Thoughts on Alien Commander?
Bullet_Force
Join Date: 2012-11-02 Member: 165952Members
Join Date: 2012-11-02 Member: 165952Members
I enjoy playing Marine Commander a lot but when it comes to Alien commanding it feels no where near as fun. Apart from making the odd hive and more eggs the rest of the time its all about continually replacing cysts and the odd harvester and throwing up an occasional bone wall. I feel it needs more things to do for instance marines get the MAC repair bots as well as ARC all the Aliens get is that drifter thing. Also since marines can build things like phase gates and use distress beacons there seems to be a lot more strategy involved in Marine commanding then Alien not to mention dropping weapons, health and ammo.
Comments
Was hoping aliens would be more fleshed out in NS2 instead of being more shallow compared to NS1.
I dunno, given that you don't need marines to help you build, I'd say the alien commander actually gets a fair bit to do; you often just need your units to be working to different ends. Spread infestation wherever the marines aren't looking, and they have their work cut out for them.
PS. Did you know you can Rupture your Cysts? It pisses off marines in combat to no end.
My favorite instance was on one game, I had three hives and plenty of res, and we had just knocked out a power node and pushed the marines out for just a second. They were coming back fast, so I filled the room with infection and threw up a few shades and crags around the corners where no one goes. It was dark and they were fixing the lights, and they couldn't even tell that the whole room was infested and that whips were going up all around them. I got so many whip kills that game. Tons of fun.
You just have to have a different mindest for alien com. Some people are never going to like it as much as marine com, but I personally love commanding as alien.
and so do marine comm which was not as fun as it was. you cant even do a relocation into a random position or ninja phase gate? what?
Using a cooldown/charge/mana system or some hybrid of those kinds of systems and removing the res cost for tactical support abilities would be a big step towards making the commander feel like he can actually do something to help his team in battles (and would probably make a lot more people interested in doing it).
Cysts are most of it, yes. The rest is knowing what the upgrades are. For instance, were you aware that a shift can teleport structures around the map? Did you know drifters are wall hacks for aliens? Were you aware that you can tell where marines are from sound, and direct your team to them? Did you know the marines can't build on infestation? Or has someone told you about how infestation heals alien units standing on it? Not to mention all the different structures you can build to shore up your teams front lines with eggs, healing stations, invisibility cloaks, and infinite energy?
Whips are mostly trash though, I'll give you that much. Definitely not worth 15 t.res, they would be if grenade deflection worked half the time, but since it doesn't they're mostly just to waste resources and guard power nodes.
It doesn't appeal to everyone I'd bet, but personally I think alien commanding is the most fun you can have in Natural Selection.