The Shade, Crag, and Shift and their abilities
aeroripper
Join Date: 2005-02-25 Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
Join Date: 2005-02-25 Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
Does anybody use the commander controlled chamber abilities as more than a novelty in a real game?
Crags: Place 3 behind a hive to make it a difficult hive to kill, or make healing stations on the front lines. I don't believe I've seen heal wave used much (ever) since its animation is a bit ambiguous. Overall its probably the most useful chamber.
Shift: Place one by the building second hive to help the gorge build it quickly due to fast energy regen. It's echo ability is of dubious usefulness as it only transports single chambers at a time somewhere else on infestation. The only time I've really used this (for fun) is to transport 3 bombard whips I was maturing in the hive to the front lines. Still probably would have just been easier to grow them and use nutrient mist. I don't think I've ever seen a commander use this in a real game.
Shade: It's passive ability cloaks a relatively small area. This doesn't seem to be very useful to me since its difficult to use it offensively since marines can find it so easily and kill it. Always seemed like a waste of res to put a few around the map and have them die shortly after, even in good positions. As soon as a marine kills a nearby cyst its life expectancy goes down significantly. It's ink ability IS pretty cool, but its range negates its usefulness most of the time. Hallucination is pretty useful and interesting.
What do you guys think?
Crags: Place 3 behind a hive to make it a difficult hive to kill, or make healing stations on the front lines. I don't believe I've seen heal wave used much (ever) since its animation is a bit ambiguous. Overall its probably the most useful chamber.
Shift: Place one by the building second hive to help the gorge build it quickly due to fast energy regen. It's echo ability is of dubious usefulness as it only transports single chambers at a time somewhere else on infestation. The only time I've really used this (for fun) is to transport 3 bombard whips I was maturing in the hive to the front lines. Still probably would have just been easier to grow them and use nutrient mist. I don't think I've ever seen a commander use this in a real game.
Shade: It's passive ability cloaks a relatively small area. This doesn't seem to be very useful to me since its difficult to use it offensively since marines can find it so easily and kill it. Always seemed like a waste of res to put a few around the map and have them die shortly after, even in good positions. As soon as a marine kills a nearby cyst its life expectancy goes down significantly. It's ink ability IS pretty cool, but its range negates its usefulness most of the time. Hallucination is pretty useful and interesting.
What do you guys think?
Comments
that's why I rarely use it, I find it only really useful when my team can't finish the job. and if my team can't finish the job, we shouldn't be winning in the first place. 4 onos should be able to wreck any power node in existence regardless of the marine count. if they're sitting on 2 dualies, might pose a slight problem, but yeah.
- Crags no longer stack healing on the same target, so you can't keep a Hive indefinitely alive just by planting 3 Crags behind it. You are rather forced to utilize Heal Wave frequently if there are too many marines than one Crag could outheal.
- Shifts gain the Echo ability automatically if you have a Shift Hive. And since you are now able to echo Harvesters and Gorge Tunnels, as well as having a Supply Point cap on the number of structures you can grow and generally slower growth processes, it becomes actually viable to grow stuff in your base and quickly reinforce the front line with it.
- Shades are harder to take out because you can always relocate structures since they gained the ability to slowly walk away. The fact that Ink got fixed and can now effectively stop ARCs from firing makes the Shade Hive even more meaningful as a defensive strategy.
Also, doesn't a craig at a new hive heal it to full health much more quickly than just letting it grow? Assuming no gorge of course.
does shorten the duration to reach 100% health
does not shorten the duration to reach maturity (aka 100% grown)
I think echo costs too much to be effective. It costs 15 to evolve the 10 res shift to echo, and then 5 I think to transport any of the 10 res structures. You cant echo just to save a base that's being threatened, because by the time you've echoed all the buildings back to a forward position, you've spent as much res as it costs to build them all fresh. The only thing cost effective to echo are upgrades and bombard whips, and bombard whips are nearly useless to begin with.
Personally, I would make the ability free after the upgrade. I really like the idea of giving khammanders things they can do mostly to keep busy and active in the game without really hurting their teams res flow. It would probably be cooldown based in order to keep it balanced, with maybe an increased evolve to echo cost.
I would also like to see the same thing with Hallucination. Actually hallucination deserves to be free even more than echo, due to the fact that you don't actually get any direct benefits out of it. What I would do would be to apply a different global cooldown for each hallucination ability scaled to the "size" of the hallucination. Making Skulks would probably only be a second or two between (probably with a population cap similar to drifters), but making a hive might block you from making new hallucinations for several minutes.
Ink can be awesome, I've kept the old deposit (mineshaft) safe from a central ARC attack for 7 minutes or so once. I'm not even a good comm. Also, healing wave is awesome at the right time/place.
Hallucinations have been fun but didn't feel like they did anything worth a significant res investment though.
Way too often I see unused "forward" bases littered all over a map, in corridors well in to Alien territory that just aren't being traversed/assaulted any more. As Commanders will usually place at least 3 Crags at a time, plus a Shift and sometimes even Whips, this can become a large amount of resources sitting there on the floor, unused. 10 Res gets you everything up to the front lines... and it takes a LOT less time to move a Crag than it does to grow one.
Just remember... as Shifts can only Echo structures in their close radius, make sure you move it last! Done that before... >_<
you dont see the commander use it because there's not much to see and its not like players are notified "THE HIVE IS ECHOING LOCKER ROOM CRAG TO GENERATOR!" lol
shade is a bit blerggh.
despite the reasoning for this, it is still too big of a structure.
and frankly the ink cloud is too ineffective because it takes so long to trigger it in response to an attack or a scan - would love an automatic ink cloud option.
This is and has always been an issue for the game. With most being underused, and many never being used. Either down to poor UI, implementation or design (relating to a situation or otherwise) and make for a more linear game.
A good example is the Whip in the BT mod. It now has auto root/unroot. From a usability point of view, a simple change can make a huge difference. Things like this seem so obvious, yet only now they being modified.
The marine team also lack from having usable upgrades that are worth the research. I think it would be better (as per the BT mod) to have upgrades across both sides be easily accessible early on. BUT with individual weapons/structures having upgrade paths that boost stats, etc.
So for instance, do you want the crap shade or the mega shade camo path. Or do you want the flamethrower that can deter, or the one that fills a room with fire?
It's not 10 res to do that, it's 35. 15 to upgrade the shift, and 5 each to move the crags and shift. It only costs 40 to build them all from scratch, so all you save is 5 res. For that 5 res, I think I would rather keep the backup base in case we end up getting pushed back.
As far as speed goes, the first crag gets there fast (if the shift is already upgraded), but by the time the shift gets there you could have grown all 4 buildings and had a decent amount of maturity on them as well.