marines commander that knows their stuff, and a team that can consistently hit skulks? If your team can actually use life forms effectively as well; that's when things get interesting.
I also blame the impulse to team-stack, but that would be like complaining that the sky is blue.
Either way, the majority of the matches I play are interesting and quite varied even with the limited structures I can play. Certainly a lot of matches involve me placing things where I know they'll be effective from doing it that way numerous times before, but when the Marines counter one of those things you then need to come up with something new.
In all honesty, if everyone on your team goes Onos it's actually not as effective as an organized team of various life forms. Those life forms cost a lot less, just require more T.Res spent to reach their optimal strength. Delaying research like Bile Bomb for an early Onos just doesn't seem worth it to me when you could just Gorge rush after Bile Bomb. Try and tell me that wouldn't work just as well as an early Onos, yet be different and <i>fun</i>.
fade's have their uses in midgame, in endgame however they are nothing but expensive skulks, lol ;F
i think fade cost should be reduced to 30, but that's just me.
oh, and onos egg spam should definetly stop, it's just ruining the game.
In close games, fades could make a difference. In the beta, lots of people went fade and it made a difference. Unfortunately, fade is EXTREMELY hard to play effectively (lerk kind of is too), especially when you're facing shotguns, whereas you can play onos just as well using your left foot. So people would rather save for oni than go fade.
The real problem is alien teams who don't go lerk or fade should never even get to a position to have an onos. It was that way in most games in the beta. If you didn't get higher life forms, eventually you either lost your second hive or didn't even get a second hive or enough RTs before the game ended to even have a single onos on the team.
Low understanding of the game on both sides means protracted games with lots of camping, blurring of lines, and eventually exo/onos spam. 5 min onos just exacerbates that problem.
I see a HUGE problem with marine teams at the moment. There's no sense of urgency. People are used to FPS games where time is meaningless. In RTS games, time is everything. The moment the game starts, you're on a timer. If you don't outsmart (rush) or outproduce (better economy) your opponent, you lose. This isn't like COD where you camp in a corner and rack up kills...
As people start to play this game like an RTS, you'll probably see a lot more dynamics and variety. Right now a lot of teams camp and wait for exos and oni, which creates absolute crap quality games.