Simple: I got carried away. My ego took over. I became obsessed. I grew with writing, however. But simply enough I got carried away. I took the mod in a direction that was unnecessary. I took on the challenge of attempting to cover every aspect of detail that's required of a team, and not a single person that doesn't have the resources to do everything.
It's actually funny how default settings are the perfect setup for this version of siege.. I mean, sure NS1 rules where great. It was what launched the mod in the first place. Whoever came up with the idea I credit them fully, and all the mappers back in the day who contributed to the project with brilliant designs, I too credit.
But man, Siege in NS2... It's just, great. Really. For example, Contamination is a stalemate breaker. However it's debate-able if it should be allowed to echo eggs into the siege room before it opens (technically, siege is just a *DOOR*, which doors block things like arcs and drifters and macs from entering, but the purpose of contamination is to be able to be spawned anywhere, right?).
TL;DR ~ The reason siege is defaulted is that it's what fills the server.
i didn't play the first NS, so i might be mistaken on this, but my understanding is that infestation wasn't really a thing then, and so siege maps were built around the idea that no one were to be in the siege room untill the doors opened. the whole idea of it is to have one team, usually marines, hold out till the doors open, at which point they get the reward of blasting the other team after often times, barely holding on. if aliens get in the siege room from the get-go, which will happen, cause people like to exploit things they're not supposed to be exploiting, unless marines manage to push them back on the front, which don't happen too often, it's essentially an automatic alien win. what's the point in playing marines then?
Right now I have it set to delete any MARINE built structure (or arc, mac, cyst, and not power node) that's located inside any room with the words "siege" or "Siege" before the door actually opens (some maps have a "siege hallway" as well). This means that blueprints are allowed, and alien structures.. due to contamination + echo...
This could change in the future to prevent contamination + echo inside siege before it opens But these are the settings right now. I don't like being in charge of things due to my past history of taking it too far with all the updates and whatnot.. so it's best the community decides on if contamination + echo should be allowed in siege before it opens.. Until then there's really no final judgement on it.. So far everyone has different opinions on if it should be allowed or not.. there's not really a major vote on it as far as I can tell..
So far it's just people being upset at the chance of losing when doing so well up until the door opens. Which is kinda the point of the mod, imo. The fate of the game can be decided last minute. Personally I don't like knowing who the winner is until it appears on the screen..
EDIT: In the past I was very against this. Even as going as far as to modify most maps to have the siege room height adjusted to be higher than hive room height, to prevent hive infestation from reaching inside to spawn structures before it opens. I even modified the search range to not include height in its range calculation so that structures can still perform even if there's a height difference.
Well, it may seem that... with default settings, and with 3 tech points initially spawning at marine start.. that, marines end up pushing rather than defending. The combination of dual exo's and narrow hallways are not a good combination for aliens without enough res to spam onos.. and even with onos, there's no ranged attack to combat that.. especially with flamethrowers making bile useless... oh and mobile arcs are easy to offend with, however nice to send straight to siege when it opens.
As easy as it would be to simply double alien pres gain and enable crag stack, or give back skulks ranged spam acid rockets.. these may not be the solution.
Perhaps punishing (for lack of a better term) a marine team that decides to offend rather than defend. Such as pausing the siege timer if choosing to offend. As it may seem gorge tunnels sneakily passing by, and 200 supply limit for marines, in all recent observed games, are not good enough to combat marine exo hallway rush toward alien hive.. ontop of aliens already having to offend during a timelimit or be wiped out.
Welp despite my ramblings. I'm just gonna repeat history here. I began Siege with default settings and adjusted it via based on observations of playthroughs, so I'll do the same here, except now with all my knowledge of writing gained from the past experiences.
There's an advertisement ingame promoting the current changes, and the "Vanilla" portion of the server will be removed on restart.
Current changes:
2x alien res gain
instant alien structure maturity
crag healstack (divided by # of crags in radius)
clog infestation
aaaaand it's back to default vanilla with clog infestation, modified entity search range to not include height (for the different of height with siege/hive room so that infestation doesn't bleed to/from, and so that the entities that use range don't include height such as arcs/crags, so it doesn't think the hive is out of range, if in siege, to hive, and visa versa.).. also with rollthedice.. giveres.. siegemod commands.. but i guess that's it with this thread.
I mainly saw acid rocket being an issue down long corridors vs exos (miniguns spread being too much to hit that distant fade with his sniper-loaded babblers :P )
Map detailing / rebalancing should eliminate this as an issue.
Comments
It's actually funny how default settings are the perfect setup for this version of siege.. I mean, sure NS1 rules where great. It was what launched the mod in the first place. Whoever came up with the idea I credit them fully, and all the mappers back in the day who contributed to the project with brilliant designs, I too credit.
But man, Siege in NS2... It's just, great. Really. For example, Contamination is a stalemate breaker. However it's debate-able if it should be allowed to echo eggs into the siege room before it opens (technically, siege is just a *DOOR*, which doors block things like arcs and drifters and macs from entering, but the purpose of contamination is to be able to be spawned anywhere, right?).
TL;DR ~ The reason siege is defaulted is that it's what fills the server.
This could change in the future to prevent contamination + echo inside siege before it opens But these are the settings right now. I don't like being in charge of things due to my past history of taking it too far with all the updates and whatnot.. so it's best the community decides on if contamination + echo should be allowed in siege before it opens.. Until then there's really no final judgement on it.. So far everyone has different opinions on if it should be allowed or not.. there's not really a major vote on it as far as I can tell..
So far it's just people being upset at the chance of losing when doing so well up until the door opens. Which is kinda the point of the mod, imo. The fate of the game can be decided last minute. Personally I don't like knowing who the winner is until it appears on the screen..
EDIT: In the past I was very against this. Even as going as far as to modify most maps to have the siege room height adjusted to be higher than hive room height, to prevent hive infestation from reaching inside to spawn structures before it opens. I even modified the search range to not include height in its range calculation so that structures can still perform even if there's a height difference.
As easy as it would be to simply double alien pres gain and enable crag stack, or give back skulks ranged spam acid rockets.. these may not be the solution.
Perhaps punishing (for lack of a better term) a marine team that decides to offend rather than defend. Such as pausing the siege timer if choosing to offend. As it may seem gorge tunnels sneakily passing by, and 200 supply limit for marines, in all recent observed games, are not good enough to combat marine exo hallway rush toward alien hive.. ontop of aliens already having to offend during a timelimit or be wiped out.
There's an advertisement ingame promoting the current changes, and the "Vanilla" portion of the server will be removed on restart.
Current changes:
2x alien res gain
instant alien structure maturity
crag healstack (divided by # of crags in radius)
clog infestation
Map detailing / rebalancing should eliminate this as an issue.