Basic Rts Strategies.
GoldenShadow
Join Date: 2002-04-21 Member: 483Members
Join Date: 2002-04-21 Member: 483Members
<div class="IPBDescription">understanding how the aliens are flawed</div> If you know which tactice your enemy will use, you should be able to beat them. thats basic RTS knowledge.
For example, take the three main ways to play any ordinary RTS game.
Rushing, Turtling, Booming
Rushing: use your resources solely for destroying or slowing your enemy enough to delay their advancement so you have the advantage. an example of this is the JP HMG rush.
Turtling: using your resources to fortify your base(s) and expand very slowly. NS example would be building Turrets or Offensive chambers at your base. The 2 hive lockdown counts as this.
Booming: Using your resources soley to gain new resources.(You have to spend money to make money) An example would be to build lots of Res Towers as soon as the game starts to get a big resource flow.
Anyone who is not new to RTS gaming knows that
Rushing beats Booming
Booming beats Turtling
Turtling beats Rushing
Obviously, the marines have access to all 3 of these fundamental strategies, they can build up massive defenses or go for a tech rush, or just go and cap lots of resource nodes to win by attrition.
The alien's *Turtling* strat doesn't beat the marine's *Rush* If there was such a thing as alien turtling, it would probably involve lots of OC and DC at the hive, but without webbing, JPs and HMG would decimate the aliens.
Obviously, real time strategy games depend on recon and knowing what your enemy is doing at all times. so if you see they are teching up for a JP HMG rush, you should be able to turtle up your base to thwart off their attempts.
Also, the alien equivalent of rushing is obviously to build all 3 hives as quickly as possible to gain all the abilities. this is flawed too since it is always beaten by marine booming, which it should win against. (If your gorge doesn't cap any resnodes, he will never get enough res for just 1 hive! let alone both. But the marines can tech up and rush with only 1 res node.
Aliens only have one way to do things. Cap res towers and upgrade a linear chain of upgrades. just hope your players are more skilled than the marine players.
I hope NS 1.1 has changed enough to fix these flaws.
For example, take the three main ways to play any ordinary RTS game.
Rushing, Turtling, Booming
Rushing: use your resources solely for destroying or slowing your enemy enough to delay their advancement so you have the advantage. an example of this is the JP HMG rush.
Turtling: using your resources to fortify your base(s) and expand very slowly. NS example would be building Turrets or Offensive chambers at your base. The 2 hive lockdown counts as this.
Booming: Using your resources soley to gain new resources.(You have to spend money to make money) An example would be to build lots of Res Towers as soon as the game starts to get a big resource flow.
Anyone who is not new to RTS gaming knows that
Rushing beats Booming
Booming beats Turtling
Turtling beats Rushing
Obviously, the marines have access to all 3 of these fundamental strategies, they can build up massive defenses or go for a tech rush, or just go and cap lots of resource nodes to win by attrition.
The alien's *Turtling* strat doesn't beat the marine's *Rush* If there was such a thing as alien turtling, it would probably involve lots of OC and DC at the hive, but without webbing, JPs and HMG would decimate the aliens.
Obviously, real time strategy games depend on recon and knowing what your enemy is doing at all times. so if you see they are teching up for a JP HMG rush, you should be able to turtle up your base to thwart off their attempts.
Also, the alien equivalent of rushing is obviously to build all 3 hives as quickly as possible to gain all the abilities. this is flawed too since it is always beaten by marine booming, which it should win against. (If your gorge doesn't cap any resnodes, he will never get enough res for just 1 hive! let alone both. But the marines can tech up and rush with only 1 res node.
Aliens only have one way to do things. Cap res towers and upgrade a linear chain of upgrades. just hope your players are more skilled than the marine players.
I hope NS 1.1 has changed enough to fix these flaws.
Comments
this is way more complicated then just a RTS, well I could write for like 10 pages about this but im not in the mood for it...
[edit] also 1.1 is gonna change the resources so maybe that will fix the turtling part of aliens... we should wait for 1.1 before talkin abut this I think [/edit]
Rushing - building OCs in front of marine entrance and healing skulks as they rush
Turtling - lotsa OC and DC around hives early on
Booming - getting lots of rez nodes
Also I dont know if any of the 3 above apply directly to it but:
Teching - quickly building everything you need to get the upper-class good stuff(I guess it goes with booming since it takes resources to do this quickly enough)
1 more (ONLY applying to NS)
Relocating - Im pretty sure you know that already
But you are right. The aliens are limited in tactics and nowadays the outcome of a battle depends almost ENTIRELY upon how the marines perform. Aliens just have to hope they arent so good.
Booming beats Turtling
Turtling beats Rushing
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Ha! What a joke. Turtling doesn't beat anything, it just makes you die slower. If you don't expand quickly and efficiently, you will get outpaced and out-teched. When you get rushed, you don't turtle, you counter-attack! Building more defenses will just stagnate you, and place you further behind in the game. Base defenses are really just to delay the enemy from destroying your stuff before you can get your actual force back there.
This is true in the vast majority of traditional RTS games (triply so in Warcraft III, because of creeping and exp), and hold true in NS.
The basic concept is that a "rush" means building all (or almost all) offense and sending it at your enemy as fast as you can... "turtling", conversely, is concentrating on all defense.
In a traditional RTS, if you put all of your resources into offense, then go up against someone who's all defense, you should lose the battle, plain and simple. The defender, who would have taken substantially lower losses, now has a serious advantage and, all other things being equal, will most likely dominate the rest of the game.
It doesn't apply as much to NS... Think of it this way... At the very beginning, marines build an armory without IPs (Not possible now, but will be in 1.1 according to Flayra), hand out as many shotties as the comm can afford, and go straight to the hive.
Now, if the skulks are out scouting the map, or rushing the marine base from another direction, the marines will likely reach the hive and kill it right away. If, however, the skulks have anticipated this and are waiting in ambush near the hive (closest analogy to defense/turtling), the marines will likely be wiped out, and the skulks will be free to destroy their base.
A simplistic example, I know, but that's the basic idea behind the "turtling beats rushing", I believe.
Also true that alien strategy may be somewhat linear, but 1.1 WILL correct this. One must still give props to the Dev team for coming up with something that at least works without 'cloning' the opposing forces.
but in NS its more like
Rushing beats a not organised opposite team
Booming beats a not organised opposite team
Turtling beats a not organised opposite team
Think WW1 trench warfare. *shiver*
Rushing beats Booming
Booming beats Turtling
Turtling beats Rushing
Turtling should be replaced by "Defending" as turtling implies that you just sit in one spot <i>for the entire game</i> and just build defence.
Granted too much time on defense WILL sink you.
Also, take into acount that everything CAN be beaten, it isn't a true R-P-S (rock-paper-scissors)
A rush can beat a defence as long as the rush is better equiped and larger than the defence.
Booming very quickly can beat a rush, as you have more resources to pump into defence/offence or relocation.
Defending resources defeats the purpose of [the enemy] Booming.
mp that is, I have beaten 7 brutals as China by turtling (computers can be dumb sometimes <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->)
Rushing, Turtling, Booming
Rushing beats Booming
Booming beats Turtling
Turtling beats Rushing
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Heh, this is an old RTS idea, but you've missinterpreted it, and i don't like your labels.
Let me give you the same idea, but presented differently:
<Long strategy rant that doesn't directly relate to NS>
Massing, teching, expanding.
The key differences between the 3 center around how resources (money, manpower, time) are allocated.
"Massing" is the label i'm giving your "Rushing". The phrase massing comes from RTS games where one use of your resources is to mass low-level units early in the game to give you early dominance. It is not a good idea to call this "Rushing" because rushing implies that it has to involve a base hit, or an attempt to end the game early. But this is not necessary. The term rushing is also poorly used in RTS games and ends up being applied to everything - Hive rush, jetpack rush, phase rush (res rush?). "Rushing" simply implies that something is done quickly, but since time is a resource, anything worth doing is worth doing quickly.
Replace "Rushing" with "The investment of resources in early game power". In a traditional RTS game, this early game power would give you map control because you would be able to beat your opponent in any even confrontation. Because of this, Massing beats Expanding. Because expanding requires a player to push out of his base and secure territory in areas where he does not have a defensive advantage.
"Teching" is what i will call your "Turtling". Here is where you have made the most obvious missinterpretation of the idea, and where everyone in the thread seems to be critising you. You cannot defend your opponent to death. By calling this strategy "Turtling" you've implied that your main resource expenditure will be in defence. This is not the idea behind this strategy. An option in RTS games such as warcraft, is to stay in your base, forgoe early game power and map control, and instead upgrade very quickly with the aim of being more powerful later in the game.
This is teching, and a key feature of this strategy is that it relies on strong defensive advantages to keep you safe. This does not mean your priority is defence - your priority is to tech and become stronger later in the game. How this strategy fits into the paper/scissors/stone principle depends on how the game is designed. To take early versions of warcraft 3 as a good example - Prior to the shamen nerf, the most common strategy for an orc player was teching. The orc player had very strong natural defences which made it very difficult to rush and kill his base. The orc would pump all his resources into teching as fast as he could, building no early units, which meant he had no way of controlling the map. The orc player was confined to his base because he was not capable of winning any battles outside of the protection of his base, but the orc was teching very quickly. Later in the game, the orc would reach his tech, produce units and then leave his base with a very powerful army. You can call this turtling, but unlike your explaination of the strategy, defence is not the priority. Late game power without expansion is the priority.
The orc's teching would beat a player who invested resources in early game power but was unable to crack the orcs base. By spending gold early the opponent forfeited his tech, and once the orcs fully teched army rolled out of his base the opponent had little to stop it. A counter to this strategy would be mass expansion, with no map control or early power the orc is unable to prevent you from taking multiple expansions and gaining a huge resource advantage. Which you can then use to crush the orc once he leaves his base.
"Expanding" is my label for your "Booming". Expansion also sacrifices early game power for late game power, just like teching. The difference is expansion requires you to secure areas outside the safety of your base. The idea being that doing so is riskier, but ultimately more rewarding than teching if you pull it off. Expansion would therefor beat teching, because a teching player would not be able to prevent it. But massing would beat teching, because without the strong defensive advantages of your base you are unable to hold your expansions against a strong early game force.
</Long strategy rant that doesn't directly relate to NS>
Firstly, i should state that this is only an <b>idea</b>. An idea for a paper/scissors/stone way of evaluating strategy. It applies in part to many games, but i have yet to see a RTS that perfectly conforms to it. Secondly, i'll state that this does not represent some magical law of how RTS games should behave. You have no grounds to say that a game is 'flawed' because it doesn't follow this principle. But you are correct, NS doesn't follow this principle at all, and i'm going to explain why:
Your attempt to categorize NS strats into one category or another is flawed, because you are thinking too long-term. When NS is infact all about the early game. You have filed the JP rush under your "Rushing" category, but this is missplaced. JPs are not an early game power, they are a late game power. The act of going straight to jetpacks off a couple of nodes, without investing res in TFs, phases, or significant upgrades could be considered a semi-tech/semi-expand strategy. The problem is, the strategy as a whole (as used by clans) will not fit into my "Teching" description because the marines are not weak in the early game. The marines are not confined to their base and they do not lack map control despite the fact that they are performing a "tech" strat.
The reason behind this is: Marines start with a free "Mass". NS teams unlike RTS teams, begin the game with free fighting units. In the case of the marines, their free fighting units are automagically more effective than the alien team's, and will be for the duration of the early game regardless of what the alien team tries to do. In the early game, the marine team ALWAYS has early game power. Because of this early game power, and because it comes free, the marines can invest their resources in expanding, and teching. They are able to expand because they have the early game power to defend their expansions. The marine team performing a clan style strategy is consequently performing all 3 of the mentioned RTS strategies at once. They are Massing by default, their free Massing allows them to easily Expand, and they Tech at the same time because marine expansion in NS is very cheap.
Now to consider the alien side, they have 2, possibly 3 viable options. From the gorges perspective, you have the question of how many resource towers to get, when to go for DCs and when to save for the hive. You can drop DCs right from the start of the game, which could be considered "Massing". The problem being that you are already playing catchup to the marines due to their free mass. If the marines expand and you go early DCs to "Mass" and stop their expansion, there is no guarantee that you will be able to muscle them off res nodes. In some cases, going for early DCs is less about gaining map control and more about simply surviving. Another option is to "Expand" by taking multiple res nodes before you go for DCs, the problem with this strategy being that the marines "Mass" by default and in many cases will be able to prevent your expansion which may cripple you. Another area where aliens have options is in the use of lerk/gorge evolutions once the skulks have enough resources. You can choose to spend resources early on lerks and gorges which may payoff (save a hive, kill marine base) but if it doesn't pay off, will weaken you long term due to the expenditure of resources. Using lerks before the 2nd hive would probably be categorized as a "Mass" option. Spend resources now for an immediate payoff.
You'll notice the aliens have nothing equivalent to "Tech". The principle behind the tech is to become strong late game off a single base at the expense of all map control. This is impossible for aliens because the only way for them to become strong late game is to take a 2nd hive, which requires them to secure an area outside their defended base. Once you throw the hive system into the equation everything falls apart, and none of these paper/scissors/stone theories can be applied to the hive race. NS in its current form just doesn't fit into these RTS traditions.
From all that i've said, you get the impression that NS is pretty heavily stacked in the marines favour... Well it is. But there's one advantage the aliens have going for them that i haven't covered. Dropping the 2nd hive forces the marines to go on the offensive. From the moment the hive goes down, marines have the burden of killing it, because nothing they do will recover the game if the aliens reach 2 hive tech. The orc player who sits in his base and techs can be overcome by an aggressive expansion strategy, but this doesn't work against the aliens. An Alien team with a 2nd hive building is a teching orc player who you HAVE to kill before he reaches his tech, otherwise you get beat down by shamens who fire acid rockets and spit webs over your barracks.
except i believe the initial skulks are equal in power to the inital marines, assuming the skulk knows how to ambush.
also, you left out the bit about res income speeds with a 2v2 game is way tilted twards aliens, and a 14v14 game is way tilted towards marines. so we'll just assume you meant the CAL standard 6v6 or 7v7.
There are 2 types of expansion:
1) resource expansion - Like most RTS games, NS encourages the building of an "expansion" to acquire more resources. Unlike those games, an expansion in NS just involves an undefended resource tower which the team can reach fast enough to defend if it's under light attack.
2) hive expansion - For marines, this is to prevent alien hive expansion. For aliens, this is to tech. The aliens must EXPAND to TECH. Thus, alien expand and tech is intertwined. This is why people are complaining that there is too much emphasis on the hive - because it is key to teching yet has the requirements of expansion. The other problem with hive teching is explained by the "slippery slope" phenomenom. If someone could explain clearly why this is bad, feel free, because I've had a hard time explaining it.
Massing takes a very limited form in NS. The closest things that NS has to contribute to massing are infantry portals and hives (the spawning aspect of them). So the hive is even more crucial because it's the only way aliens can spawn.
The tech system is fairly limited in NS, and the tech system for aliens is just flawed.
Other flaws:
Marines indeed do have the advantage at the beginning because skulks are plainly inferior. The problem has to do with skill level. A newbie "level 0" skulk will likely defeat a newbie "level 0" marine, assuming the marine has poor FPS skills. However, an experienced and careful marine will easily take out an experienced skulk, even if that skulk is laying an ambush.
But why do aliens usually win in public games when players on either side are fairly experienced and skilled? Teamwork. The NS "feature" of making aliens individualistic has introduced an unintentional flaw. It is more likely that an alien team WITHOUT teamwork defeats a marine team WITHOUT teamwork than an alien team WITH teamwork defeats a marine team WITH teamwork.
These along with many other factors are sources of the disparity between pub and clan games.
Fair comment, the terms come from traditional RTS's where massing units in the early game was the only form of powering. Powering would be a more appropriate term for NS because you always have the same number of units.
However, i would argue that a player who masses and decides to sit in his base is still powering - he's just an idiot :)
The key being how you allocate your resources, massing units gives you the ability to pressure or control the map against a player who invests in tech or expansion. Wether you choose to or not is simply a question of execution.
But the marines have one problem.. they are lost on the map, they have no idea where the aliens are, where the marines are as long as the commander dont help them. But i think this problem could be solved a little bit with the new minimap where you see marines...
don't forget that marines have motion tracking which shows all alien movements.
When the teams are evenly matched with skills siege can easily push forward, yeh u do get the attacks that slow it but when u have massive range and the ability to shoot something u can't see, you can fight from safety.
For aliens all u can do for "turtling" is creep forward with oc's. But who wins between a wall of lame or a siege??
- RD
don't forget that marines have motion tracking which shows all alien movements. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
We haven't forgotten - but aliens automatically have this wallhack-inspired ability, whereas a commander needs to lay down a total of 70 res in order to achieve blip4 goodies. <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
EDIT: By the way this should be stickied in the newbie forum
EDIT: By the way this should be stickied in the newbie forum <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sorry i was unclear but this is assuming you have relocated to a hive alrdy eg: feed and atmos on bast (as this is the only place i have seen a 2 hive stalemate for aliens). All you have to do is get siege at feed stopping buildings at tram tunnel, move into tram tunnel turret and siege the middle. Then move into the hallway between ref and tram tunnel turret and siege and u can have easy access to the hive.
I assume this may work in other places but this is the only time i have seen this turtling effect work at all.
- RD
These along with many other factors are sources of the disparity between pub and clan games. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><span class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
It's not an accident, it's deliberate. The initial concept of NS was for marines to be more squad based, but have Kharaa be more flexible. Because of this however, I do feel that at least at a public play level, people do not work together nearly enough as Kharaa.
i also took confidence in taking the fortifying the hive with the best gaurdable areas and hope i could get my defense up soon for a time, but then peeps didn't trust me 'nemore cause i screwed up one game. and my career was over 'cause i had the bad luck playing with a clan. now it's all about relocation, and getting one rambo to kill the hive. and in some exploiter maps, a two-hive sieging point. sad isn't it?
In fact, I joke with the PTs and Vets that the game should be renamed "Natural Scouting"...
Fan-bloody-tastic - JUST what I wanted in a game like this but couldn't get! <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->