Alien Res Balance On Large Games

Dantemss · July 2004

<div class="IPBDescription">Again...</div> This subject, I believe, is of large interest to the community, specially now that NS is going official and there will be lots of new 32-player servers up and running. However, nothing has been done since 2.0, when this issue showed up (since there were no more perma gorges) and we are only one week away from the 3.0 beta 5 release.

The issue is alien res balance on large games. Currently the game flow and balance can be explained like this: When the game starts (early-game), marines can't cover the entire map, while the aliens, although a bit weaker at first, have much better mobility. They dominate the map while the marines are busy somewhere else and get enough res to go fade or put up the second hive. What would be mid-game: Ether second hive up or first fades up or PGs built. These change dramatically the game flow. As you can see, the team with most res forces the mid-game first. End-game would be when one team is clearly going to lose.

The problem is when there are, for example 12 players on each team. Aliens either reach the mid-game when too late or never reach it. This is because of res distribution among the aliens. To be even with the marines, the Kharaa would need to have 2 times the number of rts they need on a 6vs6 game. This slows alien progress so much that when the hive is built the marines siege rush it and when fades appear all marines already have shotguns. Thus, all that res spent is lost and aliens have a better chance building DC bunkers or doing desperate MS rushes.

Seeing how the NS mode is only balanced for a set amount of players, people prefer to play combat and we end up with many more servers running co maps than ns maps.

To help balance large games, we have already some plugins on sites such as modns.org. However, most server admins don't even know these exist and it shouldn't be necessary to run any plugins to play the game.

My proposal is that alien res income is untied from the number of players. It would only depend on the number of rts. This idea is that of Cheesy's res balance plugin and I find it to be the best one. Some people defend a 50% balancing, so that aliens would get 1.5 times res (comparing to now) on a 12vs12 game instead os 2 times. Let me explain why I disagree.

You have to remember that alien upgrades are one-time only, while marine upgrades are permanent. Also, marines weapons can be picked up when the user dies. This helps counter the fact that higher alien lifeforms are better than lone marines. You also need to take into account that with more players the marines are likely to dominate the rts easier, since 1 LA is better than 1 skulk. All this makes me feel that aliens need the full boost instead of half of it.

I'm posting this because I want the Classic mode to be played. After NS becomes an official mod, the tendency is that the CO mode will be played more and more, while the NS mode will have a small increase. Balancing NS for large games may help it's growth.

So, please devs, hear what I'm saying and let aliens have their res on large games.

Any opinions? Do you agree or disagree with this post? Remember, this is my opinion and WILL NOT fit every one's view of the current balance, but I believe most people here will agree with this. This res thingy has been talked about so much that even Flayra has said that he would do some res tweaking if this continued to be an issue.

About the extensive discussion of this subject: all other topics seem to have died out, but if you think I should use some topic-resurrection-black-magic instead of posting this, feel free to lock it. I felt I had to post this because this is still an unsolved issue in the current version. And from my point of view it's a very important one.

GunFodder · July 2004

Yeah I almost think that the spawn rate is the real crippling factor for the alien team in big games. If you are dead, you don't collect res AFAIK and in 14 player games, it is not strange at all to wait nearly a minute before spawning.

That being said, res gain in large games is kinda screwy too, but the spawning needs to be adjusted is at all possible.

BattleTech · July 2004

It's going to take alot of balance to have the correct formula for alien res. on 14v14 game's because if it's to fast, It'll give alien's a huge advantage.

Example. I was playing on a 12v12 server where the server used that res flow plugin, I think it's like 1/7 res or something a tick from a nozzle. With only three res. nozzle's, our team was able to have 5 Fade's within the first 5 minute's of the game and a hive going up about the sametime. It was ridiculous on the marine's side, most of the time you only had to worry about 1-2 Fade's. But, 4-6 is just ridiculous, it completely turn's the tide of the game before the game even reach's midgame. You can pass out shotguns, sure. It'll kill the dumb one's, but it won't stop the Fade blitzkreig across the entire map.

If you're going to make a nice "balanced" res. system, then we're going to need some die-hard testing going on. Perhap's removing RFK would help to if they revamped the res. system.

Now, alien's spawning faster is something I'm not going to deny that's needed desperately. Marine's just outspawn the alien's significantly, especially with 3-4 IP's on a 14v14 game. Maybe having the alien's spawn in wave's of two at hive 1 until the second hive goe's up.

Zek · July 2004

I think small wave spawning(2, max of 3) based on the marine team's size would be appropriate, and certainly the easiest quickfix for the problem. An ideal res fix probably isn't in the scope of 3.0's Beta anymore with all the necessary testing; we should, however, implement some form of scaling res and just err on the side of too little to at least make the big pubs a little better, especially considering the new influx of CS players with full Steam support.

RyoOhki · July 2004

I really think the dves should focus more on making the game balanced for 7v7 and 8v8. The larger servers are probably always going to be marine biased, and frankly the people who run the servers should accept that NS isn't designed for 32 player games and simple lower the max amount of players.

KaiserRoll · July 2004

I'd like to try full blown alien wave spawning for classic. Something to make aliens even more differnt from marines.

TSAYautja_Cetanu · July 2004

The problem (as one person mentioned) is that higher alien lifeforms are better then any marine.

The problem at the moment is with huge games it takes ages for one alien to go onos.

However the second problem is that generally if one can go onos, then the whole team can (or lots on the team can).

So whilst at the moment it takes ages to go onos, if you untied the res, you'd just get everyone in the team being able to go onos. This would just make games boring and repetative because most of the game would be onos vs lvl 3 HA/hmgs.

Maybe there should be a giveres plugin like on the old voogru servers? But giving res would be at a penalty.

Slow_Smurf · July 2004

If NS is only meant to be balanced at 7v7 or 8v8(insert arbitary numbers here), then it shouldn't support more than that. However as feature lists etc have mentioned up to 32 players and they require maps to be designed with it in mind, I'd assume they intend it to be played and thus balanced.

The good part about a suggestion such as this, though it might be a bit unbalanced in the current form(its hard to get that perfect amount of res flow, hence why the old single/double gorge system worked so well(though had its flaws as well), is that it wouldn't alter the balance at all in 6v6(the clan size) and only very slightly in 7v7/8v8. Even those sizes are marine bias as it is(hell, 6v6 is marine bias in high level play), so I'm really not concerned with aliens getting a buff.

rknZ · July 2004

Flayra did say he was gunna collect more stats on this, and maybe change the way res works, but this was a long time ago, and he is busy doing other projects now <img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/sad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='sad.gif' />

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Flayra @ Mar 6 2004, 03:44 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>Once we have good playtest-statistics up (soonish), I'll be able to see exactly how big a problem this is, and will probably be able to fix it.</td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'>
 <a href='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=64650&hl' target='_blank'>http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/in...wtopic=64650&hl</a> 

Below was my idea back then, and I still stick by it:

Since the rines upgrade and usally get res at a set rate, aliens shouldnt have the res divided amongst them the way it works now...

Now the res each alien gets is divided by the number of aliens there are which can be between 1 and 10 on most servers. Perhaps this should be limited, so they get it on a scale divided between 5 and 8...

....1.....2.....3.....4.....5.....6.....7.....8.....9....10...11...12...13

_5.0_5.3_5.6_5.9_6.2_6.5_6.8_7.1_7.4_7.7_8.0_8.0_8.0_

It;s just a rough idea, and would need tweaking, but imo this would balance it quite a bit for larger and smaller games...

Kalias · July 2004

Perhaps some time ns will have to be tried with centralised res - the difference being any alien can access it at any time. I realise this could be abused... a method of solving this would also be required.

Dantemss · July 2004

I didn't mention alien spawning because 1 hive = 2 (1.5?) ips.
Marines usually have 3 ips on large games and giving the aliens more res would mean more hives earlier. 2 hives = 4 (3?) ips. At this point aliens are equal to or seriously outspawn marines. So I think the spawn thing is rather balanced. It's just more visible for the alien team because:

1- Marines have wave spawn (lots of ips). Aliens, although they spawn at more or less the same speed as the marines, have single-person spawns.

2- Marines dominate early-game (always) and mid-game if they can have upgrades in time. Then the aliens are stuck in their dying and respawning dilema.

3- The solution for this would be to have the second hive up ASAP, but for that you need res. So fixing res would also reduce, if not fix, spawn problems.

But it's just my opinion.

BattleTech: I find your report to be quite different from what people were reporting about large games, even with that plugin. Are you sure the teams weren't skill stacked? With 3 rts you would get 36/7 res per minute, which is approximately 5 res per minute. In 5 minutes you would have the exact 50 res needed to go fade or put up a hive. Sure, 5 fades are a bit too much, but you have to consider that there were 2 times as many marines, which were probably killing 2 times as many skulks and building 2 times as many rts, in fact dominating the map early-game. They failed to kill the fades (remember 12 shotguns, probably), so the outcome was expected. A hive up around 5 minutes is also expected on normal games. If it proves to be an issue, I bet the devs could make the balance only half-effective, like I said before. However, I don't like this idea too much for the reasons stated above.

Zek: Well limiting the number of ips can be something interesting. But I've heard somewhere (correct me if I'm wrong) that the marines were already limited to 3 ips. No matter how many you might have, only 3 marines could be "Reinforcing" at a time.

Kalias: Flayra said he wanted the teams to be as assymetrical as possible. So a centralised alien res system is not likely to be implemented.

Ice9 · July 2004

There's no limit to IP's and Reinforcements (We had about 5 one time, 5 people could respawn). Also, as for the resources, maybe make the resources collect 1.25 or 1.5 times as much. In my opinion, 2 is WAY to much...

BattleTech · July 2004

The difference between my post and everyone else's is I was playing on a server that altered the alien's res. flow so it was faster. I was just giving everyone an example on how "unbalanced" giving alien's to much res. flow could be. But, if I were to talk about the regular non-plugined large game's, I'd have the same complaint's as everyone else.

Kalias · July 2004

</div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Dantemss @ Jul 17 2004, 03:29 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> Kalias: Flayra said he wanted the teams to be as assymetrical as possible. So a centralised alien res system is not likely to be implemented.  </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> 
I don't think this difference -is- possible nowadays though. It is, and always has been a major issue for balance.

Jared101 · July 2004

i say for spawn issue there should be a a structure that can be build onto the hive,worth 15 res,and only 1 per hive

just give it another end

Zek · July 2004

Kalias, there are always going to be issues for balance, we're just trying to minimize them. Obviously the best solution to any balance problem is to make the teams more symmetrical but Flayra wants to preserve the differences in the team structures since it's one of the main features of the game.

Alien Res Balance On Large Games

Comments