It takes a long, drawn out process to win as marines
Enhance89
Join Date: 2009-11-04 Member: 69261Members
Join Date: 2009-11-04 Member: 69261Members
I know it's the beta and I know that there are a lot of changes to come, but bare with me.
Right now it appears aliens have the clear advantage from beginning to end. The aliens have speed, power, the ability to get advanced lifeforms early and the marines just don't have the capability to dominate the map early. Every single game I've won as a marine has resulted from a long, drawn out process where the game takes over an hour. I know this is just my personal experience, but it's EVERY single game for me.
Personally, I feel the marines have too much going against them early with everything being predicated on having resources. Unless you're playing a completely inept aliens team, it's near impossible to defend resource extractors early on and take control of areas. And within ten minutes of the game aliens already tend to have at least one Fade. And I don't know about you guys, but trying to defend areas AND trying to give your marines upgrades to combat fades is near impossible with the amount of res coming in. As a comm in NS1, I remember having access to res earlier and often. I mean hell - we used to have to drop shotguns, weapons and ammo all the time. If we still had to do that there'd be no way the marines would have enough res to win.
Furthermore I feel like I'm trying to hold and advance on only a small portion of the map while being bombarded from one side by rushing aliens that have nothing else to do but attack for the moment to try and build personal res for evolving.
To me this isn't just minor grumbling - it really comes down to the game itself. I've played probably 10 full games start to finish the last few days, 6 as marines and four as aliens. I've won as aliens every single time and won only two complete matches as a marine. There are countless other games I've come in on where aliens are dominating and there's no point really joining marines.
Perhaps I just need to get back into the swing of things as a commander. What your guys' experiences so far and how do you handle the beginning of the game as a commander? With trying to put turrets in your base to stop the never ending rushes, to keeping your extractors alive, to getting your marines upgrades to stop fades and to trying to lock-down enemy hive locations, I feel like marines don't have enough res or firepower to win consistently right now. Anybody else seeing this or feeling this as well?
Right now it appears aliens have the clear advantage from beginning to end. The aliens have speed, power, the ability to get advanced lifeforms early and the marines just don't have the capability to dominate the map early. Every single game I've won as a marine has resulted from a long, drawn out process where the game takes over an hour. I know this is just my personal experience, but it's EVERY single game for me.
Personally, I feel the marines have too much going against them early with everything being predicated on having resources. Unless you're playing a completely inept aliens team, it's near impossible to defend resource extractors early on and take control of areas. And within ten minutes of the game aliens already tend to have at least one Fade. And I don't know about you guys, but trying to defend areas AND trying to give your marines upgrades to combat fades is near impossible with the amount of res coming in. As a comm in NS1, I remember having access to res earlier and often. I mean hell - we used to have to drop shotguns, weapons and ammo all the time. If we still had to do that there'd be no way the marines would have enough res to win.
Furthermore I feel like I'm trying to hold and advance on only a small portion of the map while being bombarded from one side by rushing aliens that have nothing else to do but attack for the moment to try and build personal res for evolving.
To me this isn't just minor grumbling - it really comes down to the game itself. I've played probably 10 full games start to finish the last few days, 6 as marines and four as aliens. I've won as aliens every single time and won only two complete matches as a marine. There are countless other games I've come in on where aliens are dominating and there's no point really joining marines.
Perhaps I just need to get back into the swing of things as a commander. What your guys' experiences so far and how do you handle the beginning of the game as a commander? With trying to put turrets in your base to stop the never ending rushes, to keeping your extractors alive, to getting your marines upgrades to stop fades and to trying to lock-down enemy hive locations, I feel like marines don't have enough res or firepower to win consistently right now. Anybody else seeing this or feeling this as well?
Comments
In the late game I've played a couple games now where Aliens just can finish the game. Playing on summit The Alien team has twice gotten all the hives up and all the resources nodes, But marines can just drop 20 sentries around marine start and there is no beating them. It took us aliens almost 2 hours after we took the whole map to finish the marines.(it was about a 3 hour game)
A lot of the game right now comes down to proper teamwork and both sides have good commanders.
If marines stay is large groups and put sentries down in key choke point locations, they are unstoppable force especially when tech comes into play, grenades and flamethrowers +arcs. However if you get a couple marine rambos on your squad giving up free kills to skulks the tides can quickly turn in the others favor.
Now If aliens play smart and dont give up free kills, and attack new structures before they can be fortified, they have a very good chance of winning as long as they get a quick 2nd hive, and survive until fades.
Either way with the Phase gate and armory mechanics the marines are definitely the "Favored" side imo. It's very easy in a 10+ person player game, to get quick phase gates up and completely dominate the maps resources.
However the big problem here is game performance, everything should feel more equal when the game is performing better and hit boxes start registering regularly.
Was it the same team each time? Maybe you guys just had a lot more coordination/teamwork than the average Marine squad.
That's the trend I've seen at least, but I think as the player base becomes more skilled in general this will even out. With the new build and netcode improvements and what not I've seen a huge increase of regular players. This is my first time seeing large and regular games of NS2 being played, at least on servers with suitable pings for me. That's a lot of new players that I think the Khaara have a natural advantage over. On the other hand, those same improvements mean more people can play more, play better, and get more experience than ever before. The Khaara have also never had to face such large and well coordinated teams before, so strategies against them are new and scarce right now, and some new players are learning that throwing more Khaara at a problem doesn't stack the same way it does for Marines.
Those are the main reasons I think for hardship on both sides of the fence as far as winning goes. There's other problems here and there but I think the current build is pretty balanced and experience really will solve most of those problems for now.
In the late game I've played a couple games now where Aliens just can finish the game. Playing on summit The Alien team has twice gotten all the hives up and all the resources nodes, But marines can just drop 20 sentries around marine start and there is no beating them. It took us aliens almost 2 hours after we took the whole map to finish the marines.(it was about a 3 hour game)
A lot of the game right now comes down to proper teamwork and both sides have good commanders.
If marines stay is large groups and put sentries down in key choke point locations, they are unstoppable force especially when tech comes into play, grenades and flamethrowers +arcs. However if you get a couple marine rambos on your squad giving up free kills to skulks the tides can quickly turn in the others favor.
Now If aliens play smart and dont give up free kills, and attack new structures before they can be fortified, they have a very good chance of winning as long as they get a quick 2nd hive, and survive until fades. Marines giving up easy deaths aside, getting fades that early while marines don't have the resources to combat it yet isn't quite right.
Either way with the Phase gate and armory mechanics the marines are definitely the "Favored" side imo. It's very easy in a 10+ person player game, to get quick phase gates up and completely dominate the maps resources.
However the big problem here is game performance, everything should feel more equal when the game is performing better and hit boxes start registering regularly.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
If Marines have an easier time dominating the map's resources, as you suggest, then why is it marines seem to lose more often than aliens? I don't know if this poster's information is correct, but if it's true that Marine's have a 30 percent winning percentage then something is wrong imho. I think it is possible for Marines to dominate the resources and areas of a map, but with how many resources it costs to build and with how quickly fades make their way into the map it's tough for Marines from the get-go.
That said I do agree with you in that game performance is a large problem right now. It's tough to truly calculate how you're doing when the game isn't optimized and there are obvious imbalances (like lerks have spores and marines currently have no way to defend against it, and the fact that Fades are prevalent early on in games even before you've gotten past armor 1 or 2). I can't tell you how many times I've seen Fades dominate the game before I even had time to get armor and weapon upgrades, and I usually get those asap.
Any marines with the ability to aim absolutely destroy aliens early game unless aliens are allowed to get a second hive.
<a href="http://ns2.sorcerer.de/stats/" target="_blank">http://ns2.sorcerer.de/stats/</a>
I can't use it on this computer without it crashing/freaking out.
Any marines with the ability to aim absolutely destroy aliens early game unless aliens are allowed to get a second hive.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Or just, like, lots of marines.
You don't need good aiming skills if you get enough marines together.
You don't need good aiming skills if you get enough marines together.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This but also I think larger player numbers generally favor marines. If you have 10+ marines vs 10+ aliens it's easier for the marines, because generally speaking marines stick together and aliens play a little more spread out. So when you do come across that lone fade, your group of four will do better than the group of 2 that fades always run across now because of team size.
Basically fades work well in groups of two or three against larger groups of marines, and lerks/gorges make good support for these fades, but skulks and lerks don't work very well together, whereas any sort of gun wielding marine works really well with other gun wielding marines.
Marines in groups are always exponentially better, whereas aliens in groups are only exponentially better if they are using later lifeforms.
1. Lag. All the time.
2. Lack of coordination. Rines have to attack hives one by one. Unbuilt hives have almost no chance against coordinated rine team.
3. Totally unimportant factors like little res. It is true that it's hard to keep rts alive, it's hard to kill fades in amount that aliens get and so on and so on.
I have seen several (but rare) games on summit where marines ignored first hive drop and went straight for main hive. They didn't even build a pg, just an armory + power pack. 5 minutes later main hive was down. If aliens were lucky they still had half built 2nd hive which went down fast. It's basically equivalent of NS1 skulk rush.
You can get stuck in really bad situation from which recovery takes forever. For instance being surrounded in marine start on summit. You need to place arcs in corners, defend base, have fairly stupid aliens playing against you. Then you can try to regain a bit of area in flight control. Then Heliport. All of that can go horribly wrong from single base rush from aliens. Yes, it feels overwhelming but your team got themselves into defending turtled marine start.
I've never destroyed one as an alien, so I don't know how fast/slow it goes. But building one as a marine takes forever and it's a little ridiculous.
1. Difference in team skill (with comm skill being the largest factor)
2. Which team has less net bored-quits (i.e. the team with fewer players leaving due to boredom minus replacement joins)
Right now, I think there is a very strong learning curve with 'skilled' players being one who a) know how to compensate for the lag and b) understand the most powerful strategies for each side.
Also, matches either end quickly due to a rush (5-15 min) or drag on for hours (1-3 hr). I rarely see matches in the intermediate time range and never in B178 or B179.
Marines have the best siege weapons, ARCs, which unfortunately have rather buggy AI. Hence Marines often have to assault hives slowly on foot, with heavy casualties on both sides.
Kharaas are simply forced to assault the Marine fortress to end the game, by close to medium range combat, which is often defended by no less than 10 sentries. Marine structures are also tougher by design, and take a long time to destroy unless the aliens have a large number of Gorges.
In short, the current game build does not yet have effective siege weapons to end the game decisively (when the winner should be decided). The quickest fixes I can imagine are to fix ARC pathing and targetting AI, and to increase Bilebomb damage (since Mature Whip does not yet have the Bombard ability).
1. Difference in team skill (with comm skill being the largest factor)
2. Which team has less net bored-quits (i.e. the team with fewer players leaving due to boredom minus replacement joins)
Right now, I think there is a very strong learning curve with 'skilled' players being one who a) know how to compensate for the lag and b) understand the most powerful strategies for each side.
Also, matches either end quickly due to a rush (5-15 min) or drag on for hours (1-3 hr). I rarely see matches in the intermediate time range and never in B178 or B179.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I remember NS had rounds that averaged in the 30-45 minute range, and I think that's perfect. As it stands, nobody likes to lose within five or 15 minutes, and nobody likes to lose after having sat at their computer in one game for 90 minutes or more. Nobody likes to lose period but what you get what I'm saying, I hope. There needs to be something that equalizes the games into shorter, manageable matches that still allow for every aspect of the game to be used - i.e. the rounds shouldn't be so short that we never get the chance to research heavies or see some onos but they shouldn't be so long that it takes 90 minutes or more to see the end.
I think the fact that it takes marines so long to get better weapons, ammo and all the technologies they need to win is a reason why these matches can drag or be really short. They're short if there's a good alien team and they beat you early, or they're long if you play the way the game was meant to be played.
Marine Commander need to put people into proper squads.
In NS1 beacon was also important to make your team do something together; beacon+ weapon drop + clear order ("phase and kill this hive").
decrease sentry damage.
increase bilebomb a bit if you consider it as the primary siege weapon. but if you gonna say that whips should do that job, make their movement speed 3-4 times faster (increase root, unroot time to prevent "hit&run" whips ^^)
release more content please :D
edit:
make power-nodes and infestation easier to build / destroy. the game is too slowly at the moment
is huge to marines winning.
Expanding is huge to marine winning.
As far as the game dragging.
I feel it drags more to end as alien than marine.
If as alien you take over the entire map except the marine base.
It takes forever to clear out the turret farm that is marine city.
If as marine you take over the entire map.
ARC cannons do a wonderful job of cleaning up if you guard them well.
Sure their pathfinding is buggy and you have to wait forever for a commander to wheel them to the right place.
But they are awesome.
But more features and more performance....then we get to tweaking more.
The Onos, Heavy, and Jetpack may make this long drawn out process .... GONE.
The heavies were good in NS1.
The Onos were good in NS1 until their health got chopped.