SamusDroidColoradoJoin Date: 2013-05-13Member: 185219Members, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Playtester, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
edited June 2013
Don't marines lose their upgrades if all the arms labs are taken out? If they do then I think this is fair.
How long does it take to resecure, recyst, redrop hive, vs "oh no they took out our arms lab, drop another one somewhere( anywhere really). Aliens can't just drop a have anywhere they have it cysted.
Longer for aliens, they have a lot more to lose. Since upgrades aren't really tied to chairs as much anymore for Marines. Marines can turtle, Aliens can't really because Marines with their long range weapons, and upgrades, and no multiple hive upgrades available, which is why games seem to last longer, partially because it takes longer for Aliens to kill the last Marine base. Meaning they drag out longer unless the team concedes, but who is going to concede when you can kill stuff for fun with GL's, FT's, etc...
Thanks for the guide, I would have asked for it in a moment.
I try not to sound like I'm making a point about what's needed and what's not. People just tend to push the discussion that way. I'm just interested about what is and what isn't. So yeah, the only benefit from occasional A/D strafing would be the occasional saved blink. Depending on how hard A/D strafing is, everyone can evaluate its worth on their own. (10% saved energy woot!) I'd just use it because it's fun.
No prob, and yea its okay, the discussion does tend to get pushed that way after we just had weeks of the masses being confused how exactly to use it, so introducing other concepts or phrases can easily scare away and further confuse individuals. Trying to keep it simple is important, both in implementation as well as explanation, i find
Don't marines lose their upgrades if all the arms labs are taken out? If they do then I think this is fair.
How long does it take to resecure, recyst, redrop hive, vs "oh no they took out our arms lab, drop another one somewhere( anywhere really). Aliens can't just drop a have anywhere they have it cysted.
Longer for aliens, they have a lot more to lose. Since upgrades aren't really tied to chairs as much anymore for Marines. Marines can turtle, Aliens can't really because Marines with their long range weapons, and upgrades, and no multiple hive upgrades available, which is why games seem to last longer, partially because it takes longer for Aliens to kill the last Marine base. Meaning they drag out longer unless the team concedes, but who is going to concede when you can kill stuff for fun with GL's, FT's, etc...
I thought we were talking things like shells/spurs/veils. I see now your talking about leap/bile bomb/etc. I'd be happy if it took multiple hives to unlock the ability to research biomass (and thus abilities) but that hive was not required to maintain it. Game often starts a slippery slope once aliens lose one hive, which doesn't really apply so much to marines.
I've barely played since release, checking in every 10 patches or so to see NS2 progressively deteriorate; but 250 is a huge improvement. We're not talking NS1 levels of greatness here, but you've probably surpassed NS1 version 1.04.
Still don't like alien comm and power nodes, probably never will.
I've read somewhere that supply limit would scale with number of bases built. But it's constant. And it's really bad, it means doesn't matter how much of the map you own, you are going to have only such amount of armories and arcs to support a push.
@CrushaK said the same thing over here. My reply is that more map control gives you more res, and that's enough of an advantage. If it also gave you a higher supply limit then the snowball effect would be too much.
@hozz lessening the rts impact has been a popular request that I agree with and historically a topic that pops up in these forums about 3 times a month. Many problems arise from rts elements having too large of an impact. (most notably being able to tell who will win in the first 4 minutes, and then being unable to change it .)
I agree with hozz that making strategic choices should be very important. I'm not as convinced as he is that b250 has made the choices less important.
I disagree with IronHorse's view that "the rts elements have too large of an impact". At least, I wouldn't phrase it that way. I completely agree that the game being decided early is a terrible problem, but I don't see that as necessarily being due to the importance of the rts elements. It's quite possible to design a strategy game where decisions are meaningful and important at every stage of the game. NS2 was not such a game prior to b250; it remains to be seen how much b250 has improved things in that regard.
"Strategy" and "RTS" does not equal "snowballing". Snowballing equals bad RTS. NS2 should strive to be a good RTS.
@hozz lessening the rts impact has been a popular request that I agree with and historically a topic that pops up in these forums about 3 times a month. Many problems arise from rts elements having too large of an impact. (most notably being able to tell who will win in the first 4 minutes, and then being unable to change it .)
I agree with hozz that making strategic choices should be very important. I'm not as convinced as he is that b250 has made the choices less important.
I disagree with IronHorse's view that "the rts elements have too large of an impact". At least, I wouldn't phrase it that way. I completely agree that the game being decided early is a terrible problem, but I don't see that as necessarily being due to the importance of the rts elements. It's quite possible to design a strategy game where decisions are meaningful and important at every stage of the game. NS2 was not such a game prior to b250; it remains to be seen how much b250 has improved things in that regard.
"Strategy" and "RTS" does not equal "snowballing". Snowballing equals bad RTS. NS2 should strive to be a good RTS.
I'd say more often than not the snowballing is due to the FPS side of the game not the RTS. If one team wins virtually all the battles in the first 4 minutes of the game it doesn't really matter what strategic choices are made that teams gonna win. The RTS side of NS is like Starcraft where 2 marines can kill an ultralisk.
Atm, after a dozen hours, I still find it overcomplicated and confused.
What I dislike :
- Building on infestation which destroys alien map control strategy
- Forced drifters micro-management as a Kham, otherwise, the structure take beyond ages
- Frustation on alien side when you clearly had the best over marine but you gonna need an looong amount of time to finish them off (providing alien boredoom don't allow the marines to comeback)
- Neverending games
Spent several rounds playing commander for both aliens and marines and I must say that the difference in Alien commander gameplay is impressive. I feel like I can actually help my alien buddies out a little just like if I was a marine commander. The ability for drifters to heal and speed up my alien buddies gives me much pleasure since before I was more of a spectator than of any help. I'm honestly considering next time I play to send my first drifter out with a large pack of skulks on crag hive and to see the difference the healing and enzyme from the drifter have on combat. I love this feature.
On the flip side, I'm curious and hesitant about the cysting changes. This cysting mechanic combined with the need for drifters has slowed down alien expansion/res a significant amount. Also I feel like the slow spread of infestation coupled with the 4 second? cool down on placing another cyst means that simply by cutting the cyst in a room near the harvester you can kill any harvester under 16% health. I tried saving a harvester with 14% health but it died regardless, what I would have given for a gorge that day *sigh*
I can kinda understand why the cysting was done how it was done but I want someone to tell me themselves otherwise I can't be sure. I kinda have the Fade down pat now but I'm still trying to figure out how to work shadow step properly in combat since you lose all speed if you do it on the ground. Even with blink its kinda hard to aim, but then again it might just be my 20 frames doing me in there *sadface*
Skulk feels great if a bit too sticky, I often go to jump from the top of walls onto a marines head but instead stick to the ceiling lol. I do feel flamethrowers are a bit too strong, this coming from a commander who watched a new player get a flamethrower and then proceed to kill all the skulks and gorgies without a jetpack, of course I did keep healing him and providing him with ammo. Grenades are being used now which is great but I feel that they shouldn't explode as soon as they hit a alien. make it have a timer till it goes off just like if the grenade hits the ground. That's my idea for that anyway, maybe its just cause I don't like taking a grenade to the face lol.
Not sure how to deal with flamethrowers as far as balancing them. Its good that they don't scale I guess but as a skulk I feel like it would be suicide to even attempt to attack them even via ambush because it seems like your life literally melts away as soon as they know your there.
Moving crags/shifts/shades is just too slow lol. I'd be better off either creating new ones farther forward or echoing them there. Also, moving them off of infestation even for a second causes them to take damage, could this be changed because the infestation range of cysts vs how far cysts can be placed now is very different?
I love marine commander play since there are so many ways you can play now, although admittedly I've only gone one route and stuck with it. *cough early upgrades cough* Although it is annoying to nano a marine that just died. I do mean he is already dead and yet I still lose the res and have the cooldown.
We really, REALLY, need to get rid of that bug with the music when a command chair or hive gets low, it NEVER stops playing AGRH!!!!! Official combat and movement tutorials would be nice including an update to explore mode. Like the new bot addition in which you can choose the marine skill level.
That's about it for now. By all means could anyone help by explaining or elaborating, I feel this would help me a lot. Especially since I've been on a lot of servers recently where everyone is looking to me for practically everything. I mean don't get me wrong, I love helping the new players, but it doesn't help me help them have a good time when even I have a hard time explaining some things to them.
Atm, after a dozen hours, I still find it overcomplicated and confused.
What I dislike :
- Building on infestation which destroys alien map control strategy
- Forced drifters micro-management as a Kham, otherwise, the structure take beyond ages
- Frustation on alien side when you clearly had the best over marine but you gonna need an looong amount of time to finish them off (providing alien boredoom don't allow the marines to comeback)
- Neverending games
1. Infestation IS NOT map controll.
2. Although I dislike having to use drifters to build stuff, it is better than "micro" checking your cloaked drifters. Now you have more drifters on the map, you can help your team by buffing them when they come to defend an RT under attack etc.
3. Turtling has always been a problem in pubs. If people would attack that god damn marine base together there wouldn't be.
4. Concedes. Everywhere.
After a lot's of pubs games and pcw's i believe the Onos is too weak for the late game. Maybe bring back devour instead of just give him more hp ?
I think the long term solution is bone shield so that the onos isn't literally a mindless sack of hp that you mash the marines with while still being tough enough to actually stand up against exos, but so far there hasn't been a decent implementation of it.
Pardon me but what is bone shield? Keep in mind please that I've never played NS1
It's not finished yet but in its most basic form it's a skill-based ability for the Onos which makes it take less damage under certain situations. In its most recent implementation it made the Onos take less damage from frontal attacks while it was active, but reduced movement speed.
- I prefer to have abilities researchable on the hive instead of crag/shift/shade structures. Not a big issue, but still, simple is nice.
- GL spam and flamethrower rushes are a bit OP at the moment to restate the obvious. GL is too cheap, and flamethrower does too much player damage imo.
- Onos needs some love.
- Little reason for marines to get a second cc (maybe tie jetpacks or nanoshield back to 2 cc?)
Those are some of the things that are bugging me the most at the moment. For the rest, I'm thoroughly enjoying b250. It's awesome.
Reversed judgement until I could have a few days playing the new build. Yes there are issues, and new players not knowing what they are doing, but the key thing is, this build is fun to play!
So just want to say, good job on this build and look forward to further improvements
Atm, after a dozen hours, I still find it overcomplicated and confused.
What I dislike :
- Building on infestation which destroys alien map control strategy
- Forced drifters micro-management as a Kham, otherwise, the structure take beyond ages
- Frustation on alien side when you clearly had the best over marine but you gonna need an looong amount of time to finish them off (providing alien boredoom don't allow the marines to comeback)
- Neverending games
1. Infestation IS NOT map controll.
2. Although I dislike having to use drifters to build stuff, it is better than "micro" checking your cloaked drifters. Now you have more drifters on the map, you can help your team by buffing them when they come to defend an RT under attack etc.
3. Turtling has always been a problem in pubs. If people would attack that god damn marine base together there wouldn't be.
4. Concedes. Everywhere.
3 and 4: I was on marine side in a match where clearly the aliens won, but they were stuck trying to kill the last base defended by marines with LMGs. I was yelling at the aliens to get a damn gorge to bile the base, got fed up with their failure to comply for 15 minutes, switched sides, went gorge myself, and the game was over in 1 minute. I hope those players learned something.
Atm, after a dozen hours, I still find it overcomplicated and confused.
What I dislike :
- Building on infestation which destroys alien map control strategy
- Forced drifters micro-management as a Kham, otherwise, the structure take beyond ages
- Frustation on alien side when you clearly had the best over marine but you gonna need an looong amount of time to finish them off (providing alien boredoom don't allow the marines to comeback)
- Neverending games
If aliens can cyst into powered rooms, then marine building on infestation should be OK.
All you have to do is send a drifter into a room you are building in. Far easier than marines where comm has to instruct people what to build and in what order, which also entails losing fighting players. About time we had some semblance of having to actually think about and plan alien room construction rather than just cysting in and dropping one of everything.
In any case in servers I play on I find aliens dominate generally. If server is 8v8, then there is a good chance of marine comeback since they don't have 4 fades healed by 4 gorges and 2 saving res for onos, as happens in 10v10 servers.
Anyway looks like the 6min onos of December has been replaced by the 6min fade since build 250.
I love gorge tunnels. Please make it easier to place them. When I was setting a ninja one in Mineshaft (between water pump and operations down by the waterfall) it seemed almost random where you could and couldn't place it. Also couldn't place one in the large air duct in the south side of central.
I changed the conclusion of a veil game by building a sneak PG just in front of pipeline on plain infestation.
Although it gave us the game, it sucked. Because the aliens overall gave a far best fighting for an hour, I felt it was a stolen victory.
It not that difficult to do now while the Kham is busy with the drifters, and you don't have any alert of any sort.
What does Charge do? How does it work? What purpose does it serve? It just seems to make you slow down for a few seconds, which seems like the opposite of a charge.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
It speeds you up while you charge, good for escaping down corridors. It does slow you down after for a bit though. And the damage you do with gore is more if you gore while charging (I think...).
Thanks for the info. I'll have to play around with it a bit to see what I can achieve using it. It seems that onos movement could stand to be improved in some manner - bone shield sounds like a interesting option to explore. It certainly needs something to add to the skill ceiling now that EXOs are faster and have horizontal thrusting.
Hydras are not worth the money now. I understand that Gorge forts might have been to good (like being able to stop 3 Marines just with healing the Hydras and good Clog placement), but right now what are they good for? They die in seconds.
Drifter micro is more annoying than challenging. Give them a little more HP, better sight lines, or something.
I still think having them cloaked (semi-cloaked now) would be better.
Don't like fade movement one bit. Stopped playing it altogether now.
Glad to read I'm not the only one feeling that way. Very sad how they killed fade.
Eh? The Fade is the best alien unit right now. By a large margin. Because they now have more health.
If a marine team fails to exploit the insanely powerful rush tactics they can pull off right now, 2-3 reasonably skilled fades (out of, say, 10 players in the alien team) concentrated on one side will generally tie far too many marines up in a defensive fight -or alternatively destroy a lesser force and the buildings- on that side. And the Fades can keep this going for long if they retreat and heal properly. Just evolve them ASAP!
The layered evolutions was to stop the 1 minute omg so strong skulks and to scale them through the game. It is also to give a little bit more of a res sink to aliens because they had such a lower cost tech tree than marines.
You talk as though something like early cara skulks were too strong before build 250. In larger games, these actually usually were *too weak* for otherwise normal matches with even just a few marines that had decent frame rates. The marines just had to push for the hive locations while expanding only on the side. The alien eggs depleted rapidly then, game over.
But now far more people have better frame rates, marine weaponry got even better. And regen skulks got worse, as did the overall movement speed of skilled skulk players.
Comments
Longer for aliens, they have a lot more to lose. Since upgrades aren't really tied to chairs as much anymore for Marines. Marines can turtle, Aliens can't really because Marines with their long range weapons, and upgrades, and no multiple hive upgrades available, which is why games seem to last longer, partially because it takes longer for Aliens to kill the last Marine base. Meaning they drag out longer unless the team concedes, but who is going to concede when you can kill stuff for fun with GL's, FT's, etc...
I thought we were talking things like shells/spurs/veils. I see now your talking about leap/bile bomb/etc. I'd be happy if it took multiple hives to unlock the ability to research biomass (and thus abilities) but that hive was not required to maintain it. Game often starts a slippery slope once aliens lose one hive, which doesn't really apply so much to marines.
Still don't like alien comm and power nodes, probably never will.
I disagree with IronHorse's view that "the rts elements have too large of an impact". At least, I wouldn't phrase it that way. I completely agree that the game being decided early is a terrible problem, but I don't see that as necessarily being due to the importance of the rts elements. It's quite possible to design a strategy game where decisions are meaningful and important at every stage of the game. NS2 was not such a game prior to b250; it remains to be seen how much b250 has improved things in that regard.
"Strategy" and "RTS" does not equal "snowballing". Snowballing equals bad RTS. NS2 should strive to be a good RTS.
I'd say more often than not the snowballing is due to the FPS side of the game not the RTS. If one team wins virtually all the battles in the first 4 minutes of the game it doesn't really matter what strategic choices are made that teams gonna win. The RTS side of NS is like Starcraft where 2 marines can kill an ultralisk.
What I dislike :
- Building on infestation which destroys alien map control strategy
- Forced drifters micro-management as a Kham, otherwise, the structure take beyond ages
- Frustation on alien side when you clearly had the best over marine but you gonna need an looong amount of time to finish them off (providing alien boredoom don't allow the marines to comeback)
- Neverending games
On the flip side, I'm curious and hesitant about the cysting changes. This cysting mechanic combined with the need for drifters has slowed down alien expansion/res a significant amount. Also I feel like the slow spread of infestation coupled with the 4 second? cool down on placing another cyst means that simply by cutting the cyst in a room near the harvester you can kill any harvester under 16% health. I tried saving a harvester with 14% health but it died regardless, what I would have given for a gorge that day *sigh*
I can kinda understand why the cysting was done how it was done but I want someone to tell me themselves otherwise I can't be sure. I kinda have the Fade down pat now but I'm still trying to figure out how to work shadow step properly in combat since you lose all speed if you do it on the ground. Even with blink its kinda hard to aim, but then again it might just be my 20 frames doing me in there *sadface*
Skulk feels great if a bit too sticky, I often go to jump from the top of walls onto a marines head but instead stick to the ceiling lol. I do feel flamethrowers are a bit too strong, this coming from a commander who watched a new player get a flamethrower and then proceed to kill all the skulks and gorgies without a jetpack, of course I did keep healing him and providing him with ammo. Grenades are being used now which is great but I feel that they shouldn't explode as soon as they hit a alien. make it have a timer till it goes off just like if the grenade hits the ground. That's my idea for that anyway, maybe its just cause I don't like taking a grenade to the face lol.
Not sure how to deal with flamethrowers as far as balancing them. Its good that they don't scale I guess but as a skulk I feel like it would be suicide to even attempt to attack them even via ambush because it seems like your life literally melts away as soon as they know your there.
Moving crags/shifts/shades is just too slow lol. I'd be better off either creating new ones farther forward or echoing them there. Also, moving them off of infestation even for a second causes them to take damage, could this be changed because the infestation range of cysts vs how far cysts can be placed now is very different?
I love marine commander play since there are so many ways you can play now, although admittedly I've only gone one route and stuck with it. *cough early upgrades cough* Although it is annoying to nano a marine that just died. I do mean he is already dead and yet I still lose the res and have the cooldown.
We really, REALLY, need to get rid of that bug with the music when a command chair or hive gets low, it NEVER stops playing AGRH!!!!! Official combat and movement tutorials would be nice including an update to explore mode. Like the new bot addition in which you can choose the marine skill level.
That's about it for now. By all means could anyone help by explaining or elaborating, I feel this would help me a lot. Especially since I've been on a lot of servers recently where everyone is looking to me for practically everything. I mean don't get me wrong, I love helping the new players, but it doesn't help me help them have a good time when even I have a hard time explaining some things to them.
1. Infestation IS NOT map controll.
2. Although I dislike having to use drifters to build stuff, it is better than "micro" checking your cloaked drifters. Now you have more drifters on the map, you can help your team by buffing them when they come to defend an RT under attack etc.
3. Turtling has always been a problem in pubs. If people would attack that god damn marine base together there wouldn't be.
4. Concedes. Everywhere.
I think the long term solution is bone shield so that the onos isn't literally a mindless sack of hp that you mash the marines with while still being tough enough to actually stand up against exos, but so far there hasn't been a decent implementation of it.
It's not finished yet but in its most basic form it's a skill-based ability for the Onos which makes it take less damage under certain situations. In its most recent implementation it made the Onos take less damage from frontal attacks while it was active, but reduced movement speed.
- GL spam and flamethrower rushes are a bit OP at the moment to restate the obvious. GL is too cheap, and flamethrower does too much player damage imo.
- Onos needs some love.
- Little reason for marines to get a second cc (maybe tie jetpacks or nanoshield back to 2 cc?)
Those are some of the things that are bugging me the most at the moment. For the rest, I'm thoroughly enjoying b250. It's awesome.
So just want to say, good job on this build and look forward to further improvements
3 and 4: I was on marine side in a match where clearly the aliens won, but they were stuck trying to kill the last base defended by marines with LMGs. I was yelling at the aliens to get a damn gorge to bile the base, got fed up with their failure to comply for 15 minutes, switched sides, went gorge myself, and the game was over in 1 minute. I hope those players learned something.
If aliens can cyst into powered rooms, then marine building on infestation should be OK.
All you have to do is send a drifter into a room you are building in. Far easier than marines where comm has to instruct people what to build and in what order, which also entails losing fighting players. About time we had some semblance of having to actually think about and plan alien room construction rather than just cysting in and dropping one of everything.
In any case in servers I play on I find aliens dominate generally. If server is 8v8, then there is a good chance of marine comeback since they don't have 4 fades healed by 4 gorges and 2 saving res for onos, as happens in 10v10 servers.
Anyway looks like the 6min onos of December has been replaced by the 6min fade since build 250.
I changed the conclusion of a veil game by building a sneak PG just in front of pipeline on plain infestation.
Although it gave us the game, it sucked. Because the aliens overall gave a far best fighting for an hour, I felt it was a stolen victory.
It not that difficult to do now while the Kham is busy with the drifters, and you don't have any alert of any sort.
I still think having them cloaked (semi-cloaked now) would be better.
If a marine team fails to exploit the insanely powerful rush tactics they can pull off right now, 2-3 reasonably skilled fades (out of, say, 10 players in the alien team) concentrated on one side will generally tie far too many marines up in a defensive fight -or alternatively destroy a lesser force and the buildings- on that side. And the Fades can keep this going for long if they retreat and heal properly. Just evolve them ASAP!
You talk as though something like early cara skulks were too strong before build 250. In larger games, these actually usually were *too weak* for otherwise normal matches with even just a few marines that had decent frame rates. The marines just had to push for the hive locations while expanding only on the side. The alien eggs depleted rapidly then, game over.
But now far more people have better frame rates, marine weaponry got even better. And regen skulks got worse, as did the overall movement speed of skilled skulk players.