While you are certainly correct that there significant imbalances aside of the economy, I would like to argue that even these are ultimately largely a byproduct of the broken economy. Aside from the fact that a few gorges and crags can outheal ARCs, why is it that marines with a 600 t.res advantage don't have a significant lead on aliens? First and foremost that is because aside from harvesters, the second hive and 2 upgrades as well as 3 relatively 'vital' upgrades (leap, bilebomb, blink), the alien t.res economy simply doesn't have to invest in anything else for aliens to be competitive. All t.res gained from that point is then spent on spamming whips, crags and shifts, as well as on even more higher lifeforms.
If we look at the basic cost estimate of what a 'competitive' alien side needs it is:
40 for hive
30 for first upgrade (cara or cele)
30 for second upgrade (cara or cele)
30 for crag and shift upgrade on hive
25 for leap
20 for bilebomb
30 for blink
205 t.res. With just this and p.res lifeforms who require no prior t.res research, aliens are going to be competitive even against lategame marines.
Now for the marine side it looks like this:
15 extra IP
10 armory
15 obs
15 PG tech
30 2 PGs (minimum, but let's be honest, they'll need more.
5 Welders
20 Shotguns
20 Arms Lab
150 Armour and Weapons 3
20 Adv Armory
15 Second CC
40 Proto Lab
25 JPs
380! That's almost double what alien need in t.res. And mind you I am omitting 'optional' things like EXOs, flamethrowers, gls, arcs, sentries and mines. (not to mention scans, ammo and med drops) This is the VERY basics of what marines need to invest in order to be competitive with the 205 t.res alien investment. Even if you calculate in the fact that aliens spend 1 t.res per cyst and need on average another 5 per harvesters, will want some shifts (10) or crags (10), they don't even come close to what marines have to spend.
So do tell me, oh wise people who claim the economy isn't broken. How exactly isn't it? How is it even remotely balanced that aliens are competitive at just 2 hives and are competitive for late game at almost half the cost as marines? Aliens get to the late-game faster if they are not crippled heavily from the get-go (less than half of the marine amount of extractors), which means marines have a very narrow timeframe in which they stand a chance of winning. It also means that it's much harder for marines to properly delay the alien teching than it is for aliens to do so with marines (as there's less overall costs involved)
The more I think about it the more outrageous it is that UWE still hasn't made this analysis themselves. I'd say given these numbers, it's quite frankly remarkable that the winrates aren't worse than 60/40. Yes, this is an assymetric game, but no that can be no justification for the economic reality of each side being assymetric too.
This issue has been known since the alpha and UWE balanced it by making alien res expansion slower than marine (e.g. aliens have to cyst, extractor build time < harvester build time, extractor health > harvester health so it takes longer to kill, etc). I don't necessarily agree with this approach, but its just as valid for balancing the economies than adjusting the critical tech TRes values.
This is also why its common to see comp marine teams get 4-7 early RTs as opposed to 2-3 for aliens. My personal estimate is that marines need to gain a roughly 1.5-2x total res gathered advantage over aliens in the early game to be able to tech at a equivalent rate (which seems consistent with your roughly 1.85 ratio).
Yes but slower alien expansion is
1. counteracted by the presence of a single gorge
2. relatively insignificant in the overall t.res picture, particularly in pubs where there is generally a lot more pressure on marine rather than alien harvesters
In addition, marines also have to build power nodes which, particularly when only one or two marines are present, delays their expansion speed to some extent just as well. (And then we're not even talking about repairing broken power nodes without welders) It's not important to forget about this.
So yeah, not only is the slower expansion rate an incredibly complex way to try and 'balance' the hugely cheaper alien tech, it's also very much an inefficient one.
Yes. Thats why "cysts only for gorges" would fix it. It sure takes away some of the little options the alien com has. But it is the best way to fix all the mentioned problems. Sure, in exchange we need more things for the alien com to do. But this is the lesser problem I think.
Problem with cysts only on gorges is that
- it makes the alien commander even more of an empty shell than it already is
- it's very tedious to constantly require a gorge every-time a cyst chain gets cut somewhere because of a ninja marine. Basically the comm would sit there powerless, constantly requesting gorges to run to point A and B to get something done. It's also just incredibly unintuitive that the commander can place all the structures yet has no power to actually do so until a gorge has cysted an area.
The idea certainly has merit at the start of the game, but as the game progresses it would become an increasingly tedious task for the gorge. So no, we had it in the past (both on comm and on gorge) and I think removing it was the best choice. Gorges definitely need more things on their hands, as do alien commanders, but cysts aren't it.
Basically the comm would sit there powerless, constantly requesting gorges to run to point A and B to get something done.
Like the marine com? It is exactly what you try to fix. Getting players from the frontline back to build up the economy. Also the increased teamplay requirement between gorges and kham would introduce more ways to fail. (also like at the marine team)
But yes, it takes more from the kham... and he got already so little...
As you all are postin suggestions here:
Upgradeable cysts: Commanders get a high cooldown on cyst placement, in turn they can upgrade their existing cysts to increase their radius. Upgrade cost and time would increase for each upgrade, but gorges can heal up cysts to speed up their growth and infestation spread. New cysts can only be placed on infestation.
-> The alien comm gets to do some micromanagement througout the game.
-> Deals with cyst spam.
-> Hiding cysts in not so obvious spots becomes neccesary and feasible.
-> Makes early gorges a valuable asset.
chasing broken cystlines as gorge is arguably an even worse and tedious mechanic than powernodes are for marines.
It doesn't sound tedious to me. It sounds dangerous and challenging, because a broken cyst chain means "marines were here and maybe they still are".
Right now (at least in mid-level pub games) marines don't actually break cyst chains very often, because it's not worth spending five seconds per cyst and drawing attention to your presence given that the kham will just recyst in a heartbeat. BUT! If you knew that it would draw some gorges off the front lines, NOW it would be worth doing - or at least worth considering, depending on whether your mission was sneak-and-snipe or wanton-destruction.
This also plays nicely with the recent buffs to gorge spit. Gorges can hunt down and fix broken cyst chains, with the accompanying risk of encountering marines... but those encounters could go either way now that the gorge has a decent offensive weapon, so it's both a risk and an opportunity.
So by requiring gorges to make and repair cyst chains, you've upped the stakes for behind-the-lines play for both aliens and marines. That's a win-win.
If we look at the basic cost estimate of what a 'competitive' alien side needs it is:
205 t.res.
Now for the marine side it looks like this:
380!
So do tell me, oh wise people who claim the economy isn't broken. How exactly isn't it? How is it even remotely balanced that aliens are competitive at just 2 hives and are competitive for late game at almost half the cost as marines?
You've made this point several times, but I don't think it's justified. For example:
It's vital for the RTS component to work that both sides are subject to the same economic ruleset. Though one could argue that this is only partially the case anyway since alien p.res works differently from marine one and t.res is worth less on top of that because it needs to be spent on less. Messing with income rates just wouldn't be a good idea. They COULD consider messing with some of the lifeform costs, though that would also affect the timing of higher lifeforms which is not necessarily something they want.
Here you say it's vital, but then immediately afterwards point out why it's not actually vital after all.
You can think of a.p.res, a.t.res, m.p.res, and m.t.res as four completely independent currencies, each with their own value in terms of game-winning potential. You might think that they should be balanced, but those numbers aren't what we want to balance. Win ratios should be balanced; strategies should be balanced; tactics and weapons and lifeforms should be balanced. But resource amounts are merely an internal bookkeeping number of no external consequence. It doesn't matter if alien res is twice as effective as marine res; what matters is if aliens win twice as often as marines.
Having res be more-or-less the same value across the board can be a helpful tool in balancing factions and strategies and weapons. But it's not vital. And clearly UWE have chosen a different method.
I disagree that the kham/t-res model is the underlying cause of the balance problems. Balance is the culmination of many, many factors. It's quite possible to balance the game using the existing economic model; UWE just hasn't gotten there, yet. As a very crude example, they could buff all marine HP by 1% every month until the win ratios got to about 50/50. Poof - problem solved. (Or rather "solved".)
A much more important question is whether the kham/t-res model leads to better gameplay assuming the game is also balanced accordingly.
I think you've been making the case that kham/t-res gives a big advantage to the aliens relative to NS1, and that NS2 marine play isn't also sufficiently altered from NS1 to counterbalance that advantage. You make a good case. HOWEVER, if your point is that the kham/t-res model cannot be balanced, I think you've not come close to making that case. If that is your point, I'd like to see it argued more persuasively.
@CrazyEddie: Certainly 1 res for aliens does not have to have the same value of 1 res for the marines but it would make balancing the game a lot easier if that were the case. You have this similar in Starcraft 2, where Terrans need a lot of minerals and protoss need a lot of gas. However one 100 mineral Zealot is about as strong as 2 50 mineral Space Marines.
Why would you complicate the game, by letting one team get stronger with the same amount of ressources given and then try to counterbalance that by making it harder for them to gain this ressource? If you manage to balance it, the effect is the same and all it does is confuse the players and make comparisons more difficult. If you dont manage to balance it, well you have NS2.
@CrazyEddie: Certainly 1 res for aliens does not have to have the same value of 1 res for the marines but it would make balancing the game a lot easier if that were the case. You have this similar in Starcraft 2, where Terrans need a lot of minerals and protoss need a lot of gas. However one 100 mineral Zealot is about as strong as 2 50 mineral Space Marines.
Why would you complicate the game, by letting one team get stronger with the same amount of ressources given and then try to counterbalance that by making it harder for them to gain this ressource? If you manage to balance it, the effect is the same and all it does is confuse the players and make comparisons more difficult. If you dont manage to balance it, well you have NS2.
It's been awhile since I took such a close look at SC; however, are not the "gather" rates different between the races slightly? (fastest to slowest: Protoss, Terran, Zerg?)
@CrazyEddie: Certainly 1 res for aliens does not have to have the same value of 1 res for the marines but it would make balancing the game a lot easier if that were the case. You have this similar in Starcraft 2, where Terrans need a lot of minerals and protoss need a lot of gas. However one 100 mineral Zealot is about as strong as 2 50 mineral Space Marines.
Why would you complicate the game, by letting one team get stronger with the same amount of ressources given and then try to counterbalance that by making it harder for them to gain this ressource? If you manage to balance it, the effect is the same and all it does is confuse the players and make comparisons more difficult. If you dont manage to balance it, well you have NS2.
It's been awhile since I took such a close look at SC; however, are not the "gather" rates different between the races slightly? (fastest to slowest: Protoss, Terran, Zerg?)
Absolutely not. One Drone gathers the exact same time as one SCV. The difference is that Z/T/P have different economic models. Zerg can have more bases but building units cuts into their "eggs" meaning they build less drones. However, in a "build the best economy" comparison, Zerg wins out because they can expand faster and cheaper if unharassed.
It's funny. Starcraft has a similar issue in TvZ. You either harass the Zerg enough and force him to fight / kill his drones and economy, or you die in end game because his army will be better than yours even if you try to out-econ him. The difference is Marines in NS2 can't be guaranteed to kill skulks in a 1:1.
@CrazyEddie: Certainly 1 res for aliens does not have to have the same value of 1 res for the marines but it would make balancing the game a lot easier if that were the case. You have this similar in Starcraft 2, where Terrans need a lot of minerals and protoss need a lot of gas. However one 100 mineral Zealot is about as strong as 2 50 mineral Space Marines.
Why would you complicate the game, by letting one team get stronger with the same amount of ressources given and then try to counterbalance that by making it harder for them to gain this ressource? If you manage to balance it, the effect is the same and all it does is confuse the players and make comparisons more difficult. If you dont manage to balance it, well you have NS2.
It's been awhile since I took such a close look at SC; however, are not the "gather" rates different between the races slightly? (fastest to slowest: Protoss, Terran, Zerg?)
Absolutely not. One Drone gathers the exact same time as one SCV. The difference is that Z/T/P have different economic models. Zerg can have more bases but building units cuts into their "eggs" meaning they build less drones. However, in a "build the best economy" comparison, Zerg wins out because they can expand faster and cheaper if unharassed.
It's funny. Starcraft has a similar issue in TvZ. You either harass the Zerg enough and force him to fight / kill his drones and economy, or you die in end game because his army will be better than yours even if you try to out-econ him. The difference is Marines in NS2 can't be guaranteed to kill skulks in a 1:1.
I must be thinking of SC1 then, I was pretty sure there was a small difference in the rate at which the workers worked...
Yes but slower alien expansion is
1. counteracted by the presence of a single gorge
2. relatively insignificant in the overall t.res picture, particularly in pubs where there is generally a lot more pressure on marine rather than alien harvesters
Cant emphasize the end of #2 enough.
The entirety of that team have one job early game: Pressure marines.
This really undermines any disadvantage that may come from "slower build times" for the alien team.
The games where I feel most like a "cosmic gardener" as Charlie so elegantly put it, are round where I go shade hive first. This is because I spend a lot of time hiding my cyst chains, and my infestation expansions are actually my offensive fronts, because its where the camouflage goes.
I think this is something worth building on. Currently infestation isn't such a big deal, even to the alien commander. If a chain gets cut, so what, just regrow it sometime in the next 5 minutes and nothing is worse off. The alien commander also has very little to do a lot of the time.
So, make cyst chains more important, make cutting them more beneficial for the marine team, and provide ways for the commander to protect them effectively and feasibly, resource wise. Shades already cloak cyst chains, that's a good start. Hatch is a pretty good ability, but the price and the way its used is inhibiting to fluid commanding. Crags should be placeable on top of cysts (in fact everything should be placeable on top of cysts).
At the moment the alien commander basically has no job, because his territory essentially defends itself and this is a big source of imbalance compared to the marine teams method of expansion. Make the alien commanders job cyst defence and maintenance, in some interesting and involving way, and make one of the marine's top priorities cutting the cyst chains.
I must be thinking of SC1 then, I was pretty sure there was a small difference in the rate at which the workers worked...
You are correct. In SC1 there are very small differences in the gathering speeds between SCVs, Drones and Probes. In SC2 though, they all work with the same efficiency.
As for Cysts - maybe they should work similarly to SC2's Creep Tumors. New Cysts may be spawned only by the Hive or other Cysts. Each Cyst may spawn 1 (and only 1) new Cyst. This would arguably make creating and maintaining Cyst chains a pain in the ass for the Alien commander but at least he would have something to do. For Marines it would be easier to actually break a chain for long enough to make a difference.
definitely like what the OP(aka post #1) said. The economic models need to be better. There are a lot of different discussions on how to fix it but the #1 post i think is a good starting point.
I just played a game where the marines had to be 100% on point to win. Several players were even helping the comm notice power nodes being attacked (because he was pushing with the team and there is poor notifications about power). After at least a 30min game were we able to win.
I agree there are some balance issues but I'm far from convinced that the alien economy is to blame.
NS2's best new feature is the tres/pres system on both teams. People don't like to spend their personal resources on things that benefit the team. One of the least fun things in NS1 was being the poor sap that had to save and drop the hive. People want fun lifeforms, which means you force an unlucky person to make a sacrifice or all too often nobody makes the sacrifice and your team is screwed. With NS2 there's just less drama: no complaints of "somebody needs to drop a hive/res tower".
I most certainly do not want to throw away this solid game advance. Aliens may have a slight edge. But it's quite backward-thinking and unimaginative to assume that the only way to solve this is to force individual players to dump their res on stuff that helps the team. For instance talk about some assumptions on how many RTs a marine team needs to hold to keep up in tech with aliens. If you think it's infeasible for them to hold that many you can lower the costs of marine tech/equipment!
This while the marine side received practically no changes to cope with this changed reality: marines in NS 2 are still equipped for and balanced around fighting NS 1 style aliens when said aliens no longer exist.
Nothing at all changed about the marines? Maybe you forgot personal resources. Any lifeform an alien might buy with pres is matched by something a marine might buy with pres. If you think that the average alien lifeform at a given stage in the game is more powerful than an average-equipped marine, then you make balance changes to the lifeforms, upgrades and equipment so it becomes an even battle. You can adjust damage and HP to tweak the effectiveness of different pres items, and change their cost, prereqs or research time to change where they show up in the game. Giving the aliens an un-fun resource sink that stops some of them from getting late-game lifeforms is just a lazy and bad way to deal with it.
I do however believe that these imbalances while significant, particularly in pub games, alone can't account for the persistent, unbudging, alien dominance that has been in place since the very first days of Beta.
And from this you seem to conclude that it is impossible to balance by tweaking HP, damage, cost, speed, prereqs and research time. That does not follow. I think a much simpler explanation is that the NS2 team makes balance changes conservatively. They don't want to tip things too far the other direction.
I disagree that the kham/t-res model is the underlying cause of the balance problems. Balance is the culmination of many, many factors. It's quite possible to balance the game using the existing economic model; UWE just hasn't gotten there, yet. As a very crude example, they could buff all marine HP by 1% every month until the win ratios got to about 50/50. Poof - problem solved. (Or rather "solved".)
This shows a very lacklustre understanding of how true balance is achieved. Just because you buff marines until 50/50 winrates are achieved doesn't mean the game has magically become balanced. All you're doing is masquerading the impact of clearly broken things by given the other side clearly broken things just as well. Ultimately you'd be turning the game into a coin flip, where it's no longer a matter of which side is most skilful and uses the best strategy but simply of what side uses the most broken things at the right time.
If something is broken from a balance point of view, it's absolutely essential that you analyse the root cause and fix that, not 'compensate' by buffing something with a complete disregard of the potential side-effects that may then cause. Yes, you could very well balance one side having much cheaper tech by making that tech also inferior to the opposing side's more expensive tech as quite some RTS games do, but I'd like to point out that this isn't at all what NS 2 is trying to do. In addition to that, it's much harder to properly balance a game in which each faction uses a completely different economic reality than it is in one that is symmetric. NS 1 arguably succeeded in balancing two completely different economic models for aliens and marines, but only after a very lengthy balancing process. I honestly don't think NS 2 has the same amount of time to 'get things right' as NS 1 did and on top of this, the way they have approached this attempt to 'asymmetrically' balance the two side's economic models once again (by making the side who needs the most t.res expand faster while the other that expands slower needs less t.res) has been lacking at best.
So would you blame me that I argue in favour of taking an easier, quicker approach to achieving balance? It's not like symmetric economic models would really alter your game experience all that much, heck they would even give the alien commander more to do which is by all means a good thing.
What it comes down to, gentlemen, is this: whichever way you look at it; whether you believe the economic models should be symmetric or asymmetric, NS 2, and the alien side in particular, is in DIRE need of some drastic changes as currently it succeeds in neither balancing the asymmetric way nor in offering symmetrical economical realities. Anyone who believes this game is to be balanced with just some fine-tuning left and right is either incredibly naive or blind.
GISPBattle GorgeDenmarkJoin Date: 2004-03-20Member: 27460Members, Playtest Lead, Forum Moderators, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester, Forum staff
Balancing is a constant in all multiplayer games, just look at starcraft or league of legends. They have 100s of people working on there games and just as NS2, tweaked to become a better experience in every patch.
First of all, it seems there were enough players in NS1 who went gorge and dropped rts and hives, or the game would have been a complete failure (I was one of them). There is also a hardly known game around these days, where teamwork is extremly important, and most of the team have to sacrifice their personal ressources to buy stuff to help other players get kill and make their team win. That game is called Dota (2).
Moreover I think you have a very egoistic personality if you are not willing to spend anything of your game ressources for your team. It is not like you can keep those res or pay them out in real money.
To top it off, neither the OP nor the following discussion involved the topic of making the players build their rts again, at most it was mentioned as possible solutions in a 2-3 posts.
Finally you argue that NS2 is totally different than NS1 but talk about tweaking HP, damage, etc. to do the trick. Well, most of the values of hp and damage are 1:1 take over from NS1. The OP's point was, if you totally rebalance the economic system, you have to rebalance everything else too because it affects everything else.
Balancing is a constant in all multiplayer games, just look at starcraft or league of legends. They have 100s of people working on there games and just as NS2, tweaked to become a better experience in every patch.
NS 2 has 1 guy working on its balance mind you, and not even full time. Now you also know why there's very little reason to be hopeful. The titles you compare it to have a handful of people, if not more, assigned to balance. Now of course UWE is a small indie company with limited resources, but if they too are as serious about balance as they say they are then it's a nobrainer to get more people, and particularly volunteers, involved. Charlie can still have the final say in everything, it's his game, but it'd at least be sensible if there was a committee of knowledgeable people that forwarded issues and analyses to him rather than the current cluster**** of information that is being thrown at him from various groups.
To top it off, neither the OP nor the following discussion involved the topic of making the players build their rts again, at most it was mentioned as possible solutions in a 2-3 posts.
It's a bit of the elephant in the room I suppose, I personally believe it would have been much wiser to continue with NS 1's economic approach as the drawbacks this new economic model brings are just as great, if not greater than the problem of 'scaling' was in NS 1 (i.e the more players the bigger the alien advantage). Surely there were ways to address scaling without requiring an entirely economic overhaul. (That mind you to this date hasn't received much finetuning at all)
I would argue they could even keep the p.res/t.res system for marines and reimplement the p.res only system for aliens, that already would address the NS 1 scaling issue to some extent. But it's a DOA discussion, there is no way in hell UWE is going to go back to the no-comm NS 1 alien economic approach, so there's really not much point in wasting time on discussing it.
First of all, it seems there were enough players in NS1 who went gorge and dropped rts and hives, or the game would have been a complete failure (I was one of them). There is also a hardly known game around these days, where teamwork is extremly important, and most of the team have to sacrifice their personal ressources to buy stuff to help other players get kill and make their team win. That game is called Dota (2).
Moreover I think you have a very egoistic personality if you are not willing to spend anything of your game ressources for your team. It is not like you can keep those res or pay them out in real money.
The fact that people can work around a gameplay issue and still have fun does not excuse the issue. Making the players spend their personal res to get essential team structures was creating a coordination problem that didn't need to exist. Whether or not you sacrificed for the team and dropped RTs or hives in NS1 has no bearing on whether or not you think it should be a required activity in NS2. I always dropped RTs and hives when needed in NS1, but I happen to be a big fan of the fact that never again will I need to beg my teammates to drop an RT at the start of the game. I've played it both ways and I enjoy the system in NS2 far more.
To top it off, neither the OP nor the following discussion involved the topic of making the players build their rts again, at most it was mentioned as possible solutions in a 2-3 posts.
He did mention RTs as a pres sink in the OP:
"Aliens only had personal resources and as a result some players had to 'sacrifice' their p.res for the team's sake. 2 - 3 Players usually had to invest in things like hives, harvesters and upgrades."
And whether or not you have to actually sit around and build them is irrelevant to the discussion.
Finally you argue that NS2 is totally different than NS1 but talk about tweaking HP, damage, etc. to do the trick. Well, most of the values of hp and damage are 1:1 take over from NS1. The OP's point was, if you totally rebalance the economic system, you have to rebalance everything else too because it affects everything else.
It's been a while since I've played NS1 but I remember Fades being a lot less fragile in that one. And devouring heavy armor being an important thing. And jetpacking around with an HMG. And having to construct siege turrets on site. So like a lot of stuff is different already. But yeah that's the point of NS2. You get a brand new economic system that makes the game more fun and you make sure all your new toys and numbers work well with it. And I'm pretty sure that's what they've been doing. Arguing that balancing is now impossible just sounds crazy to me because it should be even easier with both sides having the same economic model.
1 point about marine's having to build structures....marines often have at least 3 rt's up prior to the aliens rt's being finished if someone isn't gorging them.
I do think aliens are slightly more over powered than marines however but with good tactics marines can still win.
douchebagatronCustom member titleJoin Date: 2003-12-20Member: 24581Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
One thing we haven't considered is breaking out the different rez models into something manageable on their own. Marine p.res and Allen p.res are not equivalent. Neither are their t.res, though t.res is much closer than p.res.
What if we break them out into their own things so they can be balanced separately. I propose we at least try a system where t.res comes from Res nodes, but p.res comes from an entirely different mechanic.I hate rfk, but what about something like res for point? Then support roles aren't left out, and teams can be balance by their p.res contributors, so if aliens get too much p.res currently then decrease their income from building or kills.
Comments
This is also why its common to see comp marine teams get 4-7 early RTs as opposed to 2-3 for aliens. My personal estimate is that marines need to gain a roughly 1.5-2x total res gathered advantage over aliens in the early game to be able to tech at a equivalent rate (which seems consistent with your roughly 1.85 ratio).
1. counteracted by the presence of a single gorge
2. relatively insignificant in the overall t.res picture, particularly in pubs where there is generally a lot more pressure on marine rather than alien harvesters
In addition, marines also have to build power nodes which, particularly when only one or two marines are present, delays their expansion speed to some extent just as well. (And then we're not even talking about repairing broken power nodes without welders) It's not important to forget about this.
So yeah, not only is the slower expansion rate an incredibly complex way to try and 'balance' the hugely cheaper alien tech, it's also very much an inefficient one.
- it makes the alien commander even more of an empty shell than it already is
- it's very tedious to constantly require a gorge every-time a cyst chain gets cut somewhere because of a ninja marine. Basically the comm would sit there powerless, constantly requesting gorges to run to point A and B to get something done. It's also just incredibly unintuitive that the commander can place all the structures yet has no power to actually do so until a gorge has cysted an area.
The idea certainly has merit at the start of the game, but as the game progresses it would become an increasingly tedious task for the gorge. So no, we had it in the past (both on comm and on gorge) and I think removing it was the best choice. Gorges definitely need more things on their hands, as do alien commanders, but cysts aren't it.
Like the marine com? It is exactly what you try to fix. Getting players from the frontline back to build up the economy. Also the increased teamplay requirement between gorges and kham would introduce more ways to fail. (also like at the marine team)
But yes, it takes more from the kham... and he got already so little...
Upgradeable cysts: Commanders get a high cooldown on cyst placement, in turn they can upgrade their existing cysts to increase their radius. Upgrade cost and time would increase for each upgrade, but gorges can heal up cysts to speed up their growth and infestation spread. New cysts can only be placed on infestation.
-> The alien comm gets to do some micromanagement througout the game.
-> Deals with cyst spam.
-> Hiding cysts in not so obvious spots becomes neccesary and feasible.
-> Makes early gorges a valuable asset.
Yea, like marines though chasing broken cystlines as gorge is arguably an even worse and tedious mechanic than powernodes are for marines.
It doesn't sound tedious to me. It sounds dangerous and challenging, because a broken cyst chain means "marines were here and maybe they still are".
Right now (at least in mid-level pub games) marines don't actually break cyst chains very often, because it's not worth spending five seconds per cyst and drawing attention to your presence given that the kham will just recyst in a heartbeat. BUT! If you knew that it would draw some gorges off the front lines, NOW it would be worth doing - or at least worth considering, depending on whether your mission was sneak-and-snipe or wanton-destruction.
This also plays nicely with the recent buffs to gorge spit. Gorges can hunt down and fix broken cyst chains, with the accompanying risk of encountering marines... but those encounters could go either way now that the gorge has a decent offensive weapon, so it's both a risk and an opportunity.
So by requiring gorges to make and repair cyst chains, you've upped the stakes for behind-the-lines play for both aliens and marines. That's a win-win.
You've made this point several times, but I don't think it's justified. For example:
Here you say it's vital, but then immediately afterwards point out why it's not actually vital after all.
You can think of a.p.res, a.t.res, m.p.res, and m.t.res as four completely independent currencies, each with their own value in terms of game-winning potential. You might think that they should be balanced, but those numbers aren't what we want to balance. Win ratios should be balanced; strategies should be balanced; tactics and weapons and lifeforms should be balanced. But resource amounts are merely an internal bookkeeping number of no external consequence. It doesn't matter if alien res is twice as effective as marine res; what matters is if aliens win twice as often as marines.
Having res be more-or-less the same value across the board can be a helpful tool in balancing factions and strategies and weapons. But it's not vital. And clearly UWE have chosen a different method.
CYSTS ARE POWERNODES ARE NOT FUN, AND TAKE AWAY FROM THE GAME.
I disagree that the kham/t-res model is the underlying cause of the balance problems. Balance is the culmination of many, many factors. It's quite possible to balance the game using the existing economic model; UWE just hasn't gotten there, yet. As a very crude example, they could buff all marine HP by 1% every month until the win ratios got to about 50/50. Poof - problem solved. (Or rather "solved".)
A much more important question is whether the kham/t-res model leads to better gameplay assuming the game is also balanced accordingly.
I think you've been making the case that kham/t-res gives a big advantage to the aliens relative to NS1, and that NS2 marine play isn't also sufficiently altered from NS1 to counterbalance that advantage. You make a good case. HOWEVER, if your point is that the kham/t-res model cannot be balanced, I think you've not come close to making that case. If that is your point, I'd like to see it argued more persuasively.
Why would you complicate the game, by letting one team get stronger with the same amount of ressources given and then try to counterbalance that by making it harder for them to gain this ressource? If you manage to balance it, the effect is the same and all it does is confuse the players and make comparisons more difficult. If you dont manage to balance it, well you have NS2.
It's been awhile since I took such a close look at SC; however, are not the "gather" rates different between the races slightly? (fastest to slowest: Protoss, Terran, Zerg?)
Absolutely not. One Drone gathers the exact same time as one SCV. The difference is that Z/T/P have different economic models. Zerg can have more bases but building units cuts into their "eggs" meaning they build less drones. However, in a "build the best economy" comparison, Zerg wins out because they can expand faster and cheaper if unharassed.
It's funny. Starcraft has a similar issue in TvZ. You either harass the Zerg enough and force him to fight / kill his drones and economy, or you die in end game because his army will be better than yours even if you try to out-econ him. The difference is Marines in NS2 can't be guaranteed to kill skulks in a 1:1.
I must be thinking of SC1 then, I was pretty sure there was a small difference in the rate at which the workers worked...
The entirety of that team have one job early game: Pressure marines.
This really undermines any disadvantage that may come from "slower build times" for the alien team.
I think this is something worth building on. Currently infestation isn't such a big deal, even to the alien commander. If a chain gets cut, so what, just regrow it sometime in the next 5 minutes and nothing is worse off. The alien commander also has very little to do a lot of the time.
So, make cyst chains more important, make cutting them more beneficial for the marine team, and provide ways for the commander to protect them effectively and feasibly, resource wise. Shades already cloak cyst chains, that's a good start. Hatch is a pretty good ability, but the price and the way its used is inhibiting to fluid commanding. Crags should be placeable on top of cysts (in fact everything should be placeable on top of cysts).
At the moment the alien commander basically has no job, because his territory essentially defends itself and this is a big source of imbalance compared to the marine teams method of expansion. Make the alien commanders job cyst defence and maintenance, in some interesting and involving way, and make one of the marine's top priorities cutting the cyst chains.
You are correct. In SC1 there are very small differences in the gathering speeds between SCVs, Drones and Probes. In SC2 though, they all work with the same efficiency.
As for Cysts - maybe they should work similarly to SC2's Creep Tumors. New Cysts may be spawned only by the Hive or other Cysts. Each Cyst may spawn 1 (and only 1) new Cyst. This would arguably make creating and maintaining Cyst chains a pain in the ass for the Alien commander but at least he would have something to do. For Marines it would be easier to actually break a chain for long enough to make a difference.
I just played a game where the marines had to be 100% on point to win. Several players were even helping the comm notice power nodes being attacked (because he was pushing with the team and there is poor notifications about power). After at least a 30min game were we able to win.
NS2's best new feature is the tres/pres system on both teams. People don't like to spend their personal resources on things that benefit the team. One of the least fun things in NS1 was being the poor sap that had to save and drop the hive. People want fun lifeforms, which means you force an unlucky person to make a sacrifice or all too often nobody makes the sacrifice and your team is screwed. With NS2 there's just less drama: no complaints of "somebody needs to drop a hive/res tower".
I most certainly do not want to throw away this solid game advance. Aliens may have a slight edge. But it's quite backward-thinking and unimaginative to assume that the only way to solve this is to force individual players to dump their res on stuff that helps the team. For instance talk about some assumptions on how many RTs a marine team needs to hold to keep up in tech with aliens. If you think it's infeasible for them to hold that many you can lower the costs of marine tech/equipment!
Nothing at all changed about the marines? Maybe you forgot personal resources. Any lifeform an alien might buy with pres is matched by something a marine might buy with pres. If you think that the average alien lifeform at a given stage in the game is more powerful than an average-equipped marine, then you make balance changes to the lifeforms, upgrades and equipment so it becomes an even battle. You can adjust damage and HP to tweak the effectiveness of different pres items, and change their cost, prereqs or research time to change where they show up in the game. Giving the aliens an un-fun resource sink that stops some of them from getting late-game lifeforms is just a lazy and bad way to deal with it.
And from this you seem to conclude that it is impossible to balance by tweaking HP, damage, cost, speed, prereqs and research time. That does not follow. I think a much simpler explanation is that the NS2 team makes balance changes conservatively. They don't want to tip things too far the other direction.
This shows a very lacklustre understanding of how true balance is achieved. Just because you buff marines until 50/50 winrates are achieved doesn't mean the game has magically become balanced. All you're doing is masquerading the impact of clearly broken things by given the other side clearly broken things just as well. Ultimately you'd be turning the game into a coin flip, where it's no longer a matter of which side is most skilful and uses the best strategy but simply of what side uses the most broken things at the right time.
If something is broken from a balance point of view, it's absolutely essential that you analyse the root cause and fix that, not 'compensate' by buffing something with a complete disregard of the potential side-effects that may then cause. Yes, you could very well balance one side having much cheaper tech by making that tech also inferior to the opposing side's more expensive tech as quite some RTS games do, but I'd like to point out that this isn't at all what NS 2 is trying to do. In addition to that, it's much harder to properly balance a game in which each faction uses a completely different economic reality than it is in one that is symmetric. NS 1 arguably succeeded in balancing two completely different economic models for aliens and marines, but only after a very lengthy balancing process. I honestly don't think NS 2 has the same amount of time to 'get things right' as NS 1 did and on top of this, the way they have approached this attempt to 'asymmetrically' balance the two side's economic models once again (by making the side who needs the most t.res expand faster while the other that expands slower needs less t.res) has been lacking at best.
So would you blame me that I argue in favour of taking an easier, quicker approach to achieving balance? It's not like symmetric economic models would really alter your game experience all that much, heck they would even give the alien commander more to do which is by all means a good thing.
What it comes down to, gentlemen, is this: whichever way you look at it; whether you believe the economic models should be symmetric or asymmetric, NS 2, and the alien side in particular, is in DIRE need of some drastic changes as currently it succeeds in neither balancing the asymmetric way nor in offering symmetrical economical realities. Anyone who believes this game is to be balanced with just some fine-tuning left and right is either incredibly naive or blind.
Moreover I think you have a very egoistic personality if you are not willing to spend anything of your game ressources for your team. It is not like you can keep those res or pay them out in real money.
To top it off, neither the OP nor the following discussion involved the topic of making the players build their rts again, at most it was mentioned as possible solutions in a 2-3 posts.
Finally you argue that NS2 is totally different than NS1 but talk about tweaking HP, damage, etc. to do the trick. Well, most of the values of hp and damage are 1:1 take over from NS1. The OP's point was, if you totally rebalance the economic system, you have to rebalance everything else too because it affects everything else.
NS 2 has 1 guy working on its balance mind you, and not even full time. Now you also know why there's very little reason to be hopeful. The titles you compare it to have a handful of people, if not more, assigned to balance. Now of course UWE is a small indie company with limited resources, but if they too are as serious about balance as they say they are then it's a nobrainer to get more people, and particularly volunteers, involved. Charlie can still have the final say in everything, it's his game, but it'd at least be sensible if there was a committee of knowledgeable people that forwarded issues and analyses to him rather than the current cluster**** of information that is being thrown at him from various groups.
It's a bit of the elephant in the room I suppose, I personally believe it would have been much wiser to continue with NS 1's economic approach as the drawbacks this new economic model brings are just as great, if not greater than the problem of 'scaling' was in NS 1 (i.e the more players the bigger the alien advantage). Surely there were ways to address scaling without requiring an entirely economic overhaul. (That mind you to this date hasn't received much finetuning at all)
I would argue they could even keep the p.res/t.res system for marines and reimplement the p.res only system for aliens, that already would address the NS 1 scaling issue to some extent. But it's a DOA discussion, there is no way in hell UWE is going to go back to the no-comm NS 1 alien economic approach, so there's really not much point in wasting time on discussing it.
The fact that people can work around a gameplay issue and still have fun does not excuse the issue. Making the players spend their personal res to get essential team structures was creating a coordination problem that didn't need to exist. Whether or not you sacrificed for the team and dropped RTs or hives in NS1 has no bearing on whether or not you think it should be a required activity in NS2. I always dropped RTs and hives when needed in NS1, but I happen to be a big fan of the fact that never again will I need to beg my teammates to drop an RT at the start of the game. I've played it both ways and I enjoy the system in NS2 far more.
He did mention RTs as a pres sink in the OP:
"Aliens only had personal resources and as a result some players had to 'sacrifice' their p.res for the team's sake. 2 - 3 Players usually had to invest in things like hives, harvesters and upgrades."
And whether or not you have to actually sit around and build them is irrelevant to the discussion.
It's been a while since I've played NS1 but I remember Fades being a lot less fragile in that one. And devouring heavy armor being an important thing. And jetpacking around with an HMG. And having to construct siege turrets on site. So like a lot of stuff is different already. But yeah that's the point of NS2. You get a brand new economic system that makes the game more fun and you make sure all your new toys and numbers work well with it. And I'm pretty sure that's what they've been doing. Arguing that balancing is now impossible just sounds crazy to me because it should be even easier with both sides having the same economic model.
I do think aliens are slightly more over powered than marines however but with good tactics marines can still win.
What if we break them out into their own things so they can be balanced separately. I propose we at least try a system where t.res comes from Res nodes, but p.res comes from an entirely different mechanic.I hate rfk, but what about something like res for point? Then support roles aren't left out, and teams can be balance by their p.res contributors, so if aliens get too much p.res currently then decrease their income from building or kills.
And by good you mean near perfect?