feedback on commanding and strategy
Wheeee
Join Date: 2003-02-18 Member: 13713Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2003-02-18 Member: 13713Members, Reinforced - Shadow
i've been experimenting with commanding on both sides and i felt like now would be a good time to offer my thoughts on it.
Marines:
Marine commanding is feeling very complete (albeit obviously lacking a few upgrade options) from an RTS standpoint. There is a good mix of macro and micro, and there is definitely the feel of a solid strategy game, with fleshed-out options to tech, expand/gain map control, or attack. The experience is very smooth, and i feel has a low enough skill floor for new commanders to be only mildly intimidated, the learning curve is not too steep, and there is a lot of room for high level play. I do feel, however, that there isn't enough consequence for medspamming. It is entirely too easy/cheap to medspam. This makes weapon dropping by the comm very inefficient as it is much cheaper to spent 1-5 pres on medpacks and ammo packs to save a shotgunner in the field than it is to spend 20-35 pres to drop a new weapon once he respawns. speaking of weapon dropping, it's too costly since you can't outfit the entire marine team on the 100 pres you're limited to.
Kharaa:
There really are not enough tech choices early game and I think that locking # of chambers/lifeforms to hives was the wrong solution to the problems it was meant to solve, because now aliens become extremely predictable. Also, the khamm doesn't have enough direct-support abilities to match the marine comm. A solo marine being medpack/ammopacked and nano-shielded can rout the entire alien team, especially when defending a corridor. yes, there are things like umbra or cloaking that you can do to help, but those are limited by the range of the chamber. it's nearly impossible to support an offensive push by aliens due to the slow growth of chambers, and the requirement for them to be built on infestation. This makes a lot of the khamm's abilities more defensive, which usually means you're already in deep ######. Cysts coming from hive energy is a terrible mechanic; an early marine push that kills 2-3 cysts in a chain will set you back by a minute or more, which snowballs into an unwinnable situation since upgrades come late, which means the marines can do timing pushes, etc that your team can't counter. I understand that the idea behind alien khamm is different than that of the marine one, but it should still have those elements of decisionmaking that make an RTS what it is - managing your team's resources, activating abilities and micromanaging units/buildings, and making meaningful decisions on your team's upgrades and upgrade path. Right now there is no such thing: you build as many RTs as you dare and then you save up for a 2nd hive. There's no real strategy behind it.
If I had to fix the current strategy side of kharaa, i would do the following: keep the hive choice (crag/shade/shift), but allow all chambers to be built. Only the chosen chamber type for the hive is allowed to get the upgrade buildings (shells, veils, whatever the shift equivalent is), and only the chosen chamber type can be upgraded. Also, the effects of each chamber scale with the number of hives the aliens control. For example, Let's say you have a shade hive and you build a crag. The crag base healing would be, say, 3 health/tick, +2 for each hive you control, +5 if you have a crag hive. So in this example, you have 1 hive, so your crag's health pulses would heal for 5/tick. Now let's say you gained a second hive, and made it a crag hive. Now your crags are doing 14 health/tick. Or let's say you had a crag hive, and you built a shade. The shade's cloaking ability would allow skulks to travel with some slight camouflage shader effect, and become fully visible after attacking once. Now, perhaps you got a shade hive as your 2nd hive, now the cloaking ability allows the skulks to have much stronger camo for a longer period of time, and would slowly become visible even after attacking, instead of immediately.
Also, I would allow fades at hive 1 and onos at hive 2, and give some extra options to kharaa to increase their pres gain. This way there will be a serious choice between expanding your map/RT control and going for a 2nd hive, or building other chambers.
Finally, I would suggest placing cysts be much reduced in energy cost. 5 sounds good. However, when placing cysts, the initial infestation spread is very low, and you must use hive energy to "bolster" a cyst and give it a larger infestation field. That way you're not boned if a single marine gets into your cyst chain and destroys 3 or 4 of them before any alien can respond.
Other thoughts:
* The arms lab upgrades are too important to the marine game. Because aliens are locked from evolves based on hives, marines can count on alien strategy being either 1) rush or 2) build a hive and get fades. this leads to very predictable strategic gameplay and makes the optimal tech path pretty much a given. This means that everything else after shotguns is marginalized in importance except for getting those critical w2/a2 upgrades.
* Still feels like having a bad comm is still an insurmountable detriment to the marine team. Especially worrisome is the fact that marines almost always lose if no one comms in the first 10-15 seconds of the game. Has been suggested elsewhere, but games should remain locked until someone gets in the comm chair.
* It's too much easier to defend an empty hallway than it is to defend the marine base due to structures blocking your bullets and making it difficult to track opponents. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.
* Tech trees are too easy to advance through. I feel that the more advanced in a tech tree you go, the more you should need to commit to make it happen. It's far too easy to research every single weapon and jetpacks and all the weapon and armor upgrades. I think this is indicative of a deeper problem though, which is the current resource model.
* Right now pres and tres tick up at the same rate, which is based on the number of extractors you control. In other games with two or more resource types, you must invest one kind of resource to increase production in another kind of resource (e.g. you must have wood and gold to build extra mines/expansions to gain more gold income, or spend more gold and increase food count to train peasants to harvest more wood in warcraft 3). This kind of trade off allows you more control over what kind of resources you want to harvest, and makes decision making important to avoid supply locks. Right now the only decision making that is available to the comm/kham is "do i spend or do i not spend." Without going into balance issues of -how fast- these resources are collected, we should consider that with more resource types, there needs to be more trade-offs in order to balance their collection. Otherwise it would make more sense to collapse the res system together (i.e. comm support mechanics like medpacks, weapon dropping, etc come out of tres) because having separate resource systems is just complexity for the sake of complexity, and adds nothing to gameplay.
Marines:
Marine commanding is feeling very complete (albeit obviously lacking a few upgrade options) from an RTS standpoint. There is a good mix of macro and micro, and there is definitely the feel of a solid strategy game, with fleshed-out options to tech, expand/gain map control, or attack. The experience is very smooth, and i feel has a low enough skill floor for new commanders to be only mildly intimidated, the learning curve is not too steep, and there is a lot of room for high level play. I do feel, however, that there isn't enough consequence for medspamming. It is entirely too easy/cheap to medspam. This makes weapon dropping by the comm very inefficient as it is much cheaper to spent 1-5 pres on medpacks and ammo packs to save a shotgunner in the field than it is to spend 20-35 pres to drop a new weapon once he respawns. speaking of weapon dropping, it's too costly since you can't outfit the entire marine team on the 100 pres you're limited to.
Kharaa:
There really are not enough tech choices early game and I think that locking # of chambers/lifeforms to hives was the wrong solution to the problems it was meant to solve, because now aliens become extremely predictable. Also, the khamm doesn't have enough direct-support abilities to match the marine comm. A solo marine being medpack/ammopacked and nano-shielded can rout the entire alien team, especially when defending a corridor. yes, there are things like umbra or cloaking that you can do to help, but those are limited by the range of the chamber. it's nearly impossible to support an offensive push by aliens due to the slow growth of chambers, and the requirement for them to be built on infestation. This makes a lot of the khamm's abilities more defensive, which usually means you're already in deep ######. Cysts coming from hive energy is a terrible mechanic; an early marine push that kills 2-3 cysts in a chain will set you back by a minute or more, which snowballs into an unwinnable situation since upgrades come late, which means the marines can do timing pushes, etc that your team can't counter. I understand that the idea behind alien khamm is different than that of the marine one, but it should still have those elements of decisionmaking that make an RTS what it is - managing your team's resources, activating abilities and micromanaging units/buildings, and making meaningful decisions on your team's upgrades and upgrade path. Right now there is no such thing: you build as many RTs as you dare and then you save up for a 2nd hive. There's no real strategy behind it.
If I had to fix the current strategy side of kharaa, i would do the following: keep the hive choice (crag/shade/shift), but allow all chambers to be built. Only the chosen chamber type for the hive is allowed to get the upgrade buildings (shells, veils, whatever the shift equivalent is), and only the chosen chamber type can be upgraded. Also, the effects of each chamber scale with the number of hives the aliens control. For example, Let's say you have a shade hive and you build a crag. The crag base healing would be, say, 3 health/tick, +2 for each hive you control, +5 if you have a crag hive. So in this example, you have 1 hive, so your crag's health pulses would heal for 5/tick. Now let's say you gained a second hive, and made it a crag hive. Now your crags are doing 14 health/tick. Or let's say you had a crag hive, and you built a shade. The shade's cloaking ability would allow skulks to travel with some slight camouflage shader effect, and become fully visible after attacking once. Now, perhaps you got a shade hive as your 2nd hive, now the cloaking ability allows the skulks to have much stronger camo for a longer period of time, and would slowly become visible even after attacking, instead of immediately.
Also, I would allow fades at hive 1 and onos at hive 2, and give some extra options to kharaa to increase their pres gain. This way there will be a serious choice between expanding your map/RT control and going for a 2nd hive, or building other chambers.
Finally, I would suggest placing cysts be much reduced in energy cost. 5 sounds good. However, when placing cysts, the initial infestation spread is very low, and you must use hive energy to "bolster" a cyst and give it a larger infestation field. That way you're not boned if a single marine gets into your cyst chain and destroys 3 or 4 of them before any alien can respond.
Other thoughts:
* The arms lab upgrades are too important to the marine game. Because aliens are locked from evolves based on hives, marines can count on alien strategy being either 1) rush or 2) build a hive and get fades. this leads to very predictable strategic gameplay and makes the optimal tech path pretty much a given. This means that everything else after shotguns is marginalized in importance except for getting those critical w2/a2 upgrades.
* Still feels like having a bad comm is still an insurmountable detriment to the marine team. Especially worrisome is the fact that marines almost always lose if no one comms in the first 10-15 seconds of the game. Has been suggested elsewhere, but games should remain locked until someone gets in the comm chair.
* It's too much easier to defend an empty hallway than it is to defend the marine base due to structures blocking your bullets and making it difficult to track opponents. Not sure if this is a good thing or not.
* Tech trees are too easy to advance through. I feel that the more advanced in a tech tree you go, the more you should need to commit to make it happen. It's far too easy to research every single weapon and jetpacks and all the weapon and armor upgrades. I think this is indicative of a deeper problem though, which is the current resource model.
* Right now pres and tres tick up at the same rate, which is based on the number of extractors you control. In other games with two or more resource types, you must invest one kind of resource to increase production in another kind of resource (e.g. you must have wood and gold to build extra mines/expansions to gain more gold income, or spend more gold and increase food count to train peasants to harvest more wood in warcraft 3). This kind of trade off allows you more control over what kind of resources you want to harvest, and makes decision making important to avoid supply locks. Right now the only decision making that is available to the comm/kham is "do i spend or do i not spend." Without going into balance issues of -how fast- these resources are collected, we should consider that with more resource types, there needs to be more trade-offs in order to balance their collection. Otherwise it would make more sense to collapse the res system together (i.e. comm support mechanics like medpacks, weapon dropping, etc come out of tres) because having separate resource systems is just complexity for the sake of complexity, and adds nothing to gameplay.
Comments
however:
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I do feel, however, that there isn't enough consequence for medspamming.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
+1. in fact i'll now make a thread in ideas&suggestions to adress this...
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I think that locking # of chambers/lifeforms to hives was the wrong solution to the problems it was meant to solve<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
i disagree on that. if you only have 2-3 options available in early game, it adds to diversity if you can only chose one of them. before this change, people would often simply chose either all or none.