<!--quoteo(post=1856052:date=Jun 24 2011, 09:10 AM:name=MuYeah)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (MuYeah @ Jun 24 2011, 09:10 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1856052"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I <b>love</b> the idea! Why should you be allowed to fire and forget while playing as an on the ground support class? They are not the commander of the alien team any more. This idea adds much needed depth to the gorge class by keeping it dynamic. Temporary hydras means you need to constantly re-evaluate where you want to be fighting.
The gorge/hydra relationship which has carried over from NS1 cannot be balanced for an RTS/FPS game because the relative costs and power of them varies so widely based on the number of players on each team. A fundamental change in how they work is required: <ul><li>Buff to health/damage</li><li>Each gorge can drop a maximum of 1, 2 or 3 (depending on balance/flavour of the ability the devs want to have [possibly increase with hive number to keep things interesting as the game progresses tech-wise])</li><li>Time limit ~60 seconds or so, then they wither and die. No slow loss of health.</li><li>Free to drop or very low cost if you don't want gorges to accumulate too much res throughout the game.</li></ul> edit: Alternate idea, no hard limit on number of hydras droppable, have them high cost but when they time out or are killed refund 100% of the cost back to the gorge. Basically a soft-cap of requiring the start-up cost. This would also let it scale throughout the game, but be tied to economy rather than tech (which would be the case with the other suggestion above).
Now you've got a proper support class with the possibility for an alien team to make meaningful decisions when choosing how many gorges to have at which time. "A timing attack at 3 minutes would crush this build" -> "Lets get an extra gorge before hive2 is finished. It'll delay our offense by X time but the build will be more robust." It also continues to give the gorge a role throughout the game, if you want the benefit of hydras then you need a gorge.
In NS1 the relative cost of OCs was way too high and it discouraged their use <b>a lot</b>. They were only good for defending against JPs late-game or if you had a very good early game you might be able to squeeze a few out to protect the second hive as it was building because of RFK and minimal res tower losses. In public games you had excessive OCs making it very difficult for marines to do anything until GLs and they could be maintained by only a couple gorges. Having each individual gorge only be able to drop X number of hydras removes the funky scaling you see with teamsize in NS1.
I remember back in 2.01 we experimented a lot on ns_veil with taking both double nodes and an early OC as our opener but we never got it to work as well as we'd have liked, the cost was too high and the marines would just go to your hive and kill that res instead. Making hydras temporary is a buff for the alien team as it lets you keep your defense mobile around the map, which IMO fits in very nicely with the how the kharaa work.
The up-point about how OCs worked in NS1 was their relative cost changing throughout the game. Once you had a second hive and a decent foothold on the res game they were suddenly a much more reasonable investment. Of course, they were never really a choice if you were playing against a good marine side who knew how to pressure because all that res would be going into RTs/on-map MCs and SCs/saving for fades. I guess a good way to view them would be being a conservative insurance option against marine come-backs by stopping sneaky phasegates that was used to extend your lead rather than a viable strategic option. By linking max hydra number to hives you simulate the changing relative cost throughout the game. Yeah it's not as RTS-y but I'm of the opinion that some things should be focused on the FPS side of the gameplay out of pragmatism - ease of use, skill curves etc. and in the specific case of hydras they cannot be balanced because of how relatively powerful they are at different team sizes.
The reason why hydras should be such a low cost is that if you present the choice of hydra or lifeform then players will pick lifeform every time until hydras become overly powerful. This comes back to not being balanced because of variable team sizes. It's like the choice between upgrades or lifeform from NS1: People wouldn't use upgrades as skulks so they were made free.
I want to see hydras used by every gorge as a part of their combat strategy. By removing the cost you remove the choice of committing to full hydra spam or only gorging temporarily to heal stuff and saving most of your res for a different lifeform. Suddenly you have people using this interesting ability. If hydras are dear then you can bet your life that in low player number games they won't be seen because the res is needed elsewhere.
tl;dr: Temporary hydras are a buff to the alien team. The idea adds depth to the gorge role both strategically and tactically.
It's basically about moving away from fat little guy who sits 30 miles behind the front line gardening. That role belongs to the alien comm now. I want to be able to main class gorge and not have it be a temporary form that only gets used in niche situations!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree with most of your points, but I think the overarching issue is that gorge just needs a complete redesign it needs more to do. Be it in the form of utility or just more structures / constructs, the gorge & alien comm dynamic needs to find a proper balance where they both feel useful and involved.
I liken the Gorge to the Engineer class in Team Fortress 2.
The Gorge should be a: <ul><li>Support Class</li><li>Live just behind the front line</li><li>Able to be offensive</li><li>Able to be defensive</li><li>Somewhat required for success</li></ul> In TF2 you pretty much always have 2 engineers - anymore and it is a waste - any less and you can get rolled over.
As for the hydra, I see two ways to go: <ul><li> Have 1 or 2, make them strong</li><li> Have 3 or 4, make them weak</li><li> Make this a commander or gorge decision! Upgrade to more powerful hydra, but you get less!</li></ul> Make the Gorge able to move existing Hydra's (similar to an Engineer moving a dispenser/sentry). You could actually have a cool sequence here, takes 10s for a Gorge to 'consume' a Hydra- cool animation of him eating it, maybe another of him 'puking' it.
I love the idea of two Gorge's per Hive, just another benefit to expansion.
I hate the idea of temporary hydra's. As a marine I would just wait and then attack.
SewlekThe programmer previously known as SchimmelJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16247Members, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Developer
if hydras are cheap enough, why not make it temporary? currently if you build hydras at an outpost (without permanent infestation) they are anyway temporary. if you die, or leave the area because your attention is needed somewhere else these hydras will die. so if the creating of permanent infestation will not become esier than now, i would be grateful about lowered hydra costs. especially if they are more effective in addition.
I still find all of this just unnecessary tweaking for a game that doesn't have all of its features yet and has far greater issues at hand (like lag). If you change them at all, you're making the game unfair imho. Why should marines be allowed to have turrets but aliens don't get a similar trade-off? Furthermore, implementing a new alien structure doesn't seem realistic at this point in the process.
SewlekThe programmer previously known as SchimmelJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16247Members, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Developer
<!--quoteo(post=1856124:date=Jun 24 2011, 02:09 PM:name=Enhance89)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Enhance89 @ Jun 24 2011, 02:09 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1856124"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I still find all of this just unnecessary tweaking for a game that doesn't have all of its features yet and has far greater issues at hand (like lag). If you change them at all, you're making the game unfair imho. Why should marines be allowed to have turrets but aliens don't get a similar trade-off? Furthermore, implementing a new alien structure doesn't seem realistic at this point in the process.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
we are only discussing an announced change (which might or might not come)
I agree that, with the current res model, people will probably just tend to skip hydras if they die off. It's more cost-effective to evolve to a better lifeform.
And I don't think the fix really justifies the mental hassle of keeping track of your hydras constantly. Unless UWE enhances the the UI a bit, it's gonna SUCK to always remember which hydras are dying when.
There are of course ways to reduce the hassle: * put hydra info on the UI, with a countdown timer on each * put a fixed cap on the hydras instead. When you exceed some cap number, the oldest hydra dies * recover the P.res if a hydras dies of age, instead of in combat, so the gorge doesn't bleed res for doing a good job
But I think the simplest solution, where stuff just dies, is a mental hassle, and will really confuse new players. It's gonna need to be more sophisticated than that.
I think I would personally dislike my Hydra's dying automatically after a set time.
They could die off automatically unless they are heal sprayed once every X seconds/minutes. That way you can't "place and forget" but you'd be running around maintaining your garden if you wanted to keep them.
I think consuming them and getting X% res back would be more fun though as a gameplay element. It allows both aggresive and defensive hydra placement.
Can anyone explain to me why the current hydra system is seen as effective? They were never balanced in NS1 and it's the exact same system here, right?
<!--quoteo(post=1856413:date=Jun 26 2011, 04:27 AM:name=MuYeah)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (MuYeah @ Jun 26 2011, 04:27 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1856413"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Can anyone explain to me why the current hydra system is seen as effective? They were never balanced in NS1 and it's the exact same system here, right?<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<!--quoteo(post=1856405:date=Jun 25 2011, 09:16 PM:name=Motig)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Motig @ Jun 25 2011, 09:16 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1856405"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I think I would personally dislike my Hydra's dying automatically after a set time.
They could die off automatically unless they are heal sprayed once every X seconds/minutes. That way you can't "place and forget" but you'd be running around maintaining your garden if you wanted to keep them.
I think consuming them and getting X% res back would be more fun though as a gameplay element. It allows both aggresive and defensive hydra placement.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Motig, what is your opinion on limiting the number of hydra's (a few strong ones) vs temporary (require periodic heal spray)?
Big FAT Gorge consuming Hydra's, (to move/regain res) who wouldn't love that? What do others think about this as an animation AND game mechanic?
Comments
The gorge/hydra relationship which has carried over from NS1 cannot be balanced for an RTS/FPS game because the relative costs and power of them varies so widely based on the number of players on each team. A fundamental change in how they work is required:
<ul><li>Buff to health/damage</li><li>Each gorge can drop a maximum of 1, 2 or 3 (depending on balance/flavour of the ability the devs want to have [possibly increase with hive number to keep things interesting as the game progresses tech-wise])</li><li>Time limit ~60 seconds or so, then they wither and die. No slow loss of health.</li><li>Free to drop or very low cost if you don't want gorges to accumulate too much res throughout the game.</li></ul>
edit: Alternate idea, no hard limit on number of hydras droppable, have them high cost but when they time out or are killed refund 100% of the cost back to the gorge. Basically a soft-cap of requiring the start-up cost. This would also let it scale throughout the game, but be tied to economy rather than tech (which would be the case with the other suggestion above).
Now you've got a proper support class with the possibility for an alien team to make meaningful decisions when choosing how many gorges to have at which time. "A timing attack at 3 minutes would crush this build" -> "Lets get an extra gorge before hive2 is finished. It'll delay our offense by X time but the build will be more robust." It also continues to give the gorge a role throughout the game, if you want the benefit of hydras then you need a gorge.
In NS1 the relative cost of OCs was way too high and it discouraged their use <b>a lot</b>. They were only good for defending against JPs late-game or if you had a very good early game you might be able to squeeze a few out to protect the second hive as it was building because of RFK and minimal res tower losses. In public games you had excessive OCs making it very difficult for marines to do anything until GLs and they could be maintained by only a couple gorges. Having each individual gorge only be able to drop X number of hydras removes the funky scaling you see with teamsize in NS1.
I remember back in 2.01 we experimented a lot on ns_veil with taking both double nodes and an early OC as our opener but we never got it to work as well as we'd have liked, the cost was too high and the marines would just go to your hive and kill that res instead. Making hydras temporary is a buff for the alien team as it lets you keep your defense mobile around the map, which IMO fits in very nicely with the how the kharaa work.
The up-point about how OCs worked in NS1 was their relative cost changing throughout the game. Once you had a second hive and a decent foothold on the res game they were suddenly a much more reasonable investment. Of course, they were never really a choice if you were playing against a good marine side who knew how to pressure because all that res would be going into RTs/on-map MCs and SCs/saving for fades. I guess a good way to view them would be being a conservative insurance option against marine come-backs by stopping sneaky phasegates that was used to extend your lead rather than a viable strategic option. By linking max hydra number to hives you simulate the changing relative cost throughout the game. Yeah it's not as RTS-y but I'm of the opinion that some things should be focused on the FPS side of the gameplay out of pragmatism - ease of use, skill curves etc. and in the specific case of hydras they cannot be balanced because of how relatively powerful they are at different team sizes.
The reason why hydras should be such a low cost is that if you present the choice of hydra or lifeform then players will pick lifeform every time until hydras become overly powerful. This comes back to not being balanced because of variable team sizes. It's like the choice between upgrades or lifeform from NS1: People wouldn't use upgrades as skulks so they were made free.
I want to see hydras used by every gorge as a part of their combat strategy. By removing the cost you remove the choice of committing to full hydra spam or only gorging temporarily to heal stuff and saving most of your res for a different lifeform. Suddenly you have people using this interesting ability. If hydras are dear then you can bet your life that in low player number games they won't be seen because the res is needed elsewhere.
tl;dr: Temporary hydras are a buff to the alien team. The idea adds depth to the gorge role both strategically and tactically.
It's basically about moving away from fat little guy who sits 30 miles behind the front line gardening. That role belongs to the alien comm now. I want to be able to main class gorge and not have it be a temporary form that only gets used in niche situations!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree with most of your points, but I think the overarching issue is that gorge just needs a complete redesign it needs more to do. Be it in the form of utility or just more structures / constructs, the gorge & alien comm dynamic needs to find a proper balance where they both feel useful and involved.
The Gorge should be a:
<ul><li>Support Class</li><li>Live just behind the front line</li><li>Able to be offensive</li><li>Able to be defensive</li><li>Somewhat required for success</li></ul>
In TF2 you pretty much always have 2 engineers - anymore and it is a waste - any less and you can get rolled over.
As for the hydra, I see two ways to go:
<ul><li> Have 1 or 2, make them strong</li><li> Have 3 or 4, make them weak</li><li> Make this a commander or gorge decision! Upgrade to more powerful hydra, but you get less!</li></ul>
Make the Gorge able to move existing Hydra's (similar to an Engineer moving a dispenser/sentry).
You could actually have a cool sequence here, takes 10s for a Gorge to 'consume' a Hydra- cool animation of him eating it, maybe another of him 'puking' it.
I love the idea of two Gorge's per Hive, just another benefit to expansion.
I hate the idea of temporary hydra's. As a marine I would just wait and then attack.
The only DECENT defense the Kharaa have.
or leave the area because your attention is needed somewhere else these hydras will die. so if the creating of permanent infestation will not become esier than now, i would
be grateful about lowered hydra costs. especially if they are more effective in addition.
The only DECENT defense the Kharaa have.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
lol yeah.
i like to see them address turret spam, flamethrower problems.
we are only discussing an announced change (which might or might not come)
I agree that, with the current res model, people will probably just tend to skip hydras if they die off. It's more cost-effective to evolve to a better lifeform.
And I don't think the fix really justifies the mental hassle of keeping track of your hydras constantly. Unless UWE enhances the the UI a bit, it's gonna SUCK to always remember which hydras are dying when.
There are of course ways to reduce the hassle:
* put hydra info on the UI, with a countdown timer on each
* put a fixed cap on the hydras instead. When you exceed some cap number, the oldest hydra dies
* recover the P.res if a hydras dies of age, instead of in combat, so the gorge doesn't bleed res for doing a good job
But I think the simplest solution, where stuff just dies, is a mental hassle, and will really confuse new players. It's gonna need to be more sophisticated than that.
Did I miss some bot spam or something?
They could die off automatically unless they are heal sprayed once every X seconds/minutes. That way you can't "place and forget" but you'd be running around maintaining your garden if you wanted to keep them.
I think consuming them and getting X% res back would be more fun though as a gameplay element. It allows both aggresive and defensive hydra placement.
Er, hydras weren't in NS1.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/Dfqh2.gif" border="0" class="linked-image" />
They could die off automatically unless they are heal sprayed once every X seconds/minutes. That way you can't "place and forget" but you'd be running around maintaining your garden if you wanted to keep them.
I think consuming them and getting X% res back would be more fun though as a gameplay element. It allows both aggresive and defensive hydra placement.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Motig, what is your opinion on limiting the number of hydra's (a few strong ones) vs temporary (require periodic heal spray)?
Big FAT Gorge consuming Hydra's, (to move/regain res) who wouldn't love that? What do others think about this as an animation AND game mechanic?
Oh, there isn't one.
Then don't change anything.
The end.