Some Comm thoughts after my first real start-to-finish game
thecaptain_ps
Join Date: 2010-11-05 Member: 74785Members
Join Date: 2010-11-05 Member: 74785Members
Just finished my first game, all the way through, on a public server!
It started out 2v2 and ended up about 6+v6+. As has been reported, after about 6 players total performance started to drop fairly rapidly for all players.
Even though I didn't comm much on NS1, I figured I'd give it a shot. Overall the game was quite laggy (intermittent screen updates and random pausing), and this made some UI interactions very difficult. Here are my thoughts (apologies if some of these are duplicated in other threads)
1) Changing sentry gun facing is very broken. Sometimes it worked, most of the time they faced 90* to the left and never changed, and they were incredibly easy to flank and eat by the Kharra. It seems the way to change facing was T and then right clicking (this caused a particle effect), but most of the time I tried that, nothing happened. Sometimes the facings changed later to what appeared to be my last facing command when enemies appeared, but this wasn't usually noticeable. I tried to cover rooms with 4-5 sentries, but usually the kharra could find a blind spot and eat them all with no trouble at all. I wondered why other servers I joined had sentry farms.. now I know. They're mostly useless, but you hope that with a half dozen sentries pointing the same direction, kharra will run in front of at least one. It was very frustrating being in a CC surrounded by a half dozen sentries, frantically trying to reface them, and have no option besides hopping out of the chair and blasting the lone enemy (with a very low chance of success).
2) When a MAC building a command chair was killed, the comm chair could then spawn its own MACs, and I was thus able to finish building. bug or feature?
3) It was impossible for me to determine marine health without selecting them first. Since I could only deploy medpacks from a selected CC, this required me to select a rapidly moving and warping marine while dealing with my own low framerate, determine if they were low on health, then select my hotkeyed CC (hoping that through the lag it would eventually select from my single tap, since a double tap would warp me to the CC's location), then hit H or select the button, then click on the ground. I resorted to just spamming health packs near any marine with any chance of being attacked, in the hope that they would blindly stumble over one, and skipped selecting them at all.
4) The green message popups on the lower right often obscured the button grid (I was running at minimum settings in an 800x600 window). This forced me to do a lot of guessing and waiting.
5) It was very hard to determine where marines were on the minimap, since their green circles blended into everything else. 'A soldier has died' was usually a good indication of where players were fighting.
6) Build bots were finicky to manage due to the network problems, but eventually I figured out I should just pump out 2 or 3 from the nearest CC every time I wanted to build something, drop a few buildings, and babysit. Sometimes, when the build bots were wiped out, a few marines finished the in progress buildings, which was a nice touch.
7) I had no reliable way to spend my eventual stockpile of money/resources. By the end of the game I must have had 5-600 from holding 2-5 res nodes. Buildings were difficult to build, and research was a one-off expense. Medpacks and MACs were basically free so I created as many as possible, as often as possible. With a full tech tree and all buildings possible, I think I would still amass the stockpile before an eventual defeat or victory.
8) I ultimately had difficulty marshalling my team (I had little indication of how many marines were even playing actively, let alone what they were doing, as I was often busy fighting fires with macs or spamming medkits), and little way to inspire or control them, so I resorted to just building more CC's and armories, spamming health packs, using observatory ping occasionally, and hoping we could survive long enough for the players with the flamers to kill the enemy hives.
9) Because of the network instability, the flamer was basically the end-all, be-all weapon for marines. Figuring this out pretty quickly in a previous game made me realize the need to expand and upgrade the CC's, and secure my base. It wasn't immediately apparent how to get through the tech tree to flamers, so that took a lot of trial and error to figure out. (You need an advanced armory... advanced armory requires command _station_. Command station is the upgrade on the command chair upgrading it to T2, which is greyed out until you have 2 CC's, but because the tooltip on the command station upgrade doesn't mention what it unlocks, I wasn't sure which parts of the tech tree I was missing out on.) Once my team had flamers, we were roughly on par if not better equipped than the kharra.
10) I figured out how to put my marines into hotgroups, but not squads.. so the spawn-with-squad upgrades confused me. Occasionally blobs of soldiers would be highlighted with a red circle, but I had no idea what this means. Sometimes a popup that would say "Red Squad" would pop up on the left side of the screen. This made me think that squads and hotgroups were not the same thing.
11) I actually enjoyed the power node system, as in the game I played the kharra were not diligent about knocking out all power nodes at the start of the game, and I was able to build bases and repair nodes slightly faster than the kharra took them down.
Overall, this was the first game that I was able to complete from start to finish (without crippling lag), and that I actually enjoyed. It seemed like the game bottlenecked in terms of player abilities and attrition rather than being influenced by economy, so once our force was upgraded to the maximum amount, we slowly slogged through the alien hives burning them as we went. There was a lot of back and forth fighting over expansion bases and power nodes, but I felt like there wasn't much for me to spend money on to help that process out, other than heavily suggest that my team buy flamers. This made me miss the ability of the comm to burn all his resources on team weapons to get a qualitative advantage (using both the carrot and the stick). I did most of my fighting with the interface rather than the kharra, but by the end of the game I was satisfied with our victory. Can't wait for the network issues to be worked out!
My main gameplay wishes for a future version:
1) Fixed sentry gun facing (if this is a reproducible bug), and possible arc increase (120 degrees?)
2) Medpack deployment that doesn't require a selected CC (eg, a hotkey that can be pressed with anything selected). Having to select the CC first was one of my biggest frustrations, even using a hotkey.
3) A way to see soldier status (health and/or position) easily, whether through big, visible health bars on screen, a list on the side, better minimap highlighting, etc
4) A way to select soldiers without finding them in the main view and clicking them (Eg, TAB/Shift-TAB -> cycles through all troops, etc). Because I want to select/view troops by context/location/status rather than by name, I don't think hotkeys fully solve this problem.
It started out 2v2 and ended up about 6+v6+. As has been reported, after about 6 players total performance started to drop fairly rapidly for all players.
Even though I didn't comm much on NS1, I figured I'd give it a shot. Overall the game was quite laggy (intermittent screen updates and random pausing), and this made some UI interactions very difficult. Here are my thoughts (apologies if some of these are duplicated in other threads)
1) Changing sentry gun facing is very broken. Sometimes it worked, most of the time they faced 90* to the left and never changed, and they were incredibly easy to flank and eat by the Kharra. It seems the way to change facing was T and then right clicking (this caused a particle effect), but most of the time I tried that, nothing happened. Sometimes the facings changed later to what appeared to be my last facing command when enemies appeared, but this wasn't usually noticeable. I tried to cover rooms with 4-5 sentries, but usually the kharra could find a blind spot and eat them all with no trouble at all. I wondered why other servers I joined had sentry farms.. now I know. They're mostly useless, but you hope that with a half dozen sentries pointing the same direction, kharra will run in front of at least one. It was very frustrating being in a CC surrounded by a half dozen sentries, frantically trying to reface them, and have no option besides hopping out of the chair and blasting the lone enemy (with a very low chance of success).
2) When a MAC building a command chair was killed, the comm chair could then spawn its own MACs, and I was thus able to finish building. bug or feature?
3) It was impossible for me to determine marine health without selecting them first. Since I could only deploy medpacks from a selected CC, this required me to select a rapidly moving and warping marine while dealing with my own low framerate, determine if they were low on health, then select my hotkeyed CC (hoping that through the lag it would eventually select from my single tap, since a double tap would warp me to the CC's location), then hit H or select the button, then click on the ground. I resorted to just spamming health packs near any marine with any chance of being attacked, in the hope that they would blindly stumble over one, and skipped selecting them at all.
4) The green message popups on the lower right often obscured the button grid (I was running at minimum settings in an 800x600 window). This forced me to do a lot of guessing and waiting.
5) It was very hard to determine where marines were on the minimap, since their green circles blended into everything else. 'A soldier has died' was usually a good indication of where players were fighting.
6) Build bots were finicky to manage due to the network problems, but eventually I figured out I should just pump out 2 or 3 from the nearest CC every time I wanted to build something, drop a few buildings, and babysit. Sometimes, when the build bots were wiped out, a few marines finished the in progress buildings, which was a nice touch.
7) I had no reliable way to spend my eventual stockpile of money/resources. By the end of the game I must have had 5-600 from holding 2-5 res nodes. Buildings were difficult to build, and research was a one-off expense. Medpacks and MACs were basically free so I created as many as possible, as often as possible. With a full tech tree and all buildings possible, I think I would still amass the stockpile before an eventual defeat or victory.
8) I ultimately had difficulty marshalling my team (I had little indication of how many marines were even playing actively, let alone what they were doing, as I was often busy fighting fires with macs or spamming medkits), and little way to inspire or control them, so I resorted to just building more CC's and armories, spamming health packs, using observatory ping occasionally, and hoping we could survive long enough for the players with the flamers to kill the enemy hives.
9) Because of the network instability, the flamer was basically the end-all, be-all weapon for marines. Figuring this out pretty quickly in a previous game made me realize the need to expand and upgrade the CC's, and secure my base. It wasn't immediately apparent how to get through the tech tree to flamers, so that took a lot of trial and error to figure out. (You need an advanced armory... advanced armory requires command _station_. Command station is the upgrade on the command chair upgrading it to T2, which is greyed out until you have 2 CC's, but because the tooltip on the command station upgrade doesn't mention what it unlocks, I wasn't sure which parts of the tech tree I was missing out on.) Once my team had flamers, we were roughly on par if not better equipped than the kharra.
10) I figured out how to put my marines into hotgroups, but not squads.. so the spawn-with-squad upgrades confused me. Occasionally blobs of soldiers would be highlighted with a red circle, but I had no idea what this means. Sometimes a popup that would say "Red Squad" would pop up on the left side of the screen. This made me think that squads and hotgroups were not the same thing.
11) I actually enjoyed the power node system, as in the game I played the kharra were not diligent about knocking out all power nodes at the start of the game, and I was able to build bases and repair nodes slightly faster than the kharra took them down.
Overall, this was the first game that I was able to complete from start to finish (without crippling lag), and that I actually enjoyed. It seemed like the game bottlenecked in terms of player abilities and attrition rather than being influenced by economy, so once our force was upgraded to the maximum amount, we slowly slogged through the alien hives burning them as we went. There was a lot of back and forth fighting over expansion bases and power nodes, but I felt like there wasn't much for me to spend money on to help that process out, other than heavily suggest that my team buy flamers. This made me miss the ability of the comm to burn all his resources on team weapons to get a qualitative advantage (using both the carrot and the stick). I did most of my fighting with the interface rather than the kharra, but by the end of the game I was satisfied with our victory. Can't wait for the network issues to be worked out!
My main gameplay wishes for a future version:
1) Fixed sentry gun facing (if this is a reproducible bug), and possible arc increase (120 degrees?)
2) Medpack deployment that doesn't require a selected CC (eg, a hotkey that can be pressed with anything selected). Having to select the CC first was one of my biggest frustrations, even using a hotkey.
3) A way to see soldier status (health and/or position) easily, whether through big, visible health bars on screen, a list on the side, better minimap highlighting, etc
4) A way to select soldiers without finding them in the main view and clicking them (Eg, TAB/Shift-TAB -> cycles through all troops, etc). Because I want to select/view troops by context/location/status rather than by name, I don't think hotkeys fully solve this problem.
Comments
quite a difference from ns1 then lol... OCs blew... turrets raped skulks. OC's u can dodge lol
I think structures that make use of quick use abilities should have an interface that reflects that. So on the top down view the umbra/babbler/whatever abilities should be 'floating decals' around the structure. Therefore you just click/double click them and that is it.
This game is too fast for the menu structures they have in place currently.
I didn't think that would be that great at first. Simply because it is not that accurate and you have to access a menu or key to do so, which would make for a complicated interface.
How about when you 'right click' in the game, it is area specific. So if it is near a crag, it brings up options for the crag.
Just to give you our perspective. I know it's silly to ask for balanced game play already, and I'm not doing that. You can however if you want to count this as the first official NS2 balance whine. ;p
This game is too fast for the menu structures they have in place currently.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I agree. Deep menus are a no no. It would be great to be able to click areas on the map and send out general orders that wouldn't require you to micro manage your "fleet." For instance. You could click on a resource node and have the nearest, free drifter automatically move to that location and build, instead of having to move your view back to your hive, click on a drifter(or make one if there aren't any available), move back to the node, navigate the drifter menu for the structure and drop it. Even better. If there are no free drifters, that action could automatically spend the 2 resources for you to get one from the nearest hive and send him on his way.
RTS's require so much coordination between an ever growing amount of assets that efficiency is key. Having simple, or predictive menus would cut out so much hassle that doesn't need to be there.
Just to give you our perspective. I know it's silly to ask for balanced game play already, and I'm not doing that. You can however if you want to count this as the first official NS2 balance whine. ;p<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I don't know if I was in the same game but I had a very similar game anyway. We(aliens) managed to hold off a bit killing the expansion's(alien natural but taken over) power node but with flamethrowers its pretty impossible to get close to a marine. Is the lerk supposed to be the counter to them firebats?
All it needs to balance this out, is to make weapons cost more expensive, so ppl have to manage their resources and not just get a free weapon every respawn(i havent managed to get short on res at least) - weapon drop and pickup function could be considered after this step. (add a res cap to marines and aliens?)