I'm not a huge fan of cheap lifeforms with pres upgrades anyway. It's not necessary to prevent upgrade swapping abuse, it just seems like another new system adding complexity for its own sake.
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
edited June 2013
@zek its for much needed and long awaited alien pres sinks.. and i personally am loving it.
But starting pres values might need to be lowered for aliens so that timings arent messed with. IDK.. still need to test this.
But yea, preventing swapping is done by costing pres, which was done even before lifeform cost reductions and typical upgrade costs.
Lowering starting res would help with the one thing I don't like about NSBT right now which is the faster progression into midgame. It would open a whole can of worms balance wise though.
@zek its for much needed and long awaited alien pres sinks.. and i personally am loving it.
But starting pres values might need to be lowered for aliens so that timings arent messed with. IDK.. still need to test this.
But yea, preventing swapping is done by costing pres, which was done even before lifeform cost reductions and typical upgrade costs.
I'm not sure what you mean, it's not a pres sink at all - higher lifeforms buy their upgrades once and never change them, same as before, and the overall cost is roughly the same. I think we should be more careful about adding new complexity without good reason. Upgrade swap abuse can be prevented simply with gestation times.
My biggest problem is the impacts at point blank range..
I'm down to increase the movement of the skulk, as has been done, and any other mechanics like bite speed, if it means less frustrating gunplay for marines. "Fun" should factor into these decisions as well, as Sewlek mentioned.
/My 2 cents
If you put in your 2 cents worth.... and its a penny for your thoughts.... Who makes that extra one cent?
lol
The only thing A3 protects you against is gorge bile/spit and lerk spikes... all other lifeforms will 4 bite/swipe you. Its a redundant upgrade.
I get why sewlek changed the numbers but I still think the game should be put back to vanilla where A0 = 2 swipes, A1 = 3 swipes, A2 = 3 swipes, A3 = 4 swipes. At least then A3 feels useful. For those complaining about getting 2 swiped with armor 0... if you let fades come up before you get armor 1, you lost anyway.
Dude... read 5 posts above you. "There is a point to A3 and it's to do with medpacks." Have a think about it.
What and put even more pressure on an arms lab start??
IronHorseDeveloper, QA Manager, Technical Support & contributorJoin Date: 2010-05-08Member: 71669Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Subnautica Playtester, Subnautica PT Lead, Pistachionauts
@nachos assuming perfect timing and landing of medpacks for every single potential fade encounter, as well as assuming that such a narrow scoped benefit somehow impacts the mechanic enough to make it viable based on said cost, is well..... unconvincing.
i know this is may be a redundant comment and that it probably wont change a thing re the armory armor issue which is the source of this but recently ive been seeing people not weld teammates with better weaponry so that they die faster and drop their weapon. its not very common, but i havent seen it mentioned (though there are 88 pages so i may have missed it ^^) and its extremely frustrating to have teammates intentionally trip you up to steal your stuff.
re the fade swipe+medpacks thing, im guessing that the armor lasting longer would mean the medpacks were more effective beyond just the one or two medpack. it would be worth testing to see how many more swipes it would take with A3 before the medspam was overcome. i imagine it would also make nano shield more effective. whether its worth 40 res in the late game though.
I loved BT at first, but i've gotten incredibly bored with it these past few days. It seems like the new "meta" is sentry spam in every room, and aliens have to devote someone to suicide bile rush all game. It's not just me either, virsoul merc'd for my team yesterday and he actually assigned one of us to be on constant bile duty. It seemed like that was a huge factor in the BT cup as well, I noticed godar trying to suicide bile over and over again in a few matches, and every scrim we've played the past week or so has devolved into bile spam as well.
For marines it's been turrets in every room + flamethrowers. It's significantly worse than when it was just shotguns and carapace because at least back then you were required to have the ability to aim.
Yeah gorges are pretty annoying right now, unfortunately they're the only counter to the sentries as you've stated, god damnit I hate sentries. The fact marines can ignore upgrades (for a while) just to sentry everywhere does get on my nerves too.
I played ~650 hours of vanillia Ns2 and never got bored. I've played about 30 hours of BT and i'm already bored as shit. I was LOVING BT until I switched from being a field player to a commander, but I feel like if I'm aliens i'm pretty much obligated to send someone to bile the enemy base constantly. When I play marines, I feel like I have to put sentries up everywhere or else we won't be able to defend against the repeated bile rushes, because we'll get wiped while trying to kill the gorge so we need a force multiplier.
It's not even because we're playing better teams, it seems like that's what the whole meta has devolved into from all the streams i've been watching. If it keeps going this way, north america is about to lose another team
Also, powersurge is pretty lame. If we need backup power, why don't we just go back to having sentry batteries working like they did in beta where you could put anything in their radius and it'll power it? That way if the marines feel the need to have backup, they can plan ahead accordingly and spend some res on it instead of being able to just turn something back on after the powers been turned off.. it defeats the whole purpose of powernodes.
Gorge bile bomb and mass sentries is a pretty easy thing to fix. Just up the cost a little bit so that they are still effective but their is a trade off for committing to that particular strat. ATM constant suicide bb rush is possible cause of 5 pres gorge. I really haven't seen mac sentries yet, time to play with that tonight.
The sentries aren't as big of a deal as the bile, but I feel like the sentries are almost required to be able to hold a gate since you can afford to suicide with gorges constantly. Since every alien push can afford to have 2 gorges (com + 1 other), you pretty much HAVE to have a force multiplier in order to keep the bile down, otherwise the fades are just going to wipe you while you're shooting the gorges.
I've been trying to keep my team away from doing these sort of strategies cause I feel they're really cheesey and make the game stale and boring, but we did a 2 gorge + fade support push on a gate today and killed it and the defending marines and their turrets in about 2 seconds flat.
I think it's time to abandon the whole idea of lowering the cost of lifeforms but compensating with upgrade costs. The system doesn't add anything, it's just convoluted and feels like it's complicating things just for the sake of complexity. And on top of all that it's allowing suicide gorge bile rushes to happen constantly.
I really don't ever want to see a metagame in which sentry spam is popular. There's a reason Flayra wanted to err on the side of keeping them useless. Ideally I think they should be a situationally useful PRes deployable.
I don't like it because there's no need for it in the first place and because it makes gorges too easily exploitable.
It's not complicated necessarily, that isn't the right word. But it feels like a change that's being done just for the sake of changing things, without a pressing concern in vanilla justifying it.
How exactly is it complicated?
It's literally only 1 of 2 things you use your pres for...
There's no change from vanilla other than timing, which is pretty small and so far hasn't presented a downside.
So.. Why don't you like it?
Before: Upgrades cost nothing, lifeforms cost one price.
After: Upgrades cost nothing for skulks, this much for Gorges, that much for Lerks, etc. Lifeforms are cheap, but if you evolve one too soon you won't have upgrades and might lose everything by dying early.
It's not incredibly difficult to understand in and of itself, but it is clearly more complicated. It's the little things that add up - what's the benefit that is added in exchange for increasing the complexity of the game rules? The BT already has increased the complexity of the game in other areas, for what I feel is a worthwhile benefit. I'm not convinced that this is one of those things.
How exactly is it complicated?
It's literally only 1 of 2 things you use your pres for...
There's no change from vanilla other than timing, which is pretty small and so far hasn't presented a downside.
So.. Why don't you like it?
It's presented a pretty major downside in that gorges have been made so cheap that you can spam them constantly and bile comes on 1 hive now. They really need to be made significantly more expensive, or bile needs to come out much, much later. They're seriously ruining the game right now... at least for me.
Sentry spam could be somewhat countered by going back to the mechanic where you got additional Supply Points for each tech point that you captured. No idea why that change got reverted. It gave marines more of a reason to take another point instead of sitting forever on their single CC and get everything they needed, including 200ish Supply for Sentries. And on the other side of the medal are 3-Hive aliens still stuck on 200 Supply right now.
If 100 per CC was too low to start with or the impact of additional tech points was too high, then perhaps make every team start with 100 base Supply and add 50 Supply for every captured tech point, starting you off with 150 and giving you 250 on 3 tech points.
And Whips really should get a fix so that they don't try to throw their Bombs when they don't have a clear trajectory towards the target. In about 70% of the cases does a Whip Bomb hit a Drifter, Hive, wall or something else, but definitely not the actual enemies. It feels more like the Whip is handicapping itself once it matured because it gives it's location away with those failed attack attempts (which are not really useful in the first place, given that they only damage armor and marines weld armor back up faster anyway) when it's cloaked otherwise and actually wastes time on trying a ranged attack first, rather than just whacking away at it.
I don't like it because there's no need for it in the first place and because it makes gorges too easily exploitable.
Yes, gorge is under priced. This has no bearing on the system as a whole.
It's not complicated necessarily, that isn't the right word. But it feels like a change that's being done just for the sake of changing things, without a pressing concern in vanilla justifying it.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge things as change simply for the sake of change. Even if this was true, it's neither a strong argument nor very insightful/constructive. A system without pressing concerns is not the same as a system that cannot be improved. It's also entirely possible for the bt lifeform system to be addressing issues that you are unaware of.
I've listed some below for you off the top of my head, though I'm sure sewlek has more/better reasons why he implemented it. 1) Vanilla lifeform system meant huge power/tech explosions (pres/tres isn't going to be removed). Upgrade costs help soft scale tech explosion effects in the same way w/a upgrades are supposed to now scale minigun for example. 2) Losing a lifeform is not as big of a blow because it's cheaper. Sewlek is really big on allowing comebacks, and the BT lifeform system supports this. There is probably nothing more off-putting for a new player than saving up 10 minutes for a fade, only to die instantly. Now they only need to save up like 8 minutes or whatever, so lifeforms are generally more accessible for players to learn without being OP. 3) You need to play more cautiously untill you can get the upgrades. A subtlety that I think will better teach new players to be careful with their lifeforms. Instead of only relying on beating them with a stick when they lose lifeform, you 'ladder' them so they have a real and immediate incentive to stay alive for a bit. 4) Gameplay timings feel much smoother and tighter. 10 minute vanilla fade was pretty boring/stale (read: 10 minutes of skulking). 5) To a lesser extent, it limits the power of continually tres spammed eggs in certain situations (like onos) since you still need considerable pres for the upgrades.
I think gorge cost needs to be increased. After some thought, I decide that a good value would be 8 res to evolve, with 1 res per upgrade. This leaves the total 3 upgrade cost unchanged, but decreases the number of suicide bile bomb hits players can do over the course of a game.
Regen's in-combat effectiveness should be reduced by a few percentage, not completely eliminated. It feels too powerful to be regening large amounts of health while being shot.
The onos needs a little more mobility. I think it's health is at a good point, but it feels a little too slow and its hard to keep up with marines that are jumping away from you. I think this can be solved by increasing its strafe accel a little bit. Also, sometimes the onos seems to slide around on iceskates. Not sure what the cause of this is.
I also think the bump to fade and lerk armor was just a little too much. Both should be reduced by 5.
Comments
But starting pres values might need to be lowered for aliens so that timings arent messed with. IDK.. still need to test this.
But yea, preventing swapping is done by costing pres, which was done even before lifeform cost reductions and typical upgrade costs.
I'm not sure what you mean, it's not a pres sink at all - higher lifeforms buy their upgrades once and never change them, same as before, and the overall cost is roughly the same. I think we should be more careful about adding new complexity without good reason. Upgrade swap abuse can be prevented simply with gestation times.
If you put in your 2 cents worth.... and its a penny for your thoughts.... Who makes that extra one cent?
Dude... read 5 posts above you. "There is a point to A3 and it's to do with medpacks." Have a think about it.
What and put even more pressure on an arms lab start??
Makes you feel like you re ice skating. Very unpleasant feature
Dude... read my post. I said I understood why the changes were made. I simply have a different opinion. jeez lol
You're wrong. It's not a redundant upgrade.
"There is a point to A3 and it's to do with medpacks."
armor 2 + 2 med packs = 5 swipes
armor 3 + 1 medpack = 5 swipes
I'm gonna go with redundant.
A2 + Med spam = still 2 hits
A3 + 1 med = 3 hits
re the fade swipe+medpacks thing, im guessing that the armor lasting longer would mean the medpacks were more effective beyond just the one or two medpack. it would be worth testing to see how many more swipes it would take with A3 before the medspam was overcome. i imagine it would also make nano shield more effective. whether its worth 40 res in the late game though.
For marines it's been turrets in every room + flamethrowers. It's significantly worse than when it was just shotguns and carapace because at least back then you were required to have the ability to aim.
It's not even because we're playing better teams, it seems like that's what the whole meta has devolved into from all the streams i've been watching. If it keeps going this way, north america is about to lose another team
Also, powersurge is pretty lame. If we need backup power, why don't we just go back to having sentry batteries working like they did in beta where you could put anything in their radius and it'll power it? That way if the marines feel the need to have backup, they can plan ahead accordingly and spend some res on it instead of being able to just turn something back on after the powers been turned off.. it defeats the whole purpose of powernodes.
Gorge bile bomb and mass sentries is a pretty easy thing to fix. Just up the cost a little bit so that they are still effective but their is a trade off for committing to that particular strat. ATM constant suicide bb rush is possible cause of 5 pres gorge. I really haven't seen mac sentries yet, time to play with that tonight.
I've been trying to keep my team away from doing these sort of strategies cause I feel they're really cheesey and make the game stale and boring, but we did a 2 gorge + fade support push on a gate today and killed it and the defending marines and their turrets in about 2 seconds flat.
It's literally only 1 of 2 things you use your pres for...
There's no change from vanilla other than timing, which is pretty small and so far hasn't presented a downside.
So.. Why don't you like it?
It's not complicated necessarily, that isn't the right word. But it feels like a change that's being done just for the sake of changing things, without a pressing concern in vanilla justifying it.
Before: Upgrades cost nothing, lifeforms cost one price.
After: Upgrades cost nothing for skulks, this much for Gorges, that much for Lerks, etc. Lifeforms are cheap, but if you evolve one too soon you won't have upgrades and might lose everything by dying early.
It's not incredibly difficult to understand in and of itself, but it is clearly more complicated. It's the little things that add up - what's the benefit that is added in exchange for increasing the complexity of the game rules? The BT already has increased the complexity of the game in other areas, for what I feel is a worthwhile benefit. I'm not convinced that this is one of those things.
It's presented a pretty major downside in that gorges have been made so cheap that you can spam them constantly and bile comes on 1 hive now. They really need to be made significantly more expensive, or bile needs to come out much, much later. They're seriously ruining the game right now... at least for me.
If 100 per CC was too low to start with or the impact of additional tech points was too high, then perhaps make every team start with 100 base Supply and add 50 Supply for every captured tech point, starting you off with 150 and giving you 250 on 3 tech points.
And Whips really should get a fix so that they don't try to throw their Bombs when they don't have a clear trajectory towards the target. In about 70% of the cases does a Whip Bomb hit a Drifter, Hive, wall or something else, but definitely not the actual enemies. It feels more like the Whip is handicapping itself once it matured because it gives it's location away with those failed attack attempts (which are not really useful in the first place, given that they only damage armor and marines weld armor back up faster anyway) when it's cloaked otherwise and actually wastes time on trying a ranged attack first, rather than just whacking away at it.
I've listed some below for you off the top of my head, though I'm sure sewlek has more/better reasons why he implemented it.
1) Vanilla lifeform system meant huge power/tech explosions (pres/tres isn't going to be removed). Upgrade costs help soft scale tech explosion effects in the same way w/a upgrades are supposed to now scale minigun for example.
2) Losing a lifeform is not as big of a blow because it's cheaper. Sewlek is really big on allowing comebacks, and the BT lifeform system supports this. There is probably nothing more off-putting for a new player than saving up 10 minutes for a fade, only to die instantly. Now they only need to save up like 8 minutes or whatever, so lifeforms are generally more accessible for players to learn without being OP.
3) You need to play more cautiously untill you can get the upgrades. A subtlety that I think will better teach new players to be careful with their lifeforms. Instead of only relying on beating them with a stick when they lose lifeform, you 'ladder' them so they have a real and immediate incentive to stay alive for a bit.
4) Gameplay timings feel much smoother and tighter. 10 minute vanilla fade was pretty boring/stale (read: 10 minutes of skulking).
5) To a lesser extent, it limits the power of continually tres spammed eggs in certain situations (like onos) since you still need considerable pres for the upgrades.
I also think the bump to fade and lerk armor was just a little too much. Both should be reduced by 5.