How to scale aliens.
Crumbling Ego
Join Date: 2012-10-30 Member: 164692Members
Join Date: 2012-10-30 Member: 164692Members
Right now, aliens don't scale. At all. A vanilla marine straight out of spawn will be more powerful at endgame then beginning, while a skulk remains the same. This leads to skulks being frustrating to play in the endgame. What I think could be done about this is create a new upgrade structure, called a biote, tied to the maturity aspect of alien structures. It would be built for a rather high one time cost, and have both a long build time, and an extremely long maturation time. However, as it reached the different levels of maturation, it would gain increasingly powerful upgrades. This could go well one of three ways. One, which would enhance the hive choice aspect, is that each biote would be tied to a certain hive type, giving universal upgrades depending on the khammander's choices. Or a singular structure, high in cost, but would scale the aliens simultaneously the entire game, which would allow aliens to not give up on certain traits, even if the upgrades would do it better. Or maybe it could leave the hive types to do their own thing, but focus only on attack damage, which would also preserve hive choice, while most directly affecting skulks in the late game. It would also have to be unaffected by regular nutrient mist, which would have to be upgraded at two hives to affect it in mid-late game. It would be an asymmetric way to scale aliens, without breaking from their design philosophy.
Just had to get that out there, I'll be refining this over time.
Just had to get that out there, I'll be refining this over time.
Comments
To balance this, more content would have to be added to the Marine team, but scaling has potential.
It would reward those who actually PREFER playing Skulk in lategame so they aren't forced to "lifeform up" if they didn't want to. It'd be like adding more specialization to each lifeform, so if someone just LOVES playing Lerk (like I do) or Gorge, they'd get rewarded over time as they played successfully in their role, rather just saving up to all role Onos because the massive amounts of health/damage. Kinda levels all the lifeforms on the same plane, but gives them different purposes.