4th hive upgrade: Damage?

duke_Qa

Searched and didn't see anything like it, so here goes.
Thought this might have been a way to make aliens a bit more interesting and the choices the khammander has to make even trickier(although I suspect it will hurt the shade first).

4th hive type: "Scythe"/generic-damage-hive-upgrade.
mutations:
- "Focus" / other damage-increasing mutation name, adds damage to attacks, reduces attack speed(?)
- "Burn" /other recharge-oriented mutation name, adds adrenaline regeneration speed.
alternative: "Burst" /other high-speed-attack-oriented mutation name, increases attack speed but doesn't decrease damage, good for lerks and other ranged attackers doing their thing. Total DPS should be less than focus though.

Chamber alternatives:
Babbler ant hill?
Screamer-chamber that makes it hard for the marines to hear incoming enemies, and commander can drop banshee-howls causing camera-shake and whatnot?
Also thought about Hydra-tower, like the old-school. But might be too balance-breaking and defensive though...

duke_Qa

No love for the 4th hive theory? Oh well, wasn't expecting it to rock the world but I thought it could have been an interesting way to expand the game in a relatively safe manner :p

Luminoth

I think that at this point the 3 hives are quite balanced and aliens don't really need a damage upgrade because when they hit, they allready hit pretty hard especially if you have level 0 or 1 armor. Plus increasing the attack speed would go against the aliens way, which is to be precise in their bites/slashes and so on.

It's not whitout reason that the last update reduced the onos gore by 0.5 meters. Ok, aliens have to be fun, but they shouldn't be brainless for that matter.

As for the lerks spike attack, my guess is that increasing it's "firerate" would be to OP. In fact, right now as a marine, it is very hard to notice that you're actually being hit by them and that attack has allready killed many marines as it is and increasing the firerate would be too much.

duke_Qa

Well I'd hope that the marines would get some more choices too if the aliens got access to this. Or else nothing good would come of it. Expansion-pack material more or less, not r240.

Higher Lerk(/alien attack-rate) would allow them to send out a lot more spikes in a shorter amount of time, but it would also drain their energy much faster, so you couldn't do it all the time. Since there's no real way to increase damage on aliens by upgrades, a damage-oriented hive upgrade would need some variations of how that damage gets dealt. Also, increasing the sound-effect when you are being hit with massive amounts of spikes is a viable addition to such a mutation, outside the box and all.

Anyway, I think a higher adrenaline regeneration speed is more in the vein of this upgrade, even though it gets into shift-territory.


It's up to the khammander to decide which tactic works best for his team. If the Marines know the enemy is going damage, then they should have the time and opportunity to upgrade armor before weapons/exos.