Amory Walls Drag Games out
mR.Waffles
Join Date: 2009-02-03 Member: 66280Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2009-02-03 Member: 66280Members, Reinforced - Shadow
<div class="IPBDescription">Armory Walls too strong</div>Here's the scenario: Aliens win like crazy for the first 15 minutes. The game should be over any minute. Next thing you know, marines build armory walls. By using tons of MACs you cannot out DPS these walls. Meanwhile, the courageous Gorges attempt to bilebomb the mass of MACs. Unfortunately, grenades are easily fired over the armory wall, and out DPSing the repair rate of 8 MACs is impossible. Queue a 30 minute alien siege. Sure, eventually aliens win, but I believe armory walls are too strong. Discuss.
Comments
This would also end them being used in this frankly abusive manner.
I'm pretty sure if you enzyme 3 gorges with bilebomb that there is no way possible way that your wall and MACs are going to stay alive
Bile has a huge range if you arc it too so great chance that Marines won't even be able to fight back without overextending
MACs go down super fast from bile so in this scenario where marines are trapped in one base you can bleed them dry of resource in no time just by suiciding as gorge
Option B is you just have a 7 Onos "Fight to the Death" style assault and I guarantee that wall goes down with even minimal gorge and lerk support
turtling with armory + Grenade launchers if annoying though but it's not THAT annoying i mean there's always a waya round it, you could just push elsewhere or get a couple onos, a gorge and maybe a mature whip to counter the grenades (if they really spam it)
On the flip side, gorges need more effective / more clogs to counter block, marines certainly have enough counters to breaking a clog wall.
I'm pretty sure if you enzyme 3 gorges with bilebomb that there is no way possible way that your wall and MACs are going to stay alive
Bile has a huge range if you arc it too so great chance that Marines won't even be able to fight back without overextending
MACs go down super fast from bile so in this scenario where marines are trapped in one base you can bleed them dry of resource in no time just by suiciding as gorge
Option B is you just have a 7 Onos "Fight to the Death" style assault and I guarantee that wall goes down with even minimal gorge and lerk support<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Option A is a lot of coordination required to kill a ten resource structure.
Option B, aliens shouldn't have to spend 525 resources to kill a ten resource structure.
To those saying Gorges should be able to bile bomb the 6-10 MACs repairing the armory wall, yes they should be able to. Sometimes they can pull it off, but I'll be damned if they can do it on certain locations with grenade launcher spam from behind the wall. The grenade launchers are balanced (pathetically but this is the idea) by their low ammo capacity. This suddenly becomes irrelevant when standing behind two armories. Also, the health on the armory is insane and the MAC repair rate makes it invincible. If the Gorges manage to kill a few macs, chances are they will die in the process. The armory HP is too damn high.
Every time we tell UWE to do the obvious: MACs cannot repair stuff thats under attack.
And every time UWE did the opposite.
Bilebombs don't bounce around corners with the same efficacy as grenades.
EDIT: Also I wanted to remind you Bilebomb does not go through the armory. It explodes on contact. It is very hard to arc a bilebomb over an armory wall to hit the MACs behind it, in most scenarios. Additionally, grenades kill everything whereas bilebomb does 0 non-armor damage to the marines. Grenades are infinitely more effective in that they kill players, walls, everything, and can easily be bounced around the corners without detonating against the wall unlike the Bilebomb.
Option B, aliens shouldn't have to spend 525 resources to kill a ten resource structure.
To those saying Gorges should be able to bile bomb the 6-10 MACs repairing the armory wall, yes they should be able to. Sometimes they can pull it off, but I'll be damned if they can do it on certain locations with grenade launcher spam from behind the wall. The grenade launchers are balanced (pathetically but this is the idea) by their low ammo capacity. This suddenly becomes irrelevant when standing behind two armories. Also, the health on the armory is insane and the MAC repair rate makes it invincible. If the Gorges manage to kill a few macs, chances are they will die in the process. The armory HP is too damn high.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I'm pretty sure the res cost for 3 gorges and a drifter with enzyme isn't 525 resources....if you can't organize a team in this game then you shouldn't be playing :). Btw it's 35 XD
Read what I posted again and you will see the 525 estimation was in regards to someone saying to gather 7 Onosi together as a solution to the problem.
The issue at hand is not whether team work is required, it's how much and for what cost. The amount of effort exerted to break through an armory wall with MACs healing it as described in the scenario above is disproportional to the cost and effort required to simply spend a few resources on an armory.
I'm not implying all scenarios require an equal proportion of effort and resource cost for both sides, but it is obvious in this scenario and to anyone who has played the game for a long period of time matches can drag out for forever even though one side has been losing for a significant amount of time.
It primarily drags out because of marine scalability/resource retention and alien ineffectiveness, which we've beaten drums about for months, but I'm not here to talk about that. Armory walls are just another significant boost to the already exhausting and boring attrition game required to finally purge losing marines.
Armory walls working as intended is interesting information, but this is a horrible design decision when most complaints are about how long a lost game drags out. The last thing we need is to make alien sieges even more difficult and exhausting. Marines at least have ARC's and Scans and ranged weaponry to really bring down pathetic alien defenses. Egg locking is infinitely easier than killing a power node assuming the marine commander built MACs.
Next.
This solves many issues such as MAC trains still being effective against lifeforms that dont have Bile bomb, since they have no way to individually bite all 4 macs fast enough to cease their repairing.. let alone the marine thats shooting at them.
I played an alien game on Tram where marines had taken logistics, setup armory walls with a ###### tonne of MACs, spawners, phase gates with about 6 marines there, all with nade launchers just propelling them ENDLESSLY into shipping hive through a tiny overlook. Most of the time, I couldn't spawn or get out of the room thanks to the insane nade spam. If we tried counter-attacking into another base, the majority would portal back and forth defending each base. If we were better players, we may have made counters more effective and made them lose their position in logistics or at least some position. If we tried gathering a bunch of gorges to take down the armories, we would die immediately to the nade spam. Onos would fall in less than 3 seconds, Fade was worthless and Lerks can get in to spore.
Honestly, this is OT a little bit but I believe we could have broke that line IF nade launchers didn't explode on contact, allowing lerks to fly in, gas everyone then fly back out since most of the marines were nade junkies. Before they could get everyone nades, I would fly in and sometimes get multiple kills thanks to the high concentration of marines having no clue what to do.
As far as armory walls for dragging out long games, it's annoying but it's not too bad, gorges kinda solve the problem by themselves but not many people play gorge.
Not sure if they have this but my suggestion is that armories should be significantly slower in regenerating HP/armor and ammo if used too much. A similar concept to Wolf:ET medic system, you do't have infinite energy so you can't keep regenerating medpacks for people, eventually you will slow down to a crawl in healing people.
Any one of these fixes should help stop the problem.
1. Make macs not able to repair buildings under attack.
2. Make it so only one mac can repair any one building instead of having 10 repairing one armory.
3. Increase the cost of Macs. (reason for this most of the time marines turtle cuz they are low on resources, this will make it difficult to resupply macs once killed.)
1. Make macs not able to repair buildings under attack.
2. Make it so only one mac can repair any one building instead of having 10 repairing one armory.
3. Increase the cost of Macs. (reason for this most of the time marines turtle cuz they are low on resources, this will make it difficult to resupply macs once killed.)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
You wouldn't need to increase the cost of MACs if you disable their ability to stack. Why have 20 of them when only 1 at a given area is useful? I also don't think #1 is the answer as this could be pretty easily leveraged vastly in favor of Aliens (the Bile Bomb would be that much more powerful for not really much reason).
Personally, I would take #2 (extend it to include players in that "limit of one") and also make it so that MACs cannot be repaired while they are actively repairing something else. Enough with the damn daisy chains and EXO repair spam. It isn't strategy, it's mobbing and bad design.
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That said, this also includes my general disdain for Armory spam in general. They should have to be within a radius of an existing CC and unable to have more than one in that radius. ... You know, that would fix my gripe with them repairing armor, too. Wouldn't be able to make invincibility stations for sieges and would actually require the Marine Commanders to learn that they can drop ammo and med packs.
I'd prefer it if it were considered an exploit like in ns1 with command chair blocking. That way the game can be balanced without this in mind. But it seems like it's being fairly welcomed as a legitimate strategy in ns2.
I would prefer that if the developers really want to include this in the gameplay that they make it an actual feature, in that a blockade structure can be placed rather than an armory. Then reduce the height on the armory so that it can be jumped over (such that it can't be used as a wall structure).
I'd also like to see an ability for onos to attack at the end of a charge to do increased damage to structures. This might help the current walling scenario.
Also, a point to note which was made in the armory walling thread I made: with the state of play at the moment with early onos eggs being dropped and fades not being all that viable, it's going to promote walling. You're likely to see a decrease in walling once onoses aren't available as early and other lifeforms become more important in seiging marine outposts.
Maybe that's the problem, it's just way easier to exploit the game as Marines right now. I mean, I can't do anything to protect my Cysts, yet the Marines commander can put an armory or a Robotics factory on top of the power node? A comparison would be placing a whip inside a resource node for the aliens team. Why can you do one, and not the other?
There are bugs/exploits for the aliens, but it seems like none of them are actually half as useful as the ones the Marines can do.
I also bet you that if the Gorge clog ability healed players while giving them infinite energy people would complain about that too. Maybe clog HP should be effectively tripled if Marines can build a wall that heals health, ammo, and repairs armor all at the same time.
You can't place whips inside of resource towers, but you can stack multiple whips on top of multiple upgrade chambers by using echo shifts. It's not as easy or inexpensive as blocking powernodes with armories, but it can still be done.
It's not as well known an exploit though. And i've already made a thread on it so hopefully it gets fixed.
As for why they don't just put a slight no-build radius on power nodes, is beyond me.
It's not as well known an exploit though. And i've already made a thread on it so hopefully it gets fixed.
As for why they don't just put a slight no-build radius on power nodes, is beyond me.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I was under the impression that any more than two stacked Whips failed to attack Marines. Could be wrong here. Either way, it's not as useful to stack a whip into a crag or shift. (Although Shades are about the same height as a Whip and go really well together with whips...hmm...)
But even if using Armories as a wall/blockade is intended, I would strongly encourage UWE to take a look at that choice. It is terribly counter-intuitive game-design and does not promote fun gameplay at all.
Make it so you cannot build two armories within X distance of eachother - Like someone else here said. It doesn't even have to be a long distance at all to stop these walls.