why does everyone just play aliens without thinking at all?
those of you who are sitting on 5 harvesters and just buying everything mindlessly need to go yell about the balance
the tech tree itself was always kind of fine other than some balance/timing issues which made prioritization irrelevant... there's no way you can afford everything you want to buy without a ridiculous level of income that you never should have
If I remember correctly UWE removed hive sight for marines moving on creep cause they wanted the alien commander’s to use drifters more, where are we at now?
Alien players can use their mobility to scout the map. Drifters can still be used for scouting by a comm with an APM higher than 4 though, they're very tanky and fast. You can even build them anywhere on infestation so that travel time is even further reduced.
I do agree the current upgrade system is confusing at the moment. The idea was to make it simpler by having each life form have all of its upgrades tied to a chamber, and it seems a bit weird.
Requiring that research before biomass HP scales is really broken though and will be fixed soon I suppose. An unintiated alien comm can spend 20+30 on biomass 2 and 3 straight away, even though it is completely useless until you've upgraded a whip or the gorge at the hive.
DC_DarklingJoin Date: 2003-07-10Member: 18068Members, Constellation, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver
I dislike the current drifters. Expensive, to expensive.
Fast yes..
Biggest thing I dislike is the waypoints for drifters. It allowed the comm to keep focus somewhere needed and call in a new drifter.
The button on the hud now just seems to call in the closest one, which is not always what I want to do.
Kham seems like a buff bot at the moment. Just place structures, click and upgrade. Repeat.
Drifters in a fight are easily shot for the cost they have. So its a lot harder to use them, many focus fire drifters.
Tbh I would REALLY like to see ALL abilities just dropped into hive and let buildings be buildings. Just adjust cost accordingly. It's just SO messy right now. Khammanding feels like you're filling a form lol. "this, and this, check this box and sign here, move over here and sign..."
It's a shame because I actually think that field play is in a really excellent place right now, maybe as good as it's ever been. Marine commander has always been excellent and remains so. This weird, unorganized mess of an alien comm sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the game, all of which is better designed.
My ideas to fix it:
1. Pipe dream edition: Khammander and infestation removed, Gorges now place all alien buildings. This system worked for years in NS1 and I don't see why it couldn't here.
2. Get rid of the silly "skulk evolutions" research options and make support chambers only about their primary functions (no more researches on whips). Introduce a new building which is only used to research abilities. Maybe make it possible to build up to 3 if the aliens want to research things faster. This is probably the more likely option since I can't see UWE dropping the khammander entirely.
No matter what we do to make the research path better, Drifters will need to be re-worked. They aren't nearly useful enough to justify the 8 res cost right now. Either make them cheaper or find a way to make them more valuable (improved/re-worked sprays that have a more significant impact on combat? bring back the cloaking?)
SewlekThe programmer previously known as SchimmelJoin Date: 2003-05-13Member: 16247Members, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Gold, Subnautica Developer
i agree, i heard basically every player (who tried alien comm) complaining about the weird arrangement of the life form upgrades. i want to move them all into 1 structure, but i dont like to use the hive for that, since you could then no longer upgrade multiple life forms at once, together with bio mass (all cost a lot of time, and it would turn the hives into precious "research slots" you need to trigger researches. you should be able to influence this, like marines can drop 3 armories or 2 arms labs and trigger multiple researches at once when they swim in res).
i think nobody is happy that the alien tech tree was changing so often in the past, but i assume most of you agree with me that one last final change is required here.
@Sewlek I think it would work fine if you introduce only one more structure, similar to veil, spur and shell. The first thing after planting it is choosing for what lifeform this structure should research. This (and biomass) unlocks further upgrades for this lifeform.
@Sewlek I think it would work fine if you introduce only one more structure, similar to veil, spur and shell. The first thing after planting it is choosing for what lifeform this structure should research. This (and biomass) unlocks further upgrades for this lifeform.
Easy and understandable.
yes, kind of like the alien version of the arms lab, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130391092
its using atm the crag model, im going to change that today. feel free to experiment with it. its probably not entirely bug free since i wrote that code really fast yesterday
Is the current consensus that no trait should be discriminated, and thus all the traits of a lifeform would be unlocked via a general lifeform upgrade and biomass level, like it is now? Or would it still be possible to choose what traits to research based on your team's lifeform composition and goals? I personally like every trait being a separate research.
If most of the traits weren't a must-have, or if the trait palette was bigger, I'd agree with you. Right now there just aren't that many choices to be made.
Is the current consensus that no trait should be discriminated, and thus all the traits of a lifeform would be unlocked via a general lifeform upgrade and biomass level, like it is now? Or would it still be possible to choose what traits to research based on your team's lifeform composition and goals? I personally like every trait being a separate research.
its not really necessary to do that. once you decide "ok, lets upgrade fade first" you either have already a lot of fades in your team and want to support them, or you at least assume a lot of people will evolve into fade. it doesnt make sense in this situation to unlock only shadow step, and skip vortex or? you will go for vortex then as well, since that would help your team the most. i see that you would like to go the cheapest route first (assuming here that indiv. abilities are cheaper to research than the grouped researches), by skipping things which are commonly known as "bad abilities", but this would just create newbie traps for unexperienced commanders, and it also makes the vital part of the tech tree incredible cheap. ideally there would be no such thing as bad abilities, but some abilities are simply stronger than others, thats unavoidable.
besides that, the biggest argument for grouped up life form researches is that there was too much clutter. we would end up in ~13 individual buttons you would need to click as commander, each of them has to be relatively cheap or otherwise the total cost of the tech tree would be too high, so there is no real choice anymore. spend 10 t.res to get bilebomb or leap or vortex? not really a choice, i would do that any day. 30 t.res to upgrade gorge or lerk or fade? thats more of a choice, it depends on either your teams strategy (if you have one) or in pub games on the current situation / life form compositions.
I agree with the move @Sewlek, but attributing the upgrades to different buildings is really odd for me. That is my only real complaint, and I feel they should all be linked to a single structure. But you have highlighted that already, so that is great!
I do applaud these changes from a user interface standpoint. The difficulty of this game comes not in the complexity of the RTS aspect - if Starcraft has anything to do with it - but that you are managing real players with variable skill, who might or might not complete the objective irrelevant of numbers, class or upgrades.
Therefore it is my opinion that time taken away from managing these upgrades should possibly go towards more commander/world/player interactions that have always been successful.
For example, the tactical support the marine comm provides for the team rather than strategic planning that can be irrelevant when you are not sure if X number of marines are going to beat X number of aliens.
Your move also supports the idea of players having more control over their upgrade decisions as the Kharaa, just as the armoury improves on this from NS1 for the marines, and that researching advanced weapons also become a single research as well.
I think these sort of moves really simplify the game whilst also providing players options. Options that the commander can advise on and direct.
@sewelek the old tech tree was pretty good, it needed some adjustements but at least you can choose a usefull upgrade and not the entire branch for a life form for a ridiculusly expensive way.
Now to get bile bomb you need to spend 80tres. I think this example shows itself the problem and there are many others.
Lets go back to the 251 tech tree with some cost / biomass adjustements (umbra to biomass 4 and bilebomb to biomass 3 at least).
And make the drivers cheaper (3 or may be 5) but increase harverseters cost.
The whip cost need to be increased too.
You really should take a look to the NSL Summer Cup Balance Mod, cause even if it wasn't perfect we played the most balance game ever in NS2. You can ask all competitive players on any levels, everybody said the same thing about it.
A last thing, why commanders starts with 0pres and why the 60s no ress when login out ? What the point of that ? As alien commander you got nothing really usefull to do in hive right now. If you really want to keep alien commander in hive, you shouldn't do that but instead try to improve alien commander impact on field. Cause right now I don't gonna stay in hive. I gonna bite RTs.
Why do you think marine comander almost never logout ? Its only because he can be a fight changer. He got a needed impact on each fight.
I really hope you gonna do something about all these changes cause right now its crap.
I understand the benifits of clustering the abilities, but I'd still prefer to have them seperate. Alien comm isn't that intensive to begin with, I'll gladly push a few more buttons. And ultimately, if the game goes on long enough, all abilities will get researched anyway. In any case, I love having one structure at which you can research all abilities, so yeah, awesome.
aeroripperJoin Date: 2005-02-25Member: 42471NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation
The grouped alien upgrades is much better, so you don't have to wait around for the comm to research individual upgrades, only biomass. Having a dedicated chamber for upgrades makes more sense than building a crag, shade, shift, and whip, even if it makes it slightly more like marines. The incentive for marines to kill it is to delay further evolving, as if its destroyed, any upgrades currently in process will be canceled.
Evil_bOb1Join Date: 2002-07-13Member: 938Members, Squad Five Blue
I'm just throwing out an idea I got after reading the thread. You could also consider each chamber as having a research slot. Being all part of the hive mind, they could all be able to subcontract for one another, and use their nervous system on a upgrade. They could indifferently be used for research of any upgrade if you have the prerequisites. You could also develop a new building for aliens, a brain chamber, with a research slot which also has the capacity of remembering evolutions. Kill one of the current chambers and you kill its passive ability plus a research slot. Kill the brain chambers and you kill a research slot and make aliens forget their evolutions.
I don't like just upgrading a lifeform over individual abilities. Commanders should be able to pick and choose the tools that their team needs based on the situation or plan of action. It removes choice and makes the commander less interesting. If the problem is certain abilities get upgraded rarely or ever, you could adjust that a number of ways; make the ability more attractive, lower the cost, or lower the research time. We're one step away from just making all abilities unlock at biomass levels automatically when I feel we need to be going more in the other direction.
Alien commander needs more choices in tech, not less. As it is right now (and the direction it's going) staying in the hive is uninteresting.
@Sewlek I feel exactly the same way @Virsoul does... Having alien abilities grouped makes it simpler on the comm, but that's the opposite of how it should be... Alien comm is already too simple and now boring because you're not even having the choice. Taking away the only strategy tool alien comms have is not fun and goes in the opposite direction it should be.
His argument is actually a very good one, breaking them down into individual abilities actually makes it much easier to choose which upgrade to take next because of the individual smaller costs involved and the fact that upgrades are gated by biomass. Clicking the 'buy upgrade' button more frequently when there's very little actual decisionmaking involved doesn't strike me as compelling gameplay.
@RabidWeasel just makes alien commanding more boring... Lets just click this button and then wait until I have enough res for the biomass needed... Fun?... Here's a hint it's not
I've had few matches now where we had hard times getting third hive up, so we had every lifeform upgraded with 2 hives. So when third hive was up, all I had to do is click shade, then bio and bio... third hive grants you exactly zero choices to make.
Also, lifeforms lose all their upgrades when their ability chamber is destroyed? I had contamination whip attack and echoed 2 crags with them. Those were my only crags left on the field. When my plant army was destroyed, onos upgrade icon went red... does this mean all the oni lost all their abilities and biomass hp that moment?
If yes, then does this mean I always have to keep a whip somewhere or my skulks will be unupgraded?
@sewelek the old tech tree was pretty good, it needed some adjustements but at least you can choose a usefull upgrade and not the entire branch for a life form for a ridiculusly expensive way.
Now to get bile bomb you need to spend 80tres. I think this example shows itself the problem and there are many others.
Lets go back to the 251 tech tree with some cost / biomass adjustements (umbra to biomass 4 and bilebomb to biomass 3 at least).
And make the drivers cheaper (3 or may be 5) but increase harverseters cost.
The whip cost need to be increased too.
You really should take a look to the NSL Summer Cup Balance Mod, cause even if it wasn't perfect we played the most balance game ever in NS2. You can ask all competitive players on any levels, everybody said the same thing about it.
A last thing, why commanders starts with 0pres and why the 60s no ress when login out ? What the point of that ? As alien commander you got nothing really usefull to do in hive right now. If you really want to keep alien commander in hive, you shouldn't do that but instead try to improve alien commander impact on field. Cause right now I don't gonna stay in hive. I gonna bite RTs.
Why do you think marine comander almost never logout ? Its only because he can be a fight changer. He got a needed impact on each fight.
I really hope you gonna do something about all these changes cause right now its crap.
Whats getting lost in all this is that there were two specific design goals with these changes.
Context: alien comm and pres/tres is staying.
1) force field player gorge which pulls a player from the first 40 pres fade explosion wave. (0 pres, expensive drifter). Fast/mobile drifter acts counter to this however.
Alien comm could be so boring you would just skulk rt's, it'd still be a good idea to have 0 pres. Alien comm was just as boring before, only you were gorging the whole game with free hydra and babbler. The free hydra, clogs, and healspray building were balance problems no matter how you mask them with other changes - nsl balance mod.
2) make the alien comm stay in the hive room. (no pres gain)
Do I like the second goal? No. I do however think its necessary to do this, or restrict to skulk, if you want to make the ns2 alien comm model work.
Nsl balance mod was balanced, but it was still working off a flawed gameplay model. it was stale, had very little flexibility across skill levels, and fell into the same 40 minute game grind pitfall.
Is the current consensus that no trait should be discriminated, and thus all the traits of a lifeform would be unlocked via a general lifeform upgrade and biomass level, like it is now? Or would it still be possible to choose what traits to research based on your team's lifeform composition and goals? I personally like every trait being a separate research.
its not really necessary to do that. once you decide "ok, lets upgrade fade first" you either have already a lot of fades in your team and want to support them, or you at least assume a lot of people will evolve into fade. it doesnt make sense in this situation to unlock only shadow step, and skip vortex or? you will go for vortex then as well, since that would help your team the most. i see that you would like to go the cheapest route first (assuming here that indiv. abilities are cheaper to research than the grouped researches), by skipping things which are commonly known as "bad abilities", but this would just create newbie traps for unexperienced commanders, and it also makes the vital part of the tech tree incredible cheap. ideally there would be no such thing as bad abilities, but some abilities are simply stronger than others, thats unavoidable.
besides that, the biggest argument for grouped up life form researches is that there was too much clutter. we would end up in ~13 individual buttons you would need to click as commander, each of them has to be relatively cheap or otherwise the total cost of the tech tree would be too high, so there is no real choice anymore. spend 10 t.res to get bilebomb or leap or vortex? not really a choice, i would do that any day. 30 t.res to upgrade gorge or lerk or fade? thats more of a choice, it depends on either your teams strategy (if you have one) or in pub games on the current situation / life form compositions.
On the same note, having grouped up life form researches creates an "all-in" scenario where even if one or two player goes lerk, I won't be as inclined to support those player because the grouped research is more expensive when I'm going to need the t.res to upgrade the fades waiting to evolve as they're the more powerful unit on the team. So we're back to the scenario where lerks are sideline lifeforms, only upgraded once everything else has been upgraded.
The split upgrades allowed me the pick and choose the progress, when (and where specifically) I needed it.
Clutter shouldn't be an issue if you have the lifeform buttons on the evo chamber open up to a different page with separate upgrades.
Comments
those of you who are sitting on 5 harvesters and just buying everything mindlessly need to go yell about the balance
the tech tree itself was always kind of fine other than some balance/timing issues which made prioritization irrelevant... there's no way you can afford everything you want to buy without a ridiculous level of income that you never should have
"your game files are different from servers maybe geim just updated lul"
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130391092
Fast yes..
Biggest thing I dislike is the waypoints for drifters. It allowed the comm to keep focus somewhere needed and call in a new drifter.
The button on the hud now just seems to call in the closest one, which is not always what I want to do.
Kham seems like a buff bot at the moment. Just place structures, click and upgrade. Repeat.
Drifters in a fight are easily shot for the cost they have. So its a lot harder to use them, many focus fire drifters.
My ideas to fix it:
1. Pipe dream edition: Khammander and infestation removed, Gorges now place all alien buildings. This system worked for years in NS1 and I don't see why it couldn't here.
2. Get rid of the silly "skulk evolutions" research options and make support chambers only about their primary functions (no more researches on whips). Introduce a new building which is only used to research abilities. Maybe make it possible to build up to 3 if the aliens want to research things faster. This is probably the more likely option since I can't see UWE dropping the khammander entirely.
No matter what we do to make the research path better, Drifters will need to be re-worked. They aren't nearly useful enough to justify the 8 res cost right now. Either make them cheaper or find a way to make them more valuable (improved/re-worked sprays that have a more significant impact on combat? bring back the cloaking?)
i think nobody is happy that the alien tech tree was changing so often in the past, but i assume most of you agree with me that one last final change is required here.
Easy and understandable.
yes, kind of like the alien version of the arms lab, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=130391092
its using atm the crag model, im going to change that today. feel free to experiment with it. its probably not entirely bug free since i wrote that code really fast yesterday
I like this direction.
Is the current consensus that no trait should be discriminated, and thus all the traits of a lifeform would be unlocked via a general lifeform upgrade and biomass level, like it is now? Or would it still be possible to choose what traits to research based on your team's lifeform composition and goals? I personally like every trait being a separate research.
its not really necessary to do that. once you decide "ok, lets upgrade fade first" you either have already a lot of fades in your team and want to support them, or you at least assume a lot of people will evolve into fade. it doesnt make sense in this situation to unlock only shadow step, and skip vortex or? you will go for vortex then as well, since that would help your team the most. i see that you would like to go the cheapest route first (assuming here that indiv. abilities are cheaper to research than the grouped researches), by skipping things which are commonly known as "bad abilities", but this would just create newbie traps for unexperienced commanders, and it also makes the vital part of the tech tree incredible cheap. ideally there would be no such thing as bad abilities, but some abilities are simply stronger than others, thats unavoidable.
besides that, the biggest argument for grouped up life form researches is that there was too much clutter. we would end up in ~13 individual buttons you would need to click as commander, each of them has to be relatively cheap or otherwise the total cost of the tech tree would be too high, so there is no real choice anymore. spend 10 t.res to get bilebomb or leap or vortex? not really a choice, i would do that any day. 30 t.res to upgrade gorge or lerk or fade? thats more of a choice, it depends on either your teams strategy (if you have one) or in pub games on the current situation / life form compositions.
I never liked to get biomass first, then each individual upgrade.
I can not stress enough, however, the feel that the kham is becoming more of a buff bot instead of a commander.
I do applaud these changes from a user interface standpoint. The difficulty of this game comes not in the complexity of the RTS aspect - if Starcraft has anything to do with it - but that you are managing real players with variable skill, who might or might not complete the objective irrelevant of numbers, class or upgrades.
Therefore it is my opinion that time taken away from managing these upgrades should possibly go towards more commander/world/player interactions that have always been successful.
For example, the tactical support the marine comm provides for the team rather than strategic planning that can be irrelevant when you are not sure if X number of marines are going to beat X number of aliens.
Your move also supports the idea of players having more control over their upgrade decisions as the Kharaa, just as the armoury improves on this from NS1 for the marines, and that researching advanced weapons also become a single research as well.
I think these sort of moves really simplify the game whilst also providing players options. Options that the commander can advise on and direct.
Now to get bile bomb you need to spend 80tres. I think this example shows itself the problem and there are many others.
Lets go back to the 251 tech tree with some cost / biomass adjustements (umbra to biomass 4 and bilebomb to biomass 3 at least).
And make the drivers cheaper (3 or may be 5) but increase harverseters cost.
The whip cost need to be increased too.
You really should take a look to the NSL Summer Cup Balance Mod, cause even if it wasn't perfect we played the most balance game ever in NS2. You can ask all competitive players on any levels, everybody said the same thing about it.
A last thing, why commanders starts with 0pres and why the 60s no ress when login out ? What the point of that ? As alien commander you got nothing really usefull to do in hive right now. If you really want to keep alien commander in hive, you shouldn't do that but instead try to improve alien commander impact on field. Cause right now I don't gonna stay in hive. I gonna bite RTs.
Why do you think marine comander almost never logout ? Its only because he can be a fight changer. He got a needed impact on each fight.
I really hope you gonna do something about all these changes cause right now its crap.
Also glad to hear that you are working on the new trait research building idea, I really think it will improve the alien tree considerably.
that is, if marines kill, say, the fade evolution chamber, will all fades lose their abilities, leaving everything else untouched?
Or will it just be a research station for upgrades (exact same as arms lab)?
Alien commander needs more choices in tech, not less. As it is right now (and the direction it's going) staying in the hive is uninteresting.
Also, lifeforms lose all their upgrades when their ability chamber is destroyed? I had contamination whip attack and echoed 2 crags with them. Those were my only crags left on the field. When my plant army was destroyed, onos upgrade icon went red... does this mean all the oni lost all their abilities and biomass hp that moment?
If yes, then does this mean I always have to keep a whip somewhere or my skulks will be unupgraded?
Whats getting lost in all this is that there were two specific design goals with these changes.
Context: alien comm and pres/tres is staying.
1) force field player gorge which pulls a player from the first 40 pres fade explosion wave. (0 pres, expensive drifter). Fast/mobile drifter acts counter to this however.
Alien comm could be so boring you would just skulk rt's, it'd still be a good idea to have 0 pres. Alien comm was just as boring before, only you were gorging the whole game with free hydra and babbler. The free hydra, clogs, and healspray building were balance problems no matter how you mask them with other changes - nsl balance mod.
2) make the alien comm stay in the hive room. (no pres gain)
Do I like the second goal? No. I do however think its necessary to do this, or restrict to skulk, if you want to make the ns2 alien comm model work.
Nsl balance mod was balanced, but it was still working off a flawed gameplay model. it was stale, had very little flexibility across skill levels, and fell into the same 40 minute game grind pitfall.
On the same note, having grouped up life form researches creates an "all-in" scenario where even if one or two player goes lerk, I won't be as inclined to support those player because the grouped research is more expensive when I'm going to need the t.res to upgrade the fades waiting to evolve as they're the more powerful unit on the team. So we're back to the scenario where lerks are sideline lifeforms, only upgraded once everything else has been upgraded.
The split upgrades allowed me the pick and choose the progress, when (and where specifically) I needed it.
Clutter shouldn't be an issue if you have the lifeform buttons on the evo chamber open up to a different page with separate upgrades.