-I don't play onos but they do seem to die very quickly. I suspect this might be due to players buying them w/o upgrades though.
Tbh the issue with Onos is that even with upgrades it is pretty squishy and expensive compared to say a 60 pres dual exo. 76-84 pres for a fully upgraded Onos with nerfed attributes. Before the Onos had 1300 health with 900 armor with carapace. This was with Exos and jetpacks that were slower. Now you got faster moving cheaper exos, jetpacks that can easily decimate an Onos given it's lack of mobility compared to something like the fade and how easily a fleeing Onos will be gunned down by marines with jetpacks. At best with 2 hives and maxed out biomass you would have 1150 health and carapace only gives 100 armor now compared to the 400 so max 550 armor. Gore range reduced as well which makes it a bit easier for jetpacks to get away.
Either way I have not gone Onos since 250. Fade is probably best at this point.
No.
The problem is a single onos thinking he can solo a base in a 12v12 server. If you are going to take damage down a hallway, then make sure you have a gorge and some other lifeforms with you. Onos are not suppose to be an unstoppable juggernaut that can charge through groups of marines. If an onos engages poorly, it will die. This has nothing to do with its current HP.
No.
The problem is a single onos thinking he can solo a base in a 12v12 server. If you are going to take damage down a hallway, then make sure you have a gorge and some other lifeforms with you. Onos are not suppose to be an unstoppable juggernaut that can charge through groups of marines. If an onos engages poorly, it will die. This has nothing to do with its current HP.
Not really so much it's health as much as the issue is carapace. 100 armor seems pretty low for something that use to give a lot more.
Regardless of the reason onos are dying, they don't have enough health to get things done. They charge through a damage filled corridor, get in a couple smashes on whatever structure is blocking the doorway, then retreat. If crags were unnerfed, this may be a viable strategy, but right now its too slow to deal damage.
Being very carful how I put this since I admit I do not play onos (though i shoot at em quite a bit) you don't want the onos to be able to as you put it run down a corridor taking damage and be able to kill the structure blocking the door and have enough health to leave would be super OP. I did play onos once since the patch release and I was surprised at how much more maneuverable they were. My understanding is they are now more maneuverable at the cost of being less of a tank. This highlights the need for using the other classes for support. Having gorges for heal support (or those pesky spitter gorges who can actually kill you now lol), lerks for umbra support, and fades/skulks to soak some damage if you are doing a all-in base assult. This in affect increases skill floor (less hp) and increases skill ceiling (more maneuverable). Both are steps in the right direction. The days of having 1 onos wreck a base are over.
I feel once people realize how strong umbra is you'll see the onos get some of its balls back with no HP/armor increases.
This is not a mentality issue, it is a game design issue.
You can't make a game in which keeping your lifeform alive is the most important thing to do, and then suddenly expect people to throw their lifeforms away for a chance of a gain (basically risking an Onos to kill a wall-in Armory or Robo), and the danger of a Marine comeback. Marines can turtle multiple of their bases too easily... some phased in GL/FT JPs and maybe an Exo are all they need, so it's not just about last base turtles.
You can't blame players for not doing the opposite of how the entire game (minus this turtle issue) works.
It's more bad design than bad player behavior.
I completely disagree. Most pubbers completely fail at understanding when to engage, how to engage and when to retreat. Instead they do as you say and throw their life forms away pointlessly. That isn't the game telling them to do that..that's lack of understanding how to play the game.
It makes sense for a game to penalize you losing your expensive equipment or lifeform. NS2 is a game that requires you to build resources to buy things to help you finish off the other team. You can't make those things unkillable or idiot friendly because then the really good players would go 100-0 in every game they play and you would create a even worse snowball affect the winning team has.
I've seen games where alien teams have done coordinated attacks with 12 biomass, onos, bile, umbra and enzyme and not even managed to take down the armory wall blocking the door before they all die from GLs, FTs and exos. By the time they've respawned/healed the armories are full healed as well.
Alien end game tech is just not strong enough. Marine tech is strong enough, who's ever heard of an alien turtle.
I've seen games where alien teams have done coordinated attacks with 12 biomass, onos, bile, umbra and enzyme and not even managed to take down the armory wall blocking the door before they all die from GLs, FTs and exos. By the time they've respawned/healed the armories are full healed as well.
Alien end game tech is just not strong enough. Marine tech is strong enough, who's ever heard of an alien turtle.
If you lose all lifeforms attempting to kill an armory then well...there are bad players in every server. The first "paragraph" in my post is the answer as to why you lose all lifeforms in that case.
To be fair though I think part of that issue is the exo element. I agree braking turtles with exos involved is a pita. However, i often play gorge in pubs and its kinda LOL at armory walls. gorges alone can kill armory walls quite easily when you have a fade or 2 go in for a distraction. The hard part comes in is getting in when you have multiple exos involved. I also agree the marine turtle can be hard to break even without exos.
The hard part comes in is getting in when you have multiple exos involved.
Which in 250 is fairly often. 249 breaking turtles wasn't too bad, GLs cost more and it was rare that exos were still left. Even if they had armory walls up with out exos and with the stronger onos they could deal out enough damage to break through.
You can make statements about bad players but the fact is end game marines can deal out a metric tonne of damage that will kill of multiple gorges and onos before they can do substantial damage. All you can do is repeatedly die hoping that those last few hits are enough to destroy the wall so at least 10 Tres has to be spent rebuilding it, getting a new onos at that point is nothing as the hives are probably filling up with onos eggs given there's nothing left to spend on.
To be fair though I think part of that issue is the exo element. I agree braking turtles with exos involved is a pita. However, i often play gorge in pubs and its kinda LOL at armory walls. gorges alone can kill armory walls quite easily when you have a fade or 2 go in for a distraction. The hard part comes in is getting in when you have multiple exos involved. I also agree the marine turtle can be hard to break even without exos.
Which is one of the issues I mentioned: do we really have to rely on Gorges to end the game against a marine turtle? Marines have so many ways to deal with aliens, but for aliens it always boils down to Bile Bomb.
And as it stands are the 5-11 res per Gorge a lot more worth their cost than the 60-84 res Onos. I can get 8-12 Gorges for that res and solo-suicide-rush the base constantly (perhaps with one or two other aliens as distraction or another Gorge to cooperate) and it will hurt marines more than that "super lifeform" Onos ever could. Which feels kinda wrong.
Anyway, Sewlek mentioned yesterday that he has no problem with buffing alien lategame tech a bit, since that's a point in the game that is rarely reached in comp matches anyway and thus can have some more potential as game ender in pub matches.
It makes sense for a game to penalize you losing your expensive equipment or lifeform. NS2 is a game that requires you to build resources to buy things to help you finish off the other team. You can't make those things unkillable or idiot friendly because then the really good players would go 100-0 in every game they play and you would create a even worse snowball affect the winning team has.
You can't break a turtle (especially as an Onos) without having a big chance to lose it. There's just no way to play in a way to not lose these expensive units. That's the problem, and you can't blame it on "play better", "better teamwork", whatever.
Even Fades are now better against turtle.
I am pretty sure this is from over commitment rather than no upgrades.
Less commitment would mean doing nothing. The real problem is, as Onos, you can't really engage anything except a lone Marine or lone, surprised single Exo. Everything else, you will be focused down and die (with Gorge, without Gorge, does not matter, and Gorge healing is much slower now). Basically, playing Onos means running away from anything which could be the slightest danger, at best being in a group where you aren't really needed and might as well be a Fade or just a Skulk in terms of what damage you do. There's just no real use for Onos now because they are so weak.
Onos is simply boring. Only trick you got is hold shift, go straight forwar roaroro. No skillshot devour, very clumsy stomp, no real movement special.
It's just boring to be an onos
Regardless of the reason onos are dying, they don't have enough health to get things done. They charge through a damage filled corridor, get in a couple smashes on whatever structure is blocking the doorway, then retreat. If crags were unnerfed, this may be a viable strategy, but right now its too slow to deal damage.
Being very carful how I put this since I admit I do not play onos (though i shoot at em quite a bit) you don't want the onos to be able to as you put it run down a corridor taking damage and be able to kill the structure blocking the door and have enough health to leave would be super OP. I did play onos once since the patch release and I was surprised at how much more maneuverable they were. My understanding is they are now more maneuverable at the cost of being less of a tank. This highlights the need for using the other classes for support. Having gorges for heal support (or those pesky spitter gorges who can actually kill you now lol), lerks for umbra support, and fades/skulks to soak some damage if you are doing a all-in base assult. This in affect increases skill floor (less hp) and increases skill ceiling (more maneuverable). Both are steps in the right direction. The days of having 1 onos wreck a base are over.
I feel once people realize how strong umbra is you'll see the onos get some of its balls back with no HP/armor increases.
Youre probably much better than me, but im speaking from the particular situation i was in. It wasnt one onos, we had 4 at one point go in with 2-3 gorges healing (which other people are telling me im not supposed to do?) and biling where we could. the best we could do is to take out the robotics factory that blocked off the hallway. We lost a bunch of lifeforms there because spam is strong and fuck it we wanted the game to end, one way or another.
Up until that point we would have 2 oni running halfway down the hallway, realize they were gonna die, then back out. Obviously wasnt that effective.
Im not sure where our player skill is supposed to come in. Onos is pretty simple imo. run in, do damage, dont die. Gorge is pretty simple as well, and it seems like judging by this thread, we were doing the right things. Granted we didnt have anyone spraying umbra on our teammates. But even so, why is supposed to be a strategy in ending the game? shouldnt the strategy be in winning it?
more mobility and less health sounds awesome in a general situations (and especially applied to the onos), but it doesnt help in turtles. It just makes it even harder to break it.
I like the idea of tailoring the underused 3rd hive abilities towards breaking stalemates and ending the game.
I'm tempted to say that the Onos health nerf is part of the plan to help marines with the comeback. I mean yeah sure marine turtle means 1-base/1-RT while the aliens have the rest of the map, but these eggs aren't cheap. Aliens bashing their head against a wall can lead to the loss of 3-4 Onos easy as well as the decimation of most higher lifeforms. It doesn't matter how much Tres you can burn when it takes time to muster up your forces again to repel the marine counterattack. Failure to repel the counterattack just snowballs into a possible "miracle" marine comeback. Let's not forget forcing a bacon isn't as viable to isolate Exos anymore given their loliceskates.
Granted a number of factors contribute to this nonsense, a neutered Onos is part of the problem. Why did it even need neutering to begin with? If anything buff health and reduce attack damage or basic attack speed so Onos can better serve as damage sponges rather than glorified killwhoring machines.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited July 2013
Whats the downside to not being able to recycle marine weapons?
That they are sometimes expensive? GLs aren't 30 pres anymore and even if it were still expensive, it sounds like it would make for a more varied team, and possibly lessen some tech explosions, depending.
I also think it would create more team work too, since you really want that flame thrower to stay alive in your squad, and if he dies, adios FT..
Given the lowered costs of weapons lately like 15 pres GLs.. there's far less justification for such a mechanic. I just see it causing more harm than good lately,
Recycling weapons feels like it creates sloppy offense and teamwork at best, and severely assists turtling at worst.
Weapon recycling being taken out of the game is long overdue to be honest. This is particularly problematic when turtling. You simply can't justify a symmetric economic model allowing only one side to effectively recycle p.res investments.
Also, I must have missed the discussion but I really do not understand the motives behind forcing alien tech order through biomass. The original implementation that allowed the alien comm to choose between several abilities was MUCH better. As it stands currently, alien strategic gameplay has effectively been watered down to the point where you may as well get rid of the alien comm. If in the old system somehow some tech choices were clearly more preferable over other ones, then that is a balance problem, not a design one.
Secondly, I completely agree with the notion that aliens need help in breaking marine turtles. The amount of coordination that is required for aliens to break a turtle in pubs is excessive, when really, at 3-4 hives, it should be fairly simple (surely we can all agree that if one side holds 3 TPs for a significant amount of time they should have a sizeable advantage). There's many ways to address this:
- Continue biomass scaling on 4 hives
- More significant biomass scaling in general
- 4th upgrade on 4th hive
- Fix the alien lategame abilities. (Most of them are still in a terrible state, I'm looking at you Vortex)
- Marine W/A 3 tied to second CC.
- Remove weapon recycling. (Or attach a cost to it somehow)
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
edited July 2013
Still needs to be possible to swap weapons with people. Would much rather see the time be drastically reduced (half the current idle time perhaps) than weapons simply disappearing on death.
As for breaking 1 CC turtles. Make the 3rd hive abilities boss.
Xenocide destroys dropped weapons and does bulk damage to structures.
Vortex effects arms lab.
Remove horrible trailing lerk gas and replace with something useful.
Gorge web for jetpackers.
There comes a point where striving for possible comebacks from any situation just results in boring stalemates.
Lowering the idle time would nerf offense while having little impact on defense. I don't care that much one way or the other, but no weapon drops would be very unforgiving without a dramatic cost reduction. Marines are much less capable of reliably preserving their own lives than alien higher lifeforms are.
Marines are much less capable of reliably preserving their own lives than alien higher lifeforms are.
I definitely think something needs to be done to reevaluate pres investments for marines as the risk involved for aliens in any sort of push is always much higher than that for marines. But I do agree with the above quote and I'm not sure flat out removing recycling would be an effective solution.
With regards to turtling I've seen a lot of talk about some of the buffs to rines / nerfs to fade/onos were to make it easier for a marine comeback. Im not really sure why this was something that needed to be considered? I know the game is intended to not be entirely symmetrical across both sides but looking at it generally, if an alien team does not secure a 2nd tech point by mid-late game. They have pretty much lost. Likewise if the aliens are pushed down to one hive they lose a great deal more compared to the marine side. A lost hive room for aliens is a loss of the res invested in the room, an element of map control, but more importantly a whole chain of upgrades is gone for spawning aliens (until they reclaim the room and rebuild/upgrade/drop 3 upgrade structures), as well as the biomass and upgrades tied to that. A lost tech point for marines is only the first two mentioned, res investment and map control. In the case where that room also held the arms lab, marines lose thier upgrades for however long it takes to replace the one structure (which many comms will do as the room goes down in a safe location).
It just doesnt seem like a fair situation to me. Marines still hold the potential for a comeback throughout most of the game. If the aliens lose too many lifeforms and get pushed down to one hive, its basically GG. I think other tech points need to be made much more valuable to the marine team. As many people have said things like W3/A3, exos should not be avaliable on one TP.
Another idea I was thinking about when it came to marine turtling was possibly to make more use of the power system. At the moment power nodes just determine whether buildings/lights work in a given room. Why not limit how much one power node can accommodate? Would make other tech points more valuable in terms of needing the space to build, as well as promoting more forward bases in non TP rooms (i.e forcing the marines into having to push out more to remain effective rather than sitting in one spot and trying to farm lifeforms until they have the advantage). It would also present commanders with a choice when trying to turtle, do I wall up with armories? but sacrifice my proto lab/robotics lab to do so.
Power management alongside resource management is quite a common thing in RTS games (and it is in NS2 to a certain extent), but I think it could be a really interesting way to tweak the games balance without necessarily having to enforce simple rules like "no exos without 2 CCs".
Would be interested to hear peoples thoughts on it.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
An arbitrary limit not communicated to the player would be annoying. We already have excess hidden timers and limitations. Honestly don't think it is necessary if biomass levels 9-12 scale more and the third hive abilities are actually worth using and capable of breaking a tech'd up turtle.
Whats the downside to not being able to recycle marine weapons?
That they are sometimes expensive? GLs aren't 30 pres anymore and even if it were still expensive, it sounds like it would make for a more varied team, and possibly lessen some tech explosions, depending.
I also think it would create more team work too, since you really want that flame thrower to stay alive in your squad, and if he dies, adios FT..
Given the lowered costs of weapons lately like 15 pres GLs.. there's far less justification for such a mechanic. I just see it causing more harm than good lately,
Recycling weapons feels like it creates sloppy offense and teamwork at best, and severely assists turtling at worst.
This is something I would actually quit because of. If anything weapons should never disappear now that aliens can bile bomb them.. This would be the biggest marine nerf of all time.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
Other than a change log 5 months ago, there's no communication to a player that BB does that, afaik.
Not to mention it isn't instant, and in a turtle you can easily pick up these weapons almost instantly.
Oh and BB doesn't round corners. (think control on veil.)
Oh and when breaking a turtle, you're not focusing on BBing weapons on the ground that you probably can't see anyways.
So i dont see that point applying in this scenario, tbh.
It would only nerf marines who were a) turtling b) poorly performing a base assault.
I would not change the weapon drop system. It's pretty logical and intuitive: someone drops a weapon, anyone can pick it up. Like in real life. There's nothing wrong with that.
[ If anything, I'd remove the weapon auto destruction completely, but instead any Alien (not just Bile) can damage/destroy them. That would give increased importance to where a weapon is dropped.]
Why? Basically, this:
We already have excess hidden timers and limitations.
Yes! NS2 already has so many needlessly hidden stuff, and 250 even added tons more. For example, why can't you just parasite everything instead of "only the thing on the parasite-able entities list"? Why do MACs weld players and buildings, but not each other? And so on...
This arbitrary hidden stuff is unintuitive and the original NS2 design document, for good reasons, explicitly says it should be avoided. And worse, it does not even have a real benefit.
Also, I must have missed the discussion but I really do not understand the motives behind forcing alien tech order through biomass. The original implementation that allowed the alien comm to choose between several abilities was MUCH better. As it stands currently, alien strategic gameplay has effectively been watered down to the point where you may as well get rid of the alien comm. If in the old system somehow some tech choices were clearly more preferable over other ones, then that is a balance problem, not a design one.
The old Alien system which had tiers (1 Hive, 2 Hives, 3 Hives), and you could choose what to do with the tiers, was more dynamic. With the new "1 upgrade per tier/biomass level", there's just no choice. Alien Comm is now more or less pointless Drifter micro (thought I really like the Drifter abilities to help in a fight, similar to med/ammo/nanoshield/scan/etc), while Marines have a lot of different strategies to choose from (= what to upgrade first). Aliens have nearly no tech choice except which Hive to get first (Crag, the others are just worse... just like in 249 ).
While it may be nice that the current system forces all upgrades to be available reliably for the players, it's too static for the Comm/team strategy.
Hive tiers were not perfect, because of uselessness of 1 Hive Aliens and the fact that 3 Hive tech never mattered. I think biomass should be cheaper (15 per level, and upgrades more expensive to balance)*, and you should be able to upgrade one Hive to max biomass level. So Comms could decide between "get upgrade" or "quickly upgrade biomass and rush a certain upgrade" (like Leap or Spores) or "just max biomass quickly for HP advantage".
Also, biomass should be shared between Hives, so it does not get lost when a Hive dies (= better Alien comeback ability! Currently, losing a Hive is a death sentence.).
* it's very strange that 1st biomass upgrade is 20, second is 30. You regularly are in situations where you have 2 Hives, one of them has a biomass upgrade. Now you can get the exact same upgrade (+1 biomass) for 20 or 30 res, depending on where you do it. That's just really strange!
Why exactly did the Onos get nerfed anyway? It's essentially useless now, it doesn't have enough health to stay in fights for a long period of time, it's unable to escape easily and too slow to chase down marines, and it needs to be right next to them in order to kill them.
Compare that to the marine counterpart, the exo, which has an extremely powerful ranged attack, moves faster than an Onos, and costs less.
All this stuff about "marine comebacks" is BS. These changes do not allow the marines to make comebacks, they simply make it so that turtling, which was already a major problem in 249, is significantly more difficult to break in 250.
Comments
Tbh the issue with Onos is that even with upgrades it is pretty squishy and expensive compared to say a 60 pres dual exo. 76-84 pres for a fully upgraded Onos with nerfed attributes. Before the Onos had 1300 health with 900 armor with carapace. This was with Exos and jetpacks that were slower. Now you got faster moving cheaper exos, jetpacks that can easily decimate an Onos given it's lack of mobility compared to something like the fade and how easily a fleeing Onos will be gunned down by marines with jetpacks. At best with 2 hives and maxed out biomass you would have 1150 health and carapace only gives 100 armor now compared to the 400 so max 550 armor. Gore range reduced as well which makes it a bit easier for jetpacks to get away.
Either way I have not gone Onos since 250. Fade is probably best at this point.
The problem is a single onos thinking he can solo a base in a 12v12 server. If you are going to take damage down a hallway, then make sure you have a gorge and some other lifeforms with you. Onos are not suppose to be an unstoppable juggernaut that can charge through groups of marines. If an onos engages poorly, it will die. This has nothing to do with its current HP.
Not really so much it's health as much as the issue is carapace. 100 armor seems pretty low for something that use to give a lot more.
Agreed. Same with the fade. 20 extra armor for an upgrade is a joke.
Being very carful how I put this since I admit I do not play onos (though i shoot at em quite a bit) you don't want the onos to be able to as you put it run down a corridor taking damage and be able to kill the structure blocking the door and have enough health to leave would be super OP. I did play onos once since the patch release and I was surprised at how much more maneuverable they were. My understanding is they are now more maneuverable at the cost of being less of a tank. This highlights the need for using the other classes for support. Having gorges for heal support (or those pesky spitter gorges who can actually kill you now lol), lerks for umbra support, and fades/skulks to soak some damage if you are doing a all-in base assult. This in affect increases skill floor (less hp) and increases skill ceiling (more maneuverable). Both are steps in the right direction. The days of having 1 onos wreck a base are over.
I feel once people realize how strong umbra is you'll see the onos get some of its balls back with no HP/armor increases.
I've seen games where alien teams have done coordinated attacks with 12 biomass, onos, bile, umbra and enzyme and not even managed to take down the armory wall blocking the door before they all die from GLs, FTs and exos. By the time they've respawned/healed the armories are full healed as well.
Alien end game tech is just not strong enough. Marine tech is strong enough, who's ever heard of an alien turtle.
If you lose all lifeforms attempting to kill an armory then well...there are bad players in every server. The first "paragraph" in my post is the answer as to why you lose all lifeforms in that case.
To be fair though I think part of that issue is the exo element. I agree braking turtles with exos involved is a pita. However, i often play gorge in pubs and its kinda LOL at armory walls. gorges alone can kill armory walls quite easily when you have a fade or 2 go in for a distraction. The hard part comes in is getting in when you have multiple exos involved. I also agree the marine turtle can be hard to break even without exos.
Which in 250 is fairly often. 249 breaking turtles wasn't too bad, GLs cost more and it was rare that exos were still left. Even if they had armory walls up with out exos and with the stronger onos they could deal out enough damage to break through.
You can make statements about bad players but the fact is end game marines can deal out a metric tonne of damage that will kill of multiple gorges and onos before they can do substantial damage. All you can do is repeatedly die hoping that those last few hits are enough to destroy the wall so at least 10 Tres has to be spent rebuilding it, getting a new onos at that point is nothing as the hives are probably filling up with onos eggs given there's nothing left to spend on.
Which is one of the issues I mentioned: do we really have to rely on Gorges to end the game against a marine turtle? Marines have so many ways to deal with aliens, but for aliens it always boils down to Bile Bomb.
And as it stands are the 5-11 res per Gorge a lot more worth their cost than the 60-84 res Onos. I can get 8-12 Gorges for that res and solo-suicide-rush the base constantly (perhaps with one or two other aliens as distraction or another Gorge to cooperate) and it will hurt marines more than that "super lifeform" Onos ever could. Which feels kinda wrong.
Anyway, Sewlek mentioned yesterday that he has no problem with buffing alien lategame tech a bit, since that's a point in the game that is rarely reached in comp matches anyway and thus can have some more potential as game ender in pub matches.
Even Fades are now better against turtle. They just have no HP/Armor, even with upgrades. Less commitment would mean doing nothing. The real problem is, as Onos, you can't really engage anything except a lone Marine or lone, surprised single Exo. Everything else, you will be focused down and die (with Gorge, without Gorge, does not matter, and Gorge healing is much slower now). Basically, playing Onos means running away from anything which could be the slightest danger, at best being in a group where you aren't really needed and might as well be a Fade or just a Skulk in terms of what damage you do. There's just no real use for Onos now because they are so weak.
It's just boring to be an onos
Youre probably much better than me, but im speaking from the particular situation i was in. It wasnt one onos, we had 4 at one point go in with 2-3 gorges healing (which other people are telling me im not supposed to do?) and biling where we could. the best we could do is to take out the robotics factory that blocked off the hallway. We lost a bunch of lifeforms there because spam is strong and fuck it we wanted the game to end, one way or another.
Up until that point we would have 2 oni running halfway down the hallway, realize they were gonna die, then back out. Obviously wasnt that effective.
Im not sure where our player skill is supposed to come in. Onos is pretty simple imo. run in, do damage, dont die. Gorge is pretty simple as well, and it seems like judging by this thread, we were doing the right things. Granted we didnt have anyone spraying umbra on our teammates. But even so, why is supposed to be a strategy in ending the game? shouldnt the strategy be in winning it?
more mobility and less health sounds awesome in a general situations (and especially applied to the onos), but it doesnt help in turtles. It just makes it even harder to break it.
I like the idea of tailoring the underused 3rd hive abilities towards breaking stalemates and ending the game.
Granted a number of factors contribute to this nonsense, a neutered Onos is part of the problem. Why did it even need neutering to begin with? If anything buff health and reduce attack damage or basic attack speed so Onos can better serve as damage sponges rather than glorified killwhoring machines.
That they are sometimes expensive? GLs aren't 30 pres anymore and even if it were still expensive, it sounds like it would make for a more varied team, and possibly lessen some tech explosions, depending.
I also think it would create more team work too, since you really want that flame thrower to stay alive in your squad, and if he dies, adios FT..
Given the lowered costs of weapons lately like 15 pres GLs.. there's far less justification for such a mechanic.
I just see it causing more harm than good lately,
Recycling weapons feels like it creates sloppy offense and teamwork at best, and severely assists turtling at worst.
Also, I must have missed the discussion but I really do not understand the motives behind forcing alien tech order through biomass. The original implementation that allowed the alien comm to choose between several abilities was MUCH better. As it stands currently, alien strategic gameplay has effectively been watered down to the point where you may as well get rid of the alien comm. If in the old system somehow some tech choices were clearly more preferable over other ones, then that is a balance problem, not a design one.
Secondly, I completely agree with the notion that aliens need help in breaking marine turtles. The amount of coordination that is required for aliens to break a turtle in pubs is excessive, when really, at 3-4 hives, it should be fairly simple (surely we can all agree that if one side holds 3 TPs for a significant amount of time they should have a sizeable advantage). There's many ways to address this:
- Continue biomass scaling on 4 hives
- More significant biomass scaling in general
- 4th upgrade on 4th hive
- Fix the alien lategame abilities. (Most of them are still in a terrible state, I'm looking at you Vortex)
- Marine W/A 3 tied to second CC.
- Remove weapon recycling. (Or attach a cost to it somehow)
As for breaking 1 CC turtles. Make the 3rd hive abilities boss.
Xenocide destroys dropped weapons and does bulk damage to structures.
Vortex effects arms lab.
Remove horrible trailing lerk gas and replace with something useful.
Gorge web for jetpackers.
There comes a point where striving for possible comebacks from any situation just results in boring stalemates.
I definitely think something needs to be done to reevaluate pres investments for marines as the risk involved for aliens in any sort of push is always much higher than that for marines. But I do agree with the above quote and I'm not sure flat out removing recycling would be an effective solution.
With regards to turtling I've seen a lot of talk about some of the buffs to rines / nerfs to fade/onos were to make it easier for a marine comeback. Im not really sure why this was something that needed to be considered? I know the game is intended to not be entirely symmetrical across both sides but looking at it generally, if an alien team does not secure a 2nd tech point by mid-late game. They have pretty much lost. Likewise if the aliens are pushed down to one hive they lose a great deal more compared to the marine side. A lost hive room for aliens is a loss of the res invested in the room, an element of map control, but more importantly a whole chain of upgrades is gone for spawning aliens (until they reclaim the room and rebuild/upgrade/drop 3 upgrade structures), as well as the biomass and upgrades tied to that. A lost tech point for marines is only the first two mentioned, res investment and map control. In the case where that room also held the arms lab, marines lose thier upgrades for however long it takes to replace the one structure (which many comms will do as the room goes down in a safe location).
It just doesnt seem like a fair situation to me. Marines still hold the potential for a comeback throughout most of the game. If the aliens lose too many lifeforms and get pushed down to one hive, its basically GG. I think other tech points need to be made much more valuable to the marine team. As many people have said things like W3/A3, exos should not be avaliable on one TP.
Another idea I was thinking about when it came to marine turtling was possibly to make more use of the power system. At the moment power nodes just determine whether buildings/lights work in a given room. Why not limit how much one power node can accommodate? Would make other tech points more valuable in terms of needing the space to build, as well as promoting more forward bases in non TP rooms (i.e forcing the marines into having to push out more to remain effective rather than sitting in one spot and trying to farm lifeforms until they have the advantage). It would also present commanders with a choice when trying to turtle, do I wall up with armories? but sacrifice my proto lab/robotics lab to do so.
Power management alongside resource management is quite a common thing in RTS games (and it is in NS2 to a certain extent), but I think it could be a really interesting way to tweak the games balance without necessarily having to enforce simple rules like "no exos without 2 CCs".
Would be interested to hear peoples thoughts on it.
Now its never expected again unless coordinated between two players intentionally. And turtles are severely impacted. (just one factor though)
Its not like there's ever a shortage of non lmg weapons in a team even without recycling.
This is something I would actually quit because of. If anything weapons should never disappear now that aliens can bile bomb them.. This would be the biggest marine nerf of all time.
Not to mention it isn't instant, and in a turtle you can easily pick up these weapons almost instantly.
Oh and BB doesn't round corners. (think control on veil.)
Oh and when breaking a turtle, you're not focusing on BBing weapons on the ground that you probably can't see anyways.
So i dont see that point applying in this scenario, tbh.
It would only nerf marines who were a) turtling b) poorly performing a base assault.
[ If anything, I'd remove the weapon auto destruction completely, but instead any Alien (not just Bile) can damage/destroy them. That would give increased importance to where a weapon is dropped.]
Why? Basically, this: Yes! NS2 already has so many needlessly hidden stuff, and 250 even added tons more. For example, why can't you just parasite everything instead of "only the thing on the parasite-able entities list"? Why do MACs weld players and buildings, but not each other? And so on...
This arbitrary hidden stuff is unintuitive and the original NS2 design document, for good reasons, explicitly says it should be avoided. And worse, it does not even have a real benefit.
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This here: The old Alien system which had tiers (1 Hive, 2 Hives, 3 Hives), and you could choose what to do with the tiers, was more dynamic. With the new "1 upgrade per tier/biomass level", there's just no choice. Alien Comm is now more or less pointless Drifter micro (thought I really like the Drifter abilities to help in a fight, similar to med/ammo/nanoshield/scan/etc), while Marines have a lot of different strategies to choose from (= what to upgrade first). Aliens have nearly no tech choice except which Hive to get first (Crag, the others are just worse... just like in 249
While it may be nice that the current system forces all upgrades to be available reliably for the players, it's too static for the Comm/team strategy.
Hive tiers were not perfect, because of uselessness of 1 Hive Aliens and the fact that 3 Hive tech never mattered.
I think biomass should be cheaper (15 per level, and upgrades more expensive to balance)*, and you should be able to upgrade one Hive to max biomass level. So Comms could decide between "get upgrade" or "quickly upgrade biomass and rush a certain upgrade" (like Leap or Spores) or "just max biomass quickly for HP advantage".
Also, biomass should be shared between Hives, so it does not get lost when a Hive dies (= better Alien comeback ability! Currently, losing a Hive is a death sentence.).
* it's very strange that 1st biomass upgrade is 20, second is 30. You regularly are in situations where you have 2 Hives, one of them has a biomass upgrade. Now you can get the exact same upgrade (+1 biomass) for 20 or 30 res, depending on where you do it. That's just really strange!
Compare that to the marine counterpart, the exo, which has an extremely powerful ranged attack, moves faster than an Onos, and costs less.
All this stuff about "marine comebacks" is BS. These changes do not allow the marines to make comebacks, they simply make it so that turtling, which was already a major problem in 249, is significantly more difficult to break in 250.
What's hidden is your GL drops, but not your JP.