I still feel like having upgrades being tied to the hive will make it too important. Rather than it unlocking fades, it will unlock blink which will make fades much more powerful. It would still have the same effect on the game and be the most important thing for the aliens to get built.
It doesn't make any sense to me to have the 2nd hive automatically research abilities when it completes. It's like this 1 time upgrade for 75 res that gives almost every unit a new ability that makes them much more powerful. It would be far better if all those upgrades had to be research individually.
This would help to put more of the focus on map control and RTs, which I think makes the game a lot more interesting than the current 2nd hive importance. It would also lessen the impact of getting those upgrades as they wouldn't all become available at once. Rather than instantly getting, leap, blink, bile bomb etc. you would be required to research them individually and choose which abilities you thought were more important and worth the cost.
In general I think that the economy system in NS2 needs more work. IMO most of the gameplay should focus around RTs and limiting the opponents income/map control, to give your team a tech advantage. I don't think the Pres system is working very well right now (though I like the idea of players being able to choose their own weapons) as players aren't required to spend res on anything. There is no way for me to prevent a skulk saving his res for a fade, all I can do is slow it down a little by attacking the RTs. Perhaps spawns should cost 1-2 pres a time so that limiting your opponents pres really has a larger effect and prevents them from saving.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->1. The alien commander needs more ways to buff and protect aliens. Pheromones will help guide and coordinate aliens, but I think he needs another way to make his teammates more effective (like nano-shield and health/ammo packs for Marine Commander). But want to keep the alien commander environmental, and not micro-managey. He’s just gardening and pruning, while aliens go crazy with all their speed and movement abilities. Don’t want him clicking anything. Ideas: <ol type='1'><li> Allow cysts to create gaseous “puff†(costs 2 res) which temporarily gives cover or umbra to aliens</li><li> Allow comm to create infestation “spikesâ€, which come out of ground and either block gunfire (save harvesters, Gorges), trap marines, split squads in half, etc. (2-3 res, lasts 3-4 seconds). Doesn’t grow if marine is on top of it.</li><li> Allow comm to drop little “saplingâ€. After a second or two, it grows up, and quickly. It grows to kind of an alien tree/wall that can be destroyed or will go away after 10 seconds.</li><li> Drifter ability to temporarily blind marine (geometry draws but not entities after a certain distance, like our internal new alien vision mode). Means marine must slow attack.</li><li> Drifter ability to jams guns, so they can’t be reloaded? Or gooey slime that slows reload/rof speed.</li></ol><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> 1 sounds really good. I was thinking it would use energy that each cyst had, but res would be much better as it'd be an actual choice rather than "does the nearby cyst have enough energy Y/N". Also thought that the cover-cloud would be Lerk spores, but adding damage on top of having aliens inside it hard to see and shoot would be too much. 2 and 3 seem very similar, but either way, giving the Khamm a way to block marine movement entirely seems a bit too strong. Maybe allow shooting through it, but not movement? 4, not sure what it says - we already have Drifter Flare. 5 would also be very powerful, in a "if the marines don't kill the Drifter they're ######" kind of way.
Giving the Khamm more ways of interacting with the level (growing solid walls/fences across hallways, jamming doors, clogging vents the marines like to use, enCroaching upon unbuilt power nodes and turning the lights off, flooding rooms with goo, growing nasty hurty spikes in areas, upgrading cysts to PRODUCE goo, or gas, or flammable clouds (safe to walk through but go WHOOMPH if you fire in them)) would be a huge step towards justifying the alien commander's job (right now he's basically an eye in the sky, full-time, who gets to decide where the crags and whips go, and occasionally has to remember to cloak things... kind of boring).
One idea for changing the importance/sudden transitional effect of hive 2 would be to shift how, exactly, you GET hive 2. At the moment, most games seem to be a long dry spell waiting for the res for hive 2, and then a sudden rush of upgrade structures after that hive starts building. Basically, the first 30 or so res spent by the alien team are on res nodes, the next 75 on a hive, and then the upgrades come. This means that the first several minutes of the game have no real variety for the Kharaa... unlike marines who are usually given a couple choices of weapon, land mines, and start getting abilities like motion tracking, phase gates, or welders coming online pretty quick, your usual early Kharaa game consists of several minutes of running around (and dying) as a bog-standard or Frenzy skulk, or crouching in cover somewhere as a gorge waiting for PRes for your next (ineffective, so you have to place several) hydra.
How about, rather than linking upgrade structures to a hive, you link hives to upgrade structures? Buying Carapace, or Silence, or whatever costs 40 or so Tres by the time you get done building the structure and upgrading it, but you have your choice of whatever you want to build (rather than being limited to one tech tree only). Once you've got a certain number of upgrade structures in place (2-3), you get the option to place a hive for a significantly lower cost (say, 25 Tres for the hive itself), making the placement/destruction of a hive at the 4-minute mark in a game less absolutely crucial to the aliens (as they don't lose 100% of their investment if the hive dies) and placing more of an onus on the marines to properly secure a hive site. Getting a third hive requires 5-6 upgrade structures, fourth requires 8-9, you get the idea. Completely unlink crags/shades/etc from hives... if you have the resources, you can build them, but there might be a tech building requirement (must have all types of Shell, for example) or a 2-3 hive requirement to unlock the Mature version.
This also allows for more interesting tech-up options, if you make it so that any upgrades your team has a building for are selectable. An alien team that has managed to build 4-5 tech structures, even if only on 1 hive, might have silent, adrenalized celerity lerks zipping through the skies and hiding to regen in corners when they get winged, similar to how marines who haven't been able to expand much (but the aliens have been slow to kill them off) eventually end up with armor3/weapon3, grenade launchers, and ARCs to force their way out of base. It'd certainly be different than the existing alien tech tree, which is currently so linear it's more of a tech totem pole (which upgrade did you team start to worship first?), and I think that's a good thing.
I hope I'm posting this in the right area, and I couldn't find any other posts related to it so I'm posting here.
----------------------------- From the NS2 Design Log:
3/23/2012 There’s a problem with marine commander trying to medpack/ammo his marines and then selecting them by accident. -----------------------------
Why not just make it so if you hold shift you can spam click all you want? This is already intuitive since many other games such as sc1/2 and most other rts's have shift used in similar fashions. In most games it would queue up more buildings, units to build, waypoints to move, targets to attack, etc. Instead of spamming "a" "click" you could then hit "a", hold shift, click 50 times, then simply let go of shift and have it unselected.
Maybe it's just me, but to me this would feel right, fix the misclicks, and remain intuitive. Granted I haven't actually misclicked on a marine in the 4-5 days of my playing this game, but not having to spam "a" would be very nice either way.
<!--quoteo(post=1926003:date=Apr 16 2012, 04:25 PM:name=Gundies)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Gundies @ Apr 16 2012, 04:25 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1926003"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I hope I'm posting this in the right area, and I couldn't find any other posts related to it so I'm posting here.
----------------------------- From the NS2 Design Log:
3/23/2012 There’s a problem with marine commander trying to medpack/ammo his marines and then selecting them by accident. -----------------------------
Why not just make it so if you hold shift you can spam click all you want? This is already intuitive since many other games such as sc1/2 and most other rts's have shift used in similar fashions. In most games it would queue up more buildings, units to build, waypoints to move, targets to attack, etc. Instead of spamming "a" "click" you could then hit "a", hold shift, click 50 times, then simply let go of shift and have it unselected.
Maybe it's just me, but to me this would feel right, fix the misclicks, and remain intuitive. Granted I haven't actually misclicked on a marine in the 4-5 days of my playing this game, but not having to spam "a" would be very nice either way.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Totally agree. I feel like these are the easy wins that UWE should snap up! Adding mousewheel is another one.
UWE added an artificial delay after the drop to prevent any selections. That's simple, but also the worst possible solution in my opinion. I posted a few similiar ideas when it first came up.
<!--quoteo(post=1916797:date=Mar 24 2012, 01:55 AM:name=Raza.)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Raza. @ Mar 24 2012, 01:55 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1916797"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->There are better ways to prevent that. Adding an artificial delay seems like working around the real problem.
Some suggestions: - The commander can drop meds and left click selection is disabled as long as the med button is being held down. Each left click drops a med pack. Once the button is released, left click selection works normal again. - You could make it so that pressing the med button once enters 'med mode', e.g. each left click drops a med pack without having to press the med pack button every single time. Use right click to return to the normal mode. Or switch to ammo mode by pressing the ammo button etc. - <b>Make it possible to bind all 'global' commander abilities to hotkeys.</b> Meaning I could bind meds to Q and ammo to E, so every time I hit the Q button, I drop a med pack at the cursor location. (In my opinion this should be possible anyway! I've always felt that hiding the essential commander abilities in a submenu is suboptimal.)
You can also combine the last idea with the first or second one.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Comments
It doesn't make any sense to me to have the 2nd hive automatically research abilities when it completes. It's like this 1 time upgrade for 75 res that gives almost every unit a new ability that makes them much more powerful. It would be far better if all those upgrades had to be research individually.
This would help to put more of the focus on map control and RTs, which I think makes the game a lot more interesting than the current 2nd hive importance. It would also lessen the impact of getting those upgrades as they wouldn't all become available at once. Rather than instantly getting, leap, blink, bile bomb etc. you would be required to research them individually and choose which abilities you thought were more important and worth the cost.
In general I think that the economy system in NS2 needs more work. IMO most of the gameplay should focus around RTs and limiting the opponents income/map control, to give your team a tech advantage. I don't think the Pres system is working very well right now (though I like the idea of players being able to choose their own weapons) as players aren't required to spend res on anything. There is no way for me to prevent a skulk saving his res for a fade, all I can do is slow it down a little by attacking the RTs. Perhaps spawns should cost 1-2 pres a time so that limiting your opponents pres really has a larger effect and prevents them from saving.
<ol type='1'><li> Allow cysts to create gaseous “puff†(costs 2 res) which temporarily gives cover or umbra to aliens</li><li> Allow comm to create infestation “spikesâ€, which come out of ground and either block gunfire (save harvesters, Gorges), trap marines, split squads in half, etc. (2-3 res, lasts 3-4 seconds). Doesn’t grow if marine is on top of it.</li><li> Allow comm to drop little “saplingâ€. After a second or two, it grows up, and quickly. It grows to kind of an alien tree/wall that can be destroyed or will go away after 10 seconds.</li><li> Drifter ability to temporarily blind marine (geometry draws but not entities after a certain distance, like our internal new alien vision mode). Means marine must slow attack.</li><li> Drifter ability to jams guns, so they can’t be reloaded? Or gooey slime that slows reload/rof speed.</li></ol><!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
1 sounds really good. I was thinking it would use energy that each cyst had, but res would be much better as it'd be an actual choice rather than "does the nearby cyst have enough energy Y/N". Also thought that the cover-cloud would be Lerk spores, but adding damage on top of having aliens inside it hard to see and shoot would be too much.
2 and 3 seem very similar, but either way, giving the Khamm a way to block marine movement entirely seems a bit too strong. Maybe allow shooting through it, but not movement?
4, not sure what it says - we already have Drifter Flare.
5 would also be very powerful, in a "if the marines don't kill the Drifter they're ######" kind of way.
One idea for changing the importance/sudden transitional effect of hive 2 would be to shift how, exactly, you GET hive 2. At the moment, most games seem to be a long dry spell waiting for the res for hive 2, and then a sudden rush of upgrade structures after that hive starts building. Basically, the first 30 or so res spent by the alien team are on res nodes, the next 75 on a hive, and then the upgrades come. This means that the first several minutes of the game have no real variety for the Kharaa... unlike marines who are usually given a couple choices of weapon, land mines, and start getting abilities like motion tracking, phase gates, or welders coming online pretty quick, your usual early Kharaa game consists of several minutes of running around (and dying) as a bog-standard or Frenzy skulk, or crouching in cover somewhere as a gorge waiting for PRes for your next (ineffective, so you have to place several) hydra.
How about, rather than linking upgrade structures to a hive, you link hives to upgrade structures? Buying Carapace, or Silence, or whatever costs 40 or so Tres by the time you get done building the structure and upgrading it, but you have your choice of whatever you want to build (rather than being limited to one tech tree only). Once you've got a certain number of upgrade structures in place (2-3), you get the option to place a hive for a significantly lower cost (say, 25 Tres for the hive itself), making the placement/destruction of a hive at the 4-minute mark in a game less absolutely crucial to the aliens (as they don't lose 100% of their investment if the hive dies) and placing more of an onus on the marines to properly secure a hive site. Getting a third hive requires 5-6 upgrade structures, fourth requires 8-9, you get the idea. Completely unlink crags/shades/etc from hives... if you have the resources, you can build them, but there might be a tech building requirement (must have all types of Shell, for example) or a 2-3 hive requirement to unlock the Mature version.
This also allows for more interesting tech-up options, if you make it so that any upgrades your team has a building for are selectable. An alien team that has managed to build 4-5 tech structures, even if only on 1 hive, might have silent, adrenalized celerity lerks zipping through the skies and hiding to regen in corners when they get winged, similar to how marines who haven't been able to expand much (but the aliens have been slow to kill them off) eventually end up with armor3/weapon3, grenade launchers, and ARCs to force their way out of base. It'd certainly be different than the existing alien tech tree, which is currently so linear it's more of a tech totem pole (which upgrade did you team start to worship first?), and I think that's a good thing.
-----------------------------
From the NS2 Design Log:
3/23/2012
There’s a problem with marine commander trying to medpack/ammo his marines and then selecting them by accident.
-----------------------------
Why not just make it so if you hold shift you can spam click all you want? This is already intuitive since many other games such as sc1/2 and most other rts's have shift used in similar fashions. In most games it would queue up more buildings, units to build, waypoints to move, targets to attack, etc. Instead of spamming "a" "click" you could then hit "a", hold shift, click 50 times, then simply let go of shift and have it unselected.
Maybe it's just me, but to me this would feel right, fix the misclicks, and remain intuitive. Granted I haven't actually misclicked on a marine in the 4-5 days of my playing this game, but not having to spam "a" would be very nice either way.
-----------------------------
From the NS2 Design Log:
3/23/2012
There’s a problem with marine commander trying to medpack/ammo his marines and then selecting them by accident.
-----------------------------
Why not just make it so if you hold shift you can spam click all you want? This is already intuitive since many other games such as sc1/2 and most other rts's have shift used in similar fashions. In most games it would queue up more buildings, units to build, waypoints to move, targets to attack, etc. Instead of spamming "a" "click" you could then hit "a", hold shift, click 50 times, then simply let go of shift and have it unselected.
Maybe it's just me, but to me this would feel right, fix the misclicks, and remain intuitive. Granted I haven't actually misclicked on a marine in the 4-5 days of my playing this game, but not having to spam "a" would be very nice either way.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Totally agree. I feel like these are the easy wins that UWE should snap up! Adding mousewheel is another one.
That's simple, but also the worst possible solution in my opinion.
I posted a few similiar ideas when it first came up.
<!--quoteo(post=1916797:date=Mar 24 2012, 01:55 AM:name=Raza.)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Raza. @ Mar 24 2012, 01:55 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1916797"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->There are better ways to prevent that. Adding an artificial delay seems like working around the real problem.
Some suggestions:
- The commander can drop meds and left click selection is disabled as long as the med button is being held down. Each left click drops a med pack. Once the button is released, left click selection works normal again.
- You could make it so that pressing the med button once enters 'med mode', e.g. each left click drops a med pack without having to press the med pack button every single time. Use right click to return to the normal mode. Or switch to ammo mode by pressing the ammo button etc.
- <b>Make it possible to bind all 'global' commander abilities to hotkeys.</b> Meaning I could bind meds to Q and ammo to E, so every time I hit the Q button, I drop a med pack at the cursor location. (In my opinion this should be possible anyway! I've always felt that hiding the essential commander abilities in a submenu is suboptimal.)
You can also combine the last idea with the first or second one.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->