Imbalances With Many Players...

Nullzero

<div class="IPBDescription">Ridiculous spawn times...</div>NS is fine when you're playing 6 vs 6 or something... no problems at all.

But if you kick up the player max to something like 20 or 26 or something (I was on a 30 player server earlier)... the spawn times for aliens get ridiculously long. If 4 or 5 people die on your alien team within the span of 20 seconds, you could easily be sitting in spectator mode for 60 seconds or more, waiting to respawn.

Where as if the same number of *marines* are killed, they spawn back within 10-15 seconds... a trivial wait!

For a 12 vs 12 game, or even higher, this makes a huge difference in the gameplay. Marines can be aggressive in the begining, and take lots of resource points... where as the Aliens have to be more passive... risking an all-out rush attack can be very dangerous because losing 5 or more teammates on the alien team can spell doom for your chances at victory.

This is because if 30-50% of your teammates are stuck in spectator for 50 or more seconds, the marines can easily take a hive point with their number advantage. And any alien player can tell you... taking a hive point away from the Aliens is a HUGE deal, and can easily cost the aliens the game, if the hive is well fortified with turrets and so forth.

I'm sure some of you geniuses will be kind enough to point out that "OMG! YUO SUX! DONT DIE TO MAREEN!! I CAN CLOAK AND KILL 17 MARNES BEFOR THEY EVEN GET A TURRENNT!!1".

Save your breath. Any good alien player can tell you that aliens HAVE to be aggresive in the begining to stop the human expansion. If they let the humans expand, they become too strong, or worse still, take a hive point.

Since aliens have to be aggressive, they have to risk the lives of their teammates. If many of the aliens die in the process of being aggressive, they'll be stuck in spectator mode for an extended period of time.

Anyway... I think in larger games, alien spawn times should be increased some how.

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Nullzero

rah_xaphan

I think they should make the spawn times and spawn slots proportionate to the people on the server and on the teams.

Bridger

yea, scaling spawn times with # of players for aliens would be nice. Marines can just build more IPs. Another solution would be to limit the marines to 3 IPs, this would make them exactly like aliens (3 spawn every 10 seconds).

CMEast

There is another way to be aggresive and slow the marines expansion without rushing them. Simply hide outside their base, cloak, chuckle etc Meanwhile your gorges (you should still only have one or two even with a larger team) should be gaining resources massively and can quickly get all hives and nodes with the other aliens defending and setting up ambushes.
Within the first 5 minutes you <i>should</i> have all upgrades and the onos, meanwhile they will still have weak weapons.

Even if they could only have one portal to spawn from they will still be able to spawn quickly when needed simply by using the distress beacon. A marines spawn time is one of his advantages.

relsan

I've noticed that the marines seem more powerful when the games are bigger. And I have noticed that I spawn a lot faster as a marine. I never put those two occurances together though. You could be right.

Also like sometimes I'll see a bunch of marines and aliens killing eachother with about the same number of deaths on each side and some seconds later theres still red names on the alien list but none on the marines list. Strange.