NS2, like NS1 before it, has a slippery slope. Any game in which the collection of resources makes it easier to collect more resources (and simultaneously easier to deny the opposing team's resources) has this same positive feedback mechanism. The better you do now, the even better you will do later.
Ok, I admit I stopped reading after this, are you some how suggesting that doing well early SHOULDN'T reward you by making you do better later?
how about you get base red growth and tamp down how much towers give? so 1 res team would get 6 res per tick and 7 red team would get 12, each tick being 12 seconds long... or something like that. or each team gets 1 extra red per tick for being pretty, and prices.are adjusted accordingly.
@biz - For the purpose of my little essay, I intended "decisions" to include engagements, and "mistakes" to include losing engagements, even though combat isn't exactly a decision per se. Whether you fall behind in the game from bad aim or from bad tactics or from bad strategy, my point is that falling behind early on should be detrimental but not decisive.
NS2, like NS1 before it, has a slippery slope. Any game in which the collection of resources makes it easier to collect more resources (and simultaneously easier to deny the opposing team's resources) has this same positive feedback mechanism. The better you do now, the even better you will do later.
Ok, I admit I stopped reading after this, are you some how suggesting that doing well early SHOULDN'T reward you by making you do better later?
That was the question and point of this entire thread. Well done for missing it.
In my opinion the slippery slope problem wasn't as much of an issue in NS1. Furthermore, it isn't as much of an issue in pure RTS games (which you would think would suffer most from this phenomenon) like starcraft.
My theory as to why this is the case is resource control. In most RTS games, at almost any point, you can choose to shift from pressuring your opponent, to gathering resources instead. Typically the way resources work imply an intrinsic "cost" in maintaining your gathering outposts. Without effort, they will not be profitable, so it is nigh on impossible to focus on both heavy resource gathering, as well as heavy offense (unless your offense is so heavy that your enemy can't even attack, but that isn't really a fair fight). In your average RTS, this manifests itself in the "when should I expand" choice a player must make. This is facilitated by the surplus of resources on an average RTS map. There will almost always be more resources to take, and in fact, the number of resource locations not take by players will usually outnumber the points that are taken by players.
This is not the case in NS2. From about the 3-4 minute mark onward, every resource location is taken by one team or the other. Taking resources and attacking are essentially the exact same thing. Once all the nodes are divvied up, the only way to change the balance is to attack one and take it for yourself. This is where the slippery slope is its most painful, because the team with fewer resource nodes needs to attack other nodes in order to take them, and the team with more resource nodes can defend nodes more easily. It doesn't take long before any attempts to take more resource points becomes a losing and unprofitable battle.
In my memory, NS1 was not like this. Though it wouldn't be true to say that more nodes were left uncapped than capped, I do distinctly remember many nodes being neutral for long periods of time, and there were very few cases where every single node on the map was owned by one team or the other.
In my opinion, the lack of "neutral resources" is a big problem at the moment.
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edited April 2013
@ |strofix| I was actually noticing something similar last night when playing.. a fast moving rine team that can at least keep up with skulks, will still consume the map in a very short amount of time, and this early "claim" to ground is generally the indicator of how the round will play out.
Gone are the worries of being stretched out too thin (in pubs)
Perhaps more expensive extractor/harvester tres costs? Maybe that plus @roobubba 's idea would do it.
Been playing a lot of NS1 lately and I can confirm that every match there are usually several nodes that go unclaimed. It's pretty rare to see every node in the match taken up at once.
And I totally agree Horse. The rooms that the marines control in the mid to late game almost always represent the farthest they were able to reach before phase tech was researched.
When I think about things like this, I usually try to compare NS1 and N2 in the way things "felt".
In NS2, resource nodes just felt so much further away. Anything that didn't have a phase gate and a couple of turrets near it seemed like a distant and unreachable outpost. I don't know what the travel times between nodes is like now, or whether it differs much from NS1, but it seems like the mobile defensive capabilities of marines are a big factor in how easy it is to take and hold nodes.
To be clear, I think this is exclusively a marine issue. Any node the aliens don't take, the marines will, but the reverse cannot be said to be true in my opinion. I don't want to go back to pointing the usual finger at sprint, but...
Perhaps more expensive extractor/harvester tres costs? Maybe that plus @roobubba 's idea would do it.
I agree, higher costs for RTs could change this. Right now you don't bother if a RT goes down to an alien. You just send 1 marine to rebuild it. But it should be a decision to place a RT. You would not want to place one, that you can't defend. This is achievable by increasing the time until they pay off.
With costs of 10 res, the RT has payed for itself after 70seconds. It should be much longer. Like 150 or even 180 seconds. In order to balance this out most tech would need to get cheaper, I think. Not only because the higher costs of the RTs but also because you can't hold so many RTs anymore.
Overall this would make early victories in battles less important. You need to defend the ground that you could take at the early victory for 3-4 minutes before it pays off. The winning team gets more vulnerable because it has to defend more ground. The losing team gets a chance for 3 - 4 minutes to convert their early losses into a partial victory. (When you can claim the ground back before it has payed off for your enemy you have damaged him.)
If the skills of the both teams are to uneven, it wouldn't change much. Because after those 3 - 4 minutes the RTs are pumping the resources into the winning team leading to an even sooner win when the tech is cheaper.
So yes. It will be a big change (tweaking the costs of tech and RTs) and I have no idea how to tweak the numbers at the alien team. But I would love to try it. It could make the game much more strategic. Placing RTs would be a decision not a tedious "I have to replace this RT" / "I have to chomp down this RT".
I guess I could throw one more RFK (!) comeback mechanic around, just as some food for thought.
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One of the things that was lost in transition from NS1 res model to NS2 model was the way how skulks and gorges served as the most efficient economical units. In NS1 every bit of res you got on the small lifeforms was either taking you closer to another res node or high lifeform whereas the bigger lifeforms mostly used their res as a safety fund in case they died. As a result, the frags going skulks or gorges were usually economically the most valuable frags you could get as an alien. Whenever you were in dire situation and running a low high tier lifeform count, the RFK actually went to skulks and provided you extra value.
How this comes into NS2 would be giving the aliens an upgrade alternative that allows them to unlock some RFK mechanic for skulks and gorges. Ideally it wouldn't be an upgrade you invest every round, but it would still allow you to play a bit of catch up in situations where you know you're going to rely on low tier lifeforms longer than you really want to.
Once you've got the fades out, the RFK flow slows down and the things play out roughly as they do without the upgrade. If you still have skulks around you can actually try feeding them some RFK and somewhat encourages fielding varied lifeform lineup on the field. The outcome should be more diverse engagements and lifeform dynamics in general.
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The tricky stuff I see is fitting the upgrade into the res model and tech tree of NS2.
You don't necessarily want it to be a regular early game upgrade, but more of an upgrade that is affordable even on low econ and becomes really tempting only if you're playing skulks longer than you'd really want to. I'd like to believe there's a combination of tech time, research cost, teching requirements and such that make it overlap a bit with the ideal high econ tech path and thus making it more of an alternative than a regular pick.
The specifics of RFK mechanic are something someone else than me has to decide also. I believe the res flow should probably go to tres pool, allowing aliens to catch up a bit with their econ and possibly rebuild faster, but anything that fits the purpose of recovering strenght on the game is fine.
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I think the basic idea of making the vanilla/cheap units have more indirect unique value can be applied to many comeback mechanics in general, not just RFK. This is just the first thing that crossed my mind on the topic of economical comebacks.
I see where you're trying to go with that idea, Bacillus, and I like the direction. My main issue with that is how you can distinguish the scenarios where this would be useful rather than flat out better.
For a good team, it would have to be priced high enough that they don't take it, which means that for a bad team, it will be too expensive. Also would it be something to fall back on after losing a hive, say? In which case it needs to be available on 1 hive and therefore would must likely be the first upgrade by default if it's worth its salt.
I like the idea of making skulks' impact a little more useful on a team, but fundamentally anything that gives benefit based on combat advantage is going to favour the better team more than the worse team, isn't it?
Re: higher rt costs. Wouldn't this make the snowball worse? Taking an rt out early game will hamper the opponent's economy more, surely?
A delay is an interesting idea though. In fact, the more I think about that, the more I like it...
How about a delay in extracting res from each specific res node? At the beginning of the map, each node has to be pumped for, say 2min before it gives any res. This timer only applies once per res node, and starting res towers don't have this delay.
This could work beautifully with transparent effects, too... Imagine a thick goopy liquid having to be pumped up, but there's a head of gas/colourless goop/whatever that doesn't give any res first for each res node. If the rate is very slow (ie the liquid very thick and very rich in res so only a small volume is required per res...), this could be visually very neat indeed!
I'm getting side-tracked here, but the idea for an initial delay on new nodes in the map would open up lots of tactical options, and also reduce the economic damage only in the early game. Do you let the opponent cap nodes then strike after they've cleared the head of resless goop? Let them take the delay, then push in to take the res? Focus on locking down a tech or choke point early on instead of capping?
Would have no effect later in the game but could open up a lot of options earlier on.
I really don't like the RFK mechanic and have stated my view of pros and (mostly) cons several times.
But an asymmetric mechanic that is unique to Skulks and (maybe) Gorges could actually work. If you want to add a draw-back Skulks could need to bite a marine corpse 5 times to get resources out of it. This way they are loud and vulnerable and need to defeat all marines in the are before they profit from this upgrade.
Personally, I think increasing the res/extractor cost and reducing their income flow would be worth trying out. It should decrease the snowballing effect, prolonging the early game, and thus increasing the timeframe for both sides to make up for lost early engagements and break fortified positions.
sorry, but i'm disliking a lot of ideas in here. mainly because i just don't believe that any of the suggestions would actually tackle the true problem.
if aliens lose 5 RT's and marines lose 4 RT's, the 'slope' is still horizontal... therefore where is this idea coming from that losing RT's are the magic bean of this slippery beanstalk slope? if aliens lose 5 RT's and marines lose 0 RT's, then it's less an issue of slippery slope and more an issue of the aliens being cornholed in every engagement.
another aspect becomes clear when both teams have sufficient experience and equal skill. such games don't have a slippery slope for the most part, because the teams are exchanging economic/strategic blows throughout. although i will grant that it's a bit more harsh with fewer players (6v6 etc), as the defender's advantage is more prevalent with more players. anyway, when the slippery slope sets in, the dominant team has done enough to earn that position of superiority. if they haven't done enough to earn that superiority, then change something meaningful - not just say "you only killed 5 RT's, you need to kill 10 RT's to get that superiority!".
this thread is actually giving me a headache. it can be accurately compared to street fighter having a slippery slope. if you lose 50% of your health then it's too hard to come back, and it could be less steep by increasing everyone's base health by 100%.
i believe it was m. bison who said "NOOOOOO... just stop sucking and/or fix the imbalanced stuff".
@tarquinbb:
You analyzed the two extreme cases.
First you talk about the rare case that the player skill is divided mostly equally over both teams.
Than you talk about the common case that one team absolutely out-skills the other team.
You are right in those both cases. And we don't argument against that in this thread. But we talk about the most common cases where one team is slightly better as the other or maybe just had some luck in the early game. We talk about games with predictable outcomes, that we don't like them and how to lessen the appearance of such games. One team has to win the early engagements. But it doesn't need to mean, that they are the overall better team. Simply: The outcome of the early engagements should have less (not none!) impact of the outcome of the game.
But your street fighter - comparison is really wrong. No matter how much damage one fighter has, he can always turn the tide. He didn't lose the ability to perform some moves. The opponent didn't gained any new moves. The 2 fighters are exactly as they were at the beginning. Just the counter that decides when who has won changed.
Same goes for Basketball or Tennis. You don't gain a disadvantage that alters how you can play the game. You only get behind in points. Chess is the opposite. When you lose a figure, you also lose "moves" you can perform. Chess has a slippery slope. Street Fighter not.
@tarquinbb:
You analyzed the two extreme cases.
First you talk about the rare case that the player skill is divided mostly equally over both teams.
Than you talk about the common case that one team absolutely out-skills the other team.
You are right in those both cases. And we don't argument against that in this thread. But we talk about the most common cases where one team is slightly better as the other or maybe just had some luck in the early game. We talk about games with predictable outcomes, that we don't like them and how to lessen the appearance of such games. One team has to win the early engagements. But it doesn't need to mean, that they are the overall better team. Simply: The outcome of the early engagements should have less (not none!) impact of the outcome of the game.
But your street fighter - comparison is really wrong. No matter how much damage one fighter has, he can always turn the tide. He didn't lose the ability to perform some moves. The opponent didn't gained any new moves. The 2 fighters are exactly as they were at the beginning. Just the counter that decides when who has won changed.
Same goes for Basketball or Tennis. You don't gain a disadvantage that alters how you can play the game. You only get behind in points. Chess is the opposite. When you lose a figure, you also lose "moves" you can perform. Chess has a slippery slope. Street Fighter not.
my street fighter comparison wasn't to highlight the ability to turn the tide, but merely the chance to turn the tide. which is irrefutably and obviously true, if you have 50% health then you're at a disadvantage. the comparison was more highlighting that if you lose 50% health to the opponent, then it's either your failure or the game being imbalanced - it's not the health bar's fault. if you prefer, it's your safety net, and a slippery slope means a progressively smaller safety net.
anyway, my point is that changes should be made to marines, aliens and tech. changing the resource system is just a tranquilizer which will inhibit the snowball effect, but it won't stop marines killing all the skulks and blocking all RT's for X minutes.
if the system works when the teams are equally balanced, it doesn't make sense to me to change the system. if anything the game should expand on the RTS elements to allow COST EFFICIENT counter-strategies. currently there's an RTS resource/tech system but all combat is won by 'stronger' and 'more expensive' FPS units. for example aliens go mass lerks, what do marines have to counter that except more marines/more money?
imagine starcraft if there were no cost-efficient counters. terran just makes 100% marines, zerg has no effective counter to marine because there are no banelings. hey guys, let's reduce the rate of mineral harvesting!
my street fighter comparison wasn't to highlight the ability to turn the tide, but merely the chance to turn the tide.
But this is not what the thread is about. If you are talking only about the chance to turn the tide, your whole post can be summed up in: "The better player wins." And YES this is true. Everybody knows this. But thats not what we are talking about. We are talking about the ability to turn the tide. About the slippery slope that gives your enemy an advantage because he is better than you. As if the fact that he is better than you isn't enough for him to win the game, we also need to reward him with even more advantages.
I have seen many comebacks in street fighter. Because games have many factors that lead to the outcome. Many times you can have simply bad luck, or the opponent gets in a good combo. But than you can turn the tide and defeat him even when you are at half health. If you would have lost the ability to jump and kick with 1/2 health, such comebacks would be more scarce.
And thats what the thread is about. Finding a middle ground between letting your early victories have impact and value in the course of the game, but making early wins / loss more forgiving so that you can have more fun (=unpredictable) games even when the teams are not totally equal in skill.
Right now the slippery slope works in ending obvious skill stacked games faster. But it is poison for games with equally skilled teams that just had bad luck in some early engagements or are slightly worse as the enemy team. In this cases the game should not get to a state where you can predict the outcome (because comebacks are so rare) to early. Thats what we trying to fix.
I see where you're trying to go with that idea, Bacillus, and I like the direction. My main issue with that is how you can distinguish the scenarios where this would be useful rather than flat out better.
For a good team, it would have to be priced high enough that they don't take it, which means that for a bad team, it will be too expensive.
The general idea is that a healthy team has something more worthwile to do. This is usually achieved through stuff like time/res cost ratios.
For example you can make the upgrade cost a little, but take while to research. At that point if you're doing fine on econ and your main army is soon going to be mostly lerks and fades, you probably want to spend your time upgrading fades, lerks and some other tech rather than spending valuable research time on RFK.
Meanwhile if your econ is hurting big time, you probably can't even afford a fade research. It looks like you're never even going to get to a point where you'd have more than 1 fade or so. Go ahead and upgrade the RFK, you're not going to afford to have upgrade research running all the time anyway and RFK even supports your main units for the next 5 minutes or so.
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You could even make the RFK a free 'channelling spell'. Activate the spell and your hive will only focus on maintaining the RFK buff on all skulks. Once the duration is over the buff is removed and you can choose to trigger it again or do some valuable research on the hive.
Once again, an alien team with big economy is going to be better off upgrading something constantly. Meanwhile an alien team that's far behind in economy isn't going to be upgrading anyway, so they might as well run the RFK boost and use it to revive their economy or hoard up enough to res to afford that critical upgrade even if it comes a little late.
The possibilities of differentiating an upgrade so that it's suited for an underdog are almost limitless, you just have to be creative with the details.
Also would it be something to fall back on after losing a hive, say? In which case it needs to be available on 1 hive and therefore would must likely be the first upgrade by default if it's worth its salt.
Losing a hive is probably way out of this mechanic's recovery range. It's not meant to be a catch-all solution to all setbacks you encouter during a round.
One of the biggest downsides of the present res model is how much it dictates the direction of your investments, which then again leads to poor teams staying poor and so on. The purpose of my suggestion is to allow aliens to have some flexibility in the way they play around with their res model in relation to other important factors such as tech and map control.
If there's a need to recover from a hive loss ( which I find debatable in the first place ), it probably falls to some other mechanic.
I like the idea of making skulks' impact a little more useful on a team, but fundamentally anything that gives benefit based on combat advantage is going to favour the better team more than the worse team, isn't it?
If I understand correctly, this is once again answered by giving the better team some better suited alternatives for their situation.
There are other ways of making skulks more impactful though. The RFK is mostly inviting because it adds alternative ways to manipulate the otherwise predictable res pools and also connects the RTS and FPS layers in some quite nice ways.
As an alternative example of making skulks unique we can look at NS1 skulk-fade relation. The permanent and well regging NS1 parasite was a huge life saver for higher lifeforms. In smaller games (6v6 mostly), having many fades late game often resulted in dead fades because of how the parasite wasn't saving them from ambushes. It was still better to have loads of fades, but maintaining the high fade count was surprisingly challenging considering how powerful they were.
I really don't like the RFK mechanic and have stated my view of pros and (mostly) cons several times.
I was kind of considering using some other term than RFK because people see it as the NS1 RFK and oppose it without usually considering it as a mechanic that can be adjusted into many shapes and purposes depending on what the gameplay requires. For me RFK just means that team can gain res somehow through fragging, the rest of it are context specific details.
For every RFK suggestion you have to specify which things don't work and which work. In this case I feel most of the negatives are dealt with the upgrade nature of RFK and focus on tres pool.
But an asymmetric mechanic that is unique to Skulks and (maybe) Gorges could actually work. If you want to add a draw-back Skulks could need to bite a marine corpse 5 times to get resources out of it. This way they are loud and vulnerable and need to defeat all marines in the are before they profit from this upgrade.
Why?
Why do they have to be vulnerable before the upgrade can kick in? If anything, this requires the aliens to take decisive victories and be dominant before they can make use of the upgrade, which is pretty much the opposite of a comeback mechanic. It also reduces the skulks and gorges to cleanup duty rather than allowing them to be valuable inside the actual battle.
With direct RFK implementation, you can take little frag trades all over the map. Whenever you trade frags in 1:1 ratio against the leading team, you recover your economy a little bit and hopefully bring your team closer to the even gameplay situation.
The mechanic is quite similar to Dota XP system. When you're behind in levels, you look to create a mess and trade kills because your opponent is worth more experience than you are. That's a damn good comeback mechanic that works even if you're too far behind to pull off a decisively won fight.
my street fighter comparison wasn't to highlight the ability to turn the tide, but merely the chance to turn the tide.
But this is not what the thread is about. If you are talking only about the chance to turn the tide, your whole post can be summed up in: "The better player wins." And YES this is true. Everybody knows this. But thats not what we are talking about. We are talking about the ability to turn the tide. About the slippery slope that gives your enemy an advantage because he is better than you. As if the fact that he is better than you isn't enough for him to win the game, we also need to reward him with even more advantages.
I have seen many comebacks in street fighter. Because games have many factors that lead to the outcome. Many times you can have simply bad luck, or the opponent gets in a good combo. But than you can turn the tide and defeat him even when you are at half health. If you would have lost the ability to jump and kick with 1/2 health, such comebacks would be more scarce.
And thats what the thread is about. Finding a middle ground between letting your early victories have impact and value in the course of the game, but making early wins / loss more forgiving so that you can have more fun (=unpredictable) games even when the teams are not totally equal in skill.
Right now the slippery slope works in ending obvious skill stacked games faster. But it is poison for games with equally skilled teams that just had bad luck in some early engagements or are slightly worse as the enemy team. In this cases the game should not get to a state where you can predict the outcome (because comebacks are so rare) to early. Thats what we trying to fix.
sorry, that's not how my post can be summed up and you missed my point entirely. in fact, your reply is so far off the mark that i suspect you didn't actually read my post past the first sentence.
read the part about cost-efficiency and the starcraft analogy.
Certainly some elegant ideas in there, @Bacillus. You're right that finding a way for it to be only worthwhile in those cases in which the dominant team is least likely to find themselves is the key point that requires some creativity. I kind of like the upgrade-time-blocking idea you posted.
@Tarquinbb there's certainly a valid point to be made against my assertion that the slippery slope needs to be made more shallow, but I don't think you actually made it above! Take as an example game 1 of the arc vs nexzil invitational grand final in Cologne. At some point in that round, arc had lost 6 rts to nexzil's 1. Now in any game I've ever played of NS2, that's a loss on the cards right there. However, Arc turned that game around, managing to come back from what at one stage looked like a loss. So is the slippery slope actually shallow enough now? Or does it just take the best team in the world to get up it as it currently stands?
@roobubba there appears to be some confusion, i don't dispute the assertian that the slippery slope needs to be more shallow. my point was that if we do need to make it more shallow, the most direct and appropriate solution would be to give cost-efficient counter strategies.
i feel like i've repeated myself multiple times, but to elaborate one more time - let's look at starcraft. in the early game, if one player makes a tiny mistake (the possibilities are near limitless, failure to deal with cheese effectively, failure to scout a cheese, misplaced building, botched cheese etc) they are immediately behind and will have an incredibly hard time getting back unless the other player makes a mistake.
however, this incredibly unforgiving system is functional and not so steep a slippery slope because each race has cost-effective methods of dealing with pretty much everything else. if you fiddled around with the mining rate in starcraft, it wouldn't change anything in the long run - ergo i can't see any reason to believe your proposed solution would work in ns2.
edit: unrelated note: that arc vs nexzil game 1, i actually thought arc were miles ahead. they did as well as they could have possibly hoped. at the ~15 minute point where the arcs came i was thinking "wtf how can arc have such a good start and not be able to win this? this game is stupid". somehow, arc held on and an onos came out - but nexzil blocked their hub base - so arc charged into the undefended main and won.
just scanned through the vod. archaea had insanely good early defense and never dropped below 3 rt's = super fast lerk/fades. before the arc siege at 12 mins archaea had 4 rt's to nexzil's 3. after the arc siege at 24 minutes archaea had 4 rt's to nexzil's 3 and maintained RT lead for the remainder of the game. nexzil were so starved of resources, they couldn't even get a3, w3 or proto lab in the 25 minute game.
archaea were not behind, it was just a bit of a tense moment with the arc siege - and that's probably explained by arc's being overpowered/broken with no counter.
I think there are several intresting ideas in this thread like counter-units of @Tarquinbb and RFK ideas of @Bacillus. The last one I like because it can give each player the feeling that he can make a diffrence.
I think additional way to rise possibility of comeback in mid-game is to give more economic-oriented oprions. Like in starcraft if someone starts a new expansion it can give other team some "window of opportunity" between the time when enemy started the expansion and the time it did payoff.
In the long-run additional expension would give more chances to win, but the risk was taken.
In NS2 I think it can be done somehow like this:
1) The initial RT cost is the same (not to punish early mistakes)
2) Research that costs significantly (for exapmle 30 res) and is timely. It gives the ability to upgrade you RTs (the fixed costs that don't give imideate returns)
3) Uprade ot RTs so that they give additional res (but there is dimishing returns (for example it costs additional 15 res but the rate of production is increased by onle 50-100%)
New possibilities that can be achived by that:
Let it be that marines achived greater map control in early game.
After that marines have two options:
a) go standard and tech up
b) research ecomic uprades.
If they go a) then aliens could try to hold up and invest res in economy. Through better (or equal) economy aliens can go onos...
If marines go b) then aliens have more time before marine tech up - more time to regain map control + marines need to upgrade their rts if they want their economic upgrades to payoff. Biting down 25 res RT is significant blow.
Economic upgrades give you swings in RTS - one team invests resourses to gain more advantage in battle, but when it does - it gives other team a chance to comeback.
I don't agree with this post in general the the slope needs to be more shallow. There are numerous phases throughout the game at which either team can potentially make a comeback through superior fps play.
However I do agree with redrims post about economic tradeoffs. Thats a major problem in NS2 from a strategy perspective in that there is no economic decision making on marine side, its just, get all the rts you can. On alien side this is not really as true due to the early strength of marines.
@tarquinbb If a Street Fighter player loses half of their health they are at a disadvantage, however they do not lose any abilities and their opponent does not gain any abilities - it's a disadvantage but not a slippery slope because a comeback remains possible. In NS2 if a team controls a small portion of the map they are already at a disadvantage, and then on top of that they lose abilities and tech while the other team gains them. It turns a disadvantage into an even greater disadvantage.
Couple thouhgts on counter-units @Tarquinbb
As said idea in general is good, but you need to remeber the diffrence between Starcraft and NS2 - in SC the "feelings" of units doesn't matter)
If NS2 will have hard-couners it could lead to situiation when your skill doesn't matter much. The same feeling is someting like fade vs exo. Fade has a big chance to die so players can feel like - "I spend 50 PRES and didn't have any chance"
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How about making it a bit more dynamic to take the presure of the RTs?
* Infestation in the vicinity of marines slowly dies off. (due to the marine carrying nanobots or whatever you want to make of it)
* Rooms around aliens slowly start to take energy damage. (lets say the power node)
Now up the rate to a % where it is noticable but not to impossible. It will draw some more attention to defending outpost instead of rts & give intention to kill the enemy.
Well, lets here it. Im ready for the wave of complaints.
What if a percentage of the cost of higher lifeforms was returned to the tRes pool if the unit dies on infestation. This seems to be a good way of reducing the slippery slope as aliens dying on infestation are probably being pushed back and it won't help reinforce the aliens if they are dominant.
Perhaps more expensive extractor/harvester tres costs? Maybe that plus @roobubba 's idea would do it.
I agree, higher costs for RTs could change this. Right now you don't bother if a RT goes down to an alien. You just send 1 marine to rebuild it. But it should be a decision to place a RT. You would not want to place one, that you can't defend. This is achievable by increasing the time until they pay off.
With costs of 10 res, the RT has payed for itself after 70seconds. It should be much longer. Like 150 or even 180 seconds. In order to balance this out most tech would need to get cheaper, I think. Not only because the higher costs of the RTs but also because you can't hold so many RTs anymore.
Overall this would make early victories in battles less important. You need to defend the ground that you could take at the early victory for 3-4 minutes before it pays off. The winning team gets more vulnerable because it has to defend more ground. The losing team gets a chance for 3 - 4 minutes to convert their early losses into a partial victory. (When you can claim the ground back before it has payed off for your enemy you have damaged him.)
If the skills of the both teams are to uneven, it wouldn't change much. Because after those 3 - 4 minutes the RTs are pumping the resources into the winning team leading to an even sooner win when the tech is cheaper.
So yes. It will be a big change (tweaking the costs of tech and RTs) and I have no idea how to tweak the numbers at the alien team. But I would love to try it. It could make the game much more strategic. Placing RTs would be a decision not a tedious "I have to replace this RT" / "I have to chomp down this RT".
uh.. I don't think this is a good idea at all
1 - it would slow down a game that is already slow, it will be terrifying to say the least to see both teams defending and not going offensive for the fear of losing RTs
2 - I don't know what game you've been playing, but getting your rts destroyed early in the game delays tech so much, assuming 4-5 rts, it may very well be the difference of a 5 min armor1 + phase tech and 9 min arms lab.
@tarquinbb If a Street Fighter player loses half of their health they are at a disadvantage, however they do not lose any abilities and their opponent does not gain any abilities - it's a disadvantage but not a slippery slope because a comeback remains possible. In NS2 if a team controls a small portion of the map they are already at a disadvantage, and then on top of that they lose abilities and tech while the other team gains them. It turns a disadvantage into an even greater disadvantage.
yes, comebacks remain possible. but if you have 20% health then a comeback is significantly more tricky than if you'd've had 60% health. especially as the timer starts ticking down and you're forced into making risky moves in order to make the comeback.
therefore it's entirely accurate if you replace the health with RT's and understand that RT's are tech, upgrades and abilities.
comebacks are entirely possible in ns2. it's just less likely based on cumulative failures.
Couple thouhgts on counter-units @Tarquinbb
As said idea in general is good, but you need to remeber the diffrence between Starcraft and NS2 - in SC the "feelings" of units doesn't matter)
If NS2 will have hard-couners it could lead to situiation when your skill doesn't matter much. The same feeling is someting like fade vs exo. Fade has a big chance to die so players can feel like - "I spend 50 PRES and didn't have any chance"
noone said anything about hard-counters. everything should have a cost-efficient counter. as we saw in the archaea vs nexzil final game 1, 3-4 fades and a gorge (210 pres) aren't enough to break the 2-3 shotgun marine defense (60 pres) to clear out the various buildings. that is why comebacks are so hard... because shotguns and onos etc are far too cost effective, so you already need to raise 400% (or whatever) available resources to counter this stuff.
But losing 80% health doesn't deny you any additional moves. Losing ground in NS2 does deny you tech.
wtf is 'losing ground' ? the ground is worthless.
if you're 1-2 RT's behind the opponent, it means they're getting an additional 10-20 res every minute. since the average upgrade is ~20 pres, it means the opponent is getting a single additional upgrade every 1.5 minutes.
1 upgrade every 1.5 minutes is not a hopeless deficit.
also, you must remember that holding more RT's means that they're more difficult to defend. ergo it becomes progressively harder to take more RT's just as it becomes progressively easier through youe 1 upgrade per 1.5 minutes.
obviously i didn't calculate pres, but since pres can be preserved through FPS skill it's not as relevant to the 'slippery slope'.
Comments
Ok, I admit I stopped reading after this, are you some how suggesting that doing well early SHOULDN'T reward you by making you do better later?
That said, I agree wholeheartedly with your post.
That was the question and point of this entire thread. Well done for missing it.
In my opinion the slippery slope problem wasn't as much of an issue in NS1. Furthermore, it isn't as much of an issue in pure RTS games (which you would think would suffer most from this phenomenon) like starcraft.
My theory as to why this is the case is resource control. In most RTS games, at almost any point, you can choose to shift from pressuring your opponent, to gathering resources instead. Typically the way resources work imply an intrinsic "cost" in maintaining your gathering outposts. Without effort, they will not be profitable, so it is nigh on impossible to focus on both heavy resource gathering, as well as heavy offense (unless your offense is so heavy that your enemy can't even attack, but that isn't really a fair fight). In your average RTS, this manifests itself in the "when should I expand" choice a player must make. This is facilitated by the surplus of resources on an average RTS map. There will almost always be more resources to take, and in fact, the number of resource locations not take by players will usually outnumber the points that are taken by players.
This is not the case in NS2. From about the 3-4 minute mark onward, every resource location is taken by one team or the other. Taking resources and attacking are essentially the exact same thing. Once all the nodes are divvied up, the only way to change the balance is to attack one and take it for yourself. This is where the slippery slope is its most painful, because the team with fewer resource nodes needs to attack other nodes in order to take them, and the team with more resource nodes can defend nodes more easily. It doesn't take long before any attempts to take more resource points becomes a losing and unprofitable battle.
In my memory, NS1 was not like this. Though it wouldn't be true to say that more nodes were left uncapped than capped, I do distinctly remember many nodes being neutral for long periods of time, and there were very few cases where every single node on the map was owned by one team or the other.
In my opinion, the lack of "neutral resources" is a big problem at the moment.
Gone are the worries of being stretched out too thin (in pubs)
Perhaps more expensive extractor/harvester tres costs? Maybe that plus @roobubba 's idea would do it.
And I totally agree Horse. The rooms that the marines control in the mid to late game almost always represent the farthest they were able to reach before phase tech was researched.
In NS2, resource nodes just felt so much further away. Anything that didn't have a phase gate and a couple of turrets near it seemed like a distant and unreachable outpost. I don't know what the travel times between nodes is like now, or whether it differs much from NS1, but it seems like the mobile defensive capabilities of marines are a big factor in how easy it is to take and hold nodes.
To be clear, I think this is exclusively a marine issue. Any node the aliens don't take, the marines will, but the reverse cannot be said to be true in my opinion. I don't want to go back to pointing the usual finger at sprint, but...
I agree, higher costs for RTs could change this. Right now you don't bother if a RT goes down to an alien. You just send 1 marine to rebuild it. But it should be a decision to place a RT. You would not want to place one, that you can't defend. This is achievable by increasing the time until they pay off.
With costs of 10 res, the RT has payed for itself after 70seconds. It should be much longer. Like 150 or even 180 seconds. In order to balance this out most tech would need to get cheaper, I think. Not only because the higher costs of the RTs but also because you can't hold so many RTs anymore.
Overall this would make early victories in battles less important. You need to defend the ground that you could take at the early victory for 3-4 minutes before it pays off. The winning team gets more vulnerable because it has to defend more ground. The losing team gets a chance for 3 - 4 minutes to convert their early losses into a partial victory. (When you can claim the ground back before it has payed off for your enemy you have damaged him.)
If the skills of the both teams are to uneven, it wouldn't change much. Because after those 3 - 4 minutes the RTs are pumping the resources into the winning team leading to an even sooner win when the tech is cheaper.
So yes. It will be a big change (tweaking the costs of tech and RTs) and I have no idea how to tweak the numbers at the alien team. But I would love to try it. It could make the game much more strategic. Placing RTs would be a decision not a tedious "I have to replace this RT" / "I have to chomp down this RT".
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One of the things that was lost in transition from NS1 res model to NS2 model was the way how skulks and gorges served as the most efficient economical units. In NS1 every bit of res you got on the small lifeforms was either taking you closer to another res node or high lifeform whereas the bigger lifeforms mostly used their res as a safety fund in case they died. As a result, the frags going skulks or gorges were usually economically the most valuable frags you could get as an alien. Whenever you were in dire situation and running a low high tier lifeform count, the RFK actually went to skulks and provided you extra value.
How this comes into NS2 would be giving the aliens an upgrade alternative that allows them to unlock some RFK mechanic for skulks and gorges. Ideally it wouldn't be an upgrade you invest every round, but it would still allow you to play a bit of catch up in situations where you know you're going to rely on low tier lifeforms longer than you really want to.
Once you've got the fades out, the RFK flow slows down and the things play out roughly as they do without the upgrade. If you still have skulks around you can actually try feeding them some RFK and somewhat encourages fielding varied lifeform lineup on the field. The outcome should be more diverse engagements and lifeform dynamics in general.
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The tricky stuff I see is fitting the upgrade into the res model and tech tree of NS2.
You don't necessarily want it to be a regular early game upgrade, but more of an upgrade that is affordable even on low econ and becomes really tempting only if you're playing skulks longer than you'd really want to. I'd like to believe there's a combination of tech time, research cost, teching requirements and such that make it overlap a bit with the ideal high econ tech path and thus making it more of an alternative than a regular pick.
The specifics of RFK mechanic are something someone else than me has to decide also. I believe the res flow should probably go to tres pool, allowing aliens to catch up a bit with their econ and possibly rebuild faster, but anything that fits the purpose of recovering strenght on the game is fine.
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I think the basic idea of making the vanilla/cheap units have more indirect unique value can be applied to many comeback mechanics in general, not just RFK. This is just the first thing that crossed my mind on the topic of economical comebacks.
For a good team, it would have to be priced high enough that they don't take it, which means that for a bad team, it will be too expensive. Also would it be something to fall back on after losing a hive, say? In which case it needs to be available on 1 hive and therefore would must likely be the first upgrade by default if it's worth its salt.
I like the idea of making skulks' impact a little more useful on a team, but fundamentally anything that gives benefit based on combat advantage is going to favour the better team more than the worse team, isn't it?
Re: higher rt costs. Wouldn't this make the snowball worse? Taking an rt out early game will hamper the opponent's economy more, surely?
A delay is an interesting idea though. In fact, the more I think about that, the more I like it...
How about a delay in extracting res from each specific res node? At the beginning of the map, each node has to be pumped for, say 2min before it gives any res. This timer only applies once per res node, and starting res towers don't have this delay.
This could work beautifully with transparent effects, too... Imagine a thick goopy liquid having to be pumped up, but there's a head of gas/colourless goop/whatever that doesn't give any res first for each res node. If the rate is very slow (ie the liquid very thick and very rich in res so only a small volume is required per res...), this could be visually very neat indeed!
I'm getting side-tracked here, but the idea for an initial delay on new nodes in the map would open up lots of tactical options, and also reduce the economic damage only in the early game. Do you let the opponent cap nodes then strike after they've cleared the head of resless goop? Let them take the delay, then push in to take the res? Focus on locking down a tech or choke point early on instead of capping?
Would have no effect later in the game but could open up a lot of options earlier on.
But an asymmetric mechanic that is unique to Skulks and (maybe) Gorges could actually work. If you want to add a draw-back Skulks could need to bite a marine corpse 5 times to get resources out of it. This way they are loud and vulnerable and need to defeat all marines in the are before they profit from this upgrade.
Personally, I think increasing the res/extractor cost and reducing their income flow would be worth trying out. It should decrease the snowballing effect, prolonging the early game, and thus increasing the timeframe for both sides to make up for lost early engagements and break fortified positions.
if aliens lose 5 RT's and marines lose 4 RT's, the 'slope' is still horizontal... therefore where is this idea coming from that losing RT's are the magic bean of this slippery beanstalk slope? if aliens lose 5 RT's and marines lose 0 RT's, then it's less an issue of slippery slope and more an issue of the aliens being cornholed in every engagement.
another aspect becomes clear when both teams have sufficient experience and equal skill. such games don't have a slippery slope for the most part, because the teams are exchanging economic/strategic blows throughout. although i will grant that it's a bit more harsh with fewer players (6v6 etc), as the defender's advantage is more prevalent with more players. anyway, when the slippery slope sets in, the dominant team has done enough to earn that position of superiority. if they haven't done enough to earn that superiority, then change something meaningful - not just say "you only killed 5 RT's, you need to kill 10 RT's to get that superiority!".
this thread is actually giving me a headache. it can be accurately compared to street fighter having a slippery slope. if you lose 50% of your health then it's too hard to come back, and it could be less steep by increasing everyone's base health by 100%.
i believe it was m. bison who said "NOOOOOO... just stop sucking and/or fix the imbalanced stuff".
You analyzed the two extreme cases.
First you talk about the rare case that the player skill is divided mostly equally over both teams.
Than you talk about the common case that one team absolutely out-skills the other team.
You are right in those both cases. And we don't argument against that in this thread. But we talk about the most common cases where one team is slightly better as the other or maybe just had some luck in the early game. We talk about games with predictable outcomes, that we don't like them and how to lessen the appearance of such games. One team has to win the early engagements. But it doesn't need to mean, that they are the overall better team. Simply: The outcome of the early engagements should have less (not none!) impact of the outcome of the game.
But your street fighter - comparison is really wrong. No matter how much damage one fighter has, he can always turn the tide. He didn't lose the ability to perform some moves. The opponent didn't gained any new moves. The 2 fighters are exactly as they were at the beginning. Just the counter that decides when who has won changed.
Same goes for Basketball or Tennis. You don't gain a disadvantage that alters how you can play the game. You only get behind in points. Chess is the opposite. When you lose a figure, you also lose "moves" you can perform. Chess has a slippery slope. Street Fighter not.
my street fighter comparison wasn't to highlight the ability to turn the tide, but merely the chance to turn the tide. which is irrefutably and obviously true, if you have 50% health then you're at a disadvantage. the comparison was more highlighting that if you lose 50% health to the opponent, then it's either your failure or the game being imbalanced - it's not the health bar's fault. if you prefer, it's your safety net, and a slippery slope means a progressively smaller safety net.
anyway, my point is that changes should be made to marines, aliens and tech. changing the resource system is just a tranquilizer which will inhibit the snowball effect, but it won't stop marines killing all the skulks and blocking all RT's for X minutes.
if the system works when the teams are equally balanced, it doesn't make sense to me to change the system. if anything the game should expand on the RTS elements to allow COST EFFICIENT counter-strategies. currently there's an RTS resource/tech system but all combat is won by 'stronger' and 'more expensive' FPS units. for example aliens go mass lerks, what do marines have to counter that except more marines/more money?
imagine starcraft if there were no cost-efficient counters. terran just makes 100% marines, zerg has no effective counter to marine because there are no banelings. hey guys, let's reduce the rate of mineral harvesting!
But this is not what the thread is about. If you are talking only about the chance to turn the tide, your whole post can be summed up in: "The better player wins." And YES this is true. Everybody knows this. But thats not what we are talking about. We are talking about the ability to turn the tide. About the slippery slope that gives your enemy an advantage because he is better than you. As if the fact that he is better than you isn't enough for him to win the game, we also need to reward him with even more advantages.
I have seen many comebacks in street fighter. Because games have many factors that lead to the outcome. Many times you can have simply bad luck, or the opponent gets in a good combo. But than you can turn the tide and defeat him even when you are at half health. If you would have lost the ability to jump and kick with 1/2 health, such comebacks would be more scarce.
And thats what the thread is about. Finding a middle ground between letting your early victories have impact and value in the course of the game, but making early wins / loss more forgiving so that you can have more fun (=unpredictable) games even when the teams are not totally equal in skill.
Right now the slippery slope works in ending obvious skill stacked games faster. But it is poison for games with equally skilled teams that just had bad luck in some early engagements or are slightly worse as the enemy team. In this cases the game should not get to a state where you can predict the outcome (because comebacks are so rare) to early. Thats what we trying to fix.
For example you can make the upgrade cost a little, but take while to research. At that point if you're doing fine on econ and your main army is soon going to be mostly lerks and fades, you probably want to spend your time upgrading fades, lerks and some other tech rather than spending valuable research time on RFK.
Meanwhile if your econ is hurting big time, you probably can't even afford a fade research. It looks like you're never even going to get to a point where you'd have more than 1 fade or so. Go ahead and upgrade the RFK, you're not going to afford to have upgrade research running all the time anyway and RFK even supports your main units for the next 5 minutes or so.
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You could even make the RFK a free 'channelling spell'. Activate the spell and your hive will only focus on maintaining the RFK buff on all skulks. Once the duration is over the buff is removed and you can choose to trigger it again or do some valuable research on the hive.
Once again, an alien team with big economy is going to be better off upgrading something constantly. Meanwhile an alien team that's far behind in economy isn't going to be upgrading anyway, so they might as well run the RFK boost and use it to revive their economy or hoard up enough to res to afford that critical upgrade even if it comes a little late.
The possibilities of differentiating an upgrade so that it's suited for an underdog are almost limitless, you just have to be creative with the details.
Losing a hive is probably way out of this mechanic's recovery range. It's not meant to be a catch-all solution to all setbacks you encouter during a round.
One of the biggest downsides of the present res model is how much it dictates the direction of your investments, which then again leads to poor teams staying poor and so on. The purpose of my suggestion is to allow aliens to have some flexibility in the way they play around with their res model in relation to other important factors such as tech and map control.
If there's a need to recover from a hive loss ( which I find debatable in the first place ), it probably falls to some other mechanic.
If I understand correctly, this is once again answered by giving the better team some better suited alternatives for their situation.
There are other ways of making skulks more impactful though. The RFK is mostly inviting because it adds alternative ways to manipulate the otherwise predictable res pools and also connects the RTS and FPS layers in some quite nice ways.
As an alternative example of making skulks unique we can look at NS1 skulk-fade relation. The permanent and well regging NS1 parasite was a huge life saver for higher lifeforms. In smaller games (6v6 mostly), having many fades late game often resulted in dead fades because of how the parasite wasn't saving them from ambushes. It was still better to have loads of fades, but maintaining the high fade count was surprisingly challenging considering how powerful they were.
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I was kind of considering using some other term than RFK because people see it as the NS1 RFK and oppose it without usually considering it as a mechanic that can be adjusted into many shapes and purposes depending on what the gameplay requires. For me RFK just means that team can gain res somehow through fragging, the rest of it are context specific details.
For every RFK suggestion you have to specify which things don't work and which work. In this case I feel most of the negatives are dealt with the upgrade nature of RFK and focus on tres pool.
Why?
Why do they have to be vulnerable before the upgrade can kick in? If anything, this requires the aliens to take decisive victories and be dominant before they can make use of the upgrade, which is pretty much the opposite of a comeback mechanic. It also reduces the skulks and gorges to cleanup duty rather than allowing them to be valuable inside the actual battle.
With direct RFK implementation, you can take little frag trades all over the map. Whenever you trade frags in 1:1 ratio against the leading team, you recover your economy a little bit and hopefully bring your team closer to the even gameplay situation.
The mechanic is quite similar to Dota XP system. When you're behind in levels, you look to create a mess and trade kills because your opponent is worth more experience than you are. That's a damn good comeback mechanic that works even if you're too far behind to pull off a decisively won fight.
sorry, that's not how my post can be summed up and you missed my point entirely. in fact, your reply is so far off the mark that i suspect you didn't actually read my post past the first sentence.
read the part about cost-efficiency and the starcraft analogy.
@Tarquinbb there's certainly a valid point to be made against my assertion that the slippery slope needs to be made more shallow, but I don't think you actually made it above! Take as an example game 1 of the arc vs nexzil invitational grand final in Cologne. At some point in that round, arc had lost 6 rts to nexzil's 1. Now in any game I've ever played of NS2, that's a loss on the cards right there. However, Arc turned that game around, managing to come back from what at one stage looked like a loss. So is the slippery slope actually shallow enough now? Or does it just take the best team in the world to get up it as it currently stands?
i feel like i've repeated myself multiple times, but to elaborate one more time - let's look at starcraft. in the early game, if one player makes a tiny mistake (the possibilities are near limitless, failure to deal with cheese effectively, failure to scout a cheese, misplaced building, botched cheese etc) they are immediately behind and will have an incredibly hard time getting back unless the other player makes a mistake.
however, this incredibly unforgiving system is functional and not so steep a slippery slope because each race has cost-effective methods of dealing with pretty much everything else. if you fiddled around with the mining rate in starcraft, it wouldn't change anything in the long run - ergo i can't see any reason to believe your proposed solution would work in ns2.
edit: unrelated note: that arc vs nexzil game 1, i actually thought arc were miles ahead. they did as well as they could have possibly hoped. at the ~15 minute point where the arcs came i was thinking "wtf how can arc have such a good start and not be able to win this? this game is stupid". somehow, arc held on and an onos came out - but nexzil blocked their hub base - so arc charged into the undefended main and won.
just scanned through the vod. archaea had insanely good early defense and never dropped below 3 rt's = super fast lerk/fades. before the arc siege at 12 mins archaea had 4 rt's to nexzil's 3. after the arc siege at 24 minutes archaea had 4 rt's to nexzil's 3 and maintained RT lead for the remainder of the game. nexzil were so starved of resources, they couldn't even get a3, w3 or proto lab in the 25 minute game.
archaea were not behind, it was just a bit of a tense moment with the arc siege - and that's probably explained by arc's being overpowered/broken with no counter.
I think additional way to rise possibility of comeback in mid-game is to give more economic-oriented oprions. Like in starcraft if someone starts a new expansion it can give other team some "window of opportunity" between the time when enemy started the expansion and the time it did payoff.
In the long-run additional expension would give more chances to win, but the risk was taken.
In NS2 I think it can be done somehow like this:
1) The initial RT cost is the same (not to punish early mistakes)
2) Research that costs significantly (for exapmle 30 res) and is timely. It gives the ability to upgrade you RTs (the fixed costs that don't give imideate returns)
3) Uprade ot RTs so that they give additional res (but there is dimishing returns (for example it costs additional 15 res but the rate of production is increased by onle 50-100%)
New possibilities that can be achived by that:
Let it be that marines achived greater map control in early game.
After that marines have two options:
a) go standard and tech up
b) research ecomic uprades.
If they go a) then aliens could try to hold up and invest res in economy. Through better (or equal) economy aliens can go onos...
If marines go b) then aliens have more time before marine tech up - more time to regain map control + marines need to upgrade their rts if they want their economic upgrades to payoff. Biting down 25 res RT is significant blow.
Economic upgrades give you swings in RTS - one team invests resourses to gain more advantage in battle, but when it does - it gives other team a chance to comeback.
However I do agree with redrims post about economic tradeoffs. Thats a major problem in NS2 from a strategy perspective in that there is no economic decision making on marine side, its just, get all the rts you can. On alien side this is not really as true due to the early strength of marines.
As said idea in general is good, but you need to remeber the diffrence between Starcraft and NS2 - in SC the "feelings" of units doesn't matter)
If NS2 will have hard-couners it could lead to situiation when your skill doesn't matter much. The same feeling is someting like fade vs exo. Fade has a big chance to die so players can feel like - "I spend 50 PRES and didn't have any chance"
* Infestation in the vicinity of marines slowly dies off. (due to the marine carrying nanobots or whatever you want to make of it)
* Rooms around aliens slowly start to take energy damage. (lets say the power node)
Now up the rate to a % where it is noticable but not to impossible. It will draw some more attention to defending outpost instead of rts & give intention to kill the enemy.
Well, lets here it. Im ready for the wave of complaints.
What if a percentage of the cost of higher lifeforms was returned to the tRes pool if the unit dies on infestation. This seems to be a good way of reducing the slippery slope as aliens dying on infestation are probably being pushed back and it won't help reinforce the aliens if they are dominant.
uh.. I don't think this is a good idea at all
1 - it would slow down a game that is already slow, it will be terrifying to say the least to see both teams defending and not going offensive for the fear of losing RTs
2 - I don't know what game you've been playing, but getting your rts destroyed early in the game delays tech so much, assuming 4-5 rts, it may very well be the difference of a 5 min armor1 + phase tech and 9 min arms lab.
yes, comebacks remain possible. but if you have 20% health then a comeback is significantly more tricky than if you'd've had 60% health. especially as the timer starts ticking down and you're forced into making risky moves in order to make the comeback.
therefore it's entirely accurate if you replace the health with RT's and understand that RT's are tech, upgrades and abilities.
comebacks are entirely possible in ns2. it's just less likely based on cumulative failures.
noone said anything about hard-counters. everything should have a cost-efficient counter. as we saw in the archaea vs nexzil final game 1, 3-4 fades and a gorge (210 pres) aren't enough to break the 2-3 shotgun marine defense (60 pres) to clear out the various buildings. that is why comebacks are so hard... because shotguns and onos etc are far too cost effective, so you already need to raise 400% (or whatever) available resources to counter this stuff.
wtf is 'losing ground' ? the ground is worthless.
if you're 1-2 RT's behind the opponent, it means they're getting an additional 10-20 res every minute. since the average upgrade is ~20 pres, it means the opponent is getting a single additional upgrade every 1.5 minutes.
1 upgrade every 1.5 minutes is not a hopeless deficit.
also, you must remember that holding more RT's means that they're more difficult to defend. ergo it becomes progressively harder to take more RT's just as it becomes progressively easier through youe 1 upgrade per 1.5 minutes.
obviously i didn't calculate pres, but since pres can be preserved through FPS skill it's not as relevant to the 'slippery slope'.