The problem is not getting the whips in (echo or not), but getting the cysts in and holding. Another result of the silly knee jerk cyst changes. There was nothing wrong with cyst spam per say, only a problem with their relative time cost, a bonkers alien res system, and a mist design that has no idea what it wants to be. You could just as easily spam harvestors, hives, or any other structure.
Whip rush is currently dead and extremely unviable due to UWE shortsightedness. And like wheee has correctly mentioned, if on the offchance the other team is nub enough to let you get them in, they do way too much damage.
Basically all the hallmarks of a bad gameplay mechanic - absurd risk, absurd payoffs, success based largely on factors out of the control of the alien commander. Might as well add a button that gambles x tres for a 1% chance to instantly win the game. Yes i am in one of my moods.
If I had the power to put in very simple changes (in the context of the current balance mod and any future healspray nerfs) with the goal of improving quality of whip gameplay while also improving overall gameplay, I would
Base changes
- Increase res tick from 6 to 7
- Increase harvestor cost to 15
- Remove cyst min radius
- Remove cyst placement cd
- Reduce mature cyst health from 550 to 350
- Increase cyst maturation time from 90 to 120
- Reduce mist duration from 15 to 5
Whip changes
- Reduce whip cost to 10
- Reduce bombard cost to 10
- Increase whip maturation time from 120 to 390 (52 tres to mist this down to 130)
- Reduce grenade whipping speed by 50%
- Remove whip turning timing
- Remove whip slowdown off infestation
- Bombard only targets and damages structures
- Bombard ROF from 6 to 5.4
- Bombard damage from 1200 to 540
- You can read why these bombard numbers specifically here
Result
- No more thoughtless structure spam (yay!)
- Whip not super hard counter to gl (yay!)
- Whip micro once again possible (yay!)
- No more instagibbing vanilla marine armour (yay!)
- No more blinding people with bombard (yay!)
- 4whip rush all in cheese is once again 'viable'. (yay!)
- Mature 4whip rush timing now finishes at ~6.5 minutes earliest + another ~minute for cysting etc. assuming you manage not to lose any harvesters with no upgrades for that long (quite a feat). If your whips fail, you're looking at 1 hive no upgrades till ~10 minutes and much longer if you do lose harvesters. (yay!) *edit* This timing is pretty much inline with marine 3 arc rushes.
Yeah banelings are really useful. NS2's alien team should also have an upgrade to their basic infantry unit that allows it to self-destruct for heavy damage to surrounding units and structures.
I could support turning xenocide into this ability, but I didn't suggest it because 1) encouraging people to suicide seems counterproductive in NS2 (as it was in NS1) and 2) if you could sufficient organize enough xeno skulks to break a marine turtle, you wouldn't need a comm-related ability. Its because many aliens teams are disorganized that you need something that primarily takes the action of ones person (e.g. the comm).
Also, I think you'd run into the same problems as bilebomb; make it too good and teams will just spam it, too weak and it won't be able to break a turtle. It needs to be strong, but have a crippling weakness (like high damage from welder/axe) to make it more situational to just turtles.
xeno really was only counterproductive in ns1 because of how far you would then respawn. However, with a forward shift this is much easier in NS2.
In the cases of the marine turtle that is being discussed here it is not that the alien team can not break it when not organized it is that they can not break it when they are. For example as marine com on vail I held off the alien team who was 2 gorge 1 leark and the rest onos for about 30min using a wall of armories 2 arcs along with flames and gls.
Now I will admit that a turtle like that and when your telling the aliens to surrender is fun it really should not be able to last that long.
How about if you place the phase gate on infestation it's only a destination gate? It doesn't allow people to phase back through to re-defend or rearm. That way you can explain the power, receiving a teleport shouldn't need that much power, and could even be a unique building "Destination gate only" which is hardened to survive on infesation?
You could even have it as something the marine had to carry, small cost 5 or 10 pres to match with Gorge Tunnels (which also don't need infestation!?)
I've not played on your balance mod servers (No EU host that I've found) but I believe allowing ninja-mobility to both teams would be a brilliant mechanic to break turtles/front line issues
Yes, really need to get more people to play this regularly. It's really too good of a mod to let it slide as most of these features would very much end up making NS2 an even better game.
I'd really like to see a comp match with this mod. But thus far I've only seen a few guys from comp teams (one from Nexzil and some other guy) who called it "balance" in quotation mark and said that the mod was awful, without specifying why exactly they think so.
The problem is not getting the whips in (echo or not), but getting the cysts in and holding. Another result of the silly knee jerk cyst changes. There was nothing wrong with cyst spam per say, only a problem with their relative time cost, a bonkers alien res system, and a mist design that has no idea what it wants to be. You could just as easily spam harvestors, hives, or any other structure.
Whip rush is currently dead and extremely unviable due to UWE shortsightedness. And like wheee has correctly mentioned, if on the offchance the other team is nub enough to let you get them in, they do way too much damage.
Basically all the hallmarks of a bad gameplay mechanic - absurd risk, absurd payoffs, success based largely on factors out of the control of the alien commander. Might as well add a button that gambles x tres for a 1% chance to instantly win the game. Yes i am in one of my moods.
If I had the power to put in very simple changes (in the context of the current balance mod and any future healspray nerfs) with the goal of improving quality of whip gameplay while also improving overall gameplay, I would
Base changes
- Increase res tick from 6 to 7
- Increase harvestor cost to 15
- Remove cyst min radius
- Remove cyst placement cd
- Reduce mature cyst health from 550 to 350
- Increase cyst maturation time from 90 to 120
- Reduce mist duration from 15 to 5
Whip changes
- Reduce whip cost to 10
- Reduce bombard cost to 10
- Increase whip maturation time from 120 to 390 (52 tres to mist this down to 130)
- Reduce grenade whipping speed by 50%
- Remove whip turning timing
- Remove whip slowdown off infestation
- Bombard only targets and damages structures
- Bombard ROF from 6 to 5.4
- Bombard damage from 1200 to 540
- You can read why these bombard numbers specifically here
Result
- No more thoughtless structure spam (yay!)
- Whip not super hard counter to gl (yay!)
- Whip micro once again possible (yay!)
- No more instagibbing vanilla marine armour (yay!)
- No more blinding people with bombard (yay!)
- 4whip rush all in cheese is once again 'viable'. (yay!)
- Mature 4whip rush timing now finishes at ~6.5 minutes earliest + another ~minute for cysting etc. assuming you manage not to lose any harvesters with no upgrades for that long (quite a feat). If your whips fail, you're looking at 1 hive no upgrades till ~10 minutes and much longer if you do lose harvesters. (yay!) *edit* This timing is pretty much inline with marine 3 arc rushes.
i agree that res costs, bombard damage, and gl whip rate need to be reduced, but i think another thing should be considered - i don't think whips should have to root. this would prevent that whole frustrating mechanic of flooding marine base with cysts and dropping everyone's fps down to 20. it would also make shift echo very worthwhile (i'm assuming that you can only teleport to infestation, otherwise the mechanic would be ridiculously overpowered).
i think this would be a much better solution than to eliminate cyst spamming cooldown. this would also make whips much more interesting from a comming perspective, because often trying to use them offensively will get them killed before they can even fire a shot due to the root duration/turn speed issue.
Whips should be reworked I feel to allow them to function outside of cyst ranges, Something similar to how arcs are implemented, though obviously in not the same role.
I think "balance mod" has always been a misnomer for this. It's silly to think that it would be more balanced than vanilla with the plethora of sweeping changes all tossed in there at once. More likely the major changes will have to be ported over one by one to the main balance mod and the game itself.
As a note about turtling - it will always be a potential problem in NS2, for either side. When you have the entire team focused in a single/small area, it will always require significant teamwork from the other side to break through that defense. What really needs to be adjusted is the potential power of base defenses, and also the base cracking ability of each team. Lower spawn rates overall and hopefully potential exo/onos changes, along with crags and armories and all the smaller changes will not ever eliminate turtles, but they will help make the hour long turtles less of an occurance, and also help games end when they are clearly over.
The Biomass system adds a lot to help aliens defeat those turtles. If aliens have that amount of map control, their lifeforms become so strong that they shouldn't have a hard time killing marine bases.
Currently we have effectively 500 HP on a carapace'd Gorge on 4 Hives with Biomass upgrades to max. I've seen an entire marine team trying to kill such a Gorge that was just bunnyhopping around in the marine base while biling the hell out of it in the lategame.
Well you cannot expect everyone to provide useful feedback, however I would expect better from comp players...
You should know better than that
I've noticed that in many competitive games, players are unwilling to accept change (even good change) simply because it means they will have to relearn the game. That said, I have yet to try the mod so I can't comment on that... but some of the stuff seems interesting at least.
i agree that res costs, bombard damage, and gl whip rate need to be reduced, but i think another thing should be considered - i don't think whips should have to root. this would prevent that whole frustrating mechanic of flooding marine base with cysts and dropping everyone's fps down to 20. it would also make shift echo very worthwhile (i'm assuming that you can only teleport to infestation, otherwise the mechanic would be ridiculously overpowered).
i think this would be a much better solution than to eliminate cyst spamming cooldown. this would also make whips much more interesting from a comming perspective, because often trying to use them offensively will get them killed before they can even fire a shot due to the root duration/turn speed issue.
Was thinking about 'instant root' or the ability to attack without rooting too, but imo it would be too powerful (or require too much of a nerf to whip movement speed). Whip speed is 4, marine non-sprint speed is 5, backwards move speed about half that (when you are shooting the whip), with 6 sprint where you can't reload. You would just have too much pushing power with whips especially in lower 6 v 6 player sizes. Two marines quite literally would not be able to beat 1 gorge and whips without retreating halfway across the map. This was the issue we had in early beta when whips had a bug where they would attack instantly when the root animation began. If there was ever any room for it, I would love to see root time reduced a bit, but I do think root as a mechanic is the necessary tradeoff for mobile whips.
Also don't think removing cyst placement cd will lead to as much spam lagging as it might seem. Metaphorically, if cysts were a currency, you could say that the current UWE mechanics have merely created a higher artificial price floor, instead of actually addressing the inherent cost of cysts so that it matches that 'price floor'. I think maintaining 50 starting hp while reducing max health (maturation efficiency), reduced mist efficiency, 7 res tick, and 15 tres harvestors goes quite a way towards addressing this, with a bonus end result of cysts being more time efficient for marines to kill (instead of just ignore like currently). Couple this with properly adjusted tres sink progression (biomass system), and you have a huge opportunity cost to cyst spam. It's kind of like taking med packs off cooldown, and expecting medspam not to increase alot because marine res income/tech progression is tuned nicely for the most part.
As for the lag, apparently UWE is working/worked on an improvement regarding cysts and entity count, but i'm not a technical person so don't know how big it actually is.
Whips should be reworked I feel to allow them to function outside of cyst ranges, Something similar to how arcs are implemented, though obviously in not the same role.
You could definitely balance whips around not needing to be on infestation to function, but then the question is, would whips be fun or remotely effective to use after that? And if we allow whips to fully function off infestation, why not go the whole way and make everything function off infestation (i would be for this, but its clearly out of the scope of possibility).
@elodea it's possible that a whip rush at the beginning of the game might be too good in lower playercounts, but considering that whips are 15 tres each, a pair of early whips wrecks alien economy so it's basically an all-in.
A fully mobile NPC combat unit really doesn't have any place in NS2. It would hardly make the game more fun for the marines, or the aliens for that matter - just the khamm. Whips are unrootable so they can reposition themselves as defensive structures, I don't think whip rushes should ever be more than a novelty strat.
ARCs don't shoot players. It would be more like if sentries were on wheels with 360 degree firing, and could drive around shooting things without a battery.
Adding onto elodea's base changes, I think increasing costs of cysts to 2 after a certain number placed would lessen the mindless incessant infestation spam in mid-late game.
Cyst spam late-game is a simple consequence of alien khammanders not having much other things to spend t.res on lategame, not to mention that just raising their cost at a certain point in the game would be an incredibly unintuitive change.
SewlekThe programmer previously known as SchimmelJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16247Members, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Developer
removing the cyst min range and cooldown is a very bad idea. why do you think this would be an improvement to the game? also keep in mind, any entity created comes with a performance cost. doesnt matter if something would make more sense or is more balanced when the game ends up being unplayable. what is spamable will be spammed, just look at sentries: never used in competitive play, but always spammed in public (spam only ended after a hard cap has been introduced). im very much against this change. also regarding the resource tick change: this will have huge consequences. im not exactly sure what you want to achieve with that, you should probably explain further why you want that change and the advantages / disadvantages.
regarding the gorge tunnel infestation: those will now generate infestation when the other side is infested. im curious what this will do to game play. though the commander is not able to connect cysts, but you can of course place any other structure on this infestation.
Sewlek, please can you elaborate on "the commander is not able to connect cysts" - I read this as the gorge tunnel will entity will create infestation, but you cannot build additional cysts from it?
Comments
Whip rush is currently dead and extremely unviable due to UWE shortsightedness. And like wheee has correctly mentioned, if on the offchance the other team is nub enough to let you get them in, they do way too much damage.
Basically all the hallmarks of a bad gameplay mechanic - absurd risk, absurd payoffs, success based largely on factors out of the control of the alien commander. Might as well add a button that gambles x tres for a 1% chance to instantly win the game. Yes i am in one of my moods.
If I had the power to put in very simple changes (in the context of the current balance mod and any future healspray nerfs) with the goal of improving quality of whip gameplay while also improving overall gameplay, I would
Base changes
- Increase res tick from 6 to 7
- Increase harvestor cost to 15
- Remove cyst min radius
- Remove cyst placement cd
- Reduce mature cyst health from 550 to 350
- Increase cyst maturation time from 90 to 120
- Reduce mist duration from 15 to 5
Whip changes
- Reduce whip cost to 10
- Reduce bombard cost to 10
- Increase whip maturation time from 120 to 390 (52 tres to mist this down to 130)
- Reduce grenade whipping speed by 50%
- Remove whip turning timing
- Remove whip slowdown off infestation
- Bombard only targets and damages structures
- Bombard ROF from 6 to 5.4
- Bombard damage from 1200 to 540
- You can read why these bombard numbers specifically here
Result
- No more thoughtless structure spam (yay!)
- Whip not super hard counter to gl (yay!)
- Whip micro once again possible (yay!)
- No more instagibbing vanilla marine armour (yay!)
- No more blinding people with bombard (yay!)
- 4whip rush all in cheese is once again 'viable'. (yay!)
- Mature 4whip rush timing now finishes at ~6.5 minutes earliest + another ~minute for cysting etc. assuming you manage not to lose any harvesters with no upgrades for that long (quite a feat). If your whips fail, you're looking at 1 hive no upgrades till ~10 minutes and much longer if you do lose harvesters. (yay!) *edit* This timing is pretty much inline with marine 3 arc rushes.
Also, I think you'd run into the same problems as bilebomb; make it too good and teams will just spam it, too weak and it won't be able to break a turtle. It needs to be strong, but have a crippling weakness (like high damage from welder/axe) to make it more situational to just turtles.
In the cases of the marine turtle that is being discussed here it is not that the alien team can not break it when not organized it is that they can not break it when they are. For example as marine com on vail I held off the alien team who was 2 gorge 1 leark and the rest onos for about 30min using a wall of armories 2 arcs along with flames and gls.
Now I will admit that a turtle like that and when your telling the aliens to surrender is fun it really should not be able to last that long.
How about if you place the phase gate on infestation it's only a destination gate? It doesn't allow people to phase back through to re-defend or rearm. That way you can explain the power, receiving a teleport shouldn't need that much power, and could even be a unique building "Destination gate only" which is hardened to survive on infesation?
You could even have it as something the marine had to carry, small cost 5 or 10 pres to match with Gorge Tunnels (which also don't need infestation!?)
I've not played on your balance mod servers (No EU host that I've found) but I believe allowing ninja-mobility to both teams would be a brilliant mechanic to break turtles/front line issues
Unfortunately nobody really bothers to join up.
Way to contribute to make it better…
i agree that res costs, bombard damage, and gl whip rate need to be reduced, but i think another thing should be considered - i don't think whips should have to root. this would prevent that whole frustrating mechanic of flooding marine base with cysts and dropping everyone's fps down to 20. it would also make shift echo very worthwhile (i'm assuming that you can only teleport to infestation, otherwise the mechanic would be ridiculously overpowered).
i think this would be a much better solution than to eliminate cyst spamming cooldown. this would also make whips much more interesting from a comming perspective, because often trying to use them offensively will get them killed before they can even fire a shot due to the root duration/turn speed issue.
Currently we have effectively 500 HP on a carapace'd Gorge on 4 Hives with Biomass upgrades to max. I've seen an entire marine team trying to kill such a Gorge that was just bunnyhopping around in the marine base while biling the hell out of it in the lategame.
You should know better than that
I've noticed that in many competitive games, players are unwilling to accept change (even good change) simply because it means they will have to relearn the game. That said, I have yet to try the mod so I can't comment on that... but some of the stuff seems interesting at least.
Was thinking about 'instant root' or the ability to attack without rooting too, but imo it would be too powerful (or require too much of a nerf to whip movement speed). Whip speed is 4, marine non-sprint speed is 5, backwards move speed about half that (when you are shooting the whip), with 6 sprint where you can't reload. You would just have too much pushing power with whips especially in lower 6 v 6 player sizes. Two marines quite literally would not be able to beat 1 gorge and whips without retreating halfway across the map. This was the issue we had in early beta when whips had a bug where they would attack instantly when the root animation began. If there was ever any room for it, I would love to see root time reduced a bit, but I do think root as a mechanic is the necessary tradeoff for mobile whips.
Also don't think removing cyst placement cd will lead to as much spam lagging as it might seem. Metaphorically, if cysts were a currency, you could say that the current UWE mechanics have merely created a higher artificial price floor, instead of actually addressing the inherent cost of cysts so that it matches that 'price floor'. I think maintaining 50 starting hp while reducing max health (maturation efficiency), reduced mist efficiency, 7 res tick, and 15 tres harvestors goes quite a way towards addressing this, with a bonus end result of cysts being more time efficient for marines to kill (instead of just ignore like currently). Couple this with properly adjusted tres sink progression (biomass system), and you have a huge opportunity cost to cyst spam. It's kind of like taking med packs off cooldown, and expecting medspam not to increase alot because marine res income/tech progression is tuned nicely for the most part.
As for the lag, apparently UWE is working/worked on an improvement regarding cysts and entity count, but i'm not a technical person so don't know how big it actually is.
You could definitely balance whips around not needing to be on infestation to function, but then the question is, would whips be fun or remotely effective to use after that? And if we allow whips to fully function off infestation, why not go the whole way and make everything function off infestation (i would be for this, but its clearly out of the scope of possibility).
>arcs
regarding the gorge tunnel infestation: those will now generate infestation when the other side is infested. im curious what this will do to game play. though the commander is not able to connect cysts, but you can of course place any other structure on this infestation.