Why stalemates occur when the marines are losing.
thefonz
Join Date: 2011-06-22 Member: 105847Members
Join Date: 2011-06-22 Member: 105847Members
We've all seen one, complete map domination by the aliens, res at 999 and counting. Yet the marine team simply will not die. Some say "noob aliens can't finish the marines" others say "freaking marine turtles!". The problem isn't player's skill, it's tech.
Let's assume that we have a fairly balanced, typical game. The map is summit. The Kharaa have Alien Start and Data Core under control and hived, harvesters in those locations as well as Reactor and Crevice. The Marines have Marine Start and Heliport fully based, even a comm chair in Heliport. Extractors in both bases, and Flight Control and Ventilation.
Let's see what happens when each team start losing.
The Kharaa
Assume the Marines make a hard push on Data Core and succeed in knocking out the hive and securing the area. Now the Kharaa have lost resources and important abilities:
Harvester - one less harvester to produce res.
Leap - skulks can no longer close gaps quickly or get past turrets without suffering a lot of damage.
Bile Bomb - Great at taking out sentries that are un-flankable.
Crag/Shade - Probably shade, but either way no new crags/shades can be built.
Fade - No new fades. if you have one, better not die.
Now the marines have a big tech advantage and are in a good position to push the final hive.
The Marines
Assume the Kharaa make a push and heliport and take it out. A hive is dropped, currently, all this means is another place to heal.
Lets see what the marines have lost:
Extractor - One less extractor to produce res
So there is a huge difference in how losing a tech point affects each team. Because the marine team suffers no loss of tech, they are able to turtle. It is very hard to crack a base full of GL's, Shotties, and Flamers. Whereas a base full of skulks and lerks is a much easier target.
There exist only two solutions:
One: The Onos better be one hell of a badass. A serious base cracker.
Two: If the Onos turns out to be a big pansy, I fully believe that marines should have to use tech point for some critical structures such as the prototype lab.
Link goes to I&S forum where I got the tech point idea. The gist of it is that requiring marines to use a tech point for critical structures forces the marine team to expand.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=114970" target="_blank">Tech Point Suggestion</a>
Let's assume that we have a fairly balanced, typical game. The map is summit. The Kharaa have Alien Start and Data Core under control and hived, harvesters in those locations as well as Reactor and Crevice. The Marines have Marine Start and Heliport fully based, even a comm chair in Heliport. Extractors in both bases, and Flight Control and Ventilation.
Let's see what happens when each team start losing.
The Kharaa
Assume the Marines make a hard push on Data Core and succeed in knocking out the hive and securing the area. Now the Kharaa have lost resources and important abilities:
Harvester - one less harvester to produce res.
Leap - skulks can no longer close gaps quickly or get past turrets without suffering a lot of damage.
Bile Bomb - Great at taking out sentries that are un-flankable.
Crag/Shade - Probably shade, but either way no new crags/shades can be built.
Fade - No new fades. if you have one, better not die.
Now the marines have a big tech advantage and are in a good position to push the final hive.
The Marines
Assume the Kharaa make a push and heliport and take it out. A hive is dropped, currently, all this means is another place to heal.
Lets see what the marines have lost:
Extractor - One less extractor to produce res
So there is a huge difference in how losing a tech point affects each team. Because the marine team suffers no loss of tech, they are able to turtle. It is very hard to crack a base full of GL's, Shotties, and Flamers. Whereas a base full of skulks and lerks is a much easier target.
There exist only two solutions:
One: The Onos better be one hell of a badass. A serious base cracker.
Two: If the Onos turns out to be a big pansy, I fully believe that marines should have to use tech point for some critical structures such as the prototype lab.
Link goes to I&S forum where I got the tech point idea. The gist of it is that requiring marines to use a tech point for critical structures forces the marine team to expand.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=114970" target="_blank">Tech Point Suggestion</a>
Comments
I think the role Power Nodes play in stalemate prevention is also not significant enough.
The only real siege breaker the aliens have is the Gorge's bile bomb ability. Fades, by design, don't destroy marine bases. They are great at picking off squads of marines, but in the end, you don't win the game by just killing marines. Lerks used to be able to spam spores into marine bases without putting themselves into the direct line of fire of turrets/mass marines, but with the Lerk's redesign its much less viable to lay down spores and keep the marines scattered and confused within their fortifications.
We can play around with the most minute values and variables in the current state of the game, but in the end things aren't going to be just right until we get the Onos for aliens and Jetpack/Heavy armor for marines. As far as i can tell, the Onos isn't too far away from eventually being completed, however if i recall correctly, the dev's aren't going to put it into the game yet in order to avoid upsetting the already imbalanced gameplay favoring aliens. If you'd prefer unbalanced gameplay over long stalemates, i guess we can opt in for putting the Onos in ASAP regardless of the progress of Jetpacks/Exosuit.
I'm sure you can say they should just balance the game around the aliens having 3 tiers of tech, to be evenly matched with a marine team with 2 tiers of tech, what happens when we finally add the third marine tier of tech when the game has been balanced for only two tiers of tech? Its back to the same old careful tedious balancing over and over again, which the game still hasn't become perfectly balanced since build 178, and even before then it wasn't really all that great, it was just way harder to use the Fade.
Harvester - one less harvester to produce res.
Leap - skulks can no longer close gaps quickly or get past turrets without suffering a lot of damage.
Bile Bomb - Great at taking out sentries that are un-flankable.
Crag/Shade - Probably shade, but either way no new crags/shades can be built.
Fade - No new fades. if you have one, better not die.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's not entirely true. Both shade and crag can be built at the same hive spot if you have two. So loosing a hive doesn't imply loosing on the two.
(I usually drop whip + crag then shade, all in Alien Start).
Do aliens really loose Bilebomb ? I thought they kept it as long as the upgraded whip is alive (again, in AS)
I also think that stalemates can be won by the Aliens, if they work together.
Fades take care of marines, skulks and gorges of buildings, gorges heal fades and lerks block line of sight to cover skulks
But one very important part is the role of the alien comm at this point !
Just yesterday I joined a game in which the marines had Heli locked down with turrets, PG etc. To help the push I just had to make a line of cysts into heli.
This divert the turrets from the aliens and allow the push to be mush easier. Of course this consume a lot of energy from the hives. So it limits the use of this strategy and forced me to wait before I could do it again. In the mean time, the marines had some time to react. I think it was in the same game in which they used this time to kill DC hive. But we had AS and Cross and eventually won. I don't know how marines felt a this end of this game, but at least they had the opportunity to see the outside of marine start and this game ended.
tl;dr: Stalemates can be won if aliens work together, this includes the comm.
Alien com can help out a lot by cyst spamming rine base, disabling ARCs and sentries while Fades push and Gorges quickly build up some hydras/bilebomb cc
edit: Despite that I agree that the onos will have to fit this role
Let's assume that we have a fairly balanced, typical game. The map is summit. The Kharaa have Alien Start and Data Core under control and hived, harvesters in those locations as well as Reactor and Crevice. The Marines have Marine Start and Heliport fully based, even a comm chair in Heliport. Extractors in both bases, and Flight Control and Ventilation.
Let's see what happens when each team start losing.
The Marines
Assume the Kharaa make a push and heliport and take it out. A hive is dropped, currently, all this means is another place to heal.
Lets see what the marines have lost:
Extractor - One less extractor to produce res
So there is a huge difference in how losing a tech point affects each team. Because the marine team suffers no loss of tech, they are able to turtle.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
thats right Aliens rely more on the technodes than the Aliens.
But if you destroy the Armslab f.e. The Marines lose all they upgrades and it most GG then.
Aliens need to focus on a building and take it out, like in NS1.
Stalemates are because most players go for kills or are focusing the IPs or powernode. If it is so far that Aliens have the full map 2Fades attacking rines in the base and 2 Skulks with swarm get the Armslab down in 3-4s.
The problem Stalemates exists only in PUB games.
Indeed they do, but thats because the public is usually very disorganized and don't listen to anyone..ever. Once they start realizing it's a TEAM based game, then it gets fun again.
But this game is also made (i hope) FOR the public to buy and play, and increase sales, which is why we need to nip stalemates in the butt.
True, bile bomb damage does need a damage increase. If the onos was the only class designed to destroy structures, that would put a lot of pressure on that player, much like how there is a lot of pressure in NS1 for the fade to do well.
-also-
<!--quoteo(post=1880612:date=Oct 19 2011, 01:47 AM:name=Heroman117)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Heroman117 @ Oct 19 2011, 01:47 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1880612"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->The problem is simply the fact that the tech tree is incomplete.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This sums things up pretty well.
I agree partially. I do expect a completed tech tree will greatly improve game play and reduce stalemates. However a completed tech tree also means that the marines will have their Onos counters available (Minigun + Heavy Armor/Jet Packs). Once again, since there is little to no dependance on tech points for Marines, a stalemate can arise.
I'm sure this will change with acid rocket, and onos.
This.
Competitive matches are a bit like playing chess right now in that once a team falls far enough behind they usually resign. If one side wanted, they could easily drag out some of these matches into the 2+ hour territory that you see in pubs, but that would defeat the purpose of the matches (i.e. to practice and have fun).
In effect, a similar thing sort of happens in pub matches where once side has enough rage/boredquits that they lose. Or the server crashes.
And if you have more than one oberservatory, you practically got infinite beacon.
If beacon cost 15 Team Res(alá NS1) this problem would be alot less seen, and marines would rarely drag a match out with one base.
Aliens would simply be able to take out the extractors, and then attack base.
Marines won't be able to keep using beacon, they wouldn't be able to afford it without extractors.
This solution would also solve the silly obersavory hiding tactics that are being used at the moment.
Observatories around the map are being used as cheap, mass teleporters(phase gate?). Which are way too powerful compared to their cost.
Hidden observatory res cost, compared with two connecting phase gates:
Observatory: 10 Team Res
Phase gate: 55 Team Res (Incl. 10 res from observatory)
Make beacon cost 15 Team res and marines won't cause as many stalemates. Beacon will only be used as a last resort to save some marine territory.
need to be able to do it only once a round per obs, or something.
need to be able to do it only once a round per obs, or something.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't think having several observatories should give you "more beacon".
Make it cost 15 Team Res, so marines can't use distress beacon if they are low on extractors.
It will solve alot of the current stalemates.
Cooldown/limit(regardless of economical situation) per observatory is creating stalemates.
The marines have no motivation to expand and hold.
It is far easier to simply stop or crush a Hive and then go home.
The game is more entertaining if they do...and god bless you marine commanders who play this way.
For people arguing about the placement of structures can save them forever.
(I want the shade at the 2nd hive BTW)
It can be simplified to ...
Aliens lose:
Fade
Leap
Marines lose:
Resource Node
and it still does make sense why a alien loss is a quicker downward slope than the marines.
Aliens lose two HUGE combat modifiers and marines lose a little money.
The simplest, and easiest way to stop stalemates, is to implement a replacement "end-game" feature until UWE gets the HMG, JP, EXO, ONOS, CHAMBERS, into the game.
Such as: which ever team holds 3 techpoints, gets a small overall team bonus. Any team that holds 4 tech points, gets a LARGE team bonus, that effectively finishes the game.
Any situation where aliens or marines have taken 4 techpoints in a 5 techpoint map... that should be game over.
I'm tired of playing these drawn out games where players are occupied and involved in a drawn out NOT end-game situation, missing out on the great early-mid game tactics. And for anyone that argues or believes in the "epic" comeback. There are no real epic comebacks now, not without tier 3 units, just turret farming, hydra farming, that reduces server performance and kills servers when everyone leaves after a 2 hour game.
If there is a 20-50% increase in dmg and health for either team once they reach 4 techpoints... it's gg. I don't assume that this feature would require a lot of effort either. Just use this for now until UWE can implement end-game features, then remove it once they're in. If you agree with this idea, please let schimmel know in his Balance Mod thread so we can implement it within the Inversion servers.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=115099&st=40" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...15099&st=40</a>
^^
You might be right marines have alot of other things they really need resources for, but then again if you need to use beacon, your team made a mistake.
10 tres would also do the job. But beacon should have a economical cost, as it had in NS1. Distress Beacon was only used as a last resort, and marines couldn't use it if they didn't have any resource towers.
edit: Despite that I agree that the onos will have to fit this role<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
What alien comms are forgetting is to use chambers actively and offensively.
Also, alien players are to quick to leave the infestation..