Tips For Choosing Chambers...
Jojoshua
NS Guide Professor Join Date: 2002-11-02 Member: 5233Members
NS Guide Professor Join Date: 2002-11-02 Member: 5233Members
<div class="IPBDescription">think first.</div> Ok, I have been playing a lot of pubs lately and I see the same thing over and over. I am seeing sensory chambers always being placed first.
Now people think the "magic order" is now sensory,defense,movement. Its not very surprising I also see about 50 posts on how the games take hours upon hours aswell. Think about it.
I have no problem with sensory, but you have to have a plan if your going to do it. Be very offensive or tactical at least so it actually helps you. Almost every game I see sensory made, it did nothing for them because they didnt use it correctly. I suggest asking if the team wants to do sensory, then make a battle plan.
More rare, but still I see defense go down as the first chamber. I think this is a good choice depending on how your going to play. Redemption gorges are always good at the beginning and if you end up in a 2 hive lockdown, you will always want that regen Onos or redemption also.
My favorite is movement first. Why? Most of the time you can get a 2nd up in a few mins and you will want movements to get to that hive if it gets attacked while going up. Also, celerity/silence can bring a marine team to their knees. Not to mention the extra adrenaline it gives for defending, say for a lerk to spore, heal for gorge, ect.
Now people think the "magic order" is now sensory,defense,movement. Its not very surprising I also see about 50 posts on how the games take hours upon hours aswell. Think about it.
I have no problem with sensory, but you have to have a plan if your going to do it. Be very offensive or tactical at least so it actually helps you. Almost every game I see sensory made, it did nothing for them because they didnt use it correctly. I suggest asking if the team wants to do sensory, then make a battle plan.
More rare, but still I see defense go down as the first chamber. I think this is a good choice depending on how your going to play. Redemption gorges are always good at the beginning and if you end up in a 2 hive lockdown, you will always want that regen Onos or redemption also.
My favorite is movement first. Why? Most of the time you can get a 2nd up in a few mins and you will want movements to get to that hive if it gets attacked while going up. Also, celerity/silence can bring a marine team to their knees. Not to mention the extra adrenaline it gives for defending, say for a lerk to spore, heal for gorge, ect.
Comments
I just played a game on nothing where our idiot gorge got sensory first (Fine! He didn't *place* them anywhere, but it's not that big a mistake). They lock down one hive, err silo? And half the team that knows what is going on just keeps saying "DCs DCs DCs". He gets movement. 25-30 minutes later, we lost to an incompetent marine team because all they had to do was terraform. Just TF after TF, until they made it all the way into cargo and started sieging. Disgusted with my team that wouldn't even come as I held them off at cargo with some lerking, I quit.
Anyways, the point is... I know in 2.0, DCs aren't as "must have" as in 1.4. That DOESN'T mean don't use them. Kharaa have very little real answer to TFs without a Dchamber. Onos are great at eating up turrets, but in a crowded hallway, or turrets around a chokepoint, they are mostly dead by the time they MAKE it to the turrets, where they are finished. Fades are normally great, but only with 3 hives (Vs. Turrets, that is). Gorge bile bombing works, but it's not easy against a tech'd marine team. Skulks need not apply. We lost that game only because we didn't have DCs. They had a hive locked down, yes, but at the point where I had 100 minerals, at our 2nd hive's completion, and asked for DCs... I could have gone redemption onos, along with half my team, and we would have pounded these guys. Instead we got movements, no way to go back to DCs since they had a hive locked, and it was game. RAWRGH.
*rant over*
Anyways, here's the only thing I'd say is a golden rule about upgrades: If the marines have locked down a hive, one of your two upgrades MUST BE carapace, or taking that hive back will take forever, and require some incompetent marines.
Marines had mostly stock marines with a few GLs, yet they held off the aliens for another forty minutes. Assaults with lerks and gorges failed because they didn't have enough energy to keep up sustained umbra or bile bombs. We REALLY wished we had movement chambers at that point. Heck, we even considered letting the marines take out a hive so that we could put it back up and get movement chambers.
So, think twice before getting sensory first. Yeah, cloaking is neat and scent of fear is really powerful, but those upgrades are more suited to ambushes (or finding that last marine in a vent), whereas movement and defense upgrades will really help out an assault on the third hive.
MC-DC is just stupid. I hate it when people do this, for starters, skulks have no use for MC except for celerity. THey would be SO much better off with carapce tho.
BTW, I've won games with SC-MC, but had the marines got a HA train, we'd have been finished off. However, our resource denial kept them from getting nuff HA, and our celerity skulks plus umbra finished em off. (I got me 3 yummy rambo HAs tho <!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin.gif'><!--endemo-->)
There's a lot of tactics with SC that haven't been discovered yet. Give it a few weeks and people will start getting really clever with them. At the moment I like going around the map to essential areas and sensory it up real good. This helps a lot, as cloaked skulks are a rine's worst fear. However, smart comms will use scan.
scent of fear is indeed pretty useful, also in the beginning of a game. I use it a lot as skulk - I scout and I can then tell my team where marines are heading without getting killed, so we can then attack the marines as a group.
Give me a fade and 3 sensories instead and I'll show you how I can... hide.... or run away.... or NOT FIGHT.... :/
Sensories just don't do enough on their own for a fade, they only become even remotely useful when combined with atleast 1 more chamber (and defense sucks too).
n4s7y, defense chambers do bugger all for skulks. Their health is too low for any of the 3 upgrades to make much difference to a skulk's life span. Celerity and silence are far better choices.
1. Sensory first.
Sensory allows cloaking and Anti-mt so if they go for a rush, it's easier to block it.
It also allows SOF which is basically alien mt anyways <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
2. Movement first
Move, first allows celerity and silence which is a top player in clan games..but not as good in pubs.
If they rush you can't really stop them and the argument of "oh we can teleport to the second hive" but if its not done you can't and if it is, u can easily get this second!
3. Defence first
Carapace, redemp, both excellent, but not my 1st choice either.
I say:
Sensory, defence, move or
Sensory, move, def.
not much difference in the end, but i've seen most losses with move first as you can't defend yourself as easily as you can with the others.
Celerity - Become the fastest skulk in the graveyard
Silence - Become even more silent as you cling to a ceiling
Adrenaline - Parasiting even faster.
While *you* are good, your 6-12 nub friends are getting wiped out.
Going sensory first, everyone gets a crack at smashing the marines. If you're not on a pub server then by all means go move first, but on a pub server its suicide for the *team*.
IMHO the team comes first. That means superfades and "Need JP/HMG to pwn hive singlehanded" will unfortunately have to wait their turn. I am sure superfades exist, and I *have* seen a JP/HMG take a hive singlehanded, but they don't grow on trees <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile.gif'><!--endemo-->
I think SoF really can give skulks an edge.
Well, being as it's a team game, some of them are going Lerk and using adrenaline to spore-spam the marines that don't yet have HA, weakening them for the celerity boosted skulk rushes while another goes gorge and serves as a portable healing chamber for the attack, also boosted with adrenaline. Meanwhile, the advance group of marines is being harassed from behind by a silenced skulk, which is still effective because it's early and movement tracking isn't up yet.
Skulks killing faster and res for kills means less time before higher evolutions or before someone's ready to drop the second hive and get your next set of chambers up. If you get a fade before second hive, that adrenaline boost will be awfully handy for it to blink in and out and attack.
Now, I'll admit, if you're playing with a bunch of folks who don't know how to team up, sensory enables them to keep living in spite of that. In the long run though, maybe that's not such a good thing. We want folks to learn how to team.
As for the existance of superfades and whatnot, an example from a today springs to mind... 16 players on a server, which means 8 on each team.
The alien team consisted of a 3-man clan stack (1 vet, 1 const, me), a second vet, and one of our community's "leet" players. Even with all 5 of us asking for movements first, the selfish gorge decide to put sensory. Obviously he felt he knew better than 2 vets... Or that more than half of his team didn't know what they were talking about....
The 5 of us worked together really well as a team. We kept stacking together, and won every round (a good 7 or 8 in a row). The only difference being that when sens came down first we'd win after about 40 minutes of fighting, and when mov finally came down first we started winning in about 15 mins (except for the last round where most of us went lerk for the hell of it, which slowed us down a little vs their HA trains).
Sens might be ok-ish at first, but it makes life really difficult later on...
Or in the pub servers I've seen, half a dozen skulks run to the enemy, get shot, run back faster, get shot, etc etc. When you don't know how good everyone else is, sensory is the safe bet. Even if people are dying in droves, the gorges are setting up a solid sens network that *will* be reinforced with second hive.
"The alien team consisted of a 3-man clan stack (1 vet, 1 const, me), a second vet, and one of our community's "leet" players. Even with all 5 of us asking for movements first, the selfish gorge decide to put sensory. Obviously he felt he knew better than 2 vets... Or that more than half of his team didn't know what they were talking about...."
Yeah but at the same time a gorge might just see three tags with no idea of how good you may or may not be. Its the same situation for a comm who has men screaming for shotties and such. Are they good? Or are they rambos? Are they five good players or three mediocre clansmen and 2 people who are kissing backside so that they get invites?
What I do agree with you (and very much so) is that if after the first 2 games people are proving their ability, then the gorge has no reason not to trust them. But please note that a clan stack doesn't automatically inspire confidence.
I'm not knocking you or clans, just saying that its hard for other players to judge. And also note that this is from experience on the nub heavy pub circuit. Once we all get things squared away then I'm certain build orders will get much much more flexible.
Pub games, and matches.
Pub games definetly get sensory first, as the otehr guys said, everyone gets a crack at it, and hte nubs dont get fragged so easily, then id prolly go DC next and then MC.
In matches there are 2 orders.
If the marines want to lock down a hive instead of the double node then go MC, DC, SC. That way you can get your spores in early on, and yes celerity is very useful, not the fastest skulk int he graveyard, ud be the only skulk to get to the marines before getting fragged. If you want to take out an installation, you have to have DCs outside to regenerate you. Simple as that. Frankly experienced players don't get any disadvantage off SC's, only difference is its hard to track your gorge, if there is an open vent, they shoot to check. OCs still shoot you when cloacked too. Only use is to hide healing stations, and your weak players. However if you are winning, and you want to win, then get attacking and get DC's near by to heal you, and your lerks/fades/gorges will need that adrenaline and your onos/skluks will need celerity.
If the marines dont lock down your hive it gets a bit different. You can play the map more, in that case SC is maybe a good option for 1st if you intend on plotting ambushes.
SC upgrades are only good if you can actually OWN your opponent, so leave it when ur against hte nubs.