Lifeform scaling is something UWE should have long done based on number of hives, and it's something they did in NS 1 as well. It should work fine even without a biomass system. With lifeform scaling, they should even bring back onos t.res drops on 2 hives, or all lifeforms at 1 hive, since they'd be weaker on lower amounts of hive. This would then make for some very interesting strategic play and increase the amount of sinks for the alien commander. + Increase the comeback potential significantly.
thats a nice idea, im a bit scared of the consequences (1 hive onos...) but i would be very curious to see the result! the alien commander can now again chose which ability to research (bio mass is now a requirement for abilities, though you can skip leap/bilebomb to allow for more strategies). the new HP scaling should make it fairly easy to balance the risk/reward tradeoff for t.res lifeforms, probably worth a shot. worst case is i need to revert it, best case more possible strategies for aliens.
Very interesting, the ability for 1 hive onos play but one so weak could create some cool play. Really it should only be useful for defending a 2nd hive while it builds that your trying to hold. Basically it would be weak enough that it could not engage far from base and gorge support. I am sure a coordinated team all gorges and 1 onos could make a comeback but they leave their base exposed in this. It all comes down to the health of the onos.
Also thanks for giving the commands some choice again in the order of upgrades this will make games much more interesting than dictating what the tech order is.
I don't like the idea of balancing the game around TRes lifeforms. There's a reason why NS2 moved towards PRes for both teams, and increasing the importance of TRes drops flies in the face of those design goals IMO.
Sounds good. But one thing. Could you consider to take leap out of the default ability-tree and put it in some kind of an own researchable. While BileBomb, Spores and Blink are researched in different orders often, nobody wouldn't go Leap first. It is simply an upgrade for the default alien and this way much more important than any special-lifeform upgrade can be.
Not true, there is a lot of situations where you would not want to go leap first. Not to say it is super common not to go leap first but there are situations where it does not make sense.
Example, yesterday I went blink first b/c everyone was about to go fade and we where already destroying the marines.
Thats my main reason to argue against commanders choosing abilities - its not really a strategic choice. Its always a consequence of the current game - IE your winning heavily so you go blink first since you already have a team of fades stomping marines. Or your loosing so you go leap first since your fades are far off. Its almost always done as a reactionary measure to the games events, which generally allows for further alien snowballing. A good example of that is the spam RTs strat on pubs - you can have tons of marines killing rts (ive played pubs where alone I have killed 10 rts by 8 minutes). But because of the snowball effect and the commander being able to spend only a little amount of resources to get the only upgrades he needs - blink/cara, once the pending fade ball comes out its all but over for the marines who have been struggling but still staying in the game. I dont necessarily have an argument against the alien comm making the choice, but giving him the ability to cheaply select any T2 ability at the same time is problematic for gameplay and progression. You will never be able to balance all T2 abilities to be of equal effectiveness, since they all have very different roles and also are on completely different lifeforms (ie your always going to get combat effectiveness upgrades first).
Today I went gas first b/c we had 2 good learks on our team and needed to secure a third hive location. I then also got bio second so that the larger than usual number of gorges could get the gate down sooner than normal and catch marines off guard.
I want to point out though that under your logic there is no such thing as a strategic choice as I agree with you that the decisions are always a consequence of the current reality. To my understanding though this is what strategy is, actions made as a consequence of a current reality for the purpose of altering it. Take for example chess, I do not think anyone to argue that chess is a game of strategy. However, is there anyone who can say that the decisions made in chess when played properly are not the consequence of the current game? Clearly the decisions made in chess are largely consequence of the current game and are made to alter the state of the game in order to complete an objective, this is the fundamental essence of strategy.
On a related note I often find people asking how they can become better commanders, my suggestion is to head to the library and ask for Sun Tzu.
I would say that alien commanding in NS is more about tactics - choosing where to be at what times. As for strategy in terms of tech paths and research orders - thats really something thats more a marine commander role. There is some strategy in terms of choosing what abilities in certain situations, but I think that with each ability fitting such specific roles, the situations which warrant those abilities will always cause them do be researched first. As for the chess comparison, I think thats quite different as many chess players have certain strategies they begin with - which doesnt always involve move piece x to y - is more about how they approach and deal with the opponent. There are many levels of strategy involved in a game of chess.
Today I went gas first b/c we had 2 good learks on our team and needed to secure a third hive location. I then also got bio second so that the larger than usual number of gorges could get the gate down sooner than normal and catch marines off guard.
I want to point out though that under your logic there is no such thing as a strategic choice as I agree with you that the decisions are always a consequence of the current reality. To my understanding though this is what strategy is, actions made as a consequence of a current reality for the purpose of altering it. Take for example chess, I do not think anyone to argue that chess is a game of strategy. However, is there anyone who can say that the decisions made in chess when played properly are not the consequence of the current game? Clearly the decisions made in chess are largely consequence of the current game and are made to alter the state of the game in order to complete an objective, this is the fundamental essence of strategy.
On a related note I often find people asking how they can become better commanders, my suggestion is to head to the library and ask for Sun Tzu.
the advantage of biomass is that you can still choose to get a set upgrade sooner, but because that upgrade is positioned at a higher tech - it can be more powerful.
instead of having 5 abilities of 'tier2 power', you can buff some of those and move them to tier3, or tier4 etc. you can't have a super powerful ability as an ability which is available 5 minutes into a game, it would just be a choice between that and a bunch of other tier2 farts :P
Sounds good. But one thing. Could you consider to take leap out of the default ability-tree and put it in some kind of an own researchable. While BileBomb, Spores and Blink are researched in different orders often, nobody wouldn't go Leap first. It is simply an upgrade for the default alien and this way much more important than any special-lifeform upgrade can be.
Not true, there is a lot of situations where you would not want to go leap first. Not to say it is super common not to go leap first but there are situations where it does not make sense.
Example, yesterday I went blink first b/c everyone was about to go fade and we where already destroying the marines.
Sure, such situations exist. (Even if it is bad to have to many fades, because they are weak against buildings.) But do this special cases justify otherwise stale tech-options? Or could we remove this scarce used option to implement a system that has overall more freedom?
would you keep leap if you buy it at 2 hives for 30 tres, then lose your second hive?
If you buy leap at 2 hives and go back to 1, you could just be charged the surplus 10 or 20 t.res to make it available at 1 hive too. I.e you wouldn't have to unlock it completely again for the full cost, since you already paid for a big portion of the cost at 2 hives. I think that would by far be the most straight forward approach anyway.
i do like that idea, but in the current balance mod the biomass system seems to increase lifeform hp (at least indicated in the change log, i haven't been able to find a server in a couple of days), which is 'advantage biomass'
Lifeform scaling is something UWE should have long done based on number of hives, and it's something they did in NS 1 as well. It should work fine even without a biomass system. With lifeform scaling, they should even bring back onos t.res drops on 2 hives, or all lifeforms at 1 hive, since they'd be weaker on lower amounts of hive. This would then make for some very interesting strategic play and increase the amount of sinks for the alien commander. + Increase the comeback potential significantly.
Not too fond of this kind of "charge back". I liked it the way how Biomass added the loss of a researched tech when losing a Hive.
Upgrades costing different amounts of res on a different amount of Hives is something pretty arbitrary that would need to be taught to the commanding player. Add the fact that an upgrade may suddenly cost yet another amount of res because you already bought it in the past on a higher number of Hives but then lost that number and you are sure to confuse people even more.
With the Biomass it was more obvious because you were buying Upgrade 1 on that Hive, then Upgrade 2 and so on. It was always linked to the specific structure, not upgrades being linked to the global number of buildings of a specific kind.
Plus paying the general price reduction based on the number of Hives vs. paying the difference after losing a Hive puts the commander at yet another hurdle: it may actually become undesirable to buy an upgrade at a larger number of Hives.
If you pay the full price up front, you can rest assured to always have that upgrade available even if you lose other Hives. If you spend all your res on two abilities on two Hives instead, you won't have any of them available once the Hive goes down again. So commanders might actually want to pay more for the upgrade than they would have to at two or three Hives.
I honestly prefer the idea that was brought up earlier: give the khammander the ability to move Biomass from one Hive to another. Let it take a while to do so (45-90 seconds, maybe scale the time with the number of built Hives or with the amount of Biomass that is already in that Hive, so you can get more Biomass out of a Hive that houses a lot of it faster when it gets surprise-rushed) and occupy the Hive's production in the meanwhile. That way he can save some of the upgrades if he feels like a Hive is going to get pressured soon.
Furthermore don't give a preset upgrade path but let Biomass work like a currency that you then use to unlock a specific ability. What abilities can be unlocked at what point can still be determined by the total amount of Biomass, but at least it gives the khammander some of the choices back that people here are missing so badly.
So the workflow is: research Biomass -> after research finishes, select one of the available upgrades to unlock.
A more advanced tactic could then be to not spend all the "upgrade points" instantly on upgrades but to save them until you raise the Biomass amount once more to unlock the next tier of upgrades and are able to spend your saved up points on abilities from that tier then instead of the lower ones.
As for lifeform scaling: I think the ability to have multiple trait structures stack is already doing a good job in that regard. Maybe there should be a timer between it, though, so that you can't drop three structures right away and have it actually "scale" with the match progress. Maybe let structure maturity have an impact on it too.
Furthermore don't give a preset upgrade path but let Biomass work like a currency that you then use to unlock a specific ability. What abilities can be unlocked at what point can still be determined by the total amount of Biomass, but at least it gives the khammander some of the choices back that people here are missing so badly.
So the workflow is: research Biomass -> after research finishes, select one of the available upgrades to unlock.
A more advanced tactic could then be to not spend all the "upgrade points" instantly on upgrades but to save them until you raise the Biomass amount once more to unlock the next tier of upgrades and are able to spend your saved up points on abilities from that tier then instead of the lower ones.
I was thinking along similar lines a few days ago and initially liked the idea. There is a problem though. If you get one "upgrade point" per biomass and there are more than one ability per biomass level you're not going to have enough points to get all abilities. This might seem like a good thing from the commanders perspective since he get's more of an RPG experience with a skill tree and everything, but not so much for the player on the field who never gets to use the full range of abilities of his favourite life form. Eventually we will end up with cookie cutter builds where some abilities might as well be removed from the game. This is exactly what this mod tries to get away from with the biomass and NS1-style upgrade systems.
Leaving out the "upgrade points" idea and instead making abilities require both tres and biomass allows all abilities to be researched and the commander still has a choice in what order they're researched. However, it still has the problem that some abilities won't be researched until the end game, if at all, which is what we have now in vanilla.
If we only want to solve the problem where losing a hive is too much of a hit and allow aliens access to more abilities on one hive then the system mentioned above where abilities require biomass rather than number of hives, but still need to be researched individually, would suffice. (And I believe this is what we have now in the mod? I haven't played the latest version yet.) However, if we also want to give more choice back to individual players and avoid rendering some abilities obsolete, then we need to go back to what we had in the first iteration. I'm starting to lean towards the latter, although more thought should be given to the order in which the abilities are unlocked.
Omg yes, this mod looks amazing. Now all it needs is focus upgrade and camo/silence merged into one upgrade and I will throw my money at Sewlek.
Sewlek has updated the mod with the merged silence and camo.
All the changes he has done look incredibly fun and elegant, there is even a small blood splatter to indicate taking damage as a marine.
Edit: I'm really hoping that spring break is the reason all the ns2 bt servers are empty :P
Omg yes, this mod looks amazing. Now all it needs is focus upgrade and camo/silence merged into one upgrade and I will throw my money at Sewlek.
Sewlek has updated the mod with the merged silence and camo.
All the changes he has done look incredibly fun and elegant, there is even a small blood splatter to indicate taking damage as a marine.
Edit: I'm really hoping that spring break is the reason all the ns2 bt servers are empty :P
Man he is actually listening to suggestions with the phantom mix and the skulk feels really good especially if it is refined. Too bad I disagree with the armory changes. Pretty torn with his balance mod. At least most of the changes are overall good.
Sewlek, great job with the mod, Just wondering if the biomass effecting base health of all lifeforms effects babblers & if it doesn't could it?
Since your mod is experimental, would you try out some of the babbler changes from the I&S forums?
Also someone suggested in another thread that gorge tunnels should spread infestation if the other entrance is on infestation, is that doable?
If even half of these things make it into NS 2 that would then already be the best update NS2 has had since the early days of beta. It's just doing so many things right, and I am convinced that all of these changes will outright result in a better, deeper, more enjoyable and ultimately more balanced game. Truly exciting stuff.
Let's all keep playing this to show our support, and grow a big enough playerbase around it so that the other devs may actually consider some of these very welcome drastic changes. Even if you don't agree with all of the changes in the mod, surely we can at least as a community agree that the biggest portion of it is delicious. Controversial changes like the armory one can always be fought over later :P.
i think the majority of players will be excited by any change, that's always been my experience in other games... people always freak out when there's a patch changelog.
the only concern is comp play, as obviously it's unfair to have comp players learn and adapt to a game over several months and then completely change everything. however, if the majority of changes are aimed at making both sides more comfortably balanced and adding more strategies... i'd expect most of them would be happy to adapt again.
my point; if radical changes are needed, i'm 100% behind it :P
excellent changes, especially the pogostick jump. I thought that was never going to get added, excellent work sewlek
couple of things I noticed:
1) the walljump is basically the same walljump from build 229. this is the problem with balancing around winrate and not having any clear design goals. we wasted 10+ builds with brick Skulks until we wound up full circle again with just a small tweak; limited aircontrol. this is why the winrate argument is and has always been completely idiotic.
2) you can just gain speed from jumping and holding forward along a flat surface... this is basically completely indistinguishable from NS1 bunnyhop to the average player, except it sucks the entire skill-movement aspect out of it. I don't understand all this flailing around trying to create everything that's not bunnyhopping, just to end up with a simplified and dry version of bunnyhopping?
- Phase Gates can now be build on infestation
- only one Phase Gate needs to be powered for all others to function
Why did you decide to make these changes to the phase gate? It seems like you specifically wanted ninja phase gates to be undetectable for some reason. And now they wont disconnect when you take out a bases power, so reinforcements can easily just retake the base.
Yeah, the ninja PG may be overdone. If it's allowed to build on infestation, it should at least take significantly longer than usual to build.
I like the idea that you can keep phasing to save a base where the power went down, though. If aliens want to secure it, they have to do more than to just go for the power - the PG has to die as well.
The Fade movement changes seem massive. I was dueling in 1on1 against a Fade as single minigun Exo, supported by a MAC, for about 20 minutes and was not able to kill the Fade. In skilled hands it can wreck faces, which seems like a good thing.
(I was able to hunt it down with the Railgun Exo shortly afterwards, though)
Yeah, the ninja PG may be overdone. If it's allowed to build on infestation, it should at least take significantly longer than usual to build.
I like the idea that you can keep phasing to save a base where the power went down, though. If aliens want to secure it, they have to do more than to just go for the power - the PG has to die as well.
The Fade movement changes seem massive. I was dueling in 1on1 against a Fade as single minigun Exo, supported by a MAC, for about 20 minutes and was not able to kill the Fade. In skilled hands it can wreck faces, which seems like a good thing.
(I was able to hunt it down with the Railgun Exo shortly afterwards, though)
Yeah, but the phase HP was nerfed so that might actually be enough to compensate.. I hope I can get some people on a BT server today to try these new additions.
Did some more testing today with a few others on the [HBZ] server. I very much like the overall direction you're taking things Sewlek.
I was mostly focusing on movement.
-Fade. The current fade setup in this is a vast improvement to vanilla fade imo. However, I think blink might be a *little* too slow in comparison to how much adren it eats up, even with celerity. I understand you combine it with bhop, but with the current very limited air control that's not always a useful tactic.
-Lerk. I'm not sure how much the lerks been worked on, but there's currently two points I'm not a fan of. Holding crouch while looking down no longer accelerates you. This feels like a huge nerf to my play style, as a lerk who likes to fly high and swoop down quickly for the bite and back up again. Number two is lerk gliding on the floor is no longer possible. I was a fan of this, but I understand if you've purposely removed it due to the "damn that looks silly" factor.
you can just gain speed from jumping and holding forward along a flat surface... this is basically completely indistinguishable from NS1 bunnyhop to the average player, except it sucks the entire skill-movement aspect out of it. I don't understand all this flailing around trying to create everything that's not bunnyhopping, just to end up with a simplified and dry version of bunnyhopping?
Skulk (and fade) essentially have bhop... without the fun movement of bhop. The current setup actually suits the fade I think, but the straight line bullet doesn't quite feel right for the skulk. It's grand for quickly getting down a corridor and the charge into the marine, but it's of no use in actual combat due to the strict limit on air control- and thats were skulk movement ability *really* counts imo. Strafing is floaty, I'd like to be a bit more instant.
Instead of having the emphasis on the top speed a skulk can get from jumping down a corridor, maybe reduce that, but give more acceleration from walljumps and a bit more aircontrol. You currently don't get much height or feel any "oommphh" from walljumping, something that could make combat more fun and break the mold of marines and skulks trying to strafe around each other.
Wait.. all this will be released on a official patch someday?
sewlek is the one from UWE who made the most gamefeatures. So, yes. There good chances that you going to see most of the stuff from this mod in the game soon.
After some play, the only thing i really can't stand is the skulk movement.
that sort of easy bunnyhop has no sense and the reaction of the skulk is too slow. seems like beeing an elefant if you miss to stop right at the foots of a marine for the first bite, you are a dead skulk. no way to move in again.
Comments
Very interesting, the ability for 1 hive onos play but one so weak could create some cool play. Really it should only be useful for defending a 2nd hive while it builds that your trying to hold. Basically it would be weak enough that it could not engage far from base and gorge support. I am sure a coordinated team all gorges and 1 onos could make a comeback but they leave their base exposed in this. It all comes down to the health of the onos.
Also thanks for giving the commands some choice again in the order of upgrades this will make games much more interesting than dictating what the tech order is.
Not true, there is a lot of situations where you would not want to go leap first. Not to say it is super common not to go leap first but there are situations where it does not make sense.
Example, yesterday I went blink first b/c everyone was about to go fade and we where already destroying the marines.
I want to point out though that under your logic there is no such thing as a strategic choice as I agree with you that the decisions are always a consequence of the current reality. To my understanding though this is what strategy is, actions made as a consequence of a current reality for the purpose of altering it. Take for example chess, I do not think anyone to argue that chess is a game of strategy. However, is there anyone who can say that the decisions made in chess when played properly are not the consequence of the current game? Clearly the decisions made in chess are largely consequence of the current game and are made to alter the state of the game in order to complete an objective, this is the fundamental essence of strategy.
On a related note I often find people asking how they can become better commanders, my suggestion is to head to the library and ask for Sun Tzu.
The chess/NS2 comparison is pretty apt, because the vast majority of people don't know that the game is over after a few moves, even though it is.
the advantage of biomass is that you can still choose to get a set upgrade sooner, but because that upgrade is positioned at a higher tech - it can be more powerful.
instead of having 5 abilities of 'tier2 power', you can buff some of those and move them to tier3, or tier4 etc. you can't have a super powerful ability as an ability which is available 5 minutes into a game, it would just be a choice between that and a bunch of other tier2 farts :P
Sure, such situations exist. (Even if it is bad to have to many fades, because they are weak against buildings.) But do this special cases justify otherwise stale tech-options? Or could we remove this scarce used option to implement a system that has overall more freedom?
Not too fond of this kind of "charge back". I liked it the way how Biomass added the loss of a researched tech when losing a Hive.
Upgrades costing different amounts of res on a different amount of Hives is something pretty arbitrary that would need to be taught to the commanding player. Add the fact that an upgrade may suddenly cost yet another amount of res because you already bought it in the past on a higher number of Hives but then lost that number and you are sure to confuse people even more.
With the Biomass it was more obvious because you were buying Upgrade 1 on that Hive, then Upgrade 2 and so on. It was always linked to the specific structure, not upgrades being linked to the global number of buildings of a specific kind.
Plus paying the general price reduction based on the number of Hives vs. paying the difference after losing a Hive puts the commander at yet another hurdle: it may actually become undesirable to buy an upgrade at a larger number of Hives.
If you pay the full price up front, you can rest assured to always have that upgrade available even if you lose other Hives. If you spend all your res on two abilities on two Hives instead, you won't have any of them available once the Hive goes down again. So commanders might actually want to pay more for the upgrade than they would have to at two or three Hives.
I honestly prefer the idea that was brought up earlier: give the khammander the ability to move Biomass from one Hive to another. Let it take a while to do so (45-90 seconds, maybe scale the time with the number of built Hives or with the amount of Biomass that is already in that Hive, so you can get more Biomass out of a Hive that houses a lot of it faster when it gets surprise-rushed) and occupy the Hive's production in the meanwhile. That way he can save some of the upgrades if he feels like a Hive is going to get pressured soon.
Furthermore don't give a preset upgrade path but let Biomass work like a currency that you then use to unlock a specific ability. What abilities can be unlocked at what point can still be determined by the total amount of Biomass, but at least it gives the khammander some of the choices back that people here are missing so badly.
So the workflow is: research Biomass -> after research finishes, select one of the available upgrades to unlock.
A more advanced tactic could then be to not spend all the "upgrade points" instantly on upgrades but to save them until you raise the Biomass amount once more to unlock the next tier of upgrades and are able to spend your saved up points on abilities from that tier then instead of the lower ones.
As for lifeform scaling: I think the ability to have multiple trait structures stack is already doing a good job in that regard. Maybe there should be a timer between it, though, so that you can't drop three structures right away and have it actually "scale" with the match progress. Maybe let structure maturity have an impact on it too.
Leaving out the "upgrade points" idea and instead making abilities require both tres and biomass allows all abilities to be researched and the commander still has a choice in what order they're researched. However, it still has the problem that some abilities won't be researched until the end game, if at all, which is what we have now in vanilla.
If we only want to solve the problem where losing a hive is too much of a hit and allow aliens access to more abilities on one hive then the system mentioned above where abilities require biomass rather than number of hives, but still need to be researched individually, would suffice. (And I believe this is what we have now in the mod? I haven't played the latest version yet.) However, if we also want to give more choice back to individual players and avoid rendering some abilities obsolete, then we need to go back to what we had in the first iteration. I'm starting to lean towards the latter, although more thought should be given to the order in which the abilities are unlocked.
Sewlek has updated the mod with the merged silence and camo.
All the changes he has done look incredibly fun and elegant, there is even a small blood splatter to indicate taking damage as a marine.
Edit: I'm really hoping that spring break is the reason all the ns2 bt servers are empty :P
Man he is actually listening to suggestions with the phantom mix and the skulk feels really good especially if it is refined. Too bad I disagree with the armory changes. Pretty torn with his balance mod. At least most of the changes are overall good.
Since your mod is experimental, would you try out some of the babbler changes from the I&S forums?
Also someone suggested in another thread that gorge tunnels should spread infestation if the other entrance is on infestation, is that doable?
Let's all keep playing this to show our support, and grow a big enough playerbase around it so that the other devs may actually consider some of these very welcome drastic changes. Even if you don't agree with all of the changes in the mod, surely we can at least as a community agree that the biggest portion of it is delicious. Controversial changes like the armory one can always be fought over later :P.
the only concern is comp play, as obviously it's unfair to have comp players learn and adapt to a game over several months and then completely change everything. however, if the majority of changes are aimed at making both sides more comfortably balanced and adding more strategies... i'd expect most of them would be happy to adapt again.
my point; if radical changes are needed, i'm 100% behind it :P
couple of things I noticed:
1) the walljump is basically the same walljump from build 229. this is the problem with balancing around winrate and not having any clear design goals. we wasted 10+ builds with brick Skulks until we wound up full circle again with just a small tweak; limited aircontrol. this is why the winrate argument is and has always been completely idiotic.
2) you can just gain speed from jumping and holding forward along a flat surface... this is basically completely indistinguishable from NS1 bunnyhop to the average player, except it sucks the entire skill-movement aspect out of it. I don't understand all this flailing around trying to create everything that's not bunnyhopping, just to end up with a simplified and dry version of bunnyhopping?
- only one Phase Gate needs to be powered for all others to function
Why did you decide to make these changes to the phase gate? It seems like you specifically wanted ninja phase gates to be undetectable for some reason. And now they wont disconnect when you take out a bases power, so reinforcements can easily just retake the base.
I don't see anything unfair about that at all.
I like the idea that you can keep phasing to save a base where the power went down, though. If aliens want to secure it, they have to do more than to just go for the power - the PG has to die as well.
The Fade movement changes seem massive. I was dueling in 1on1 against a Fade as single minigun Exo, supported by a MAC, for about 20 minutes and was not able to kill the Fade. In skilled hands it can wreck faces, which seems like a good thing.
(I was able to hunt it down with the Railgun Exo shortly afterwards, though)
Yeah, but the phase HP was nerfed so that might actually be enough to compensate.. I hope I can get some people on a BT server today to try these new additions.
I was mostly focusing on movement.
-Fade. The current fade setup in this is a vast improvement to vanilla fade imo. However, I think blink might be a *little* too slow in comparison to how much adren it eats up, even with celerity. I understand you combine it with bhop, but with the current very limited air control that's not always a useful tactic.
-Lerk. I'm not sure how much the lerks been worked on, but there's currently two points I'm not a fan of. Holding crouch while looking down no longer accelerates you. This feels like a huge nerf to my play style, as a lerk who likes to fly high and swoop down quickly for the bite and back up again. Number two is lerk gliding on the floor is no longer possible. I was a fan of this, but I understand if you've purposely removed it due to the "damn that looks silly" factor.
-Skulk. @Gliss hit the nail on the head here.
Skulk (and fade) essentially have bhop... without the fun movement of bhop. The current setup actually suits the fade I think, but the straight line bullet doesn't quite feel right for the skulk. It's grand for quickly getting down a corridor and the charge into the marine, but it's of no use in actual combat due to the strict limit on air control- and thats were skulk movement ability *really* counts imo. Strafing is floaty, I'd like to be a bit more instant.
Instead of having the emphasis on the top speed a skulk can get from jumping down a corridor, maybe reduce that, but give more acceleration from walljumps and a bit more aircontrol. You currently don't get much height or feel any "oommphh" from walljumping, something that could make combat more fun and break the mold of marines and skulks trying to strafe around each other.
If it is deemed actually balanced and fun maybe.
I will be on a BT server tonight when I'm gaming (need to leave work now for by 2 1/2h commute - bah)
I can probably drag a few people from my steam friends list onto there if it's looking empty, too.
Roo
sewlek is the one from UWE who made the most gamefeatures. So, yes. There good chances that you going to see most of the stuff from this mod in the game soon.
that sort of easy bunnyhop has no sense and the reaction of the skulk is too slow. seems like beeing an elefant