<!--quoteo(post=2009499:date=Nov 4 2012, 08:06 AM:name=Temphage)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Temphage @ Nov 4 2012, 08:06 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2009499"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Despite all the LOLOL L2P trolls, nobody's really been able to debunk the accusation of a skulk with 0 pres in the mid / lategame vs. a marine with 0 pres in the mid / lategame. As someone else put it, you spawn as a marine, and you know you can kick ass. Then you get a shotgun, and you know you can kick more ass. Then the commander gets some upgrades, and you just kick even more ass. A skulk with 0 pres can TRY to xenocide, if they have Hive 3, but not only is Xenocide pretty low-power, but it forces a player to die, sit in the spawn queue, and while he's there he's earning no pres, and thus has no hope of advancing to a more capable lifeform. A marine with 0 pres can just find a shotgun lying around if he really wanted to upgrade. Late-game, the Skulk gets stuck to tagging things with parasite and running away, and hoping to chew down an RT before all the marines teleport across the map with their phase gate and blow him away.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I like how you compare two things by looking at the best component of one (high innate upgrades lategame and 'finds' a shotgun!) to the worst of another (high tech, low damage, generally bad ability).
Now let's look at how skulks should be played in late game. First of all, if you're a skulk late game then it is because you-done-messed-up and lost a couple higher lifeforms. I hope you did damage with them because if you lost your onos to kill an RT, then you're at fault for this situation. Remember that commanders can drop you lifeforms for tres. You really don't need 32 whips, instead ask him to drop 3 or 4 onos. Second, skulks still do very high dps to infantry and buildings. You're also very mobile with leap.
In battles: attack with lifeforms. It's hard to hit a skulk with an onos charging at you or fade swiping you. Attack slightly after them and preferably from the side/behind. As a skulk, you can greatly increase the effectiveness of your higher lifeform teammates simply by being there. It's harder to focus DPS on an onos if he has two skulk buddies flanking at the same time.
If not fighting: Leap and skulk around to their RTs // phasegates. Maps are big and marines require a lot of res to attack (health/ammo drops, scans, nanoshields, armory/obs drops). If you aren't very good at skulk or feel outclassed in a game then simply go attack their RTs. You can be very effective on the game by constantly backstabbing. At the very least you're going to draw 1-2 players away from the front line which makes your team's higher lifeforms stronger in that area. You also have a decent chance at winning a 1v1 against a marine who responds to you. If you don't think you can win, simply bite an RT for 10-15s, then leap away to the next RT. Then return to the first. Bounce between RTs or backstab phase gates during pushes.
And just a one line quip to think about in regards to skulk effectiveness: A skulk kills an armor 3 marine faster than a fade does.
<!--quoteo(post=2009768:date=Nov 4 2012, 04:59 PM:name=Onii-chan)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Onii-chan @ Nov 4 2012, 04:59 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2009768"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->A game cannot be fun if it's imbalanced, that's basic game design 101. Padding out the game with gimmicks or "features" might entertain the ADHD kiddies akin to jiggling keys in front of a toddler but it won't make a game deep. Less is more in that regard, juat ask Blizzard on SC2.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
NS1 was limited by a terrible engine, technology, and in a lot of ways by the developers themselves.
Yeah, stating that a balanced game is more fun is obvious, but NS2 has TONS of potential, so much so that it feels remarkably half-complete. Rather than work on balancing features, they instead simply smacked the delete key on a lot of concepts that were extremely workable. For example, one of the best features NS2 has over NS1 is the infestation / power system.
So what have they done with this system? Well, it kills alien structures that aren't on infestation, and powers down marine structures that aren't on power, and it changes the color of the lights.
That's it. Whoopee.
The last thing I want is for them to put balance as a higher priority over improving the game. It's easy to say "the game is balanced right now, so we don't want to add new stuff that might mess up the balance".
There is tons of unexplored territory and I don't think it's fair to gamers themselves to have to rely on third-party-mods to make the game that they should've made.
Desert Combat was a BF1942 mod that was MASSIVELY popular, probably more popular than NS1. One of the reasons people got such a kick out of it was it had oodles of features. They waited until they implemented all that they could think to reasonably implement before they worked on the balance. Whereas we have the opposite here. Content was cut for the sake of balance in this case, and the game suffers for it.
<!--quoteo(post=2009776:date=Nov 4 2012, 07:09 PM:name=PsympleJester)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (PsympleJester @ Nov 4 2012, 07:09 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=2009776"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Acid rocket Metabolism Web Hive teleportation Catalyst HMG Heavy armour that could equip anygun Scent of fear Hand grenades primal scream RT electrify..
These are just features that it had that NS2 doesnt... your lists include opinions if you want me to add opinions the list will be even longer.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Right thanks for reminding me. I'll give you acid rocket, SoF, web, hive teleporting and primal scream. Re-implementing them in one form or another might be interesting.
But stuff like hand grenades and RT electrify were pretty much band-aid fixes for the huge mobility and harassment potential the aliens had on the bigger maps that started coming after 2.0 and the alien domination that followed. Metabolism felt like this as well and was added because fades were not "independent enough" and was basically regen with energy cost. Not very interesting at all.
HA and HMG are already in, as a new, more powerful head-on form with some limitations to their mobility. Sure, jetpackers and light marines can't use miniguns, but upgrades rifles in NS2 are actually not completely worthless like the LMG was in NS1. Having to use a mixes tech path to cover each other's weakness much more interesting that straight armor upgrades, as we already have those in the form of armor/weapons 1-2-3.
You can't hand-wave away HMGs and stuff like it wasn't a feature, but then try to pretend the Gorge belly slide is some sort of amazing revolution of the game, hell I don't even think you can say that about infestation and power nodes, which overall were huge letdowns. And you can't say that for features like Exos and ARCs which merely replaced the NS1 content that got replaced (you didn't say that, but someone else said that in another thread).
Comments
I like how you compare two things by looking at the best component of one (high innate upgrades lategame and 'finds' a shotgun!) to the worst of another (high tech, low damage, generally bad ability).
Now let's look at how skulks should be played in late game. First of all, if you're a skulk late game then it is because you-done-messed-up and lost a couple higher lifeforms. I hope you did damage with them because if you lost your onos to kill an RT, then you're at fault for this situation. Remember that commanders can drop you lifeforms for tres. You really don't need 32 whips, instead ask him to drop 3 or 4 onos. Second, skulks still do very high dps to infantry and buildings. You're also very mobile with leap.
In battles: attack with lifeforms. It's hard to hit a skulk with an onos charging at you or fade swiping you. Attack slightly after them and preferably from the side/behind. As a skulk, you can greatly increase the effectiveness of your higher lifeform teammates simply by being there. It's harder to focus DPS on an onos if he has two skulk buddies flanking at the same time.
If not fighting: Leap and skulk around to their RTs // phasegates. Maps are big and marines require a lot of res to attack (health/ammo drops, scans, nanoshields, armory/obs drops). If you aren't very good at skulk or feel outclassed in a game then simply go attack their RTs. You can be very effective on the game by constantly backstabbing. At the very least you're going to draw 1-2 players away from the front line which makes your team's higher lifeforms stronger in that area. You also have a decent chance at winning a 1v1 against a marine who responds to you. If you don't think you can win, simply bite an RT for 10-15s, then leap away to the next RT. Then return to the first. Bounce between RTs or backstab phase gates during pushes.
And just a one line quip to think about in regards to skulk effectiveness: A skulk kills an armor 3 marine faster than a fade does.
Padding out the game with gimmicks or "features" might entertain the ADHD kiddies akin to jiggling keys in front of a toddler but it won't make a game deep. Less is more in that regard, juat ask Blizzard on SC2.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
NS1 was limited by a terrible engine, technology, and in a lot of ways by the developers themselves.
Yeah, stating that a balanced game is more fun is obvious, but NS2 has TONS of potential, so much so that it feels remarkably half-complete. Rather than work on balancing features, they instead simply smacked the delete key on a lot of concepts that were extremely workable. For example, one of the best features NS2 has over NS1 is the infestation / power system.
So what have they done with this system? Well, it kills alien structures that aren't on infestation, and powers down marine structures that aren't on power, and it changes the color of the lights.
That's it. Whoopee.
The last thing I want is for them to put balance as a higher priority over improving the game. It's easy to say "the game is balanced right now, so we don't want to add new stuff that might mess up the balance".
There is tons of unexplored territory and I don't think it's fair to gamers themselves to have to rely on third-party-mods to make the game that they should've made.
Desert Combat was a BF1942 mod that was MASSIVELY popular, probably more popular than NS1. One of the reasons people got such a kick out of it was it had oodles of features. They waited until they implemented all that they could think to reasonably implement before they worked on the balance. Whereas we have the opposite here. Content was cut for the sake of balance in this case, and the game suffers for it.
Metabolism
Web
Hive teleportation
Catalyst
HMG
Heavy armour that could equip anygun
Scent of fear
Hand grenades
primal scream
RT electrify..
These are just features that it had that NS2 doesnt... your lists include opinions if you want me to add opinions the list will be even longer.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Right thanks for reminding me.
I'll give you acid rocket, SoF, web, hive teleporting and primal scream.
Re-implementing them in one form or another might be interesting.
But stuff like hand grenades and RT electrify were pretty much band-aid fixes for the huge mobility and harassment potential the aliens had on the bigger maps that started coming after 2.0 and the alien domination that followed.
Metabolism felt like this as well and was added because fades were not "independent enough" and was basically regen with energy cost. Not very interesting at all.
HA and HMG are already in, as a new, more powerful head-on form with some limitations to their mobility.
Sure, jetpackers and light marines can't use miniguns, but upgrades rifles in NS2 are actually not completely worthless like the LMG was in NS1.
Having to use a mixes tech path to cover each other's weakness much more interesting that straight armor upgrades, as we already have those in the form of armor/weapons 1-2-3.