Camo is combined with Silence again, it's hardly useless...
I might as well be 100% visible if I am 10% visible.
When I am sitting on the roof I am not moving...so being silent doesn't really help as I am not making any noise when I am not moving.
The old camo (100% invisible at slow speeds) and silence worked fine, no real need to merge them and nerf the camo side.
Buffing silence to add a level of camo was not needed, choosing silence or camo was a good trade off.
Stationary cloaking is very useful with silence. You can bhop at full speed and wait until you hear marines coming before you stop to camo. It's certainly stronger for the aliens than having both upgrades separately.
The Balance test actually is thinking about both public and competitive at the same time. If anything it has been focusing a little bit more on the public part and working on a lot of issues connecting to it. The main reason for that is lack of pcw's in the BT mod. Players also have to understand that public play and competitive is actually more alike than it seems at a first glance. Most of the issues you find in public you find in competitive and the other way around. There are just different issues highlighted.
While the mechanics are being changed and worked on the balance will not be perfect, but thats ok. What most important is that the game flow between early/mid/late game and the ability to turn games around stays viable. The game does not have to be 50/50 balance for the game to be enjoyable, its more important the mechanics are solid and good. When we enter the final phase of the mod the numbers can be adjusted to fix up the balance.
Now I want to mention why some of the recent changes have been made. These changes are not final and if its clear they don't work they will be removed, but I hope this will give you bit of insight on the decision making. This is mostly a answer to Montyp. (This is my take on the changes btw, I can't speak for Sewlek obv ).
The drifter building alien structures is to fix a major issue(that can be seen in both competitive and public) where alien commander can quickly expand through the map almost uncontested. Even if marines tried to prevent the fast expanding they usually got picked out by skulks while killing the cysts and rts, allowing the aliens to keep on expanding. This also had pretty low econ risk to it, even if it failed it could bind marines long enough for aliens to gain map control and kill the marine economy.
This is where the slower build time comes in. By having the commander spending res on drifters and using them to build alien structures you not only slow down the alien mass expanding power you also create a new choice for the alien commander to make. Another thing added was that gorges build structures faster and are cheaper, this is to encourage more use of gorges and communication between the field players and commander. From what I have seen this has been working very successfully, however the interface needs to be updated later so new commander will understand how this works right away.
The skulk and the fade mechanics were changed to help with 2 issues. 1. is the impossible to win scenario on 1 hive since fades could not really use blink and the 2nd to even up the skill ceiling.
Both the skulk and the fade mechanics gave the lifeforms little freedom to work with and were very simple to use. This allowed players to master these lifeforms very early and caused aliens to dominate most lower level games. The skill requirement for marine to have good aim and movement was simply much much higher than the skill required to play alien lifeforms. The other issue with lack of freedom is that on the highest competitive level the skulk and fades hit their skill ceiling and could barely compete with players that had mastered the marine play. If you give it some time you will see that the new mechanics give much more freedom to the players and allows for much more interesting and skillful plays. But keep in mind this is not the final product.
The biomass and the alien weaknesses is a different thing and bit hard to go into details about. The basic idea of biomass is have alien lifeforms scale so they can appear earlier in the game and end the game quicker if they got complete map control. About the different type of strength and weaknesses of the both teams it would simply take to long for me to type it and why its ok that aliens lose to much when a hive goes down. If there was any problem with it its probably that its not obvious enough what is best to do when marines gain the advantage. For every lifeform in the team to start coordinate strong defense and keep constant rt biting in a losing situation is quite rare.
But now that the alien commander is more involved in everything that happens on the field(with drifter abilities, biomass, etc) we might start to see more alien commander start coordinating his alien team against the marines. I have had some success recently as alien commander with simple requests and instructions.
One thing to mention though, even if a hive goes down you can keep the upgrades(shell/spurs/shifts) if you place them in good locations.
I hope this is helpful in any way and please ask if you want to know more.
And btw, all feedback is helpful when put down in a friendly manner so keep at it Montyp!
Not even gonna lie this is exactly where I start hating the BT mod, introducing horrible arse elements of the RTS genre (workers and supply caps) to fix some other issue, far as I see it:
BT mod increased cyst range? cool, less spam, slightly better performance
BT mod increases infest death/creep spread? cool, less time waiting around 5-10+ seconds to build stuff
Now alien comm can expand further faster and be an ever expanding dick on 4 RTs? Alright that's bad, there is some cool down associated stuff in regards to cysts but that's the gist.
How has it been fixed...
Well drifter can now be doubled up as a worker unit to help build and then sit somewhere, I mean in competitive land it makes sense since you send 2-3 drifters out anyway and initial engages can be slow as fuck and RT expansion is typically slow depending on if aliens won or rushed or not...in pub land, you need to redefine "successfully". Success wasn't sitting on 2 RTs for 11 minutes in descent with 2/6 upgrades which I know you just played on the US BT server before with the french comm, he had nfi and I highly doubt a tool tip was gonna help him anyway, to this day I still point out at 10 mins comm has 0 drifters and a majority of them feel as if it's some choice to build or not.
Not sure if this is supposed to doubly reinforce how important drifters are to pub in general by having the RT build beyond slow as fuck without one or just punish people for being idiots, doubly. And alien teams playing from behind now are fucked again, if your natural/s get sacked in a heavy push you just lost 13 tres? 10 on RT and 3 on drifter? Gets sacked twice you now lost 26 tres down from 20.
9/10 alien comms now don't use drifter enzyme enough in co ordinated rushes in both comp/pub, even less than that use cyst rupture/bone wall, alien comms now aren't using their opportunities to micro so I'm not seeing how adding even more, especially necessary ones, especially 70 fucking % build time increase motivates many people.
Biomass is another weird one:
- added bio mass, upgrade at hive. each hive can provide 3 bio mass (1 default, upgrade hive 2 times)
- each bio mass level increases the base health of all life forms and is requirement for ability researches
No idea what the fuck this means without numbers and judging by public BT mod servers neither do the majority of alien comms, in theory it sounds like some sort of option you generally slot in between the new upgrade tech tree and dropping 2nd hive, it _seems_ like it allows aliens stuck on 1 hive to play from behind better by gaining more HP and in theory be able to break into a second base easier and push on...in theory.
In reality it seems to be something a winning alien team stacks quite fast and snowballs out of control or something that never got upgraded, I believe it's now necessary to get 1 rank/step of it to continue on some upgrades so I see 55/60 biomass upgraded in game but I'm not seeing much change in the HP or armour values. I'm hoping this is a good idea with a bad execution/implementation or just a general lack of information.
New upgrade system:
- scaleable upgrades (for example build a maximum of 3 shells to get maximum efficiency for carapace, regeneration), 20 res per structure
Why? Just why? I get it, I played NS 1 and there's a few key differences.
Gorges used to temp these, on a good day one dude got all 3 and put them in weird and wonderful places that were a total pain in the arse to kill off before JP/GL, obviously the commander doesn't have this luxury so he drops them around hives. Was this to lessen the impact of 1-2 rambo marines walking into hive and being able to kill off 1-3 upgrades in a matter of seconds? Was it a buff to lessen the res sink with the new biomass system? Are the numbers at all visible to anyone in the game? Particularly the comm so he can make the choice of "hmm yes finishing 3/3 crag right now at 9 mins is more beneficial than touching off 3/3 biomass on hive 1 while I start leap on hive 2 once bio1 is done"
Did that last sentence even make any sense?
What hope do pubs have of understanding any of it without at least numbers, I don't think anyone is making an informed decision in game atm except a whole bunch of "I might as well" or "fuck off I can't afford upgrades my RTs take 2 mins to build I need to get SS and leap up before biomass or 3/3".
How about some cool shit added to the mod? Team info hud should be standard that shit is great, motd mod that links to the daily patch notes with some numbers on them would be nice, I know there's some servers in US with motd installed and to my knowledge it hasn't broken anyone's shit, would be a great heads up at least for people exploring what the BT mod is about before getting in game and commencing the Benny Hill type game play going on right now.
tl;dr:
Alien comms don't micro enough now, drifters as worker units are doubly punishing idiots.
Biomass and Upgrades have no numbers to them and make no fucking sense. Without numbers it seems like trolls trolling trolls as to what to upgrade as alien comm.
Please add MOTD mod and link to patch notes on workshop
Where's the cool shit? Thoughts on teaminfo hud.
Alien comms don't micro enough now, drifters as worker units are doubly punishing idiots.
Biomass and Upgrades have no numbers to them and make no fucking sense. Without numbers it seems like trolls trolling trolls as to what to upgrade as alien comm.
Please add MOTD mod and link to patch notes on workshop
Where's the cool shit? Thoughts on teaminfo hud.
Comm is too bad? L2P!
Biomass and upgrades are visible to the khammander and to the players on the field.
The BT server I play on has MOTD. This is nothing for the mod to address, though. You could simply ask the admins of your server.
Don't want cluttered interface that tells me about the condition of other players in random pub games. These things are good as mod as they are.
I definitely like the slower building rates for harvesters. Always been a big advocate for that change. But I feel that the drifter being able to build counters that change too much. From my experience it's still quite easy to keep all of your aliens on the offensive while you use drifters to build up your economy behind the front lines.
I also like the camo/scout function of drifters in vanilla, so I'm kinda sad to see it go (unless you go shade hive first). I'd like to see drifters restored to their vanilla function (although you could always add more support functions besides enzyme), and have the gorge be your main builder.
The Balance test actually is thinking about both public and competitive at the same time. If anything it has been focusing a little bit more on the public part and working on a lot of issues connecting to it. The main reason for that is lack of pcw's in the BT mod. Players also have to understand that public play and competitive is actually more alike than it seems at a first glance. Most of the issues you find in public you find in competitive and the other way around. There are just different issues highlighted. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
While the mechanics are being changed and worked on the balance will not be perfect, but thats ok. What most important is that the game flow between early/mid/late game and the ability to turn games around stays viable. The game does not have to be 50/50 balance for the game to be enjoyable, its more important the mechanics are solid and good. When we enter the final phase of the mod the numbers can be adjusted to fix up the balance.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Now I want to mention why some of the recent changes have been made. These changes are not final and if its clear they don't work they will be removed, but I hope this will give you bit of insight on the decision making. This is mostly a answer to Montyp. (This is my take on the changes btw, I can't speak for Sewlek obv ).<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The drifter building alien structures is to fix a major issue(that can be seen in both competitive and public) where alien commander can quickly expand through the map almost uncontested. Even if marines tried to prevent the fast expanding they usually got picked out by skulks while killing the cysts and rts, allowing the aliens to keep on expanding. This also had pretty low econ risk to it, even if it failed it could bind marines long enough for aliens to gain map control and kill the marine economy.<br />
<br />
This is where the slower build time comes in. By having the commander spending res on drifters and using them to build alien structures you not only slow down the alien mass expanding power you also create a new choice for the alien commander to make. Another thing added was that gorges build structures faster and are cheaper, this is to encourage more use of gorges and communication between the field players and commander. From what I have seen this has been working very successfully, however the interface needs to be updated later so new commander will understand how this works right away.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The skulk and the fade mechanics were changed to help with 2 issues. 1. is the impossible to win scenario on 1 hive since fades could not really use blink and the 2nd to even up the skill ceiling.<br />
<br />
Both the skulk and the fade mechanics gave the lifeforms little freedom to work with and were very simple to use. This allowed players to master these lifeforms very early and caused aliens to dominate most lower level games. The skill requirement for marine to have good aim and movement was simply much much higher than the skill required to play alien lifeforms. The other issue with lack of freedom is that on the highest competitive level the skulk and fades hit their skill ceiling and could barely compete with players that had mastered the marine play. If you give it some time you will see that the new mechanics give much more freedom to the players and allows for much more interesting and skillful plays. But keep in mind this is not the final product.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The biomass and the alien weaknesses is a different thing and bit hard to go into details about. The basic idea of biomass is have alien lifeforms scale so they can appear earlier in the game and end the game quicker if they got complete map control. About the different type of strength and weaknesses of the both teams it would simply take to long for me to type it and why its ok that aliens lose to much when a hive goes down. If there was any problem with it its probably that its not obvious enough what is best to do when marines gain the advantage. For every lifeform in the team to start coordinate strong defense and keep constant rt biting in a losing situation is quite rare. <br />
<br />
But now that the alien commander is more involved in everything that happens on the field(with drifter abilities, biomass, etc) we might start to see more alien commander start coordinating his alien team against the marines. I have had some success recently as alien commander with simple requests and instructions.<br />
<br />
One thing to mention though, even if a hive goes down you can keep the upgrades(shell/spurs/shifts) if you place them in good locations.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
I hope this is helpful in any way and please ask if you want to know more.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
And btw, all feedback is helpful when put down in a friendly manner so keep at it Montyp!
From my experience the issues with alien expansion are less of an issue on larger servers, the completely different gamestyle that having twice as many marines in the field forces upon aliens is not represented in the smaller games (have spent enough time playing on smaller servers to know that aliens have a much easier time in a 12 player game as opposed to a 24 player game).
Any half decent marine team knows that the cyst chain is the weakness to aliens expanding and they have only so many avenues to res towers.
Coupled with the lower starting HP of harvesters aliens are all too easy to hamstring early game.
Biomass does not in anyway address the issue of aliens needing multiple tech points to achieve maximum strength yet marines can turtle one and get full weapons and armour upgrades.
Biting RT's does not help address a marine team thats steamrolling your hives and upgrades, aliens cant push back from 1 hive in the same way marines can 1 CC.
You dont try to stop those marines taking your hive/s and upgrades and you have lost.
On one hand people say that we want player v player...yet aliens seem to have to go player v structure to win the game?
Skulks being relegated to harassment of res nodes is hardly inspiring for new players.
@Zek sorry but I think we shall just have to disagree on that...I would rather a marine had an idea I was in a room..rather than a visual marker as to where exactly I was.
aeroripperJoin Date: 2005-02-25Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
I also miss drifters having permanent camo for scouting. Cooldown on its abilities is also a bit annoying, but I suppose necessary since it has more functions now.
Comp VS pub: Keep in mind a lot of the testing and feedback gotten from the balance mod is from 24 player servers. There has actually been a disappointing amount of 6v6 played on it, most of the testing Sewlek sees is on the big 24p public servers that get populated.
Drifters building: About the drifters building being overly punishing to new/dumb comms, also keep in mind that there are redundancies built in through gorge building. Most of the games I play in on the mod I see at least 1 gorge at the start who helps the comm build and expand faster. There is usually always a gorge on the team through out the entire game.
User Friendliness: A lot of the balance mod notes are just quick descriptions Sewlek has put together. And english is not Sewlek's first language, mind you. When the patch does go live, I'm sure there will be a very descriptive patch notes log. Additionally a lot of tooltips and helpful UI elements are not yet in the game as the features that will make it into the live version have not yet been decided upon.
i dont really understand why alien life forms need to scale into the late game - marines scale via their upgrades and purchases, aliens scale via their lifeforms. if your are still going skulk in the late game, you are either saving for an onos, or you lost a higher lifeform. as for fades scaling - fades arent meant to be late game domination machines are they? if you go 1 lerk into 4 fades but marines still get 3-3, well, you went for super strong mid game strat and failed - why should they scale?
It upped the mechanical skill ceiling, and inreased alien commander apm from 0.0001 to something not so mind numbingly dead boring, especially if you take the effort to grow cysts.
At its simplest, it is a very easy mechanic to pick up and understand. Overly punishing is the stupidest way possible to describe it.
i dont really understand why alien life forms need to scale into the late game - marines scale via their upgrades and purchases, aliens scale via their lifeforms. if your are still going skulk in the late game, you are either saving for an onos, or you lost a higher lifeform. as for fades scaling - fades arent meant to be late game domination machines are they? if you go 1 lerk into 4 fades but marines still get 3-3, well, you went for super strong mid game strat and failed - why should they scale?
So basically you're saying that the Onos is the only lifeform that should be able to fight 3-3 marines?
i dont really understand why alien life forms need to scale into the late game - marines scale via their upgrades and purchases, aliens scale via their lifeforms. if your are still going skulk in the late game, you are either saving for an onos, or you lost a higher lifeform. as for fades scaling - fades arent meant to be late game domination machines are they? if you go 1 lerk into 4 fades but marines still get 3-3, well, you went for super strong mid game strat and failed - why should they scale?
Problem: marines are the basic unit, yet they can get upgraded to 3/3, making the basic units simply more powerful the longer the game goes. At some point the basic unit on alien side (Skulk) can't keep up anymore and is just cannon fodder. Hence why they need a way to scale too if they can hold the respective amount of territory.
I don't miss the permanent camo on Drifters. It gives me another reason to go Shade Hive instead, otherwise I simply have to use the Drifter in different ways.
Shift Hive means more aggressive use of Drifters. You have the speed advantage with them, so navigate them around marines in a battle to confuse them and make them miss bullets. The speed also gives you more map control since your Drifters are faster where they are needed to build and you can quickly reinforce them if they get taken out.
Crag Hive stands for a more tanky approach on Drifters where you want to use them as bullet sponge and then take them out of battle to regenerate or keep them a bit in the back lines. Mucous Membrane seems a bit too weak on some higher lifeforms, though.
The only thing I'd like the have with the current Drifter implementation is a button to switch the state of the Drifter between "Builder" and "Scout" or make them simply ignore Cysts for auto-growing. Too many times a cloaked Drifter gave it's position away or ran to some other place just because I dropped a Cyst there. There has to be a way to keep a Drifter at it's current location instead of becoming autonomous!
crushak - aliens scale with their lifeforms though... and if you have enough tech, you can get 2/3 upgrades on your skulk aswell.
personally, im rather sad that the emphasis of this mod seems to be on tactical flexibility, at the expense of strategy. macro scale decision making should be able to have large impacts on the game imo. there is certainly a lack of strategic variety in vanilla, but i dont really see that being changed in BT as strategy seems to be diluted in favour of tactics.
I lol'ed at how you shadowstep forward in the air and then fall down like a brick.
Also, marines full tech on 1 cc = meh.
Also, drifters building strucutres - lol, is this some kind of warcraft, srsly.
Also, phantom = silence. You don't go all invisible = you are visible.
Aura is sweet. Skulk is sweet.
I unno what to think.
But drifters... oh my.
Any marine can build anywhere on the map with his free build tool. Multiple marines can build stuff in matter of seconds. You can use MACs as well.
Now, you have to spread infestation to that exact location you want to build. You have to get a drifter there. Both infestation and drifter cost res. And tres drifter will allow you to build stuff at a rate slower than stock marine. And you gotta get a pres/tres gorge to speed things up. And with hives building at 30% rate, you can forget getting 2nd ninja hive behind enemy lines (think atrium, when you got sub and they got all the rest). I'm not even talking about how I'd hate to micro all this stuff.
Also, phantom = silence. You don't go all invisible = you are visible.
I have yet to come across a marine who spotted me when I was cloaked right next to him. Everyone always walks past you.
Did you actually ever really test the camo? I did with Sewlek as invisible Skulk. At first I thought it was quite easy to see, but that depends on the pattern of the background. Against a clean surface are you easier to spot than against a surface with some pattern. Eventually he moved the Skulk away right in front of my eyes and I suddenly had lost track of him, even though he was still right next to me.
As long as you are perfectly still, it's really hard to be seen.
I tested it in locker room at multiple spots (wall at the powernode, ground next to the rt ..). Marines were just minding their own business, building rts and stuff. I was able to take out 4 marines (well actually 2x2 because they split up). I dont know how it is against a trained eye expecting cloaked aliens though.
phantom is dope, scaling silence with camo is dope; of course you can see the camo but you need to use it smart.. that and aura dope too.. #freephantom!!
uh this post was suppose to quote someone on the page earlier, anyway phantom made shade hive pretty useful, along with aura. So I think it's great
Depending on where you are, you blend better with certain things, I prefer to stand in awkward corners and non common ceiling spots, then dropping with ctrl or slowly sneaking to a marine who doesn't have his weapon out to build etc.. gotta play ball!!!
Also, phantom = silence. You don't go all invisible = you are visible.
I have yet to come across a marine who spotted me when I was cloaked right next to him. Everyone always walks past you.
Did you actually ever really test the camo? I did with Sewlek as invisible Skulk. At first I thought it was quite easy to see, but that depends on the pattern of the background. Against a clean surface are you easier to spot than against a surface with some pattern. Eventually he moved the Skulk away right in front of my eyes and I suddenly had lost track of him, even though he was still right next to me.
I had a marine discharge shotty in my face when I was completely still (they knew I was in that room). It was a clearly aimed shot. Then a rail exo blew me to pieces when I was sitting down behind rails near control in veil. And there was another instance where I was murdered under effect of camo. All in one match.
They might pass you by when they have no idea you are there, but so do they when you don't have camo. If they know there is an alien, they will see you.
When building Arcs/Macs there is no limit to how many you can build. Hence why I was able to 1 shot a hive with 60+ Arcs.
Balance is tipped towards Marines in a big way, I really enjoy a bunch of these changes, but inorder for this game to continue to be fun it needs to be balanced. If Aliens lose something due to a hive loss, Marines should lose something due to a hive loss.
If they know there is an alien, they will see you.
That depends on the player as well.
There were two marines in Observation, I was a Gorge. I was in the small corridor right between the vent and power node and two marines just walked right past me - I was so anxious because I expected them to definitely see me.
After they were gone, I took my chances and actually spit in the back of one while they were scouting the situation with our Elevator Hive. Somewhat irritated they turned around and I hid in the same corridor again. And again they walked straight past me. I think one even bumped into me for a second.
Drifters building things is silly and needs to go. This isn't Starcraft. Aliens need more player-commander interaction, not less. Make buildings build a little slower than in vanilla, but have Gorges build them faster than vanilla. Try to give more incentives for some people to go Gorge in the beginning of the game (which I know you are trying to do). The players are the workers, not the AI.
For the Fade, I would love to have vanilla Shadowstep and double jump back. Those mechanics just add so much to Fade movement that is severely lacking in the BT mod. However, I like that Fades start with Blink as this helps to lessen the "lifeform explosion" that people sometimes complain about because a Fade with Blink and only Carapace will rapidly use up its small energy reserves trying to kill more than one Marine at a time, making it hard to get away.
As for Camouflage, just remove it if you are going to keep nerfing it (when it is already considered to be terrible). The current form of Camouflage in vanilla NS2 is fine when combined with Silence to form Phantom. Please return the full invisibility to Phantom.
Exos are just bad now. I'd rather have 75 res dual-minigun death machines than the tin cans we have now. Exos in vanilla force both sides to use teamwork to be successful and have enough drawbacks to not be ridiculous. As long as multiple Macs can't weld the same target, I think vanilla exos are fine.
Carapace should be removed as an upgrade and replaced with something else. Biomass should be replaced with a global armor upgrade (Carapace) that permanently increases the armor of all lifeforms (and possibly structures) once per Hive (maximum of Carapace 4 with a 5 tech point map). Aliens would be able to upgrade the Carapace from any Hive up to the amount of Hives they have (Carapace 2 with 2 Hives), but it would persist even after Aliens lose a Hive. It wouldn't unlock upgrades but would add decision making for the Khammander.
As for what to replace Carapace with, there have been many ideas thrown around already, but I'll add mine: My idea is for "Emergency Plating" (the name needs work) which is an upgrade that, when an Alien takes fatal damage (whether from a full shotgun blast or a single rifle bullet) they instead remain at 1 health but gain brief invulnerability (2-3 seconds; 30-60 second cooldown), giving them the chance to get away. The Alien's primary attack would be disabled during the invulnerability so that it can't be used offensively. It should give Aliens a visual on the UI that shows how long it lasts as well as the cooldown time left, and it should also give Marines a visual queue so that they know a single bullet will kill that fleeing Alien.
I still hate Armories not healing armor. It isn't fun to die because nobody would weld you, and you have absolutely no way to weld yourself. We need some way to weld ourselves.
Low health resources towers is annoying and makes it almost useless to even build outlying resource towers as they will die long before anyone can respond (especially on the Marine side).
Spending pRes for switching upgrades as Aliens is nice as long as you remove the initial cost for selecting the upgrades (that might have been a bug).
That's my opinion on the current state of the balance mod.
Comments
Stationary cloaking is very useful with silence. You can bhop at full speed and wait until you hear marines coming before you stop to camo. It's certainly stronger for the aliens than having both upgrades separately.
While the mechanics are being changed and worked on the balance will not be perfect, but thats ok. What most important is that the game flow between early/mid/late game and the ability to turn games around stays viable. The game does not have to be 50/50 balance for the game to be enjoyable, its more important the mechanics are solid and good. When we enter the final phase of the mod the numbers can be adjusted to fix up the balance.
Now I want to mention why some of the recent changes have been made. These changes are not final and if its clear they don't work they will be removed, but I hope this will give you bit of insight on the decision making. This is mostly a answer to Montyp. (This is my take on the changes btw, I can't speak for Sewlek obv ).
The drifter building alien structures is to fix a major issue(that can be seen in both competitive and public) where alien commander can quickly expand through the map almost uncontested. Even if marines tried to prevent the fast expanding they usually got picked out by skulks while killing the cysts and rts, allowing the aliens to keep on expanding. This also had pretty low econ risk to it, even if it failed it could bind marines long enough for aliens to gain map control and kill the marine economy.
This is where the slower build time comes in. By having the commander spending res on drifters and using them to build alien structures you not only slow down the alien mass expanding power you also create a new choice for the alien commander to make. Another thing added was that gorges build structures faster and are cheaper, this is to encourage more use of gorges and communication between the field players and commander. From what I have seen this has been working very successfully, however the interface needs to be updated later so new commander will understand how this works right away.
The skulk and the fade mechanics were changed to help with 2 issues. 1. is the impossible to win scenario on 1 hive since fades could not really use blink and the 2nd to even up the skill ceiling.
Both the skulk and the fade mechanics gave the lifeforms little freedom to work with and were very simple to use. This allowed players to master these lifeforms very early and caused aliens to dominate most lower level games. The skill requirement for marine to have good aim and movement was simply much much higher than the skill required to play alien lifeforms. The other issue with lack of freedom is that on the highest competitive level the skulk and fades hit their skill ceiling and could barely compete with players that had mastered the marine play. If you give it some time you will see that the new mechanics give much more freedom to the players and allows for much more interesting and skillful plays. But keep in mind this is not the final product.
The biomass and the alien weaknesses is a different thing and bit hard to go into details about. The basic idea of biomass is have alien lifeforms scale so they can appear earlier in the game and end the game quicker if they got complete map control. About the different type of strength and weaknesses of the both teams it would simply take to long for me to type it and why its ok that aliens lose to much when a hive goes down. If there was any problem with it its probably that its not obvious enough what is best to do when marines gain the advantage. For every lifeform in the team to start coordinate strong defense and keep constant rt biting in a losing situation is quite rare.
But now that the alien commander is more involved in everything that happens on the field(with drifter abilities, biomass, etc) we might start to see more alien commander start coordinating his alien team against the marines. I have had some success recently as alien commander with simple requests and instructions.
One thing to mention though, even if a hive goes down you can keep the upgrades(shell/spurs/shifts) if you place them in good locations.
I hope this is helpful in any way and please ask if you want to know more.
And btw, all feedback is helpful when put down in a friendly manner so keep at it Montyp!
edit: fixed
Grissi :þ
dw we're still teaching mf how to say "eclipse" instead of "ellipse" ^_^
Not even gonna lie this is exactly where I start hating the BT mod, introducing horrible arse elements of the RTS genre (workers and supply caps) to fix some other issue, far as I see it:
BT mod increased cyst range? cool, less spam, slightly better performance
BT mod increases infest death/creep spread? cool, less time waiting around 5-10+ seconds to build stuff
Now alien comm can expand further faster and be an ever expanding dick on 4 RTs? Alright that's bad, there is some cool down associated stuff in regards to cysts but that's the gist.
How has it been fixed...
Well drifter can now be doubled up as a worker unit to help build and then sit somewhere, I mean in competitive land it makes sense since you send 2-3 drifters out anyway and initial engages can be slow as fuck and RT expansion is typically slow depending on if aliens won or rushed or not...in pub land, you need to redefine "successfully". Success wasn't sitting on 2 RTs for 11 minutes in descent with 2/6 upgrades which I know you just played on the US BT server before with the french comm, he had nfi and I highly doubt a tool tip was gonna help him anyway, to this day I still point out at 10 mins comm has 0 drifters and a majority of them feel as if it's some choice to build or not.
Not sure if this is supposed to doubly reinforce how important drifters are to pub in general by having the RT build beyond slow as fuck without one or just punish people for being idiots, doubly. And alien teams playing from behind now are fucked again, if your natural/s get sacked in a heavy push you just lost 13 tres? 10 on RT and 3 on drifter? Gets sacked twice you now lost 26 tres down from 20.
9/10 alien comms now don't use drifter enzyme enough in co ordinated rushes in both comp/pub, even less than that use cyst rupture/bone wall, alien comms now aren't using their opportunities to micro so I'm not seeing how adding even more, especially necessary ones, especially 70 fucking % build time increase motivates many people.
Biomass is another weird one:
- added bio mass, upgrade at hive. each hive can provide 3 bio mass (1 default, upgrade hive 2 times)
- each bio mass level increases the base health of all life forms and is requirement for ability researches
No idea what the fuck this means without numbers and judging by public BT mod servers neither do the majority of alien comms, in theory it sounds like some sort of option you generally slot in between the new upgrade tech tree and dropping 2nd hive, it _seems_ like it allows aliens stuck on 1 hive to play from behind better by gaining more HP and in theory be able to break into a second base easier and push on...in theory.
In reality it seems to be something a winning alien team stacks quite fast and snowballs out of control or something that never got upgraded, I believe it's now necessary to get 1 rank/step of it to continue on some upgrades so I see 55/60 biomass upgraded in game but I'm not seeing much change in the HP or armour values. I'm hoping this is a good idea with a bad execution/implementation or just a general lack of information.
New upgrade system:
- scaleable upgrades (for example build a maximum of 3 shells to get maximum efficiency for carapace, regeneration), 20 res per structure
Why? Just why? I get it, I played NS 1 and there's a few key differences.
Gorges used to temp these, on a good day one dude got all 3 and put them in weird and wonderful places that were a total pain in the arse to kill off before JP/GL, obviously the commander doesn't have this luxury so he drops them around hives. Was this to lessen the impact of 1-2 rambo marines walking into hive and being able to kill off 1-3 upgrades in a matter of seconds? Was it a buff to lessen the res sink with the new biomass system? Are the numbers at all visible to anyone in the game? Particularly the comm so he can make the choice of "hmm yes finishing 3/3 crag right now at 9 mins is more beneficial than touching off 3/3 biomass on hive 1 while I start leap on hive 2 once bio1 is done"
Did that last sentence even make any sense?
What hope do pubs have of understanding any of it without at least numbers, I don't think anyone is making an informed decision in game atm except a whole bunch of "I might as well" or "fuck off I can't afford upgrades my RTs take 2 mins to build I need to get SS and leap up before biomass or 3/3".
How about some cool shit added to the mod? Team info hud should be standard that shit is great, motd mod that links to the daily patch notes with some numbers on them would be nice, I know there's some servers in US with motd installed and to my knowledge it hasn't broken anyone's shit, would be a great heads up at least for people exploring what the BT mod is about before getting in game and commencing the Benny Hill type game play going on right now.
tl;dr:
Alien comms don't micro enough now, drifters as worker units are doubly punishing idiots.
Biomass and Upgrades have no numbers to them and make no fucking sense. Without numbers it seems like trolls trolling trolls as to what to upgrade as alien comm.
Please add MOTD mod and link to patch notes on workshop
Where's the cool shit? Thoughts on teaminfo hud.
Comm is too bad? L2P!
Biomass and upgrades are visible to the khammander and to the players on the field.
The BT server I play on has MOTD. This is nothing for the mod to address, though. You could simply ask the admins of your server.
Don't want cluttered interface that tells me about the condition of other players in random pub games. These things are good as mod as they are.
I also like the camo/scout function of drifters in vanilla, so I'm kinda sad to see it go (unless you go shade hive first). I'd like to see drifters restored to their vanilla function (although you could always add more support functions besides enzyme), and have the gorge be your main builder.
Any half decent marine team knows that the cyst chain is the weakness to aliens expanding and they have only so many avenues to res towers.
Coupled with the lower starting HP of harvesters aliens are all too easy to hamstring early game.
Biomass does not in anyway address the issue of aliens needing multiple tech points to achieve maximum strength yet marines can turtle one and get full weapons and armour upgrades.
Biting RT's does not help address a marine team thats steamrolling your hives and upgrades, aliens cant push back from 1 hive in the same way marines can 1 CC.
You dont try to stop those marines taking your hive/s and upgrades and you have lost.
On one hand people say that we want player v player...yet aliens seem to have to go player v structure to win the game?
Skulks being relegated to harassment of res nodes is hardly inspiring for new players.
@Zek sorry but I think we shall just have to disagree on that...I would rather a marine had an idea I was in a room..rather than a visual marker as to where exactly I was.
Drifters building: About the drifters building being overly punishing to new/dumb comms, also keep in mind that there are redundancies built in through gorge building. Most of the games I play in on the mod I see at least 1 gorge at the start who helps the comm build and expand faster. There is usually always a gorge on the team through out the entire game.
User Friendliness: A lot of the balance mod notes are just quick descriptions Sewlek has put together. And english is not Sewlek's first language, mind you. When the patch does go live, I'm sure there will be a very descriptive patch notes log. Additionally a lot of tooltips and helpful UI elements are not yet in the game as the features that will make it into the live version have not yet been decided upon.
It upped the mechanical skill ceiling, and inreased alien commander apm from 0.0001 to something not so mind numbingly dead boring, especially if you take the effort to grow cysts.
At its simplest, it is a very easy mechanic to pick up and understand. Overly punishing is the stupidest way possible to describe it.
So basically you're saying that the Onos is the only lifeform that should be able to fight 3-3 marines?
Problem: marines are the basic unit, yet they can get upgraded to 3/3, making the basic units simply more powerful the longer the game goes. At some point the basic unit on alien side (Skulk) can't keep up anymore and is just cannon fodder. Hence why they need a way to scale too if they can hold the respective amount of territory.
I don't miss the permanent camo on Drifters. It gives me another reason to go Shade Hive instead, otherwise I simply have to use the Drifter in different ways.
Shift Hive means more aggressive use of Drifters. You have the speed advantage with them, so navigate them around marines in a battle to confuse them and make them miss bullets. The speed also gives you more map control since your Drifters are faster where they are needed to build and you can quickly reinforce them if they get taken out.
Crag Hive stands for a more tanky approach on Drifters where you want to use them as bullet sponge and then take them out of battle to regenerate or keep them a bit in the back lines. Mucous Membrane seems a bit too weak on some higher lifeforms, though.
The only thing I'd like the have with the current Drifter implementation is a button to switch the state of the Drifter between "Builder" and "Scout" or make them simply ignore Cysts for auto-growing. Too many times a cloaked Drifter gave it's position away or ran to some other place just because I dropped a Cyst there. There has to be a way to keep a Drifter at it's current location instead of becoming autonomous!
personally, im rather sad that the emphasis of this mod seems to be on tactical flexibility, at the expense of strategy. macro scale decision making should be able to have large impacts on the game imo. there is certainly a lack of strategic variety in vanilla, but i dont really see that being changed in BT as strategy seems to be diluted in favour of tactics.
Also, marines full tech on 1 cc = meh.
Also, drifters building strucutres - lol, is this some kind of warcraft, srsly.
Also, phantom = silence. You don't go all invisible = you are visible.
Aura is sweet. Skulk is sweet.
I unno what to think.
But drifters... oh my.
Any marine can build anywhere on the map with his free build tool. Multiple marines can build stuff in matter of seconds. You can use MACs as well.
Now, you have to spread infestation to that exact location you want to build. You have to get a drifter there. Both infestation and drifter cost res. And tres drifter will allow you to build stuff at a rate slower than stock marine. And you gotta get a pres/tres gorge to speed things up. And with hives building at 30% rate, you can forget getting 2nd ninja hive behind enemy lines (think atrium, when you got sub and they got all the rest). I'm not even talking about how I'd hate to micro all this stuff.
I have yet to come across a marine who spotted me when I was cloaked right next to him. Everyone always walks past you.
Did you actually ever really test the camo? I did with Sewlek as invisible Skulk. At first I thought it was quite easy to see, but that depends on the pattern of the background. Against a clean surface are you easier to spot than against a surface with some pattern. Eventually he moved the Skulk away right in front of my eyes and I suddenly had lost track of him, even though he was still right next to me.
As long as you are perfectly still, it's really hard to be seen.
I tested it in locker room at multiple spots (wall at the powernode, ground next to the rt ..). Marines were just minding their own business, building rts and stuff. I was able to take out 4 marines (well actually 2x2 because they split up). I dont know how it is against a trained eye expecting cloaked aliens though.
Haven't had a marine round against cloak neither.
I like the change. Definitely a good one.
uh this post was suppose to quote someone on the page earlier, anyway phantom made shade hive pretty useful, along with aura. So I think it's great
Depending on where you are, you blend better with certain things, I prefer to stand in awkward corners and non common ceiling spots, then dropping with ctrl or slowly sneaking to a marine who doesn't have his weapon out to build etc.. gotta play ball!!!
I had a marine discharge shotty in my face when I was completely still (they knew I was in that room). It was a clearly aimed shot. Then a rail exo blew me to pieces when I was sitting down behind rails near control in veil. And there was another instance where I was murdered under effect of camo. All in one match.
They might pass you by when they have no idea you are there, but so do they when you don't have camo. If they know there is an alien, they will see you.
Balance is tipped towards Marines in a big way, I really enjoy a bunch of these changes, but inorder for this game to continue to be fun it needs to be balanced. If Aliens lose something due to a hive loss, Marines should lose something due to a hive loss.
That depends on the player as well.
There were two marines in Observation, I was a Gorge. I was in the small corridor right between the vent and power node and two marines just walked right past me - I was so anxious because I expected them to definitely see me.
After they were gone, I took my chances and actually spit in the back of one while they were scouting the situation with our Elevator Hive. Somewhat irritated they turned around and I hid in the same corridor again. And again they walked straight past me. I think one even bumped into me for a second.
Drifters building things is silly and needs to go. This isn't Starcraft. Aliens need more player-commander interaction, not less. Make buildings build a little slower than in vanilla, but have Gorges build them faster than vanilla. Try to give more incentives for some people to go Gorge in the beginning of the game (which I know you are trying to do). The players are the workers, not the AI.
For the Fade, I would love to have vanilla Shadowstep and double jump back. Those mechanics just add so much to Fade movement that is severely lacking in the BT mod. However, I like that Fades start with Blink as this helps to lessen the "lifeform explosion" that people sometimes complain about because a Fade with Blink and only Carapace will rapidly use up its small energy reserves trying to kill more than one Marine at a time, making it hard to get away.
As for Camouflage, just remove it if you are going to keep nerfing it (when it is already considered to be terrible). The current form of Camouflage in vanilla NS2 is fine when combined with Silence to form Phantom. Please return the full invisibility to Phantom.
Exos are just bad now. I'd rather have 75 res dual-minigun death machines than the tin cans we have now. Exos in vanilla force both sides to use teamwork to be successful and have enough drawbacks to not be ridiculous. As long as multiple Macs can't weld the same target, I think vanilla exos are fine.
Carapace should be removed as an upgrade and replaced with something else. Biomass should be replaced with a global armor upgrade (Carapace) that permanently increases the armor of all lifeforms (and possibly structures) once per Hive (maximum of Carapace 4 with a 5 tech point map). Aliens would be able to upgrade the Carapace from any Hive up to the amount of Hives they have (Carapace 2 with 2 Hives), but it would persist even after Aliens lose a Hive. It wouldn't unlock upgrades but would add decision making for the Khammander.
As for what to replace Carapace with, there have been many ideas thrown around already, but I'll add mine: My idea is for "Emergency Plating" (the name needs work) which is an upgrade that, when an Alien takes fatal damage (whether from a full shotgun blast or a single rifle bullet) they instead remain at 1 health but gain brief invulnerability (2-3 seconds; 30-60 second cooldown), giving them the chance to get away. The Alien's primary attack would be disabled during the invulnerability so that it can't be used offensively. It should give Aliens a visual on the UI that shows how long it lasts as well as the cooldown time left, and it should also give Marines a visual queue so that they know a single bullet will kill that fleeing Alien.
I still hate Armories not healing armor. It isn't fun to die because nobody would weld you, and you have absolutely no way to weld yourself. We need some way to weld ourselves.
Low health resources towers is annoying and makes it almost useless to even build outlying resource towers as they will die long before anyone can respond (especially on the Marine side).
Spending pRes for switching upgrades as Aliens is nice as long as you remove the initial cost for selecting the upgrades (that might have been a bug).
That's my opinion on the current state of the balance mod.