High capacity drum magazine upgrade for the assault rifle.

danshyu · June 2011

<div class="IPBDescription">And other suggestions for early game marine weapons.</div>Just like how the starter alien species should get some upgrades to keep them at least somewhat useful at end game. Same should be done to early marine weapons.

High capacity drum magazine:

Increases rifle ammo count from 50 to 99 (since the counter doesn't seem to have enough space for 3 digits.) Increases the total amount of rifle ammo from 250 (5 standard magazines) to 297 (3 drum magazines).

We all know how slow the rifle reloads, which made it especially useless against Fades and to some extend, Lerks. As soon you finally reload the damn thing the target has already gone out of your reach. This upgrade doesn't touch on the damage, but reduces how often you reload the weapon.

This upgrade is researchable by the commander from the adv. armory (to prevent it from showing up too early) for 10 team resource. It'll affect all the rifle based weapons, grenade launcher attached version, etc. Once it's researched, those who are alive with a rifle will automatically get it next time he resupply at an armory, and those who died will automatically get one in their next respawn.

Custom light weight bolt:

Increases rate of fire by 25% and thus increases the damage per second of assault rifles. This is an individual upgrade that needs to be purchased by each player with their own resource should they feel the need for it, costs 5 personal resource. Unlockable by the commander from the basic armory for 10 team resource. Affects all variants of the assault rifle family. While can be used with stock 50 rounds magazines, it's not recommanded.

Welder rifle attachment:

Similar to the grenade launcher attachment to the assault rifle, but with a welder on the side instead. Right click to use. Speeds up structure building/repair by 25%, no weapon down animation during building/repairing, meaning you're able to open fire as soon as you see an enemy approaching. Also does moderate amount of melee damage to alien players, does slightly more DPS than marine hatchet on alien structures. Unlockable by the commander at adv. armory for 10 team resource. Purchasable by marines for 20 personal resource.

Some people have argued that the welder, if ever introduced should be put to the sidearm slot. But I feel that would make the marines too omnipotent, being able to carry a powerful hard hitting weapon in one hand and a handy repair everything tool in the other. By introducing the welder as an attachment means whoever wants to play the part of engineer will have to sacrifice his ability to carry a flamethrower/gatling gun/etc. But since this engineer variant of assault rifle is also affectable by the drum magazine and light bolt upgrade, means he won't be entirely defenseless either. And the welder will always be handy at burning skulks up close.

Shotgun variable choke:

While carrying the shotgun, right click will toggle a 2ndary firing mode that decreases the spread of the pellets resulting a more focused shotgun blast. This will come at a cost of a 30% slower rate of fire (represented in game with a longer recoil animation in between firing and cocking.) The barrel will extend during this mode to remind the player which mode he's on. Researchable by the commander at adv. armory for 10 team resource.

Chris0132 · June 2011

Those all sound like good ideas, and I certainly agree that skulks and rifles need upgrades to bring them up to late tier levels of usefulness once you have that sort of technology.

Large magazines would be good as it would allow you to perform sustained fire on tougher aliens. Welders would be an excellent upgrade, although I do sort of question the logic of having a repair tool be attached to a gun, you don't generally want to point your gun at something to fix it, but then again maybe the TSA realised that giving marines separate welders made them very vulnerable or something. In either case it would certainly be an interesting approach much as with the grenade launcher.

The shotgun toggle is also nice as currently you can't really aim the thing, it's more of a melee weapon than anything, my one concern is that with the new dropoff it might prove to be a bit useless. Possibly you might consider making the regular spread the tighter one, and having the secondary fire be a big bayonet you can buy to stick on it, which would essentially combine switchaxe and shotgun functionality into one weapon, making it effective against structures and also knocking back aliens a bit as the rifle butt is supposed to do.

I'd like to add a couple of other cheap rifle variants, I think it'd be interesting if you could buy a flare launcher for the rifle, you shoot it and it launches a flare out the end. Could basically be a reskinned grenade launcher. You could carry say 3 flares and they'd provide good illumination when you fire them. Useful in the now quite dark powered down areas and potentially could be life saving, also good for your teammates. Would cost 5 resources, so if you're short on cash but want to buy something useful, you can. Downside is you can't use any other weapons while carrying a flare launcher so that should prevent overuse.

Also for 5 res I think it'd be interesting if you could buy a laser sight for the rifle, essentially it would add a sort of ironsight mode, you hold right click and gun moves a little higher (but not actual ironsights, just a sort of aiming mode, like fallout 3) and also a laser sight comes out of the gun. While in this mode the gun fires in high damage bursts. This might sound weird but I personally find that the main benefit of the shotgun is that you only have to aim at the enemy for a second while you pull the trigger, this is much easier than the rifle which requires you to track the target as you shoot, so on a similar note I think adding a burst fire to the rifle would be a significant buff, if you boosted the power a little while in this mode as well, it has the benefit of ammo conservation. Obviously it wouldn't help in close quarters, but it would make using the rifle at range a lot easier and potentially make it quite powerful. Again a limited upgrade so maybe make it cost betwen 5 and 10 res and not stack with anything else, but a worthwhile one if you can't afford anything better.

You should also write some ideas for what the skulk would get to help it combat these sorts of upgrades, bearing in mind the skulks can buy upgrades like carapace to increase its health and so on, so it wouldn't really need any cheap buyable upgrades like the marines would.

SgtHydra · June 2011

This might be a touch unfair for the aliens, who have to pay for their version of these "attachments" every time they respawn.

As such, I'd either recommend the Marines do the same (weapons with attachments are more expensive than their standard counterparts) or that the Aliens get some permanent augmentations of their own (without changing the current evolution upgrades, of course).

Chris0132 · June 2011

Well, no, aliens would get free upgrades like these as well at some point, that's the idea.

danshyu · June 2011

Well I do happen to have a few idea about how to buff skulks just enough so they'll still be relative at late game.

Since skulks are suppose to be the throw-away units of alien team, much like the Zerglings of the StarCraft. Their late game abilities should be mostly be that of support and sacrificial variaty.

Advanced parasite:

Researchable by the alien commander at 2 hives mark for 10 team resource. Beside marking the host's location, it'll show the host's health/armor information and also allows the alien team to see the marine units that are near the host. The extra sighting only works on marines, however. On structures, it only show the location and health/armor.

Shock touch:

Researchable by the alien commander at 2 hives mark for 15 team resources. Skulks can now absorbs electricity from broken wall mounted power nodes by holding their use key. When charged, the next connected bite will ignore the armor and have bonus properties depends on what target it was, but would damage the skulk overtime while it still holds the charge. For mechanical targets (ARC, MAC, Turrets), it will put them offline for 3 seconds. For marines, it'll render the player immobile for about 1.5 seconds (basically if he's running it'll stop him on his track).

Acid for blood:

Researchable by alien commander at 3 hives mark for 20 team resources. When skulk takes damage from bullets, the blood splater will deal some moderate damage on nearby marines and structures.

Toxic dart:

Researchable by alien commander at 3 hives mark for 15 team resource. Requires alien players to purchase it individually for 10 personal resource. Useable by right clicking with the parasite dart selected. Slows down the target marine's movement by 30% and disables jumping for 3 seconds. However, the trajectory of this projectile will be similar to that of Lerk spike. In that it won't be as easy to score hits as parasite darts that only shoot straight.

Jason Whore · June 2011

oh yeah. drum magazine. with flapping around mag flap thing :3

Kouji_San · June 2011

Isn't that belt fed though with that "flapping around mag flap thing" :P

Marines need a frigging Tommygun with a drum mag I telzz ya! Also I would love to see the grenade launcher/suggested welder, to be put underneath the weapon... I've shown a few screenshots of NS2 to someone and he was literally laughing his ass off at the I-pod design of the weapons, with the grenadelauncher attachment simply being a BIG nono to balancing the weapon and all that weapon talk jazz I had to endure. :P

Skipjack · June 2011

when changing the skulk damage you should have in mind that there was like a system (in ns1) behind upgrades and the amount of bites needed to kill a marine.
armor upgrade 0 => 30 armor
as a skulk u had to bite a marine 3 times to kill him when he had no armor upgrades, but when he was parasited he lost 10 armor which was equal to one bite at the end.
first bite: 7X health and some armor, 2nd bite: 10 health

armor upgrade 1 => 50 armor
3 bites even with parasite

and so on

i hope u get the idea.
when u are changing the damage values you should have in mind what you want to reach with that.
for example:
fully upgraded skulk vs fully upgraded marine (i dont know how many bites are needed in that scenario, but lets say 5)
after the fourth bite the marine has 10 health and 5 armor

my idea for the Advanced parasite would now be also adding some damage to it, so u can kill the marine with 4 bites when parasiting him first.
same goes for Shock touch
When you are ignoring a marines armor you can kill him with 2 bites, that means two charged skulks (even without upgrades) could kill a fully upgraded marine.

endlesschange · June 2011

Sounds like the aliens are even more oped. Humans need more upgrades that can only be had if they own two tech points.

FocusedWolf · June 2011

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (danshyu @ Jun 23 2011, 11:43 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1855965"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>Increases rifle ammo count from 50 to 99 (since the counter doesn't seem to have enough space for 3 digits.)</div>

The counter just needs to be fixed to hold more then two digits. Really simple since it's just text. But i think what would look better is to have a horizontal progress bar. This way their's no space limitation, and a 10,000 round magazine or a 500 round magazine can be represented in the same space. Then when the ammo goes to < 99 rounds we can switch to numbers. Functionally this avoids the problem of knowing how much ammo you have when a progress bar starts to become hard to interpret, i.e. when it's just 1-3 pixels representing how much ammo is left in the magazine.

Chris0132 · June 2011

I rather like the 99 bullets approach, nice nod to aliens.

Kouji_San · June 2011

Indeed!

xVisions · June 2011

More rounds would be nice, but i rather have some high power nano bullets that shoot blue bullets out or something. MORE DAMAGE! :)

danshyu · June 2011

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (xVisions @ Jun 25 2011, 07:26 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1856229"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>More rounds would be nice, but i rather have some high power nano bullets that shoot blue bullets out or something. MORE DAMAGE! :)</div>

Doing that would be the lazy way out, not to mention with more potential to mess up the balance. The reason I want to avoid tweeking the damage directy is that by end game, plenty of higher tier hard hitting weapons would've been made avaliable. Having the starter rifle doing too much damage would mean there would be little reason to spend credits on those more expensive weapons. Plus the fact there are already damage upgrade researches. The last thing we need is to have a team dominating with just upgraded starter weapons that they can get just by spawning.

What I want is to keep the assault rifles viable in the late game, and nothing more. Same goes with Skulks. True, shock touch idea is kinda like a simple damage upgrade, but it also requires a charging up at the broken power node and hurts the skulk overtime before it can discharge it with a bite. So it's not something for nothing.

Skipjack · June 2011

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (danshyu @ Jun 25 2011, 05:36 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1856261"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'>True, shock touch idea is kinda like a simple damage upgrade, but it also requires a charging up at the broken power node and hurts the skulk overtime before it can discharge it with a bite. So it's not something for nothing.</div>
shock touch is something you wont see in this game, considering that there will be heavy armors.

Kurrine · June 2011

Well.. with the shock touch it'd be ignoring that heavy armor I guess, so there's that.

Sewlek · June 2011

i want to start in 1 week to write a gameplay mod, which alters resource model, upgrade costs, several other balanced. all things which could be
done quite fast, just to try them out, covered in one mod.

would be funny to see simple things like increased lmg magazine live in a game, and really be able to play with those changes. thats the most accurate
way to find out if ideas suck or not ^^

Captain Kirk · June 2011

I would like to see a burst fire mode as the secondary attack mode on the marine pistol. Not at all accurate but might save your life when you run out of bullets against that skulk. Or maybe make it the welder. The current alt fire mode with the pistol is useless.

Papayas · June 2011

Lifestealing Bite

I would like to see a lifestealing bite for the skulk. Like frenzy but more advanced.

It would give you health when you land a bite but every time you bite you lose health (~5). It promotes trying to properly land hits instead of biting constantly.

It could also do more damage, maybe have a slower RoF than the normal bite, kind of like Focus I suppose.

High capacity drum magazine upgrade for the assault rifle.

Comments