Marines need something to spend team resources on late game

Destroid

<div class="IPBDescription">Other than MACs and ARCs</div>This problem stems from a few separate issues coming together. The first is the aliens lack of ability to crack a turtle (should be adressed when Onos come in), and the change from pooled resources to team/personal resources. In NS1 your resources late game after all upgrades and facilities are purchased were controlled by having to replace weapons and equipment as your marines were killed fighting (and medkits/ammo? I can't remember if they cost resources). In NS2 because these pools are split in late game the team resources have basically no use other than building turrets, ARCs and MACs. This leads to ARC and turret spam, with no cost to the marine teams fighting ability, where in NS1 you would sacrifice player capability to spam such weapons.

This problem will be somewhat alleviated when Onos and Exo come in, but the possibility still remains. I'm not really sure what would be a good way to put a drain (especially late game) on team resources, that would have an impact after the tech is all done but not too great an effect on them earlier in the game. I'd prefer something that was spent on the players, but this would be a departure from the everything else that currently exists in NS2.

The alien team I feel is less susceptible to this as they must replace hives (which the marines are more easily able to destroy), and even if they didn't there really isn't anything useful for the alien commander to spam.

Zuriki

NS2's economy has always been plagued with issues. I'm not going to list them, if you look around you'll see plenty of people going over it. But the fact remains, the game is feature incomplete and until the game is feature complete it's a frivolous waste of time balancing the game.

UWE disagrees with me, but I remain adamant that they should just focus on pushing features and forget balance fully (with the exception of game-breaking balance, theoretical example being; if a single ARC was near-invincible and could 1-shot entire hives).

ktimekiller

I wholeheartedly agree with the above statements. Given that you try to balance a game that does not feature all the proper implementations of tech patterns, various upgrades, and items, you will only serve to make the game horribly balanced as each new update that includes some new "thing" comes out.

While the current Marine late game might be ######, there are no heavies or jetpacks, which were one of the larger resource dumps for the Marine teams in NS1