Cyst chain changes
Emoo
Ibasa Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11198Members
Ibasa Join Date: 2002-12-20 Member: 11198Members
I saw this on the thread about alien economy game balance in general discussion THREAD. Thought it deserved it's own thread to be thought out a bit more. The rational is that currently hitting the power is nearly always beneficial for aliens, hitting the cyst chain is nearly always not worth it for marines. It's not worth it because it does bugger all, short of helping to clear a room of cysts slightly faster.
The idea is that alien structures require an active cyst chain for their passive abilities. Thus if not connected to an active cyst:
Harvesters don't collect any resources.
Crags don't heal (but can still use the heal spray tres ability)
Shifts don't recharge energy (but can still spawn eggs and echo)
Shades don't cloak (but can still use ink)
Possibly whips don't use bombard/grenade knock back?
This means cutting the cyst chain actually means something, immediately. It's not as directly damaging as some other cyst ideas (such as faster cyst death, or damaging every unconnected cyst). But I think it's enough to make it meaningful without being too annoying.
Discuss.
Is this too much of a nerf?
Should it be more painful, disabling tres abilities such as egg spawn as well? (N.B. I think egg spawn in general is too powerful but that's for another thread)
Is it pointless and would never actually help marines anyway?
Ideas please
The idea is that alien structures require an active cyst chain for their passive abilities. Thus if not connected to an active cyst:
Harvesters don't collect any resources.
Crags don't heal (but can still use the heal spray tres ability)
Shifts don't recharge energy (but can still spawn eggs and echo)
Shades don't cloak (but can still use ink)
Possibly whips don't use bombard/grenade knock back?
This means cutting the cyst chain actually means something, immediately. It's not as directly damaging as some other cyst ideas (such as faster cyst death, or damaging every unconnected cyst). But I think it's enough to make it meaningful without being too annoying.
Discuss.
Is this too much of a nerf?
Should it be more painful, disabling tres abilities such as egg spawn as well? (N.B. I think egg spawn in general is too powerful but that's for another thread)
Is it pointless and would never actually help marines anyway?
Ideas please
Comments
But I think harvesters should still collect resources (or keep collecting resources for x seconds when no active cyst around) or else it's too much of a nerf imo: Marines could camp key locations and totally kill alien economy by killing one cyst.
If marines can manage to completely cut off one harvester its cysts and eventually the harvester itself will die anyway. I don't see it as being that much of a change on long run strategy.
I like the idea of structures slowly stopping to function, sorta like a chicken whose head has just been cut off, the body may still be run around for a bit.
What I want is for cysts to be seen as important as power nodes and to stop aliens from expanding over the whole map with out caring about whether they can control it or not. Infestation should be important, as should the chains linking to the hives.
This implies that just cutting the chain wouldn't stop the structure working. Tying in with other comments about gradual or reduced operation how about...
If a structure is not connected to a cyst chain it slowly loses nutrients and starts to starve (no health damage just effects operations), if it has no infestation under it (which implies no connection to a cyst as well) it starves much faster. Once a structure has fully starved it shuts down and starts taking health damage (unlike now where it takes damage as soon as it's off infestation).
When the chains is reconnected the nutrients start filling up again, but not instantly. This means the comm spamming a cyst as soon as it's destroyed isn't fully effective, you need to get the marine killed asap.
How fast nutrients are used and refilled would have to be tested, too fast and its OP, too slow and it's pointless cutting cysts. But rough numbers, off infestation it should go from full to empty in about 3 seconds. With a cut chain (but still on infestation) about 15 seconds.
There's possibly a way to tie in the cysts at the end of the chain dying and giving some extra nutrients into the system as well.
This can play in as well. Means that the aliens don't get the res benefit while the chain is cut, if they manage to reconnect quickly no loss. This all gives a comm a reason to spam cysts still, to try and get the res from multiple extractors behind a marine cutting the chain.
Does this sound better?
what I ment is that killing one cyst near the start at the hive will kill alien economy/res income (at least in early game (1 hive)) because all the RTs behind that cyst won't give any res anymore in the OPs idea.
if you kill one cyst near a hive and all the RTs behind that slowly die but still give res that's not the same.
cysts should be vital to alien economy (which they are already), but killing one (very easy and quick to kill) cyst shouldn't have the same effect as killing a powernode - and definitely not affect multiple rooms.
Yes being much weaker than a powernode they shouldn't be as devastating. However right now it's just not worth cutting cysts 90% of the time. The only times it's worth doing are A) when clearing a room or
cyst chain broken - immediate effect: no more res <- that's just too heavy. I like your suggestions in general (no more passive abilitys for crags, whips, shades, ..., maybe even no more marine detection on inactive infestation (maybe that's the case already)), but I think that shouldn't go for res income.
no more res after X time without active cyst or res goes into infestation and to hive when cyst chain is repaired <- that's better imo.
However I also agree that cutting the cyst chain having such a strong immediate effect is a bit much. Saving the res for when it's re connected seems less drastic, it means one marine cutting up cysts is a bit of a annoyance but doesn't cause a major loss.
One example from a game recently that could of played different with some form of these rules. Playing docking, marines were doing OK, had locker rooms, cafe and were pushing on maint and stability. Aliens managed to clear locker rooms but not fully take it as a marine force cut into maintenance fairly quickly, cutting the cyst chain there and setting up a phase gate. But in the time it took to do that aliens and cysted locker and bar, dropped both res nodes and had a shift and multiple crags in locker. Marines tried to divert a small force to locker but between shift eggs and crag heals couldn't take it, this whole time aliens continued to benefit from two res nodes. I think given that situation the aliens should of had a MUCH harder time to hold locker, and if those crags and res towers hadn't been online marines would of stood a better chance. Suffice to say aliens eventually won that game.
50% decreased healing from crags
50% decreased damage from whips
cannot spawn eggs from shift
cannot cloak nearby structures with a shade (not too sure on this one...how else to nerf? smaller radius? no ink?)
With respect to harvesters, the real problem here is that marine harass of alien harvesters is completely ineffective unless the harvester is destroyed, whereas an alien attack on a rt always has a benefit (comm gets less tres from from recycling damaged rt's) and a gorge can easily heal it up again (marines must research welders to do this, obviously). This also ignores a strategy where killing the powernode is a more viable strat for hurting a marine team's economy (the lava falls power node comes to mind as an example here).
My solution:
Harvesters don't collect res unless there is a cyst next to it. The cyst is easily replaced, of course, so it's not THAT big a deal; the marine(s) will either get the harvester or be killed, in which case the khammander drops a new cyst (1 tres) and all is well.
Scenario:
A marine destroys a harvester's cyst. Harvester no longer gets res until the cyst is replaced.
20 seconds later, the marine is killed and the harvester is left alive. The harvester could have gotten 2 or 3 res in this time.
Khammander replaces the destroyed cyst.
TOTAL Alien tres lost = 3 or 4 res lost on a FAILED marine attack on a harvester that still manages to kill a cyst.
This has the benefit of making cysts more attractive targets (the original point of this post). When you think about it in comparison to how easily it is for aliens to successfully harass marine rt's, this seems only fair that it should force the alien khammander to be more aware of marine movement on the infestation rather than telling the team to go full-offence/rt harass for the first 5 mins of the game.
Currently there isn't enough to stop aliens from expanding over the whole map. The only time I see marines win is when they massively out skill aliens. In balanced games battles go about 50:50, but when marines lose a battle they lose a lot of ground, aliens lose a battle they just expand out where the battle wasn't.
I fully accept that if the marine team is much better this will make it really easy for them to win, but they were going to win anyway. Giving an on-par marine team the ability to put pressure on currently easy alien expansions might shift overall game balance in line a bit.
The fact that marines are having a tough time on pubs is because of the Call Of Duty effect where they don't realize the entire game is a timing game, and early position is everything.
I'm perfectly fine with the idea that this game is balanced to competitive play. There's something to work towards.
Also phase gates have always been the natural counter to alien expansion since the game's inception in 2002.
If the cysts chain is supposed to be a parallel to the power node system then it needs to become more important. In most games aliens have a much easier time of taking ground than marines and a lot of people think that is one of the big contributing factors to the imbalance. In the same manner that a few skulks/gorges can tear through a power node completely invalidating a marine forward base, a few marines should be able to tear up a cyst route to damage an alien forward base. If cysts are made much bigger targets then they might have to be made free again to stop it being to OP.
No, I don't think they are parallel. They have similar ideas, but they are completely, and utterly different. It takes approximately 2-3 seconds for a single player to kill a cyst, and ~30 seconds for a single player to kill a power node. Cysts are weak, get randomly destroyed in crossfire. Power nodes are the main deal.
Cysts do NOT get randomly killed in crossfire (except in the case of GL spam). They are only killed incidentally after a push has been successful.
A power node takes longer to kill, but marines have NO control over their placement and require considerable manpower to rebuild them (even with 2 marines with welders, they take about 12 seconds to rebuild and thats AFTER a ~5 second no-rebuild time). Compare this to cysts which can be pathed wherever the Khammander wants and placed closer together so that if one goes down the chain isn't broken.
You say that commanders would just place a PG at cyst path chokepoints. Why is this not a viable strategy for marines? Shouldn't the aliens be forced to defend an expansion into contested territory of the map?