The Real Problem With Turret Farms
coil
Amateur pirate. Professional monkey. All pance. Join Date: 2002-04-12 Member: 424Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
Amateur pirate. Professional monkey. All pance. Join Date: 2002-04-12 Member: 424Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor
<div class="IPBDescription">After much playing and reading...</div> First, a pair of quotes from <a href='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=43597' target='_blank'>this thread</a>:
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->We manage to lock down one place outside of the base (maybe), and then we spend the rest of the game defending it, making no progress anywhere...<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->i was wondering if i was the only one that didn't care for being turret_builder_02... ...once you've faithfully built the 40 turrets comm drops (as your vid card grinds at 10 fps) you get leet HA...<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Since 2.0 came out, I was confused about why I never saw two things that people seemed to CONSTANTLY run: turret farms as an alien, and constant losses as a marine. The servers I play in see neither of these, ever, and it got me thinking.
What's the real problem with turret farms? It's not the fact that they needlessly prolong the end-game. It's that <b>they are the reason marines lose.</b> Think about it. Let's say your commander drops 20 turrets in base for defense. That's 200 RPs. Now imagine he had only put down 4, strategically placed. He now has 160 RPs. He sends his marines to the double node, spends 100 to cap 2 nodes, build a turret factory, and drop 4 more turrets. He sends his marines to a hive, and spends the remaining 60 to drop another turret factory and 4 more turrets. At this point he's probably gained 20 more RPs to drop the resource node there, too. For the same cost as a turret farm in base, he now has 4 nodes in 3 locations, including one of the hives.
Granted, that's a very aggressive expansion strategy. So instead of taking double node, he goes right for the hive. 100 RPs later he's got that nice and tight (including electrifying the tfac or RT), and he's got 60 RPs... he starts researching phase tech and drops gates between his two bases. He then drops shotguns in base and his marines head out towards the double node or another hive.
What's my point? Alien players hate turret farms. Marine players hate losing. It's clear to me that marines lose, more often than not, because they waste ALL of their resources on farms instead of on ATTACKING. Things to do with resources NOT spent on turret farms:
1) Upgrade armor. Armor 1 makes LA marines 50% harder to kill by skulks, and Armor 3 makes them 100% harder to kill.
2) Upgrade weapons. Not only do your marines become permanently more lethal, but your fewer turrets are more capable of defending your bases.
3) Research phase gates. You've been expanding; phase gates allows your marines to quickly respond to threats. A bile-bombing gorge can make short work of a base, but a shotgun can make even shorter work of the gorge.
4) Research MT. Give your marines a heads-up for imminent attack.
5) ATTACK! Drop weapons. Drop HA hours before you would if you farmed. Drop welders. Put your marines in a squad and give them careful waypoints. Keep them together, keep them welding each other. Deaths mean resources for the aliens; staying in a group means fewer deaths and therefore fewer Onos.
In closing: I do agree that 2.0 is unbalanced, that aliens win too often and too easily. But I think a great deal of that is the mentality of marine teams. Be aggressive; it will pay off.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->We manage to lock down one place outside of the base (maybe), and then we spend the rest of the game defending it, making no progress anywhere...<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->i was wondering if i was the only one that didn't care for being turret_builder_02... ...once you've faithfully built the 40 turrets comm drops (as your vid card grinds at 10 fps) you get leet HA...<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Since 2.0 came out, I was confused about why I never saw two things that people seemed to CONSTANTLY run: turret farms as an alien, and constant losses as a marine. The servers I play in see neither of these, ever, and it got me thinking.
What's the real problem with turret farms? It's not the fact that they needlessly prolong the end-game. It's that <b>they are the reason marines lose.</b> Think about it. Let's say your commander drops 20 turrets in base for defense. That's 200 RPs. Now imagine he had only put down 4, strategically placed. He now has 160 RPs. He sends his marines to the double node, spends 100 to cap 2 nodes, build a turret factory, and drop 4 more turrets. He sends his marines to a hive, and spends the remaining 60 to drop another turret factory and 4 more turrets. At this point he's probably gained 20 more RPs to drop the resource node there, too. For the same cost as a turret farm in base, he now has 4 nodes in 3 locations, including one of the hives.
Granted, that's a very aggressive expansion strategy. So instead of taking double node, he goes right for the hive. 100 RPs later he's got that nice and tight (including electrifying the tfac or RT), and he's got 60 RPs... he starts researching phase tech and drops gates between his two bases. He then drops shotguns in base and his marines head out towards the double node or another hive.
What's my point? Alien players hate turret farms. Marine players hate losing. It's clear to me that marines lose, more often than not, because they waste ALL of their resources on farms instead of on ATTACKING. Things to do with resources NOT spent on turret farms:
1) Upgrade armor. Armor 1 makes LA marines 50% harder to kill by skulks, and Armor 3 makes them 100% harder to kill.
2) Upgrade weapons. Not only do your marines become permanently more lethal, but your fewer turrets are more capable of defending your bases.
3) Research phase gates. You've been expanding; phase gates allows your marines to quickly respond to threats. A bile-bombing gorge can make short work of a base, but a shotgun can make even shorter work of the gorge.
4) Research MT. Give your marines a heads-up for imminent attack.
5) ATTACK! Drop weapons. Drop HA hours before you would if you farmed. Drop welders. Put your marines in a squad and give them careful waypoints. Keep them together, keep them welding each other. Deaths mean resources for the aliens; staying in a group means fewer deaths and therefore fewer Onos.
In closing: I do agree that 2.0 is unbalanced, that aliens win too often and too easily. But I think a great deal of that is the mentality of marine teams. Be aggressive; it will pay off.
Comments
The fact is most pub players still have the awe for the turrets that they acquired in the first few days. (like them actually working).
its horrible seeing that.......
I'm far from a game dev or serious play tester, but perhaps a cure to turret farms is looking on the alien side of things as well.
4 turrets SHOULD be enough. Thats probably even enough to slow down bile bomb. An Onos laughs at 4 turrets, and rightfully so. He's a tank, and has a good anti building attack, I'm ok with that. But redemption... An onos charges those 4 turrets, takes 2-3 out, we phase in and redeem him. Woohoo, base is saved drop turrets again, go back to base, refill ammo. .... .... Onos is back, takes another 3 turrets--gets redeemed. The commander drops an extra 2 turrets this time. ... ... Onos comes back, this time he only gets 2 turrets before being redeemed. Commander is pleased and this time drops a few more turrets. You can see where this is going...
The flaw in this logic is that the commander isn't even thinking about killing the Onos, he just wants a way to redeem him faster. It gets to the point where an Onos may be redeemed before he can take a turret out and we have our standard stalemate.
If some change would allow a commander a hope of actually kiling an Onos instead of redeeming it, or perhaps the Onos having to think twice before charging a turret farm, we may see a change in the turtling strats of marines.
Thoughts?
Put 5 mines exactly on top of each other (don't move while placing) in the spot the onos comes charging in. It looks like one mine, probably won't be noticed, and can kill an onos outright before any chance of redemption.
Those seem to get overlooked in a firefight (I know i'm guilty) I'll try some of that out later tonight. My first reaction to this is that it will encourage turtling more, but we'll see.
I tend to build these at central locations that cut the map in half, I dont waste restrying to turret out single res nodes perfering to place them to cover a phase gate where I can quickly deploy marines to counter attack several resnodes.
bad ideas,....
trying to farm each resnode
building massive base def (cheaper to just move base to a spot worth defending)
relieing on turrets to defend them selfs
build just 3 turrets (easy to kill, costly to build compared to one well built farm that lasts game)
placing turrets where they cant cover each other
placing turrets to shot down long halls (unless you have a hivve locked down)
placing turrets under vents (unless you just want to make some gorges day)
Good ideas
try to build one or two VARY good farms instead of 10 **** poor ones
make sure you have a welder biotch, if you dont, dont waste time on turrets
dont drop untill you have area secured
build a OB and Phase at EVERY OUTPOST
build a back up TF and set it to siege
Go for killing aleins instead of driving them off, Iff your going to blow 200-300 res you want a bunch of dead fades or oni to show for it
1) Lack of marine mobility (they are slow)
2) Onos has no counter, especially with movement and defence upgrades (celeritized onos is very overpowered, especially when combined with regen an stomp)
3) Marines have to stick together <i>too</i> much (if the marines leave an area, even if it's turret farmed against 1 hive aliens, they will break it, but if they split their forces up they get nothing done)
4) If the aliens get a second hive, even for a moment, they most likely will have level 3 upgrades of two chambers, usually movement and defence in my experience
5) Aliens can cover the entire map with resource towers and defend them because of their extremely quick reaction time (hive sight), and extremely fast movement speed (skulks). However, the marines have trouble defended nodes unless they spend extra res on electrifying, then they last until the second hive goes up.
Those are the biggest reasons IMO, I know there are more that I just can't think of now. People say 2.01b is balanced. I can tell you right now that it isn't. If you don't believe me, here's <a href='http://www.arsclan.net/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=3979' target='_blank'>proof.</a> Basically, this is a tournament I recently played in, version 2.01b. There is <b>1</b> marine win out of around 16.
Stop thinking aobut "elite" things on how to win ... tf wont do it .. its much more complex game .. and yea when ppl get more into the game (experiance) this will be all so clear to all... get experianced hehe !!! **** NOOBS <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->
MInes are good .. but rarely used right now in pub.. atleast.. again to many nubs <!--emo&;)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/wink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='wink.gif'><!--endemo-->.
(walks into time portal jumps 4 weeks forward ?n time.. finds those perfekt games again)
Stacking mines IS a good idea, but I often see them set off by skulks, so who would bother? Too bad you can't set them to only hit onii, that would be cool. Mines are useless.
There good.. if they dont ahve cara they insta die..and u dont stack.. u place them 1 at a place so they dont mass explode.. for 1 skulk..
Well first off, it doesn't involve turret farms. Turrets do **** to Onos. Especially if the aliens remember that umbra owns. You counter onos by travelling in HUGE packs, and making lots of portals. If you have more than 8 turrets in a room, thats 4+ shotguns your team could have used.
Remember people, it's priorities. The ONLY things turrets should be are things to SLOW the aliens down, not stop them. You cant stop any concentrated alien attack with turrets. You could have 200 and it still wouldn't work.
Cafeteria?
South Loop?
[I]Looks through NS maps...
Turret farms aren't a problem and always fall. Marines that turret farm lose (as coil has stated).
Turret llarms where they have a hive or an easily defended position and are grenade spamming EVERYWHERE are THE problem. I've seen marines win quite often from this position as after a few hours the aliens get frustrated and give up.
Grenade spam+ 40 turrets=game won in time.
You have made a good point addressing the problem and giving a solution but it's not the people reading this who need to be told.
As you have said, marines can guard a base with a few turrets... So why not just limit them? Simple.
Sorry to sound harsh here... But not every server is like the ones you play on. I get the impression you play on servers where regular players/forum members join? Therefore, you have sensible players on each team who know what to do and work together. This might not be the case and I'm sorry if I'm wrong.
Most of the servers I play on do not have the luxury of having veterans/playtesters on, unless I'm playing with fwd. Most of the games I play, the commander uses too many turrets to guard things instead of upgrading... I'm sure most people have seen this too.
I've recently gone from a terraformer to a techmonkey, and I have much more success when I comm now. I even made a daring (lucky) 2arms rush... 2arms labs before I got my 2nd IP, heeheehee. The Marines also seem to REALLY enjoy a nice tech rush, drop some shotguns... funny, people like to be part of the action more than build turrets. Who figured.
Sounds interesting. Maybe.
How do we travel in HUGE packs in a 4 on 4 game?
Even for a bigger game, how can we travel in HUGE packs AND defend an area AND make offensive progress?
I've deducted that you'd need at least 2 marines with HA and HMG's to defend an area against an Onos and a Lerk, and that's if they camp there and wait for them. If you use a strategy where the marines have to head back there through a pg everytime something attacks, you'd probably need more. If they are currently on the move and not already near a pg, this takes too long and they'll probably be there in time to scare off the onos and rebuild, I see this happen all the time, they repeatedly have to go back and forth just to hold on stuff they've already taken, and end up making no progress while the alien team only gets stronger.
To put everything you have said in simpler terms MOBILITY > ALL. Alot of our modern warfare is based apon this concept and the aliens are a perfect example of what it means, not only can aliens with their supperior mobility kill one of your res towers but after killing it they can then travel all the way across the map and holdup/stop your offencive thrust on their hive. The reason onos's are so hard to stop is because they have the strength (they can take one hard beating) and they also have mobility.
All these people offer these pat little answerers of how you can win as a marine team but against any decent alien team you simply can't. Even one alien player can make a massive difference due to the fact that they are designed to work on their own. There is simply no way as marines that you can defend everywere at once and attack at the same time. Its either one or the other, if you chose to focus most of your attention on defending, well the aliens will contol the map and get more and more powerful and simply wittle you down a little at a time.
If you choose to focus your attention on attacking the aliens will just use their superior mobility to get behind your lines and destroy all your res/bases, then after they do that they have the mobility to get back to where you are attacking at and then stop your attack. If you instead choose the third option of both attacking and defending with equal force you will find that you don't have the strength to do either.
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->We manage to lock down one place outside of the base (maybe), and then we spend the rest of the game defending it, making no progress anywhere...<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->i was wondering if i was the only one that didn't care for being turret_builder_02... ...once you've faithfully built the 40 turrets comm drops (as your vid card grinds at 10 fps) you get leet HA...<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Since 2.0 came out, I was confused about why I never saw two things that people seemed to CONSTANTLY run: turret farms as an alien, and constant losses as a marine. The servers I play in see neither of these, ever, and it got me thinking.
What's the real problem with turret farms? It's not the fact that they needlessly prolong the end-game. It's that <b>they are the reason marines lose.</b> Think about it. Let's say your commander drops 20 turrets in base for defense. That's 200 RPs. Now imagine he had only put down 4, strategically placed. He now has 160 RPs. He sends his marines to the double node, spends 100 to cap 2 nodes, build a turret factory, and drop 4 more turrets. He sends his marines to a hive, and spends the remaining 60 to drop another turret factory and 4 more turrets. At this point he's probably gained 20 more RPs to drop the resource node there, too. For the same cost as a turret farm in base, he now has 4 nodes in 3 locations, including one of the hives.
Granted, that's a very aggressive expansion strategy. So instead of taking double node, he goes right for the hive. 100 RPs later he's got that nice and tight (including electrifying the tfac or RT), and he's got 60 RPs... he starts researching phase tech and drops gates between his two bases. He then drops shotguns in base and his marines head out towards the double node or another hive.
What's my point? Alien players hate turret farms. Marine players hate losing. It's clear to me that marines lose, more often than not, because they waste ALL of their resources on farms instead of on ATTACKING. Things to do with resources NOT spent on turret farms:
1) Upgrade armor. Armor 1 makes LA marines 50% harder to kill by skulks, and Armor 3 makes them 100% harder to kill.
2) Upgrade weapons. Not only do your marines become permanently more lethal, but your fewer turrets are more capable of defending your bases.
3) Research phase gates. You've been expanding; phase gates allows your marines to quickly respond to threats. A bile-bombing gorge can make short work of a base, but a shotgun can make even shorter work of the gorge.
4) Research MT. Give your marines a heads-up for imminent attack.
5) ATTACK! Drop weapons. Drop HA hours before you would if you farmed. Drop welders. Put your marines in a squad and give them careful waypoints. Keep them together, keep them welding each other. Deaths mean resources for the aliens; staying in a group means fewer deaths and therefore fewer Onos.
In closing: I do agree that 2.0 is unbalanced, that aliens win too often and too easily. But I think a great deal of that is the mentality of marine teams. Be aggressive; it will pay off. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Amen!
Except on the marines loosing too much, which while true, is nice <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
I say just make it easier to upgrade the arms lab by a little bit, no nerfs to aliens other then can't bring a marine with you while reediming.