Gorge structure revamp plan

Champlo0Champlo0 Join Date: 2012-04-17 Member: 150617Members
To address the problems why 207 changed gorges in my opinion;

The massive free building limits on gorges were ridiculous. This was apparent with the huge amount of Gorge spam and ultra fortified alien strongholds. The new changes addressed this in that they lowered the limit and removed the persistence of the Gorge buildings, as well as requiring Gorges to manually recycle their buildings. Gorges also catalyze the alien expansion to make up for this due to the abysmal speed of alien expansion without Gorge spraying harvesters. The Hydra building was also nerfed to not track as fast. To sum it up:

+ Gorges catalyze alien expansion
- Gorges must manually recycle their buildings
- Alien expansion is abysmally slow without Gorges
- Gorge's buildings don't persist
- Gorges have an absolute cap on their buildings

Overall a hard nerf from the previous

+ Gorge buildings persist
+ Gorges could build automatically over old buildings
+ Gorges have caps that scale with hive amount
+ Aliens had faster expansion
+ Gorges catalyze alien expansion

While some might argue that the Gorge has buff in the regards that he is vital to the alien expansion, that point is invalid due to the previous builds where Gorges could catalyze the expansion extremely fast, however they could were not required because the expansion was still moderate paced without them. Thus, it was a nerf and not a buff because it overall nerfed the alien team.

Let's address and readdress the current issues with Gorge:

Gorges building anything is rather bulky; Gorges have to manually recycle buildings via a somewhat buggy and tedious method. Gorges also barely benefit from building due to the lackluster performance of the Hydra, and their limited solo ability to place them. Furthermore, Gorges are often tied down to catalyzing the alien expansion, often leaving them unable to fortify for some portion of the game. Gorges also have a relatively small window, if they die, to re-evolve into Gorge again (1 minute).

Heres some things we could do to address them:

<ul><li>Recycling Structures:
Recycling a gorge structure requires the Gorge to be in proximity and have direct visual connection with his structure. To fix this we should allow Gorges to recycle their structures via a simpler interface, possibly allowing them to cycle through their buildings by going to their build menu, and then clicking below the structure to recycle the particular structure in order of their placement.
</li><li>Small Gorge Window:
Expand the window to re-evolve to 1:30. The current window doesn't really take into account the length of death, getting to a safe location, and evolving. 30 more seconds would enable more versatility for the Gorge.
</li><li>Small Building Limit:
The current building limit is, in order: 5-3-10. This is inhibiting for the Gorge; goo walls need more length to be effective, unless the Gorge exclusively places one wall. Hydras, in the current build, need more concentration to compensate for a lackluster performance. Mini-cysts are also limited to their placement to help the expansion of the commander. To address this, it is simple: raise the limit. What is not simple is how to allow it to be raised. I propose that augmentation doubles the limit of all the Gorge buildings, and that additional hives raise the limit by 2-1-4 which would be doubled if aliens have an augmented hive to 4-2-8. Assuming in a balanced game that aliens get 2 hives this would create a common limit of 14-8-28 for a late game Gorge. The reason this would work is because in the mid to late game the RTs would be locked down in this theoretical game, and you would have 1-3 Gorges who would have to consistently remain Gorge to make their buildings persist.</li></ul>

These changes, either exclusive or inclusive, I believe would properly balance the Gorge to a better state for the current build.
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