Marines turtle games when game should be over.
Mango
Join Date: 2012-10-11 Member: 162061Members
Join Date: 2012-10-11 Member: 162061Members
<div class="IPBDescription">Aliens can't turtle like marines can atm.</div>I notice when aliens owns 90% of the map and Marines only have left is one base it can still last another 20 minutes. Which in reality it should not happen at all. If we turn the tables around were marines owns 90% of the map aliens would get ROFL stomp easy with no turtle at all. One solution should be when aliens control 90% of the map our res should increase by 100% which means if we go Onos and die right away it would only take minutes to go Onos again, not 15+ minutes. I would love to see marines comeback from a turtle game but most of the time they just turtle. If marines controls 90% of the map there res should also increase by 100%(even though they don't need it, like aliens do).
This is just for games that become turtles when Marines pretty much won't die in there last base. I went Onos and died easily having to wait 15+ minutes for more res even though we have 90% of the map locked down.
This is just for games that become turtles when Marines pretty much won't die in there last base. I went Onos and died easily having to wait 15+ minutes for more res even though we have 90% of the map locked down.
Comments
In discussions last night on the servers I was on other players seemed to agree as well.
Do the aliens do this? No, typically they don't. They mess around doing god knows what, and then complain when they can't finish the game. I agree that the solution and execution to taking out turtling aliens is far simpler, but honestly that is just a symptom of the asymmetry of the late game, and I wouldn't describe it as an issue.
As a counter point, compare base rushing. Can marines base rush the aliens? Not really, the only thing they can rush is the hive, which aint that easy to take down. The power node or comm chair, on the other hand, can be dispatched in a matter of second by a few skulks. Do people call that imbalanced? Well, actually they do, yes.
So I look at the one imbalance, and I look at the other imbalance, and you place them on either side of the scale and voila, it balances! In theory anyway.
When the Aliens are down to one hive, they've lost a lot of abilities and probably a few upgrades.
When the Marines are down to one command chair, they may have lost jetpacks/Exo suits, but they still might have weapons 3 and armor 3 which still makes them very deadly. Any lifeform lower than an Onos gets eaten up quickly with a few Marines concentrating on them.
End game when you own the entire map as Kharaa, you need to save for a few Onos' and rush their power node with gorges. Communication is key. Having three different Onos' going in one at a time will not do a thing, but once you start rushing together you'll be able to end the game a lot faster.
<a href="http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/index.php?showtopic=123571" target="_blank">http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/forums/in...howtopic=123571</a>
kill the chair... its the only thing worth dieing to kill.
second,aliens can keep upgrades, on one hive if they still have the chamber.... there is nothing more amusing then getting crushed down to 1 hive, just as 3-4 players hit 75 res.... turns out 3-4 angry onos with cara and celerity can turn any game around if they hit fast enough....
I just played a game on Cave, we were down to cave and ore, they hhad the rest of the map... but we got 3 onos and one gorge, and ran a circle around the map... we ran in killed the power with 3 onos and bile it when down before the beacon finished, then we killed the chair, then we left everything else and ran for obs... but this time we went strait for the chair, there was still som infestation in refinery so we knew they didnt have a chair.... the rines beacon 8 rines level 3 weapons verse 3 onos and a gorge. gorge dies quick, one onos gets stuck on a railing.... yet 2 onos kill the CC and win the game before dieing... GG
This isn't really a problem. By design marines are better at holding a location they already own, and aliens are better when they can force marines to move. Obviously, trying to besiege a base you cannot force the marines to move.
But I agree with you, the fact that marines can drag out a game they have no chance of winning for another 20 minutes is CLEARLY a problem. It's a problem created by a design that ultimately makes NS fun in every other situation, but breaks the game in this one scenario.
The temptation is solutions along the line of "the game reaches 30 minutes, aliens win!" or "Aliens reach 3rd hive, aliens win!" but I don't think either of those solutions is satisfying as the alien team, nor does it really reflect good game design.
I STRONGLY feel the solution is to respond to the design of the game and make hive 3 the point in which the game aliens can really begin to punish marines for trying to hold their positional advantage. I think in hive 3 every alien should gain an ability that punishes marines for relying on immobile structures. Punishes marines for trying to sit at long range away from aliens, punishes marines for trying to stay too near to alien structures, and like wise, not really increase the advantage of map control for aliens.
NS1 was generally bad for this in it's inconsistancy. The Hive 3 abilities were:
- Xenosplode for skulk (good for displacing marines, but also too good everywhere else, not just in a siege ability)
- Web on gorge (wow, an ability that makes marines even LESS able to push forward on the map! Perfect! Exactly the opposite of what we want!)
- Primal Scream on lerk (this was a pretty good ability, made aliens more powerful everywhere, but they had to be close to the lerk when he screamed, which obviously made it work best when aliens were in tight quarters either at the entrance to a marine base, or actually in the marine base. Unfortunately it had to stay fairly nerfed, as it was also too effective at countering a marine push into a hive room. It was just a bit too much generally beneficial not enough of specific displacement skill)
- Acid Rocket on fade (probably the best ability, it was AOE, so marines getting hit by it couldn't huddle up, it was long range, so marines couldn't just camp down a hallway, it wasn't overly powerful, so if marines were actively moving on the map it was preferable for fades to use blink/swipe over acid rocket to kill them faster... The big problem was situationally useless. Maps weren't designed for aliens to have a long range weapon. There were places where AR was godly, and places were it wasn't usable, making it very hard to balance)
- Charge on Onos (pretty clearly this just makes the onos better everywhere. Arguably, the closer to the hive you are the more of an advantage charge was. While charge certainly made it more difficult to defend your base against onos, it was more because it just made marines weaker against onos, and less that it gave onos any special siege ability)
Believe it or not, NS2 has made forward progress in this regard. The hive 3 abilities are now actually designed to be better at dealing with seiges. However, the current standard is that the hive 3 abilities are completely useless... and thus, even though they are better designed, there's no real way to utilize that design to gain an advantage over the gameplay standard of using the hive 1-3 abilities. The possible exception is umbra, I haven't really seen that properly used yet however.
- Skulk Xenosplode (no progress made since NS1, it's just weaker)
> Suggestion: Xenosplode has a very short range EMP effect against structures. This means a well off marine team can defend their structures with mines from xeno skulks, but otherwise the skulk can invest his life into disabling armories, turrets, and arms labs for a short time, effectively crippling the marine team's ability to turtle with low investment.
- Gorge (no additional advantage from T3)
> Suggestion: NOT ###### WEB! At least not at T3. If you want web do it earlier and balance it for the earlier game. How about they can build a moderately expensive structure that spawns small annoying AI creatures and sends them towards a waypoint set by the gorge like the Spawn Host from wings of liberty (Star Craft 2 expansion). If marines are mobile, they just kill the structure, if marines are immobile, the longer the structure is up the more damage it does, especially when marine can't afford the firepower to kill the AI creatures.
- Lerk Umbra (haven't seen it used properly yet)
> Suggestion: this strikes me as an ok ability, quite nice for making invading onos and bile gorges more beefy. Something really annoying for marines to have umbra scattered over a base they're trying to defend. Takes enough time to plan a coordinated attack that it's not as powerful in the open field or at a hive siege (although it's still quite strong at a hive), just balance this better
- Fade Vortex (INSANELY weak)
> Suggestion: longer duration. The idea is good, you have a very small range of effect where things are disabled for a short time. Disable armory, disable arms lab, disable marines favoriate camping positions, suddenly a marine team can't defend their base anymore. A rich marine team can afford backup armslabs, they can afford field armories. They are moving more and not as dependant on strong locations. But the alien team just can't accomplish anything meaningful in any of these cases in 4 seconds, and the fade invests quite a bit of personal risk to put a vortex in these vital spots. Right now, 90% of the time he's incurring more risk than benifit he's producing. 15-20 seconds strike me as good times.
- Onos Stomp (pretty good)
> Suggestion: possibly a slightly longer linear range (without decreasing the horizontal area of effect). Stomp is great, if marines are bunched up, they are disabled, and now skulks can chew them without getting shot. Paired with a vortex that isn't absolutely useless disabling a sentry battery, all of a sudden marines don't have much benifit from being bunched up in their base any more. The really awesome thing is that it doesn't disable exo's or jetpacks. Those things are EXPENSIVE! Why should they be disabled by a siege weapon? The whole point of a siege is that marines can't really afford those high price items anymore. If marines can afford offensive weaponary, they should still have a chance in the game even when aliens are hive 3.
Something that would help alleviate the turtling is if the Armory not repaired armor and healed health much slower, thus forcing the Marines to rely on welding and more Med Pack drops. Since both those things would require a continuous res investment from both the players and the comm, it's hardly something that a Marine team with one res tower could sustain for very long.
Decreasing the re-usage of weapons would also be a good thing. Either make the guns destroyable by any attack or by Bile Bomb, or make the Gorge able to devour dropped equipment.
onos, lerk and fade/skulk backed up with gorge... protect the gorge and spam bile bomb, all of their buildings die.
usually what happens is aliens go in 1-2 at a time with no gorge support - or they don't protect the gorge and any marine with a brain kills it. bile bomb spam just kills everything before the marines are able to kill a single onos.
In NS2 there is no problem at all, every exo that you manage to kill is lost and will not be replaced. If there are no exo's the marines simply do not have enough firepower to stop a few Oni from killing the chair... also the stomp ability instantly removes half the marine team from the equation. You could also choose to bilebomb the base to hell while a few attackers divert the marines attention away from the 2-3 gorges.
Honestly, I still think these balance opinions will change the coming week(s) as people gain experience with the game and the required teamplay.
1. Weapons can just be picked up again (they dont lose res)
2. They respawn very fast (no build limit to infantry portals)
Solution?
Easy...
make weapon pickup something that needs to be researched and make it need at least 2. Command Chairs to work. (like leap.. 1. hive only.. no leap anymore).
And they should limit infantry portals to Command Chairs. 1 IP per CC and if a CC is destroyed the last build IP stops working.
Farting around with fades, skulks and lerks won't do anything really.
I think the main issue is simply that it takes far more coordination for aliens to break a turtled base than it does for marines to kill the last hive. It shouldn't be hard at all when aliens own the map. Hive 3 abilities need to be much stronger for that purpose IMO. Umbra is good(make it affect GLs maybe), Stomp is okay, Xeno and Vortex just don't help at all.
I mean we talk regular match often 45min to 1 hour sometimes more, then we dont need 15-20min on top just because marines can turtle and waste yet another 15-20min
I cannot on the top of my head, think of any game where 1 round is longer than NS2. Dota games seems to be around 40min or close to 1 hour, Starcraft 2 is around 10-30 min usually.
All the other Counterstrike, Call of duty, rounds are like 5 min max.
Battlefield 3 a round is like 20min sometimes longer depending on map.
Its just absurd having so much waste time in NS2 on a stupid thing as turtle. when people dont actually have that much time to game. On a good day i can get maybe 2 or 3 matches in NS2, if they fixed the turtle problem, i might be able to get in one more entire match, that would be wonderful.
If you rush the CC it will be gone in seconds, and even if just one of the Oni dies then you have won the game.
The problem is that people value their life more than their teams achievement. No one likes to die after saving up for the Onos, and some guy is always going to chicken out at the last moment and leave you there with your alien pants around your ankles.
I'd like some sort of solution that doesn't unbalance the game in other areas; ie, if you know the aliens are going to win, then just let them, instead of forcing them to hold off dinnertime for the next hour because the marines are so damn stubborn.
People have mentioned that a well-coordinated, professional team can do it pretty reliably. Honestly, I sort of feel that if the aliens are THAT close to victory, they shouldn't require quite so much coordination, and it's pretty ridiculous that Onos are more or less -required-.
One idea that comes to mind is involving the Cyst-expansion in some special way that allows one to take down clustered marines. For instance, if infestation successfully spreads to a marine building, then it either gets disabled or functions at a limited capacity (it would certainly be difficult to spread cyst right up in marines' faces, but not with enough distractions like Skulks)
Oh, and I should note: When I was playing as marine and got owned, the one pretty-reliable thing that aliens used to destroy our bases was the Spores, specifically in any tight areas. Not only do they make the whole area hazardous to marines, but it makes it very difficult to shoot anything.
So basics to remember: Infestation, Bile Bomb, Spores...yeah, that's what I got. But I'd still like to see some developer input that allows final-base-assault to happen without having super-skilled players.
People just fart around with lerks and fades, here is my finish strat:
Two gorges (bile bomb and healing), one lerk (for umbra) and three ONI to concentrate on command chair. Everyone just needs to hit their base hard, even on two command chair games I find the marines/aliens get caught in one choke area, for the love of god people, if you are getting choked in one area, try a sneaky attack on the OTHER command chair.
Had a game last night doing that where we had three ONOS being held down by four EXOs, I just went around to the other side of the map, made them beacon and BAM the EXOs had no support and they were all down. By the time the marines rushed back to the choke point, this allowed me to take out their other chair.
I even had a couple of players on the aliens team tell me they cant beleive we won, strategy wins games not bigger lifeforms.
I think the main issue is simply that it takes far more coordination for aliens to break a turtled base than it does for marines to kill the last hive. It shouldn't be hard at all when aliens own the map. Hive 3 abilities need to be much stronger for that purpose IMO. Umbra is good(make it affect GLs maybe), Stomp is okay, Xeno and Vortex just don't help at all.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
it isn't too 'hard' though. it would still be trivial if it wasn't for the fact that many players are new and don't know what they're doing.
applying a 'fix' for this, would almost be like applying a fix to reloading because reloading requires the 'r' key, which is an extra key to press and might confuse some players in addition to the medpack and ammo call key's.
player's aren't braindead... even if the learning curve is steeper than the average console game (*gasp*), they're still capable of learning if they actually care.
What we're trying to think through is things that will mostly benefit newer players, without providing an unfair advantage to aliens, and without changing the game noticably for veteran players.
For instance, what if there were some alien ability that was super-effective against marine entrenchments, but only marines who DON'T know a good strategy to protect against it, and aren't coordinating with each other? Just something that would force both teams to up their game (Marines form a counter-strategy to X ability, aliens stop using it, then it's a legitimate standoff). Right now, I guess it just feels like if Marines are idiots, and Aliens are idiots, then Marines will still be able to live a very long time. I don't see that issue with any other strategy games; a Protoss team with 3 dozen carriers will have no issue crushing whatever is being put out by the enemy's 3 remaining Barracks, and I consider that an issue in NS2.
@Katana:
The life form is called a Gorge, and the super-effective entrenchment remover is called 'Bile bomb'.
2 onos (3 if you want to overkill it) , 1 or maybe 2 gorges with bile bomb and a fade or two to clean up marines.
Onos block the way out of their spawn room on both sides while alien com expands to the adjacent rooms (to get some eggs and a crag down).
You get in, kill marines in the way to the power node, and then the power node goes down in seconds before the marines get a chance to kill the fades and skulks. Power down = no more spawns = gg
It literally takes 2 minutes to coordinate this.
The only time I've seen these dragged out games occur is if the aliens just kept rushing in one or two at a time.
But the whole thing doesnt feel right, you try turtling as aliens with 1 hive...lol 1cc turtling is OP like marines. Well marines arent really OP its that aliens suck bawls so marines appear to be OP.
"Hey, have you ever played NS2? It came out last year."
"Nope. It sounds cool though. It won't take me so long to get fairly acquainted with the basics, right?"
"UUUUUUMM......."
That's why we're saying that hopefully, this shouldn't affect competitive play. Here's a really, really dumb example of what I'm thinking of. Not suggesting this, exactly.
The Bile Buster
Launched by a Gorge, and costing 40 pres, places a destructive bomb with a particular hissing noise. Takes 15 seconds to detonate, and has enough force to at least destroy a power node. However, if marines simply hit it with axes/welders a few times, it dies away.
The only real marine "turtling" issue is when marines have more than one base and because there is no hive teleport some of your teammates can spawn in the opposite side of the map and resume goofing off letting the marines take back map control.
rush hive build sentries in the room, win.
it takes less then 5min and no upgrades needed except a robot factory, it works wonder.