My Thoughts and Observations
|DFA| Havoc
Join Date: 2009-08-07 Member: 68375Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2009-08-07 Member: 68375Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<div class="IPBDescription">On the state of the game and how to make it better!</div>Warning: Massive walls of text incoming, brace for impact.
I am going to try and break this into two parts, the first being largely observations and the second ideas on how to solve the problems presented in the first.
My background:
I played NS1 at launch, and it was my primary timesink for about 3 years. I have countless untold hours logged, but I never got into the competitive scene outside of a few friendly clan scrims; I have no interest in playing at that level. As such, I am what I'd consider a 'skilled casual' player. I'm pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the top tier pros, and I probably never will be.
Naturally I paid for a deluxe pre-order as soon as they were announced. I tried playing a little bit during the alpha, but the game just crashed within seconds every time and I got fed up and decided to just wait until the game was released. Now we are a little over 2 months since launch, and I have just over 150 hours logged so far. I love the game as I did the first, but I feel like it is struggling with some pretty big issues.
First is performance, which is clearly a well documented and frequently decried issue. For my own part, it's pretty frustrating when you have dropped a not inconsiderable chunk of change on an i7 CPU and a GTX 680 and still experience unpleasant late game FPS drops and stuttering - I can only imagine what it must be like for folks trying to play on lesser hardware. I know UWE is already working on pinning down and solving the problem, but from what I've read on the forums it seems to be primarily LUA itself causing CPU bottlenecks, and I despair that a solution simply cannot be reached without a drastic overhaul of the engine or key game mechanics like dynamic infestation. I do not have much feedback to offer on this point, except that I think it would help to drastically limit the number of cysts that can be placed in a given area - I know the code is already in place, it just needs to be ratcheted up a good deal. I think this could have a positive impact on gameplay as well by making cyst chains more of a liability, which are currently trivial to rebuild and automatically construct themselves, versus the crippling liability of power nodes, which I will discuss more later. Even if the change to game balance is seen as too severe, you could still reduce the maximum number of cysts per area and simply give them more HP when mature to compensate. I don't know enough about the engine to say for certain how big of an impact this will have on performance, but it seems to me that the stuttering really only happens in late game when the alien khamm has spammed up the entire map with tons of cysts and structures.
In the end, if it came down to it, I would much rather drop dynamic infestation completely from the game and find another way to balance or limit alien expansion if it means having a game that runs butter smooth. I'm tired of slow-motion grenades and teleporting skulks.
Second is game balance, a far more complex issue, and the one that eventually drove me away from NS1. In my own experience, the game has been most enjoyable and the most 'balanced' right after launch, and in the recent weeks following the Christmas sale, thanks in large part to the influx of new players. If you get the noobery spread out across both teams, you end up with some surprisingly epic back-and-forth knockdown drag out slugfests, teams that are nearly equivalent in skill (or lack thereof) having to fight tooth and nail to claw out every hard earned victory. These are the games that I love, not the one-sided stompfests that are decided within a few minutes. Judging by the month or so of games in between these two periods, I suspect we will be back to the latter type of match in pretty short order.
To put it plainly, aliens right now are OP in pub games. From what I understand, they may be in competitive play as well, but I have only secondhand accounts of that arena. I also only have ns2stats.org to reference for hard numbers, which is unfortunately not installed on every server. At this point, I think only UWE has something like a full picture of win/loss statistics at their disposal, but I would love to see them publish that information somewhere on a continual basis. The last report we heard from Charlie was that games had become skewed to 60/40 in the aliens' favor, and if ns2stats can be used at least as a rough indicator, that ratio only got worse in the weeks that followed the alien nerf patch (which many people hilariously raged about ruining the game for aliens) before the influx of new players throwing everything off.
My own experiences can only be given as anecdotal evidence, but I played several 6-7 hour sessions during that period without seeing a single marine victory. The only way for marines to win was to stack the teams, and as a result playing as marines was simply not much fun. Playing as aliens wasn't fun either, it was just the same laughably easy stompfest game after game. I know there are some people out there who somehow enjoy those empty victories that come without cost, just as there are people who somehow enjoy cheating with similar 'rewards'. I know there are also people who just love playing aliens and will react violently to any claims that they are overpowered or the blasphemous suggestion that they be nerfed in any way, ever (Full Disclosure: I prefer playing marines, but I will play on either side and usually join the team that needs the help more), but for me the game is not fun unless I have to earn my victories.
From spending even a little time reading the forums, I know there has been a vocal group of elitists whose answer to this problem is, 'It's fine, L2P'. Maybe these people are happy rationalizing to themselves that every time they stomp a marine team, it's because those noobs just aren't as good at the game as they themselves clearly are; indeed, a small number of very capable players can dramatically tilt the balance of an individual match to their side, and this is a problem that will never really go away regardless of changes to the game mechanics, so I tend to be as wary of their anecdotal experiences of pub play as they likely are of mine as a professed casual.
Further complicating the issue is that while they may be correct in that the lack of skill is the only thing keeping marines from winning more games, the solution is simply not practical. 'You don't make enough money to feed your family? It's fine, L2P at life' - an equally true if willfully blind and useless statement. If every marine in every match had 100% accuracy, the game would be undoubtedly be imbalanced in favor of marines because of their range advantage. As it stands, many of the pub/casual players who make up the largest part of the playerbase will NEVER achieve the same level of skill as the pros, both in aiming and movement and other key skills like effective communication and tactical coordination. I've played thousands of hours worth of shooters, and I still can't compete against the elite top tier who have put even more time in or are just innately more talented / gifted, and who take the games they play as seriously as most people do their jobs. So, even if the imbalance doesn't exist at the highest level of competitive play, where certain thresholds of skill are assumed, that same degree of competence may never fully filter down to casual pub play, and we need to find a way to balance the game mechanics so that they are functional for both groups of people. We may see some incremental shifts in overall balance back towards marines as even pubbies will gradually improve over time, but you can't just flip a magical switch to make all the noobs as skilled as the pro players are, and we will never see even gradual improvements at all if the noobs stop playing because the game is not fun with marine wins nigh impossible and aliens wins boring and repetitive.
To that end, I am going to talk about some of the observed flaws or weaknesses that I have noticed that may be contributing to marines struggling in pub play. It may be that changing only one of these things would result in effectively negating some or all of the other problems, as overall balance is the sum total of many relationships in a vastly complicated and interconnected ecosystem.
1) Onos. I know this is a hotly debated topic, but you can't talk about balance without bringing it up. Onos are easy to use, and they have ridiculously high HP and damage output even before you account for stomp and charge. Most of the skewed games I played ended abruptly as soon as the aliens had enough pres for several players to go Onos, even when marines had strong resource flow and 3 tech points. There are several problems, but I think the key here is that you pretty much always, always need a group of marines to counter a single Onos. If marines were designed to always have more players than aliens it might be a different story, but when you can have half the team as skulks chewing on res nodes and the other half as Onos hitting different marine bases simultaneously, you simply do not have enough soldiers to go around. This is compounded by marines frequently needing to focus on building and repairing, whereas alien players can spend all of their time attacking. I can't even count the number of games where I've gone Onos and told the team to gather up at one base while I go attack the power node at another. As soon as the marines are forced to beacon, I run away while the rest of the team rushes and destroys the power at the second base. Game over. Onos can operate very effectively on their own, or as a force multiplier in a coordinated assault. I feel like pretty much the only time I ever die as an Onos is when I am reckless and overextend myself or in late game when the marines are turtled up in their only remaining base and it's just a matter of time before rooting them out.
Furthermore, Onos are far more accessible to aliens than the 'endgame' units for marines. Onos have no pre-reqs and they are reasonably effective right out the gate, only moreso with relatively inexpensive upgrades. Marines need to buy a second command chair, an armory which then needs to be advanced, a proto lab, research for JPs and Exos, and then arguably an arms lab for increasingly expensive weapon and armor upgrades for them to be worth risking the resource costs for the units themselves. It costs something like 300 team resources just to unlock the option to buy a fully upgraded dual exo or JP/Flamethrower, and roughly half that if you skip the armor / weapon upgrades.
2) Power nodes. These are a crippling liability for a marine base, and there is no corresponding exploitable weakness on the alien team - cysts aren't even close. Losing the power node in a base almost always means losing the entire base, and they are hilariously easy to destroy given the relative consequence to the marines. Otherwise, for res nodes and other positions on the map, they are trivial and a nuisance to rebuild at the worst. To me, this speaks of a poorly realized mechanic, where they fluctuate wildly between being either relatively unimportant or gamebreakingly critical. A coordinated attack on a power node can bring it down in a matter of seconds, and often the only recourse is to beacon at the first sign of trouble, destroying any offensive momentum your team might have had, and leaving any exos in the field as fodder to die. The window of opportunity to save a dying power node is so small that if the commander is even slightly involved supporting a push, or if he has to wait for a res tick to beacon, it might very well be too late. All it takes is 2-3 aliens to effectively destroy an entire marine base in a matter of moments, and if you coordinate attacks on multiple power nodes simultaneously while the marines are out in the field trying to be aggressive, there is almost no recourse at all for the marines. This problem is compounded when you bring Onos into the picture - even skulks can take out power nodes pretty quickly if they aren't stopped immediately, but at least an equivalent or lesser number of marines has a good chance of doing so. Once you start hitting power nodes with Onos (much less Onos with bilebomb or umbra support) you need a much larger ratio of marines to try and stop them. If you have 3 Onos plus a lerk or a gorge, only half of your average game's alien team, then it doesn't matter if the entire marine team is in base, you will be able to take down that power node. That may be useful for breaking an end of game turtle, but earlier on when the marines have multiple bases, it just feels broken. Playing as an alien, it feels like a cheap path to easy victory, there's no reason NOT to take advantage of such a glaring achilles heel. I feel like I ought to have to choose between key structures, to focus on taking out the phase gate and the obs and the IPs, or maybe something high cost like the AA or proto if we're waging a tight res war, but as it is power node = win button. By comparison, a heavily developed alien base is usually MUCH harder to destroy.
3) Exos. It's pretty telling that when someone asks on the forums when they should research exos over JPs, all the knowledgeable players answer 'Never'. Even in high level play when good aim is a common attribute, most of the pros that I know of still prefer JPs because of the need for mobility. Exos don't need to be nigh unstoppable juggernauts as Onos currently are (and in fact, as I am arguing, no unit should be), asymmetry is great, but the unit should bring value to the team commensurate with its cost, and that is currently not the case. Exos are relatively easy to destroy, and they are effectively helpless without constant support. A lone determined skulk can eventually whittle down an unsupported Exo, and often a skilled skulk can solo a less skilled Exo on the first attempt in my experience; conversely, a skilled light marine can almost never, ever kill a completely green supernoobified unsupported Onos. What's that you say, an Exo should never be unsupported? What happens when the marines are forced to beacon to save a dying power node? Goodbye Exos! Macs can support in theory, but they require babysitting by the comm and they die ridiculously fast to bile bomb, which the Exos also happen to be weak against.
Exos also die ridiculously fast to lerk spikes, which might be okay if not for all the other weaknesses. Exos cannot build, Exos cannot phase, Exos cannot beacon, Exos cannot weld. They lose much of their core marine utility, and they further need other light marines to sacrifice much of that utility in order to focus on supporting / babysitting said Exos basically full time. Those marines in turn need to be supported by the commander with meds and ammo and shields or they will fall quickly to alien attrition. All these weaknesses wouldn't feel quite so glaring if the Exos cost, say, half or two thirds of what they do now, but even then their use would be limited due to the high investment cost and their low mobility and utility. You wouldn't be able to just spam Exos and go win the game like you can usually do with Onos, you'd still need light/JP marines to build and weld and react to enemy movements in time to do any good.
4) Turrets are garbage. You frequently see it said here on the forums that only noobs waste res on turrets, and it's sadly mostly true. As an alien, I find turrets to be a laughably ineffective deterrent, even as a skulk. As a marine, I see them as a nearly total waste of resources, a brief distraction at best for an alien team or an overly expensive speedbump that might kill a skulk or two if they aren't paying attention. The battery is far, far too easy to kill, the radius from the battery is way too small, and the limited firing arc on the turrets is just icing on the cake. How is it that the TSA has regressed so dramatically in this field? I can see putting a limit on the number of turrets per battery or per room to prevent farms, but even a dozen turrets would still die in a matter of seconds to bile bomb and barely slow down a group of Onos, much less with umbra support.
By comparison, alien whips are far more useful and can be spammed in unlimited quantities as far as I can tell. A whip will quickly shred a light/JP marine, and their ability to completely and utterly negate grenade launchers as an offensive weapon (except when on fire) is an extremely useful counter. I wouldn't say that whips are OP, except that the GL counter is too absolute and needs to be addressed, but sentries are extremely underpowered by contrast.
5) Macs. These little guys are handy, but they often require babysitting and they die too quickly. Their activation radius is frequently too small for keeping a base welded without micro, but they will also wander off and end up in ridiculous places by trailing after marines until they get bored.
6) Weapons. GLs are downright clunky compared to NS1, and far too easily countered by whips or the back of your buddy's head. In your average pub game, I see almost as many GL suicides as kills, and using them solely to spam at your teammates' feet during a push feels a little silly and counter-intuitive. They don't carry enough ammo, so you often feel tethered to an armory or you are a constant resource and attention drain on your commander. They are too difficult to aim accurately (not to mention frequently too laggy by the time they are in play) to actually try and hit a fast moving target with, they don't do enough focused damage to be a strong counter against higher life forms, and as an offensive weapon are almost entirely dependent on flamethrower support.
Flamethrowers themselves feel extremely niche, and not very effective against most alien life forms. I'm not sure that I'd say FTs are broken, they're at least more useful than GLs, but at 25 res a pop they are not cheap for having what seems like such specialized usage.
Shotguns are great, but also very expensive and easily lost, and their effective use means giving up the marine range advantage to get up close. Against higher life forms like Fades and especially Onos, this is almost always a death sentence.
Mines are also great, but very expensive when you consider how easily they are countered by early alien life forms like Lerks and Gorges, and they don't even always kill a skulk outright. They rarely survive to late game in my experience, but I find that they barely even tickle when I run over them as an Onos.
7) Jet Packs. These aren't nearly as maneuverable as they were in NS1, and even back then they were vastly inferior to Fade flight. In the new incarnation, they feel extremely sluggish and unresponsive. They are good for staying away from Onos IF you have space to work with, but the number of tight congested spaces far outweighs the number of big open rooms, and you have to stay relatively close anyway if you're using a shotgun or flamethrower. A fade or lerk can pick off a JP marine with incredible ease, and with skulks it's usually effective, but again situational. This new nerfed JP might be okay if marines weren't so desperately dependent on them in endgame.
Next up, some suggestions on how to address these issues!
I am going to try and break this into two parts, the first being largely observations and the second ideas on how to solve the problems presented in the first.
My background:
I played NS1 at launch, and it was my primary timesink for about 3 years. I have countless untold hours logged, but I never got into the competitive scene outside of a few friendly clan scrims; I have no interest in playing at that level. As such, I am what I'd consider a 'skilled casual' player. I'm pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the top tier pros, and I probably never will be.
Naturally I paid for a deluxe pre-order as soon as they were announced. I tried playing a little bit during the alpha, but the game just crashed within seconds every time and I got fed up and decided to just wait until the game was released. Now we are a little over 2 months since launch, and I have just over 150 hours logged so far. I love the game as I did the first, but I feel like it is struggling with some pretty big issues.
First is performance, which is clearly a well documented and frequently decried issue. For my own part, it's pretty frustrating when you have dropped a not inconsiderable chunk of change on an i7 CPU and a GTX 680 and still experience unpleasant late game FPS drops and stuttering - I can only imagine what it must be like for folks trying to play on lesser hardware. I know UWE is already working on pinning down and solving the problem, but from what I've read on the forums it seems to be primarily LUA itself causing CPU bottlenecks, and I despair that a solution simply cannot be reached without a drastic overhaul of the engine or key game mechanics like dynamic infestation. I do not have much feedback to offer on this point, except that I think it would help to drastically limit the number of cysts that can be placed in a given area - I know the code is already in place, it just needs to be ratcheted up a good deal. I think this could have a positive impact on gameplay as well by making cyst chains more of a liability, which are currently trivial to rebuild and automatically construct themselves, versus the crippling liability of power nodes, which I will discuss more later. Even if the change to game balance is seen as too severe, you could still reduce the maximum number of cysts per area and simply give them more HP when mature to compensate. I don't know enough about the engine to say for certain how big of an impact this will have on performance, but it seems to me that the stuttering really only happens in late game when the alien khamm has spammed up the entire map with tons of cysts and structures.
In the end, if it came down to it, I would much rather drop dynamic infestation completely from the game and find another way to balance or limit alien expansion if it means having a game that runs butter smooth. I'm tired of slow-motion grenades and teleporting skulks.
Second is game balance, a far more complex issue, and the one that eventually drove me away from NS1. In my own experience, the game has been most enjoyable and the most 'balanced' right after launch, and in the recent weeks following the Christmas sale, thanks in large part to the influx of new players. If you get the noobery spread out across both teams, you end up with some surprisingly epic back-and-forth knockdown drag out slugfests, teams that are nearly equivalent in skill (or lack thereof) having to fight tooth and nail to claw out every hard earned victory. These are the games that I love, not the one-sided stompfests that are decided within a few minutes. Judging by the month or so of games in between these two periods, I suspect we will be back to the latter type of match in pretty short order.
To put it plainly, aliens right now are OP in pub games. From what I understand, they may be in competitive play as well, but I have only secondhand accounts of that arena. I also only have ns2stats.org to reference for hard numbers, which is unfortunately not installed on every server. At this point, I think only UWE has something like a full picture of win/loss statistics at their disposal, but I would love to see them publish that information somewhere on a continual basis. The last report we heard from Charlie was that games had become skewed to 60/40 in the aliens' favor, and if ns2stats can be used at least as a rough indicator, that ratio only got worse in the weeks that followed the alien nerf patch (which many people hilariously raged about ruining the game for aliens) before the influx of new players throwing everything off.
My own experiences can only be given as anecdotal evidence, but I played several 6-7 hour sessions during that period without seeing a single marine victory. The only way for marines to win was to stack the teams, and as a result playing as marines was simply not much fun. Playing as aliens wasn't fun either, it was just the same laughably easy stompfest game after game. I know there are some people out there who somehow enjoy those empty victories that come without cost, just as there are people who somehow enjoy cheating with similar 'rewards'. I know there are also people who just love playing aliens and will react violently to any claims that they are overpowered or the blasphemous suggestion that they be nerfed in any way, ever (Full Disclosure: I prefer playing marines, but I will play on either side and usually join the team that needs the help more), but for me the game is not fun unless I have to earn my victories.
From spending even a little time reading the forums, I know there has been a vocal group of elitists whose answer to this problem is, 'It's fine, L2P'. Maybe these people are happy rationalizing to themselves that every time they stomp a marine team, it's because those noobs just aren't as good at the game as they themselves clearly are; indeed, a small number of very capable players can dramatically tilt the balance of an individual match to their side, and this is a problem that will never really go away regardless of changes to the game mechanics, so I tend to be as wary of their anecdotal experiences of pub play as they likely are of mine as a professed casual.
Further complicating the issue is that while they may be correct in that the lack of skill is the only thing keeping marines from winning more games, the solution is simply not practical. 'You don't make enough money to feed your family? It's fine, L2P at life' - an equally true if willfully blind and useless statement. If every marine in every match had 100% accuracy, the game would be undoubtedly be imbalanced in favor of marines because of their range advantage. As it stands, many of the pub/casual players who make up the largest part of the playerbase will NEVER achieve the same level of skill as the pros, both in aiming and movement and other key skills like effective communication and tactical coordination. I've played thousands of hours worth of shooters, and I still can't compete against the elite top tier who have put even more time in or are just innately more talented / gifted, and who take the games they play as seriously as most people do their jobs. So, even if the imbalance doesn't exist at the highest level of competitive play, where certain thresholds of skill are assumed, that same degree of competence may never fully filter down to casual pub play, and we need to find a way to balance the game mechanics so that they are functional for both groups of people. We may see some incremental shifts in overall balance back towards marines as even pubbies will gradually improve over time, but you can't just flip a magical switch to make all the noobs as skilled as the pro players are, and we will never see even gradual improvements at all if the noobs stop playing because the game is not fun with marine wins nigh impossible and aliens wins boring and repetitive.
To that end, I am going to talk about some of the observed flaws or weaknesses that I have noticed that may be contributing to marines struggling in pub play. It may be that changing only one of these things would result in effectively negating some or all of the other problems, as overall balance is the sum total of many relationships in a vastly complicated and interconnected ecosystem.
1) Onos. I know this is a hotly debated topic, but you can't talk about balance without bringing it up. Onos are easy to use, and they have ridiculously high HP and damage output even before you account for stomp and charge. Most of the skewed games I played ended abruptly as soon as the aliens had enough pres for several players to go Onos, even when marines had strong resource flow and 3 tech points. There are several problems, but I think the key here is that you pretty much always, always need a group of marines to counter a single Onos. If marines were designed to always have more players than aliens it might be a different story, but when you can have half the team as skulks chewing on res nodes and the other half as Onos hitting different marine bases simultaneously, you simply do not have enough soldiers to go around. This is compounded by marines frequently needing to focus on building and repairing, whereas alien players can spend all of their time attacking. I can't even count the number of games where I've gone Onos and told the team to gather up at one base while I go attack the power node at another. As soon as the marines are forced to beacon, I run away while the rest of the team rushes and destroys the power at the second base. Game over. Onos can operate very effectively on their own, or as a force multiplier in a coordinated assault. I feel like pretty much the only time I ever die as an Onos is when I am reckless and overextend myself or in late game when the marines are turtled up in their only remaining base and it's just a matter of time before rooting them out.
Furthermore, Onos are far more accessible to aliens than the 'endgame' units for marines. Onos have no pre-reqs and they are reasonably effective right out the gate, only moreso with relatively inexpensive upgrades. Marines need to buy a second command chair, an armory which then needs to be advanced, a proto lab, research for JPs and Exos, and then arguably an arms lab for increasingly expensive weapon and armor upgrades for them to be worth risking the resource costs for the units themselves. It costs something like 300 team resources just to unlock the option to buy a fully upgraded dual exo or JP/Flamethrower, and roughly half that if you skip the armor / weapon upgrades.
2) Power nodes. These are a crippling liability for a marine base, and there is no corresponding exploitable weakness on the alien team - cysts aren't even close. Losing the power node in a base almost always means losing the entire base, and they are hilariously easy to destroy given the relative consequence to the marines. Otherwise, for res nodes and other positions on the map, they are trivial and a nuisance to rebuild at the worst. To me, this speaks of a poorly realized mechanic, where they fluctuate wildly between being either relatively unimportant or gamebreakingly critical. A coordinated attack on a power node can bring it down in a matter of seconds, and often the only recourse is to beacon at the first sign of trouble, destroying any offensive momentum your team might have had, and leaving any exos in the field as fodder to die. The window of opportunity to save a dying power node is so small that if the commander is even slightly involved supporting a push, or if he has to wait for a res tick to beacon, it might very well be too late. All it takes is 2-3 aliens to effectively destroy an entire marine base in a matter of moments, and if you coordinate attacks on multiple power nodes simultaneously while the marines are out in the field trying to be aggressive, there is almost no recourse at all for the marines. This problem is compounded when you bring Onos into the picture - even skulks can take out power nodes pretty quickly if they aren't stopped immediately, but at least an equivalent or lesser number of marines has a good chance of doing so. Once you start hitting power nodes with Onos (much less Onos with bilebomb or umbra support) you need a much larger ratio of marines to try and stop them. If you have 3 Onos plus a lerk or a gorge, only half of your average game's alien team, then it doesn't matter if the entire marine team is in base, you will be able to take down that power node. That may be useful for breaking an end of game turtle, but earlier on when the marines have multiple bases, it just feels broken. Playing as an alien, it feels like a cheap path to easy victory, there's no reason NOT to take advantage of such a glaring achilles heel. I feel like I ought to have to choose between key structures, to focus on taking out the phase gate and the obs and the IPs, or maybe something high cost like the AA or proto if we're waging a tight res war, but as it is power node = win button. By comparison, a heavily developed alien base is usually MUCH harder to destroy.
3) Exos. It's pretty telling that when someone asks on the forums when they should research exos over JPs, all the knowledgeable players answer 'Never'. Even in high level play when good aim is a common attribute, most of the pros that I know of still prefer JPs because of the need for mobility. Exos don't need to be nigh unstoppable juggernauts as Onos currently are (and in fact, as I am arguing, no unit should be), asymmetry is great, but the unit should bring value to the team commensurate with its cost, and that is currently not the case. Exos are relatively easy to destroy, and they are effectively helpless without constant support. A lone determined skulk can eventually whittle down an unsupported Exo, and often a skilled skulk can solo a less skilled Exo on the first attempt in my experience; conversely, a skilled light marine can almost never, ever kill a completely green supernoobified unsupported Onos. What's that you say, an Exo should never be unsupported? What happens when the marines are forced to beacon to save a dying power node? Goodbye Exos! Macs can support in theory, but they require babysitting by the comm and they die ridiculously fast to bile bomb, which the Exos also happen to be weak against.
Exos also die ridiculously fast to lerk spikes, which might be okay if not for all the other weaknesses. Exos cannot build, Exos cannot phase, Exos cannot beacon, Exos cannot weld. They lose much of their core marine utility, and they further need other light marines to sacrifice much of that utility in order to focus on supporting / babysitting said Exos basically full time. Those marines in turn need to be supported by the commander with meds and ammo and shields or they will fall quickly to alien attrition. All these weaknesses wouldn't feel quite so glaring if the Exos cost, say, half or two thirds of what they do now, but even then their use would be limited due to the high investment cost and their low mobility and utility. You wouldn't be able to just spam Exos and go win the game like you can usually do with Onos, you'd still need light/JP marines to build and weld and react to enemy movements in time to do any good.
4) Turrets are garbage. You frequently see it said here on the forums that only noobs waste res on turrets, and it's sadly mostly true. As an alien, I find turrets to be a laughably ineffective deterrent, even as a skulk. As a marine, I see them as a nearly total waste of resources, a brief distraction at best for an alien team or an overly expensive speedbump that might kill a skulk or two if they aren't paying attention. The battery is far, far too easy to kill, the radius from the battery is way too small, and the limited firing arc on the turrets is just icing on the cake. How is it that the TSA has regressed so dramatically in this field? I can see putting a limit on the number of turrets per battery or per room to prevent farms, but even a dozen turrets would still die in a matter of seconds to bile bomb and barely slow down a group of Onos, much less with umbra support.
By comparison, alien whips are far more useful and can be spammed in unlimited quantities as far as I can tell. A whip will quickly shred a light/JP marine, and their ability to completely and utterly negate grenade launchers as an offensive weapon (except when on fire) is an extremely useful counter. I wouldn't say that whips are OP, except that the GL counter is too absolute and needs to be addressed, but sentries are extremely underpowered by contrast.
5) Macs. These little guys are handy, but they often require babysitting and they die too quickly. Their activation radius is frequently too small for keeping a base welded without micro, but they will also wander off and end up in ridiculous places by trailing after marines until they get bored.
6) Weapons. GLs are downright clunky compared to NS1, and far too easily countered by whips or the back of your buddy's head. In your average pub game, I see almost as many GL suicides as kills, and using them solely to spam at your teammates' feet during a push feels a little silly and counter-intuitive. They don't carry enough ammo, so you often feel tethered to an armory or you are a constant resource and attention drain on your commander. They are too difficult to aim accurately (not to mention frequently too laggy by the time they are in play) to actually try and hit a fast moving target with, they don't do enough focused damage to be a strong counter against higher life forms, and as an offensive weapon are almost entirely dependent on flamethrower support.
Flamethrowers themselves feel extremely niche, and not very effective against most alien life forms. I'm not sure that I'd say FTs are broken, they're at least more useful than GLs, but at 25 res a pop they are not cheap for having what seems like such specialized usage.
Shotguns are great, but also very expensive and easily lost, and their effective use means giving up the marine range advantage to get up close. Against higher life forms like Fades and especially Onos, this is almost always a death sentence.
Mines are also great, but very expensive when you consider how easily they are countered by early alien life forms like Lerks and Gorges, and they don't even always kill a skulk outright. They rarely survive to late game in my experience, but I find that they barely even tickle when I run over them as an Onos.
7) Jet Packs. These aren't nearly as maneuverable as they were in NS1, and even back then they were vastly inferior to Fade flight. In the new incarnation, they feel extremely sluggish and unresponsive. They are good for staying away from Onos IF you have space to work with, but the number of tight congested spaces far outweighs the number of big open rooms, and you have to stay relatively close anyway if you're using a shotgun or flamethrower. A fade or lerk can pick off a JP marine with incredible ease, and with skulks it's usually effective, but again situational. This new nerfed JP might be okay if marines weren't so desperately dependent on them in endgame.
Next up, some suggestions on how to address these issues!
Comments
Ideas:
1) Bring the HMG back. I'm sure this has been suggested before many times, and maybe it's being planned for a future release or maybe the devs feel that Exos were supposed to fill that gap, but its absence is deeply felt. Marines need a tool for coping with Onos that doesn't require overwhelming numbers or come with all the crippling Exo weaknesses in order to retain their ranged advantage. A light marine would still need a huge lead distance in order to have a chance of taking on an Onos by himself, and the Onos would still have the upper hand in mobility and would probably be able to simply escape / avoid walker HMGs in many cases, but at least the marines would have a chance then and give Onos something to be wary of. JP/HMG combos would be much more effective, as they were in the olden days, and I feel this is as it should be. JP/HMG marines are still absurdly fragile, and the aliens have strong counters with similarly upgraded lerks and fades, so the aliens might actually feel the need to diversify instead of EVERYONE ONOS LOLOL. They would be expensive and less accurate than the LMG, and damage numbers could be tweaked to keep them from breaking game balance in the other direction. It's not a radical and untested idea either, there is already a precedent to follow, and this singular change might very well be sufficient to negate all the other marine weaknesses and bring balance back to the force.
In a universe without HMGs, I feel that at the VERY least Onos need to have their charge ability stripped away and maybe have their speed reduced overall. It is far too easy for an Onos to escape from danger, even against overwhelming odds, and especially with stomp in the picture. A group of brave / suicidal marines ought to at least have a marginally better chance of running down an Onos and finishing it off before they all die.
Also, the range on gore is just silly. Mile long horns wat?
2) To be frank, I'd be perfectly happy to see power nodes just go away completely, even if it meant switching permanently to emergency lighting in all locations, but I doubt UWE is ever going to be willing to just completely dump the mechanic, frustrating as it may be. Short of just buffing the HP/Armor outright, consider the ability to allow the marines to build Capacitors. These would cost X amount of res, maybe 10-15, and essentially function like a battery that would sustain power in its radius for a limited duration, maybe a couple minutes at most, and would then recharge itself slowly once power is restored. This would give marines a slightly larger window to respond to power node loss without forcing a potentially catastrophic distress beacon, but still with limitations and a cost, and aliens could naturally focus on destroying the capacitors next to try and cut off the timer. It would also force the marine commander to have to make certain choices about placement in order to prioritize which buildings would retain power in an outage, as well as potentially increase susceptibility to bile bombing.
3) Reducing the cost of Exos seems like an obvious answer to me, and as mentioned before, the marines still wouldn't be able to use them exclusively or even extensively without crippling themselves. I think it would be interesting to see the effect of single Exos costing closer to 30 res, and duals at 50. Another option that I like even better or possibly in conjunction would be to give single Exos a welder on / instead of their first and allow them to build and repair. They'd still be slow and unable to phase or beacon, but at least they might stand a chance of surviving the rest of their support dying or getting beaconed away, as long as there are at least two of them together. Obviously welding things would still carry the usual penalty of not being able to effectively shoot things at the same time, since you have to be up close and pointed at your subject, and I think it would introduce a difficult choice to players on whether to go single or dual Exo. Right now there is very little impetus for choosing a single Exo unless it is comm-dropped with T-res, and I think the trade off would be a compelling one.
Another possible change would be to let Exos use their jump jets for lateral thrust. They are pretty pointless right now as a vertical-only option, more of a gimmick than a useful tool. Allowing them to boost briefly in any direction, with stringent duration and recharge limitations, would throw them a desperately needed bone in terms of mobility and give them a fighting chance of winning a surprise duel with an Onos. It could also help when surprised by skulky ambush, buy you just a split second to re-orient and draw a bead properly before they gnaw your legs off. It still wouldn't hold a candle to the overall speed and agility of the Onos, with or without charge.
4) Removing the limited firing arc on turrets would make them a bit more friendly to less experienced commanders, and also marginally increase their combined effectiveness. Increasing the radius from the battery as well would limit their extreme susceptibility to bile bomb and reduce the currently staggering number of 'blind spots' in any given marine base. Increasing the HP on the battery (and maybe increasing the res cost as well to match), or even allowing the option of dropping more than one large-radius battery in a room would make them a less easily exploited weakness, because right now it's stupidly trivial to shut down all 15 resources worth of turrets by just briefly nibbling on the 5 res battery.
5) Macs need improved AI or command interface tools, like the ability to set a tether or a patrol area or to follow another unit until ordered otherwise. EMP should have no T-res cost, possibly at the expense of lesser effect or radius, and have just a (possibly lengthy) cooldown instead. It should also have the option to trigger automatically, and there might need to be some logic to keep a group of Macs from all simultaneously triggering their EMP against a lone skulk - alternately, that could just be the accepted downside of toggling on automatic EMP instead of manual, to allow for a skill step between commanders who can afford to spare their attention on micro for greater effect and those who are willing to accept the lesser effectiveness in exchange for being able to concentrate on other things. I think Macs could stand to have more HP too, they're ridiculously easy to chomp or bile down as an alien.
6) I think GLs and Mines could all benefit from having their costs reduced by 5, given their inherent limitations. Shotguns are a bit of a tossup in my mind, as they are very powerful in the early game, but less so later on. They would probably be fine at 20 with the addition of HMGs at 25-30.
Instead of knocking grenades back, have Whips catch and swallow them. This would remove the AOE component and cause only the whip to take a reduced amount of damage, therefore protecting more sensitive structures and slowing / mitigating GL pushes without completely negating them, as each whip would have to be whittled down with lessened damage before pressing forward.
Flamethrowers could stand to have their range increased considering their relatively niche role and their lackluster performance against lesser alien lifeforms. As it stands, you can barely reach a basic whip without getting slapped, and that's supposed to be one of their key uses.
Some kind of marginally useful targeting reticule for the GL would also be nice. A secondary fire with a flat trajectory and immediate detonation on impact would also be extremely gratifying, but almost certainly too effective without some kind of limitation built in. Lower damage/radius? I'm not sure on this one.
7) If improving the maneuverability of the JPs is out of the question, at least consider increasing the fuel reserve. If they're going to be awkward and clunky to fly, they could at least be a little more forgiving in endurance. I can still kill JPers frequently as a skulk just by bouncing around with leap a few times until they run out of juice. Right now they are just inferior to NS1 jetpacks in pretty much every way, which is hard to stomach when considering that Exos are likewise a poor replacement for Heavy Armor.
Other Miscellenaous Suggestions:
Include a configurable server-side variable that limits the number of Onos or Exos by playercount, and maybe leave it turned off by default. This would help in pub matches where Onos in particular are completely broken / unstoppable in low pop matches where you simply do not have enough marines, at any juncture, to effectively focus them down. It could also make a big difference in large playercount games by at least keeping them on a rotation instead of half of the alien team all going godmode at the same time, and it would help keep the marines from accidentally crippling themselves by going all Exos. :P
In the server browser, you should be able to somehow display all the mods which are actually running on custom servers so you can tell the difference between one with a radical RFK mod and one that merely has voting enabled.
Put a scanner sweep button directly into the commander interface somewhere that just turns inactive when there are no usable observatories in play. It's a pain to have to switch between menus and doing things like dropping meds / ammo and having to select the obs to do a sweep. If this already exists, I apologize for being retarded.
It seems like aliens need a more effective tool for breaking prolonged turtles, so as to not be completely dependent on unstoppable Onos and Power Node Ezmode to end a match. Maybe there could be something that would require all other tech points and res nodes on a map in order to unlock, either through hard number pre-reqs or a prohibitively high cost, or even both, that would essentially start a timer that would count down until automatic alien victory. You would want to make it a fairly generous timer, something like 15 minutes perhaps, to allow for Marines the possibility of making a spectacular comeback; if they are able to push out and secure more territory, it could either pause or reverse the timer until it cancels itself out. If you made the cost to aliens 'per tick', a sustained amount that subtracted from their res flow, then marines taking nodes back would force the countdown to eat into the reserve until the aliens re-establish map control or their reserve runs out, or the khammander simply cancels the countdown. Thematically, you could call it something like 'Gridlock' and explain it as the alien bacteria essentially using brute force to overpower and shut down the marine nanogrid at the molecular level, which would explain the extremely high resource cost.
Echo seems to be relatively ineffective in its current state, too niche and too costly for common usage. What if an upgraded shift allowed an alien lifeform to teleport to a hive under attack, like you used to be able to do from other hives in NS1? Maybe this would give the aliens too much of an advantage in the current state of the game, but perhaps something to consider for future experimentation.
Another possibility to help address the egg lock problem would be to have (upgraded?) shifts automatically spawn eggs for free, at a relatively slow rate compared to a hive, while still retaining the option to instantly purchase more for T-res. A hard limit to the number of eggs supported per shift could be added to avoid proliferation, but this would also help reduce the amount of micro the comm is forced to do by regularly spawning more eggs at a forward base. I frequently see a comm plant a shift in a useful location and then forget to continually replace the eggs as they get used. A relatively low egg support limit would also help curb the extreme effectiveness of shifts as an early offensive weapon, given that aliens already have a big advantage in basic mobility.
I have more thoughts, but I think that is plenty sufficient for now. I've been working on this post for the better part of a week, and I hope that it is received in the spirit that I intend it, with only constructive and rational discourse to follow.
I want to love this game, I want to love it long time. No other game as come as close to being 'perfect' in my opinion as the first was, at certain points in time. I want NS2 to be even better, and I hope that my observations and feedback are useful to someone, somewhere, in making it so.
<3
Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
... nope, still too much. This ended up being a much larger post than I anticipated, and I know there are going to be a lot of people who simply don't care enough to read all of it. I am okay with that.
If anyone does slog all the way through, I apologize for any formatting / grammatical errors or inefficiencies, it is very late and I need to sleep. I probably should have waited and done more revision, but it probably would never be finished if I let myself put it off any longer.
I'm sure it's all going to just get picked apart by the forum regulars anyway, and I doubt anything I've suggested is actually going to make it into the game, but I had to get it off my chest all the same.
Some of what you discuss in the problems section also shows a bit of a lack of veteran experience. I am not saying this to be mean, but for example, you state that the shotgun has the problem of needing to be in close range and this makes it bad against fade and onos. The shotgun is typically regarded as by far the best weapon against fades, and because of the size of the onos you don't really need to be that close to shoot it fairly successfully with a shotgun. Your marine bias shows in your discussion of the ONOS which most people feel is in a pretty good place right now. You must be a very careful player to avoid losing your onos once marines have jps.
All that said you do cover some important topics and bring up good points like about turrets but nobody is going to read the ridiculous wall of text you have posted in full.
I am inclined to agree. Individually, most of the alien units are in a good place in terms of balance. Sure, I'd like to see some hp or damage tweaks on skulks or fade or onos, but by and large, they match up fairly well in an even game with the marines. The issue is that with the introduction of Khamm in NS2, you now have this guy that can just play Simcity (Flora Edition!) and watch stuff grow on their own. Seriously, the only thing missing is the fast forward button. Compound this with the fact that khamming isn't nearing as taxing as comming and, now you got a situation where you are essentially playing man down as marine team in some of the smaller games while the structure just grow themselves and take over the map. The obvious solution is to delay alien expansion even more than its current pace, but then you risk the pacing with alien tech which is based on the current alien expansion model as well as giving the Khamm even less to do in between the delay.
I read it all and I appreciate every single word of it, because you have a bunch of valid arguments, constructive critique, good observations and fine ideas here, Sir!
I would really like to see the devs take these well thought out suggestions serious and improve the overall game experience.
Thank you for pointing out so precisely what you had on your mind.
I support almost all of your ideas, but the cost of mines should stay as it is! And what <!--coloro:#00BFFF--><span style="color:#00BFFF"><!--/coloro-->statikg <!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->said about shotguns is also true.
Whilst not every idea you point out might be new, it is the way you composed your arguments and kept a clear overview of the game as a whole, not skulkingly nibbling too much on small details or countering every thought with "L2P!", that I especially like about your posts.
Keep up the good work and: Thank you, man! ;)
This.
I think when we talk about Aliens, the Khamm plays a major role in this issue. While marines need good players and a good commaner, it usually hardly matters whether the Khamm has any clue what he's doing as long as he knows how to place RTs, research upgrades and such. I admit, I enjoy playing as Khamm but that might be because I'm pretty much into citybuilding games (<i>pretty popular in Germany!</i>) and the Khamm just feels like that - I spread infestation, place RTs, research upgrades, give a bit feedback and that's it. The team's doing their job and I do mine but we don't depend on each another. If cysts get killed or even an RT, well, then I just place a new one - I don't have to send my team there building structures, I pretty much follow up with infestating the map while my team's having some fun killing marines. The aliens can completly focus on the offense while I'm backing them up.
As a commander, on the other hand, you're constantly busy with all sorts of stuff. You have to balance offense and defense all yourself.
I mean, NS2 is, like NS1, supposed to have an asymmetrical gameplay but right now it obviously favoures the aliens and I think the role of the khamm and commander should be somewhat on par. Balance-wise it makes no sense that one has to deal with strategy, tactics and all sort of micromagment while the other - the khamm - only has to care about the strategy pretty much while the rest of the team can charge in like maniacs. I think it would makes sense if either alien structure don't build themselves and have to be build by a Gorge, so pretty much like marines do it. Or, marines should be given MACs to start with. I know it was tested during the Beta but I guess the marines have to be a bit more flexible or to khamm should be more dependant on his team.
I mean, I enjoy playing khamm - it feels like playing Anno, The Settlers or Simcity but in all honesty, I know that the commander on the other side is having a tough job while I can watch everything grow nicely. If I could, I think I would even add some decorations to make it more beauty. It's a lot of fun, pretty relaxing in fact, but it shouldn't be like that. Either, the commander should have a somewhat easier job or the khamm should have a tougher time.
"I think it would be interesting to see the effect of single Exos costing closer to 30 res, and duals at 50." LOL
"The only way for marines to win was to stack the teams" 4 times out of 10 there is a massive stack on marine team? Yeah right.
"Shotguns are great, but also very expensive and easily lost, and their effective use means giving up the marine range advantage to get up close. Against higher life
forms like Fades and especially Onos, this is almost always a death sentence. " Yes, it is a death sentence to the FADE.
this topic might be the longest troll post i have seen.
Some of what you discuss in the problems section also shows a bit of a lack of veteran experience. I am not saying this to be mean, but for example, you state that the shotgun has the problem of needing to be in close range and this makes it bad against fade and onos. The shotgun is typically regarded as by far the best weapon against fades, and because of the size of the onos you don't really need to be that close to shoot it fairly successfully with a shotgun. Your marine bias shows in your discussion of the ONOS which most people feel is in a pretty good place right now. You must be a very careful player to avoid losing your onos once marines have jps.
All that said you do cover some important topics and bring up good points like about turrets but nobody is going to read the ridiculous wall of text you have posted in full.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You make very good points, and I concede on pretty much every count. I also appreciate that your criticism is constructive and comes with sensible reasons to back it up.
I do try and make a point of disclaiming up front that my experience is entirely based on pub games, where I think some issues are significant that clearly do not exist at high level play. I feel that, when I play as an Onos (my admitted marine preference is slight, I do spend a lot of times on aliens) in pub games, I am nigh unstoppable, which certainly would not be true in games against pro players with JPs.
As mentioned, there is a skill gap that I'm not sure will ever close sufficiently so that the viability of Onos or Exos does not hinge entirely on the ability of the players to aim. If Onos are in a good place in comp play, what can we change without nerfing them so that they do not break pub play? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that. All I can think of is to have variables which are different for normal and tournament play, which I understand is a highly controversial topic and one the devs have stated they are not interested in pursuing.
How else can we reconcile the skill gap?
<!--quoteo(post=2059329:date=Jan 11 2013, 10:34 AM:name=xen32)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (xen32 @ Jan 11 2013, 10:34 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059329"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Ever considered writing a book?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's funny that you ask, I am sort of thinking about aspiring to be an aspiring author. I actually talked to Charlie at PAX a little bit about the possibility of writing a novel based in the NS universe.
<!--quoteo(post=2059336:date=Jan 11 2013, 10:54 AM:name=deathst4r)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (deathst4r @ Jan 11 2013, 10:54 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059336"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I read it all and I appreciate every single word of it, because you have a bunch of valid arguments, constructive critique, good observations and fine ideas here, Sir!
I would really like to see the devs take these well thought out suggestions serious and improve the overall game experience.
Thank you for pointing out so precisely what you had on your mind.
I support almost all of your ideas, but the cost of mines should stay as it is! And what <!--coloro:#00BFFF--><span style="color:#00BFFF"><!--/coloro-->statikg <!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->said about shotguns is also true.
Whilst not every idea you point out might be new, it is the way you composed your arguments and kept a clear overview of the game as a whole, not skulkingly nibbling too much on small details or countering every thought with "L2P!", that I especially like about your posts.
Keep up the good work and: Thank you, man! ;)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I appreciate the feedback and the support, thank you!
<!--quoteo(post=2059345:date=Jan 11 2013, 11:36 AM:name=VittuLima)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (VittuLima @ Jan 11 2013, 11:36 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059345"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Yes buff everything on marines and nerf everything on aliens, then we can have nice 100%-0% marine-alien winratio. When u list everything that marines have as underpowered that shows a massive marine bias.
"I think it would be interesting to see the effect of single Exos costing closer to 30 res, and duals at 50." LOL
"The only way for marines to win was to stack the teams" 4 times out of 10 there is a massive stack on marine team? Yeah right.
"Shotguns are great, but also very expensive and easily lost, and their effective use means giving up the marine range advantage to get up close. Against higher life
forms like Fades and especially Onos, this is almost always a death sentence. " Yes, it is a death sentence to the FADE.
this topic might be the longest troll post i have seen.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Marines are struggling, which is why I try and identify all the possible weaknesses that <b>could</b> be addressed. I do point out repeatedly that I don't think all of these changes are necessary, but that possibly just a few of them would be necessary to bring things back into balance. If you're going to bash the entire post, you might have at least read it a little more carefully, and your tone isn't especially helpful either. I think the only person trolling here so far might be you.
<!--quoteo(post=2059252:date=Jan 11 2013, 02:29 PM:name=|DFA| Havoc)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (|DFA| Havoc @ Jan 11 2013, 02:29 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2059252"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Warning: Massive walls of text incoming, brace for impact.
I am going to try and break this into two parts, the first being largely observations and the second ideas on how to solve the problems presented in the first.
My background:
I played NS1 at launch... I'm pretty good, but nowhere near as good as the top tier pros.
blah blah
First is performance, its pretty bad even with expensive hardware.
In the end, if it came down to it, I would much rather drop dynamic infestation completely from the game and find another way to balance or limit alien expansion if it means having a game that runs butter smooth. I'm tired of slow-motion grenades and teleporting skulks.
Second is game balance, a far more complex issue.
To put it plainly, aliens right now are OP in pub games.
My own experiences can only be given as anecdotal evidence, but I played several 6-7 hour sessions during that period without seeing a single marine victory. Marines need to stack teams to win. <!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro-->(<i>not true btw</i>)<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
From spending even a little time reading the forums, there are people who like to stomp noob marines as aliens who post here and this is why I don't listen to them.
Further complicating the issue is that while they may be correct in that the lack of skill is the only thing keeping marines from winning more games, the solution is simply not practical. This is because being a noob is hard and takes too long to L2P before they start writing long posts like this.
To that end, I am going to talk about some of the observed flaws or weaknesses that I have noticed that may be contributing to marines struggling in pub play.
1) Onos. I know this is a hotly debated topic, but you can't talk about balance without bringing it up. Onos have lots of health and armor which means it takes more than one marine to counter one onos. There, I brought it up.
Furthermore, Onos are far more accessible to aliens than the 'endgame' units for marines. I don't know how the economy or meta-game are balanced so I find it unfair that it costs something like 300 team resources just to unlock the option to buy a fully upgraded dual exo or JP/Flamethrower, and roughly half that if you skip the armor / weapon upgrades.
2) Power nodes. These are a crippling liability for a marine base, and there is no corresponding exploitable weakness on the alien team -<i><!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro--> (except egg lock, which is kinda, but who shoots eggs right?)<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--></i> cysts aren't even close. Losing the power node in a base almost always means losing the entire base. Power nodes seem to be a poorly realized mechanic, where they fluctuate wildly between being either relatively unimportant or gamebreakingly critical. A coordinated attack on a power node can bring it down in a matter of seconds. This problem is compounded when you bring Onos into the picture. If you have 3 Onos plus a lerk or a gorge, only half of your average game's alien team, then it doesn't matter if the entire marine team is in base <i><!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro-->(or anywhere else I guess because you obviously won the game a while ago)<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--></i>, you will be able to take down that power node. <i><!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro-->(I would hope so!)<!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--></i> By comparison, a heavily developed alien base is usually MUCH harder to destroy. <!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro-->(<i>you realize that an equivlent force to what you described would be 3 dual exos, several macs and JP'marines with welders plus the odd ARC... you really think its that hard to take out a hive and some eggs and with that kind of firepower?)</i><!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
3) Exos. Exos suck. Exos are not Onos. A single JP marine can't kill an unsupported Onos. Onos RULE!
Did I mention I don't like Exos? Yeah, I really don't. <!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro--><i>(we get it... try shooting back and jumping, it helps a little)</i><!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
4) Turrets are garbage. I also don't know how they are supposed to be used, but it seems like a truckload of end-game aliens could prevail against any number of turrets.
5) Macs. These little guys are handy, but they often require babysitting and they die too quickly. Their activation radius is frequently too small for keeping a base welded without micro, but they will also wander off and end up in ridiculous places by trailing after marines until they get bored.
6) Weapons. GLs are downright clunky compared to NS1, and far too easily countered by whips or the back of your buddy's head. In your average pub game, I see almost as many GL suicides as kills, and using them solely to spam at your teammates' feet during a push feels a little silly and counter-intuitive. They don't carry enough ammo, so you often feel tethered to an armory or you are a constant resource and attention drain on your commander. They are too difficult to aim accurately (not to mention frequently too laggy by the time they are in play) to actually try and hit a fast moving target with, they don't do enough focused damage to be a strong counter against higher life forms, and as an offensive weapon are almost entirely dependent on flamethrower support.
Flamethrowers themselves feel extremely niche, and not very effective against most alien life forms. I'm not sure that I'd say FTs are broken, they're at least more useful than GLs, but at 25 res a pop they are not cheap for having what seems like such specialized usage.
Shotguns are great, but also very expensive and easily lost, and their effective use means giving up the marine range advantage to get up close. Against higher life forms like Fades and especially Onos, this is almost always a death sentence. <!--coloro:#A0522D--><span style="color:#A0522D"><!--/coloro--><i>(Shotguns are bad vs. Fades?!? Really?!?!?!?!?!)</i><!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc-->
Mines are also great, but very expensive when you consider how easily they are countered by early alien life forms like Lerks and Gorges, and they don't even always kill a skulk outright. They rarely survive to late game in my experience, but I find that they barely even tickle when I run over them as an Onos.
7) Jet Packs. These aren't nearly as maneuverable as they were in NS1. This new nerfed JP might be okay if marines weren't so desperately dependent on them in endgame.
Next up, some suggestions on how to address these issues!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I didn't go into all the reasons why or where you are wrong about stuff (from my perspective obviously) because I didn't want to detract from the points you were trying to make whether or not I agree with them. Suffice to say I disagree with most of your analysis with the glaring examples highlighted above. For example, Mines are great, but I respect that you may get poor results from them... but I think you need to stop looking at marine purchases as ways to kill (or deter) aliens but rather as ways to slow down or buy time for marines. The marine game is mostly about stalling for time and getting upgrades. Marines only get stronger as the game matures... by the time marines have W3/A3, skulks are hardly useful except as harassment units. Every alien spawn is going to start draining their P-Res, and the alien comm will be dopping eggs as fast as the resources come in for them because of this, and so early game mines keeping skulks off important stuff or picking off a wounded lerk trying to make an escape through a vent can be game changing for a paltry investment.. but the key is that it buys time for the marines to respond, not that they will generate kills per se.
On the contrary, I think you did a very good job of detracting from the points I was trying to make by subverting my post and rewriting it to make me sound as stupid and belligerent as possible. :P
While it may be amusing, it's not especially helpful or constructive, and I actually would love for you to go into all the reasons why you think I am wrong. Your example about mines is great, and that's the kind of discussion I'd like to have. Otherwise you are just dismissing almost everything that I've said and calling me a noob without having to defend your position. I believe there is a logical fallacy that describes this, but I can't remember what it's called.
I think I recall reading your posts elsewhere in the forum and noticed that you seem to be pretty sharp, and I would be very interested in hearing your input and counter-arguments on these topics if you can bring yourself to present them in a way that's more productive than incisive.
If not, then I will concede <b>again</b> that, yeah, I am a pub casual noob and many or most of my arguments will not apply to high level competitive play. I ask again, how do we balance the game to address problems which exist in pub play and not comp play, aside from the tired / flawed L2P kneejerk response?
I feel like I should clarify this. Obviously the shotgun is effective against fades, but at the same range where the fade is effective against you, and the fade is more capable of escaping from imminent death. I just wanted to emphasize the point that the marines' most effective tool against higher lifeforms essentially requires them to give up their native range advantage. Against a fade, that tradeoff of damage for range is worthwhile, but you still have to do your dance in the Fade's wheelhouse, as it were.
This is another instance where I think there is probably a striking contrast between casual and comp play, it's not uncommon to see reasonably skilled Fades go on unmitigated murder sprees in pubs.
and the greatest strength of late game marine is, marines never need to push, they can just setup and defend forward positions to arc from. drop a phase, a armory, obs, macs, exos and a couple marines, and you can hold off a lot of stupid stuff.
most important thing for aliens to ever do, is try to prevent second chair... stupid jetpacks.
I will say, however, that a certain series of servers, that used to be extremely popular with the "pub scene" back in NS1, is back again. They host some good servers, but they are adamantly anti-clan anyone, and their servers happen to use res for kill I wont state names but I avoid them at all costs, due to the res for kill nonsense.
So, if you're getting uber-stomped in a pub, see if its res for kill. If it is, get out, and never return. I hopped on one the other day to try the whole res for kill thing, and lets just say 7 minute onos is anything but fair and balanced.
I will say, however, that a certain series of servers, that used to be extremely popular with the "pub scene" back in NS1, is back again. They host some good servers, but they are adamantly anti-clan anyone, and their servers happen to use res for kill I wont state names but I avoid them at all costs, due to the res for kill nonsense.
So, if you're getting uber-stomped in a pub, see if its res for kill. If it is, get out, and never return. I hopped on one the other day to try the whole res for kill thing, and lets just say 7 minute onos is anything but fair and balanced.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i don't see it as any more unbalanced than previous 5-minute t-res oni. p-res for kills doesn't work very well though. much rather be p-res for harvesters, and t-res for kills.
You are treating me like a competitive only player, when in fact I play in pubs over 50% of my play time, so I have significant experience in the arena.
Onos
I bring this because I really do not agree that ONOS are overpowered in pubs. In fact I pretty much love the onos as it represents a lifeform that new players can do well with, but good marine players can still kill without too much trouble. It is good in many sitautions, but jps and exos are all very good against it. Of course a single super marine will always lose to even a terrible onos, but that is part of what makes NS great, ultimately its a teamwork based game. I guess it may have something to do with the fact that I mainly pub in 10v10 to 12v12 servers, but I rarely see the emergence of a couple ONOS instnatly end the game, unless the aliens were well ahead in the first place, which in my opinion is a good thing because games have a tendency to drag on too long as it is. Of course in smaller games, a single onos is proportionately stronger.
I would also disagree that onos are more accessable. 75res is a ton of res to save as an alien. Did you know that aliens usually have less RTs and thus take longer to accumulate 75res. You have to be very disciplined to never spend any of your Pres all game. Meanwhile, as a marine, I can typically buy one low tier item and still have 75res in time for duelies if I want one, or I can buy shotguns all game long and still have enough for JPs.
Powernodes
I am in agreement with you regarding powernodes. Its a ridiculous win button and it seriously limits the ability of marines to ever be stealthy, or the areas where they can build. I would love to see them just be done away with all together, increase build time of RTs to compensate. It would be sad to see the darkness aspect go, but maybe they could add in a power that could be destroyable just for that in some areas. I would also agree that an acceptable backup plan could be some sort of battery like is used for sentries but can power anything nearby.
Exos
Ah the exo, nearly a guaranteed loss against a good pub alien team. I couldn't even count the number of games I have seen end in exo/onos ring around the rosey where the aliens just run in the opposite direction around the map killing all the marine bases while tthe marine team just slowly pushes into one hive finally killing it. I have no clue how this problem can get fixed, I actually kind of like your idea of single gun exos having welders, I don't know if the tradeoff would be worth it tho, singles just deal so much less damage. This is a really really complicated problem. The big problem with exos is not inherently that they are bad, they are actually amazingly strong, the problem is that the aliens can easily beat exo pushes by just killing the other marine positions without exos and gorge spam can hold the exos at bay near indefinitely.
So the problem is a combination of weak poowernodes, exos inability to phase and the strength of bilebomb. If you nerf bilebomb too much then theres basically no way to stop an exo push. If you let exos phase, then exos would need a nerf as 1 player could defend every position very effectively. Before we do anything too drastic, I think we may yet see an evolution in the use of exos. If you have one exo defending the base on the far side of the map, while most of your exos push the other side of the map, it is very very hard for aliens to make headway. The key is having an exo who is content to be a defender.
I think a possible change would be a reduction in how exo vision is obscured by bilebomb or the removal of powernodes. Maybe even try letting duelies weld but give them quite a long weapon power up delay compared to a normal marine, I think you may be on to something with that.
Agree about turrets, they suck, they would be ok if they had 360 degree radius, bigger radius on the batteries as well, currently they are just worthless, increase the cost if necessary.
Don't really care about MACs, don't wnat to see them with more health tho because MAC spam on exos could become too strong, they need to die easily to bilebomb otherwise they will just repair each other up constnatly.
I also like your whip GL idea. GLs are a touchy subject because before when whips didn't really work, they were just ridiculously good, and now they not so good because of how a whip around a corner can just totally deny GLs forever. This would be a nice solution allowing whips to still do their job, but remove the invulnerability factor. I definitely feel that GLs feel too weak and I think this kind of solution would make for exciting "siege" type situations which are always good. I don't really agree about the ammo, you have the same number of clips as any other weapon, if your going to be spamming constantly, you should run out of ammo quickly, we don't need to encourage infinite GL spam.
Mines and shotguns are both really good I don't agree with your points about them. Flamethrowere are pretty niche for sure. How to balance them is pretty problematic though, One possibility I can think of is to increase cone size to make them somewhat of a newb friendly weapon, but then we would obviously never see it in comp play. I like the idea of it as a support weapon though, maybe increasing the energy removal factor even more would make it strong enough to see real use.
I am somewhat in agreement about jetpacks. I like the current jetpacks, you can get around the map really fast and you can easily chase an onos down. That said, it has very little initial thrust so the onos can still catch u if your overzealous which I feel is fair. What I don't like is the extreme lack of verticle thrust. I would like to see more vert thrust.
If your exo pushes (which typically consist of 1-2 exos/2-3 marines (typically with JPs)/ and MACs) are being held off by a couple gorges, you're doing it wrong...
While it may be amusing, it's not especially helpful or constructive, and I actually would love for you to go into all the reasons why you think I am wrong. Your example about mines is great, and that's the kind of discussion I'd like to have. Otherwise you are just dismissing almost everything that I've said and calling me a noob without having to defend your position. I believe there is a logical fallacy that describes this, but I can't remember what it's called.
I think I recall reading your posts elsewhere in the forum and noticed that you seem to be pretty sharp, and I would be very interested in hearing your input and counter-arguments on these topics if you can bring yourself to present them in a way that's more productive than incisive.
If not, then I will concede <b>again</b> that, yeah, I am a pub casual noob and many or most of my arguments will not apply to high level competitive play. I ask again, how do we balance the game to address problems which exist in pub play and not comp play, aside from the tired / flawed L2P kneejerk response?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well, there's two ways to look at it. One is that I'm being a sarcastic jerk, and the other is that I'm getting people to read the OP that would have skipped it otherwise because statistics say that only 0.003% of people read walls of text in gaming forums from people they don't already know and care about their opinions to begin with. So, while I might be a bit cutting in there, it might cause people to go see what I snipped out and replaced with some amusing-but-not-constructive attempt at humor :) If nothing else, I'm willing to bet that more people will read the abridged version first just for the lulz... I'm helping!! \o/
To be very honest, the reason you're not getting a well thought out and heavily supported counter point-by-point to your post is that it's just too broadly focused. Internet forums don't do discussion well without narrowly focused topics to kick around. Going into why 5 out of 8 points are wrong or some degree of "not right" while someone else picks 4 out of 8 with only one overlap can quickly fracture the discussion into 3 different concurrent arguments on a range of subjects in a single thread.
Also, there is so much about the OP that says "Just play the game for a couple of weeks and this stuff should sort itself out in your head" that I just don't have the stamina to go line by line and end up writing a full fledged "noobs guide to the game" here. And then half the players better than me would just crap on my guide in the same way and we'd be back at square one.
If you want a point by point argument on anything in the OP (or something I brought up) make a new thread to discuss that specifically and I'll be glad to contribute.... maybe even constructively ;)
2)Power nodes are fine, they have a metric ######ton of HP and enough shields to ensure gorges alone have to bile for a good 10 seconds before it's down to HP only, also, nano shield buildings. Another L2P issue for marine comms, if they aren't putting any structures in between the power node and the alien entry/retreat area it's their own fault, armouries are perfect for this. Silence gorge biling is the only slightly unfair mechanic I can think of.
3)It takes a dual exo 3 dual rotations to knock out a 100% mature full HP hive. Think about that, you can fire that off in less than 20 seconds if you get in LoS of the hive. Exos are ######ing beasts and in the right hands are 100% area denial for all alien lifeforms, backed by a half decent marine comm who has 3+ MACs on control group and constant forward scans and some welder back up they won't be stopped. The threads you talked about were from a while ago during steam sales, someone with a decent KD ratio in a dual is going to cleave your alien anus apart given half the chance nowadays.
4)Turrets are speed bumps, nothing more, they allow the 1-2 marines holding bases some help and deter lone skulks when setup properly from being able to take a power node/phase/obs by themself, they're also helpful in setting up aggressive pushes by covering armoury/phase/power/direction of the hive.
5)Marines leading MACs outside the base while they weld them is a L2P issue, they shouldn't be doing that, please don't ###### on the 1-3 legitimate micro things a marine comm can do.
6)GLs are OP in the right hands, they will wipe out 10+ eggs and can knock out every upgrade in 4 near direct hits. The average TSA idiot doorway camping with 3-4 marines killing himself endlessly is not indicative of how effective a weapon is. They also force the alien comm to spend at least 30+ res on each hive to ensure a wandering JP GL marine can't just knock out 1/3 of your eggs and potentially wipe all your upgrades in 5-10 seconds. Flamethrowers do feel horrible, it's a 35 PRes investment to go knock out 10-30 TRes worth of cysts, if you get caught you will lose that FT and JP and the alien comm will get slightly upset but otherwise re cyst all his ###### in about the time you re bought a jetpack and realise you have no more PRes left. They're handy for knocking out gorge forts as well but it's rare. Shotguns are OP as ###### and can stay that way, capable of 1 shotting skulks/lerks, capable of 3 shotting fades and more than capable of chasing down onos doing 190-220 dmg per shot. You also have just enough ammo to 100-0 a hive with shotgun solo, so that's what, 6kHP and 1.4k armour in 40 shells.
7) Jetpacks are performance multipliers, they will make your great marines even better and your ###### marines will still be ######, it allows your team to mercilessly harass down alien RTs that otherwise leaping skulks could easily cover and 2-3 SG JP marines in a hive will put a huge dent into it or wipe out 2-3 upgrades before the team reacts. Jetpack marines have incredible chase against retreating onos and if they used all their energy getting into and attacking the base they won't make it out vs good marines.
"Put a scanner sweep button directly into the commander interface somewhere that just turns inactive when there are no usable observatories in play. It's a pain to have to switch between menus and doing things like dropping meds / ammo and having to select the obs to do a sweep. If this already exists, I apologize for being retarded."
It does, E F will scan, same menu as ammo/med pack/shield/scan, this sentence makes me wonder why I replied to this post.
Aliens also have very effective tools to break turtles, it consists of the team pressing the B key and seeing how many of what they have and going what they don't. Or you can drop 4-5 onos eggs and roll most things, I've never seen a balanced team of 1-2 onos, 1-2 fades, 1-2 lerks, 2-3 gorges and 1-4 skulks take longer than 2 mins to crush a base, normally once forward healing points have been setup on both sides of the base it's over in a matter of minutes unless they are spending all TRes to block which is rare.
I can't get them to work half the time, but I'm great with a FT. We should team up :D
skillbomb is too powerful.
If Aliens get killed in Cargo hive by 2 exos and some welder guys they are doing it wrong. 2 Gorges + lerk and the occasional suicide skulk kill exos before they even see the hive.