Tried NS2 with 6 people on Lanparty

BaallBaall Join Date: 2003-07-23 Member: 18374Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Last weekend we had a lanparty and i decided to try NS2 again after many years.

Out of our Group only 2 People knew NS2. I count myself to be a veteran, he only played 12 hours so far.

First i wanted to play NS2:Combat with them. but this game doesn't work at all any more due to Steam Login problem i guess.. Why is this not removed from Steam if it does not work any more ?

Here is our feedback from this session:

1. Setting up a dedicated Server was relatively easy. The more Problematic part was to connect to the Server. I could not find it in the Server Browser at all.
2. The only other way to connect to a server by IP is the console of the game i think. But this was again problematic since we use the Swiss German Keyboard Layout and the default key was not working. It took us a while to figure out where to rebind the console key.
3. The console command "connect <ip> <password>" is nowhere documented.. i luckily found it after trying things out. I also can't document it here https://wiki.naturalselection2.com/view/Console_Commands since registering a new user account seems to be disabled.

4. After we were connected the first time: We found out there are bots now ? We quickly tried them out but figured they are way too OP and disabled them at first.
5. We watched the Tutorial Videos for Marines and Aliens and jumped right into the game.
6. I was Alien Commander and my buddy who knew the game was Marine Commander
7. Marine Commander was more or less logical. I still can't understand why giving commands by right clicking on the minimap is still not a thing. Other than that it worked quite nicely.
8. Alien Commandering was a bit of a mess.. I didn't know half of it any more and specially the overall resource limit which was not there before fucked me up big time. I had too many buildings in a forward location which more or less prevented me from doing anything anywhere else on the map.

9. We quickly fucked up all the stuff that the Marines owned because no one knew how the game worked. It got very negative since the Marines were frustrated quickly.
10. We quit the first game after 20 minutes and tried to create a new game where everyone plays against a single alien commander (aka me)
11. We could not disable the auto team balance enforcement .. or could not figure out how to disable it properly.
12. We added more Bots this time so that the Marines had to shoot at something.
13. We also had some Marine Bots for good measure since we planned to fuck up the Aliens anyway. These fuckers are way too OP.. No sneaking at them at all. If they see you they fuck you up.
14. I played together with one friend in alien team and the other guys were in marine team.
15. Bots never seem to care about any building. They ignore everything and just run at the marines. They even ignored ARK.
16. We played a lot of shady games with the marine team. My Alien buddy constantly cleared hive rooms for me.. i build a have. Marine team attacked another hive.. it took them ages to kill it. and in the meantime i had again 2 hives in other locations.. it took us more than 60 minutes to be completely blocked of from half of the map and to let the marines win the game.
17. Marines told me after the game that it was very frustrating with the bots and everything. It felt like punching water for them.

Problems i noticed for marines:
1. they spent too many resources on guns they lost them again very quickly
2. they did not find their guns any more sometimes after running back to their death location.
3. They liked jetpack much more for some reason and never wanted to go Heavy Armour.
4. The commander was constantly stuck on 200/200 Resources and did not know what to do with them. Only in the lategame he figured out to spam the ARKs and throw them at our hive .. but so many times he just forgot to but them in siege mode and they were just standing there being ignored by bots
5. I had to basically force them to try the heavy armour .. This was more or less the tipping point of the game. Even though we killed at least 3 heavy armours during the game.
6. Constantly spreading Cysts made the game very frustrating for the marine team. I had almost always the whole map covered with it and every location was connected with 2-3 connections of cysts. I made a game with putting cysts directly underneath their feets

Problems i noticed for Aliens:
1. Inexperienced ONOS die like flies. My fried was frustrated very quickly and just jumped around as Skulk the whole time. I told him to kill all the power nodes but he got frustrated at the high amount of HP quickly.
3. Bots sometimes suddenly all went ONOS at the same time.. that was hilarious. I don't know what triggered that.. but it happened 2-3 times during the game.. usually they just stuck to skulking.




After the Lanparty was over i tried some of the Addons like NS2:Rebirth but could not get it to work due to lua errors.. I wanted to try to Rebirth Bots to see if they were better. Could not get it to work.


Overall it was fun for me.. but not so fun for the other guys it seems. They told me afterwards that it was just a frustrating game experience overall. Even though they won in the end.

Comments

  • SquishpokePOOPFACESquishpokePOOPFACE -21,248 posts (ignore below) Join Date: 2012-10-31 Member: 165262Members, Reinforced - Shadow
    Yeah the game doesn't really work unless you have at least 12 people, with two being commanders that know what they are doing, and at least two or three subordinates per team that know how to play.
  • cachufletacachufleta Join Date: 2020-03-27 Member: 259230Members
    too bad about ns2 combat too. I have a server running but I can't even join...
  • NoMNoM Join Date: 2015-04-13 Member: 203407Members, NS2 Playtester
    If it doesn't appear in the server browser, it's probably filters. I'd use the steam legacy server browser instead tbh, you have a lan tab there. The NS2 server browser is incredibly clunky.
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