Order Of Importance - Chambers
relsan
Join Date: 2002-11-01 Member: 3720Members, Constellation
Join Date: 2002-11-01 Member: 3720Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">Defensive, then Movement, then Sensory</div> I keep getting on servers and seeing that first chamber type to be made is a sensory chamber. I think this is a losing strategy. Here's the reasons why I think each chamber type is important.
Sensory Chamber: Enemy detection, cloaking
Movement Chamber: Hive-to-Hive transport, Adrenaline
Defensive Chamber: Healing, Carapace
I personally think the first type of structure to go up should be either defensive or movement, and I usually go for defensive. Defensive allows you to set up a reliable defense in the early rounds. A set up of two offensive chambers and one defensive chamber will defeat any of those early solo la/lmg marines that are trying to go rambo. 3 off and 2 def chambers will defeat 2 la/lmg marines if you're there to assist. 4 off and 3 def will give one ha/hmg marine problems. You can put defensive chambers anywhere to heal comrades so these structures are beneficial to the entire team in the long run.
Next I'd go with movement chambers because around the time your getting those first hives up, the marines are usually amassing for a hive attack. With movement chambers you can quickly jump to hive spots in order to help defend the area. Plus with adrenaline you can get those hives that much faster. And if you have two hives fades can really lay the acid smack down with adrenaline.
Finally I'd go with sensory last because it's very much an offense oriented chamber. That's the way these games go, first you build your defenses, then you attack. That's why I think it should go last. It's a waste to bother with it any earlier. The nay-sayers will have specific instances where it helps them but overall it hurts your team. When your team has all its defenses up and three hives established, then you can go cloak and stalk the enemy or use your enhanced sight to track them down and destroy them. The wall-hacking effect it has is great for close combat and catching marines while they are reloading.
So to reiterate, please don't make a sensory chamber first. You are just shooting your team in the foot. I've been in games where we've won with a sensory chamber made first but only when the marines were playing sub-par. Any comments?
Sensory Chamber: Enemy detection, cloaking
Movement Chamber: Hive-to-Hive transport, Adrenaline
Defensive Chamber: Healing, Carapace
I personally think the first type of structure to go up should be either defensive or movement, and I usually go for defensive. Defensive allows you to set up a reliable defense in the early rounds. A set up of two offensive chambers and one defensive chamber will defeat any of those early solo la/lmg marines that are trying to go rambo. 3 off and 2 def chambers will defeat 2 la/lmg marines if you're there to assist. 4 off and 3 def will give one ha/hmg marine problems. You can put defensive chambers anywhere to heal comrades so these structures are beneficial to the entire team in the long run.
Next I'd go with movement chambers because around the time your getting those first hives up, the marines are usually amassing for a hive attack. With movement chambers you can quickly jump to hive spots in order to help defend the area. Plus with adrenaline you can get those hives that much faster. And if you have two hives fades can really lay the acid smack down with adrenaline.
Finally I'd go with sensory last because it's very much an offense oriented chamber. That's the way these games go, first you build your defenses, then you attack. That's why I think it should go last. It's a waste to bother with it any earlier. The nay-sayers will have specific instances where it helps them but overall it hurts your team. When your team has all its defenses up and three hives established, then you can go cloak and stalk the enemy or use your enhanced sight to track them down and destroy them. The wall-hacking effect it has is great for close combat and catching marines while they are reloading.
So to reiterate, please don't make a sensory chamber first. You are just shooting your team in the foot. I've been in games where we've won with a sensory chamber made first but only when the marines were playing sub-par. Any comments?
Comments
Well maybe that's because you didn't listen to your sensory chamber when it said "The enemy approaches."
Defensive > Movement > Sensory
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If that scenario comes to pass, it is the Skulks' fault for not giving the Marines enough pressure while aggressivly scouting for Marine activities.
Not because of <!--QuoteBegin--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> </td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->Well maybe that's because you didn't listen to your sensory chamber when it said "The enemy approaches."<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Bw, there is no indication on the hivesight WHICH sensor chamber is detecting any marines, is there? Until there is, they are of little usefullness.
However, I'd still go for the sensory chamber last. Defense is important to get out first for healing and setting up hives/resources, since they heal offensive chambers. And right about the time you get a second hive and a chance to build another upgrade chamber is when you see lerks and fades coming around, so the movement chamber is perfect. The adrenaline upgrade is a must for both, in my opinion. It also allows quick movement between the two hives, for even better defense.
After all that, you should have everything you need to get and hold the third hive, at which point the sensory chamber becomes the most useful. It can "see" Frontiersmen for you in your expansions, which are no longer being guarded by active players because, at this late point in the game, they're on the offense. So you know exactly where the Frontiersmen are when they launch a counter-attack, and you can backtrack and kill them.
I think defense chambers are worthless for skulks, and a good strategy is not to build a single offense chamber until the second hive is started. Resource towers should go up first in easy to defend locations, then a second hive should be started. THEN, the defense chambers and offense towers should go up. I get really annoyed when, a few minutes into the game, there are 2 or 3 gorges on my team setting up defense/offense tower blocks in areas where the marines aren't going to get to for another 5 minutes, if ever. The skulks on the team should be able to keep the marines confined, and it's much easier to do that with cloaking or silence. It's also easier to do that when half the team isn't a gorge.
Am I the only person that even uses silence? If I sneak up on a group of marines without it, I rarely get more than 1 because they all whip around and spam bullets after the first bite, or even as I approach. Being silenced helps out considerably, as the marines usually don't even notice you're there until the first guy drops dead. I'd like to know if silence negates motion tracking - it would make sense that it does, but I can never really test it.
Cloaking is awesome early on because it allows you to camp out in front of their base and parasite everyone. You can do that without cloaking on a few maps, but you're asking to get shot full of holes on ones like eclipse or hera. Even with motion tracking, as long as you get into a good spot 10-20 seconds before the marines get there, they won't know where you are. And that good spot is sometimes in the middle of the hallway.
I usually like the movement chambers first, because lerks need adrenaline if you're forced to clear a turret farm at the third hive. Going with sensory can definitely put you at a disadvantage because of that, unless you're reasonably sure that you can secure all three hives before the marines do.
Sielnce i ususaly get second, cloaking last.
Skulk has 100 total life with carapace. That's 10 lmg shots.
The absorption percentages are worthless for a skulk because your armor is always going to be fully depleted before you die in either case. So you're looking at a 25% gain on your lifespan, which isn't *bad* (I always use carapace as skulk too), but I think silence or cloaking is a much bigger efficiency boost than 25%.
The Defense chamber's healing abilities alone make this extremely important to have as soon as possible. This should be the first you get. With your Skulks and more importantly, Gorges, harder to kill, you shouldn't have a hard time keeping the Marines at bay.
<b>Second Chamber : Movement</b>
Good, you have two hives. Things are looking good. You should have Lerks and Fades on the front lines along with Defense chambers to back them up. With Movement chambers and Adrenaline, You can attack faster and recover energy faster. With full Adrenaline, a Lerk can stay airborne indefinitely. He can also lay down Umbra and shoot spikes for 8 seconds. When both a Fade and Lerk are put together, you have a really tough force.
<b>Third Chamber : Sensory</b>
You have three chambers now. The Marines should be cracking soon. With Sensory you can cloak, but that's not too useful now. Scent of Fear is good once the Marines are broken up and running. With Scent you can track them and see them through the walls. This makes cleaning up a bit easier. <b> The Sensory Chamber would be much more useful if it actually showed people up on the hive sight instead of saying that someone is coming. In other words, if it worked more like the Marines Radar Dish thing.</b>
If a 2nd hive is assured (which it should be early game) you may even want to go for movement first, this way your sulks will be much more deadly and you can still get the defense chambers up to help you protect your hives.
The marines can get into set strategies, they have that luxury. We Kharaa can't. First off, we DO NOT build up and then fight. If you try to fortify the entire map as a kharaa and THEN head off into battle against the marines then congratulations you have just lost the game and you haven't even started playing yet...
No one choice of chamber is better than another, it just requires different strategies. No one upgrade is better than another, so don't narrow each chamber down to just one upgrade that has been working for you so far. You need to experiment.
The main problem with the sensory chamber, with all the chambers for that matter, is that we aren't using them very smartly. The sensory chamber, if correctly used can be far more useful than a defensive chamber first. Firstly, the skulks and lerks can gain advanced hivesight, so that they can aim their bites better, and/or the entire team can get cloaking, so they can stealth build or lay in ambush against the marines. We can also place sensory chambers in the hive room and in nearby corridors, so that we can hear when our hives are about to come under attack and respond quickly (as opposed to, for instance, hearing that the hives <b>already is</b> under attack and then using a movement chamber to get there quicker, or relying on the defensive chambers to keep healing the hive while you waddle over there).
If one message has been repeatedly ignored by most kharaa players it's that kharaa can not be played like the marines. We cannot place turrets down and expect them to hold a position, it's just a waste of resources. We need to rely on being everywhere at once, seeming to have all our bases covered and keeping the marines on their toes and jumping at the slightest noise. Being able to cloak helps us do that, because we can hide as the marines pass and then appear to have been behind them. A movement chamber gives us silence, celerity and adrenaline. We can move quieter, faster or do more. It helps us keep them guessing.
The defensive chamber generally houses upgrades to keep you alive longer during or after battle, and is currently used to do the same for our turrets. If anything, the defensive chamber goes directly against the strategies we need to be effective as the kharaa. The ability to stay alive during long battles is not something we need until we are making a final push against their base in the late-game. Up until that point, we need to move fast and hit hard. Right at the start, we need upgrades to help the skulks make rushes against the relativity undefended marine base.
So if we go with sensory chamber first we can see where the enemy is and hide if they come near by, but once the ruse is up and they see our hives, a bunch of silent skulks and no defensive chambers is not as strong as carapaced skulks with nearby defensive chambers and offensive chambers healing and providing SUSTAINED backup.
Besides, any ambush strategy is immeadiately broken at the first skulk bark as they are so ear-piercingly loud.
And check my Defensive Chambers and Staked Healing thread because the right set of chambers CAN hold a position, for a long time if not indefinitely in some cases. And they can definitely hold it longer than a bunch of skulks who'd have to change tactics every time the wary marines came back. Not only that but you can put a whole bunch of towers somewhere and only one gorge is needed to maintain it. You can't say the same for a skulk. There's no way a single skulk can hold a single area all by himself. Even against one soldier its still 50/50. Besides skulks are better at attacking marines from behind while they are attacking chambers. They are a good supplement to a defensive but they are definitely not the meat and potatoes of it. Like silverfox said: A skulk is STILL JUST A MOPED! So that's why I think surrounding your strat around sensory chambers in the early going is a bad move.
Oh, this may not be the topic but could all gorges build at least 3 of each type of chamber at hives, they are cheap so it doesnt matter but if you lose a hive its very useful to still have all upgrades. I played a game last night where we managed to get all 3 hives and then lost 2 of them but we could still compete even without a fade as we had lvl3 upgrades for everything. Very useful (we eventually lost it but it would have been lost straight away if it wasnt for the clever gorge that had built so many. In fact try and build them away from hives as well in a nice secret area that the marines probably wont reach (preferably away from seigable areas).
To start off with, one of the nice (or nasty) things about observatories is that they uncloak you if you come within close range. A smart marine commander will also use sensor scans to flush you out, so cloak becomes useless.
Furthermore, while offense is paramount, defensive capabilities are necessary too. A smart marine team will send one or two guys, quietly, out to assault the hive to force the aliens to pull back. Or, alternatively, they'll attempt to take resource nozzles to avoid RP starvation. With sensory, your team gets advance warning that they're incoming, but can do little to nothing about it. With defensive towers, you can hold them off for awhile at the least (giving your skulks time to get over there, just as a sensory tower would, but this time armed with defensive upgrades), or fend them off completely without assistence from the skulks. We should never be hearing the hive is under attack, because that would mean that the gorge left one entrance to the hive completely open. The OC + DC combo gives all the benefit of a sensory chamber's early warning, while simultaneously allowing our OCs to be that much more effective <i>and</i> give us defensive upgrades. Sensory only gives us early detection (which we'd have anyway) and cloak (which is of dubious value in the early game anyway).
A hive with strong defenses will not need any player assistence, at least for a little while. If your skulks are putting pressure on their base so they cannot safely send a full assault team, one gorge could conceivably hold them off forever.
Yes, cloaking is a nice ability. I happen to like it quite a lot. Regardless, it's nowhere near valuable enough to forgo:
Player healing
Structure healing
Early detection via OCs (rather than sensory chamber proximity)
Player upgrades
I mean, in the early game you really should be making nonstop suicides into their base anyway to put them on the defensive. A marine team cannot expand if they need to keep repairing their structures constantly or risk losing them. Lurking outside their base and making them paranoid is good, but making them scramble just to stay afloat is better.
Defense because the Skulks need the Carapce
Sensory because the Fades need the Lvl. 3 Cloaking
Movement because the Onos GOTSTA have the Adrenaline
Skulks don't really need Cloaking because either they can hide on the walls and ceiling and if they encounter Marines they're either
a) dead
b) victorious, really badly hurt
if they kill all the marines or don't and retreat Cloaking isn't going to help em at all.
If the marines are watching you on motion tracking, then they have a good idea where you stopped and hid. This is especially true if they are nearby. I've ran into a corner and cloaked before, only to have a marine enter the room and shotgun me in one hit. He saw me run into that corner with motion tracking, and cloaking didn't matter at all at that point.
Alone, defense chambers are worthless at hive defense. You're relying on putting up offense towers in front of the defense ones. 1 def chamber + 2 off towers = 42 RPs, half the cost for a hive. Put up 2 blocks of those and you spent enough resources to make a hive so now you're defending nothing.
Healing is pretty useless for a skulk, just die (provided your whole team isn't dying constantly). Also note that level 1 carapace is the same as 2 or 3 for a skulk, so don't yell at your team if there's only one def tower up early. The higher level carapace upgrades only matter for lerks and fades, who have a significant amount of armor in proportion to their health.
Just because you have the resources to build another Hive doesn't exactly make them expendable.
Offensive towers are best used away from hives, up & close and personal against marines who can't do anything about them.
Every dark corridor corner should feature a few offensive chambers with webbing everywhere and low to the floor. Trying to rely on an a few offensive chambers at the far end of a room is useless, because marines can peek out take few shots and hide again. With enough timing, a marine can stand out in the open and strafe side to side and completely avoid OC fire in that situation.
We have to stop trying to use offensive chambers like marine turrets, it simply wont work!
I really don't like the fact that everyone else plays Kharaa defensively. =\
With the majority of pub games being played against mostly nub marine teams, sitting cloaked outside the marine base, or near it, will allow me to take out groups of up to 4 marines as they pass me.
Since the patch, the early goal of the kharaa is to prevent marines from expanding outside their base. I for one like like the idea of even one being able to get past a blockaded area.
People say cloaking is useless cuz the marines will likely get their sat up early. For one thing, by the time they get sat up, kharaa should be on the way to 2nd hive, thus about ready for the fade phase, so cloaking has become less necessary. Or suppose they do manage to get it up while kharaa are still in skulking phase, then you can just skulk further away. Motion tracking wont help against a stationary cloaked skulk.
There are many good arguments against me.. I know.. you dont have to try to flame me. I cannot say that my way is the ONLY way. It does very much depend on the strategies the team decides to use, and the counter-strategies of the marines. I agree mostly with ShadowDrgn, and Revenge on issues of this topic.
One thing I want to remind people of is the FUN factor. Sure winning is fun. We all go for it. But one of the things that makes NS so great, is the fun of sitting cloaked as skulk in some corner, and pwning a pack of marines from behind... Do not forget this.
Duff
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I'm glad you're having fun as a skulk. But this is a TEAM game, and I, as a gorge, am going to build what I think helps the team win the game.
I don't even understand where the debate is here. I have never seen a game where defensive towers weren't the first to go up, and I cannot even imagine why anyone would choose anything else. Carapace is pretty much mandatory. Healing towers; totally necessary, or your offensive towers are worthless.
The sinple fact is that you can't rely on being "everywhere" in a public game. People don't cooperate like that. Without defenses, your hives will get taken. You need to stack a shitload pf offensive and defensive towers around your hives and resources early on. It's not going to stop a determined squad, but it will slow them down enough for you to react.
Defensive is the only choice for the strategic player.
I used to really like Sensory up first for cloaking, since it made it that much easier to stop marine expansion, but I realized that it makes it some what harder in the middle game. Once you have 2 hives up, that means fades and 2 upgrades. If you spent the first hive upgrade on Sensory, then that leaves the choice of Movement or Defense. Movement would allow the fade to regen nrg faster for longer attacks, and Defence for carapace, to absorb more damage. That in my opinion is a hard trade off, and I would most likely go for defence considering the healing factor it has. If you instead went Defence and then Movement for hive upgrades, you would not only be able to absorb more damage, but be able to attack much longer. That's why it seems that DMS is a good way to go.
If you go with Sensory first, and lets say you manage to hold off a few marines expansions with your cloaking. Great, cloaking is great for that. And, lets say you get your 2nd hive up.
BUT, what if the marines manage to fortify your 3rd hive? Now you have cloaking, and 1 other upgrade. IMHO, its about 100x harder to take back a well fortified hive with sensory+movement, or sensory+defense, then it is with movement+defense.With movement+defense, you setup defense towers at a safe distance from the hive, and do Fade runs with carapace+adren and umbra, lobbing acid bombs and clawing at the towers/factories.
If, however, you had gone with sensory+defense, then your energy will deplete far too quickly on the Fade and the Lerk won't be able to maintain the umbra. If you had gone sensory+movement, then you have no defense towers near, and you can't heal for another assault. You either have to occupy another teammate (gorge) to go healing, or run back to a hive. This decreases your effeciency of taking out that 3rd hive location, because that gorge could be another Fade (in a defense+movement situation), and running back to a hive takes far too long.
So, in short... defense->movement->sensory if there's a chance the marines will put up a fight. If the marine team is filled with NSPlayer's, then build whatever you want, obviously. But in a competitive situation where both teams could win, d->m->s is the only way to go. Period, end of story.
I have, several times. The one thing they all had in common was the Kharaa getting rolled over. Defensive>Movement>Sensory is the only way to go. Never assume you're going to get all three hives, because you're usually not. Lerks and Fade practically <i>require</i> Adrenaline, and never, ever, once seen a game where Kharaa lost their defensive chamber hive and were able to come back.
Let's face it - sensory upgrades are nice and all, but if you really want to suprise marines Silence does a much better job than cloaking.
Within the 1st 5 minutes of the game, the 2 Gorges on the team would be better off capping all the nearby resource nodes first.
Only put some DC+OC to secure the nodes when you can afford it.
If the Skulks are well trained Skulks, the marines would have trouble expanding, if they do run into any of the Kharaa Resource Chambers, dumb marines will leave their backs exposed while they duck and knife the Resource Chameber.
Within the 1st 5 minutes of the game, the 2 Gorges on the team would be better off capping all the nearby resource nodes first.
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Look closely. That's exactly what he said. He said you put a stack of DCs and OCs around your hives and RESOURCES early on.
Anyways I have two more things to say:
#1 From the beginning I've said that the Sensory Chamber is an extremely useful chamber. I don't think anyone is disputing that. However I think that SCs are not the proper chambers to start with in the early going. Plus a strat based around skulks just seems so silly. You should be preparing for the long haul. Remember NS is not a short shootout like CS; it's WAR and it's imperative you see it that way from the beginning.
#2 I just finished watching clan match demos between EC and iwa and I noticed two very interesting things. Before I go into it I'd like to say that the aliens won both games so the match was a tie; woo aliens! In the first match, EC was the marines. iwa was able to pull off a successful skulk slaughter and kill the ECs before they could set up! The reason this is so interesting is becauuuuuuse, there's no way to have sensory chambers(or any chambers for that matter) up fast enough for the very important first skulk rush when the marines are most vulnerable. The iwas were able to pwn the ECs with purebred, pristine, un-modified, un-molested skulk. It just goes to show that if you are good enough at skulk, you don't need the sensory upgrades. In the second match, the ECs were the aliens. NOW REMEMBER, the ECs are official PTs for NS. They didn't pull off the early skulk slaughter and had to take the long route to victory. Guess which chambers they went with first? Defensive and Movement.
If the strat is good enough for the clan-matching, play-testing elite, it's good enough for me. <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' valign='absmiddle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->
Btw here's the post with the links to the demos from our good man Flayra:
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I was going to post this for more people to see, but I don't think we can afford the bandwidth. If anyone wants to informally mirrors these files, just reply to the thread and I'll update this post.
<a href='http://www.natural-selection.org/downloads/TAUvsNSPT-demos.zip' target='_blank'>A couple of TAU guys (yes, the CS ones) play the NS PTs</a> (7.7 megs)
<a href='http://www.natural-selection.org/downloads/IWAvsNSPT-demos.zip' target='_blank'>Some IWA guys (yes, the CS ones) play the NS PTs</a> (4.8 megs)
<a href='http://www.natural-selection.org/downloads/RANDvsNSPT-demos.zip' target='_blank'>Random people play the NS PTs</a> (13.9 megs)
If you don't know how to watch demos for HL or NS, download and install <a href='http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay/' target='_blank'>Geekplay</a> first (mandatory utility for demo watching).
Enjoy these, and watch the masters at work (esp. TommyD's elegant commanding).