Siege Maps
Hatchan
Join Date: 2013-06-04 Member: 185478Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2013-06-04 Member: 185478Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Comments
The first 5-10 minutes is just idling, the greatest part of the game is just combat with the leveling system taken out and it has an effective time limit to end it. Could someone try to explain the appeal for a cynical bonehead like me?
@Therius it's just lotsa fun
I find time before doors are open very strategic, you got tons of res, yet you can't afford everything by 5 minute mark, so you gotta spend your res carefully. Should you get arcs, or exos, or jetpacks with gl, or block every hallway with armories? Then doors are open and brainless carnage begins!
I only have experience of NS1 siege maps, so I cannot comment on the NS2 ones. But in NS1 you really could afford everything you wanted, and the only question was whether to go for JP or HA, sometimes you managed to get both.
This is my keyword for what it was in NS1. Cannot find it to be a positive thing.
It's not as much fun to play as NS1 siege, probably needs a bit more refinement.
Yes.
When you had good players on both sides, there were two interesting situations that could happen:
1. HA rush - kind of an all-in move. The interesting part of a HA rush was to not let the tiniest Alien lifeform pass, because it could set up a base behind your rows and own your marine start.
2. Using JPs to defend until the siege doors open. The game was not over when the doors were open (most of the alien players gave up at that point), but the game had just started. The cool part were the DC and MC walls and the Fades that got energy and health from them if they managed to reach the siege room. These were extremely intense battles. Marines were trying to get the damn sieges up and the Fades had to choose between healing and attacking sieges while being under endless HMG fire constantly, and sieges already shooting the DC wall. One mistake from either side could end the game.
It was a frag fest on the highest skill level in 1 room. ratatatatta-Blinkblinkblink-hit-blinkblinkblink-whhheou-hit-blinkblinkblink-hit-rattatattaa-fly-blink-hit-splat-hit-ratttatatata...you know. Being unconcentrated for 1 millisecond meant you were instantly dead. When both teams were good, these situations could last 10 minutes or even more.
In years of FPS experience, these battles were some of the most intense I've ever had.
The problem with siege maps is that you wait 15 minutes just to find out that your teammates suck and only 2 Fades try to get inside the siege room for the rest of the game.
The battles outside of the siege rooms were not fun at all, I'll give you that.
They were awesome in 5% of the games, the rest was...yeah idling 15 minutes and then owning/getting owned.
I hope that helped.
So, aside from the tedious 'gameplay,' it was also a completely unplayable lagfest that held absolutely no interest for me at all, I'm afraid.
(I never liked siege in NS1 either, tbh)
Not sure that helped. You basically just described what I already knew, but with rose-tinted glasses, while I described it with bile oozing from my lips. Very little strategic choice and depth, and it all boils down to long and intense (tedious and brainless) combat. This combined with the retarded 10-minute limit before you can actually start playing just makes for a shitty experience for me.
Perhaps I will just never understand.
Sounds like you never enjoyed instagib in UT or Quake from time to time. If you did, you should have at least a slight understanding.
Sometimes some people want to fck all the choices and depth of a game and have some matches that are only about pure reflexes in between. I never minded a siege map every 6th mapchange.
Yes, it was tedious outside of the siege room, but not in the situations i described. Which happened not very often. So I completely understand people who don't like siege maps at all.
BTW, I actually learned how the Tech-Tree works in siege maps
NS is a fantastic corridor shooter even without the building elements. The strategy element in classic is still heavily outweighed by how well you aim (at pub level anyway) rather than which tech you chose so it doesn't add that much more depth to the fundamental shooting game.
Just like how the best way to improve in Starcraft isn't to try and outwit your opponent by scouting or countering his strat, you just need to work on the basic mechanics and beat with a-move because you will have more units - IOW kill skulk and cap RT.
You mean like combat?
Exactly. I've always felt that Siege maps were like the other side of the Combat coin.
bonkers.teamworkandtactics.co.uk:27019
is a battle, a real battle.
Last time I comm'd on the team work and tactics servers one of the maps was broken - there wasnt a second CC point (there was a room but no pad). Has that been fixed?
Quake supposedly has the "most engaging combat mechanics" in a deathmatch. Even so, it's still 90% aim. Every shooter it's about aim. I suppose you really appreciate the subtle little things. But it doesn't make a game retarded lacking those.
If you want a sub-par shooter, check out Call of Battlefields, where the winning move is strafe left or right accompanied by pressing M1 the right moment.
I'm afraid I am responsible for the hivesiege and veilsiege maps.
When creating these, I found there are several difficulties adapting the siege idea to standard NS2, which might explain why nobody else has finished a siege map or siege mod.
First of all, it is more than a bit complicated building a functional siege room that can't be entered or built in before the door opens. This is due to things like infestation reaching through walls, the nav mesh breaking or not breaking as desired at locked doors, and MACs/ARCs/Drifters not following the same collision rules as players. What I've found is that you can work around the worst of these limitations with careful map design. This is why the siege room in veilsiege is so ... strange. Some of those issues also apply to the other locked doors. Aliens can, for example, cyst through the locked doors at the start of the game and build on the other side if nobody is around to stop them.
Second, NS2 doesn't run very well in intense battles that involve everyone on both teams and two commanders each with enough income to spam things like there is no tomorrow. This should change for the better with B249's speed improvements, I think.
Third, the "siege" weapons in NS2 can move, which means if the siege room is directly connected to marine territory, marines can build up a stockpile of ARCs and steamroll the hives when the time comes without much of a buildup and no need to draw soldiers away from the front line.
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That map is not broken. The server admin simply included (perhaps by accident) the version of hivesiege intended to be run with NS2C. I built this particular flavor of hivesiege based on feedback from the first guy to run a siege server. The main differences are that marines only get one tech point (because they don't need a second one in NS2C) and the siege room door is replaced with a teleporter. The teleporter is 2-way for marines, the Siege Room -> Marine Start direction is disabled for aliens. Anyway the idea was that NS2C is much better suited for a siege map because its mechanics mimic those of NS1 where siege was originally envisioned.
See the bottom of my post above, and thanks for hosting my maps
It's not the aim, of course I respect aim. But the fact that there are only two weapons for the marines (GL and FT don't really count) with no recoil, no spread, no projectile drop, no nothing, and there really is no engaging movement mechanic for the marines. The movement of aliens is slightly more engaging, but only for the fade and the lerk, and even those feel a bit lackluster in my opinion. The alien weapons deserve no mention, for obvious reasons.
Can you really see NS2, or NS1 for that matter, competing with any other capable shooter if the combat mod was the only core gameplay? I know I'd rather be playing both Battlefield and any modern CoD over NS2 if it only came to the shooter mechanics.
Thats exactly what I had done. I have now fixed it, thanks for pointing out the mistake
The problem with Siege is that the CPU gets raped within an inch of its life. It will use 100% of a core running at 4.6GHz and you just cant throw anymore at it, this is why there are very few Siege servers out there.
Focus Cara Fade vs LVL3 Shotgun in NS1 was pretty awesome for pure deathmatch.
Combat mode was (before xmenu appeared) still pretty good in general. Xmenu made it boring.
Of course classic NS mode is what makes NS worth playing overall.
EDIT: Only talking about aliens movement: Hell, I'd throw CoD/Battlefield out of the window just to Bhop in NS for half an hour.
Second cc builds though.