Why Xenos are losing so badly - and how to fix it.

[Reuben Owen]

Especially with the new larva mechanics requiring queen to ovi before new xenos can join, and a tendency to have queen not ovi'd unless xeno team is already winning, you literally have about 2 oppurtunities to join team xeno.

1) At roundstart

2) First round of bursting local fauna

In theory you'd have more later in the game but considering how fast larva run out now, and how rare it is for a queen to stay in ovi for most of the game, you might be waiting most of an hour if there are even larvae left.

It's amazing how inconvenient it's become to play xeno compared to how it was before, and while I fully believe that the devs have the best of intentions with their changes, many of which are positive, it's also appears none of them are xeno mains who would have a deeper understanding of how the xeno team functions.

yeah so you get the starters + the monkey batch
usually if you miss the start you will always get in the monkey batch, sooner or later
then they just trickle, but by that point some of the living xenos have died, so you fight with them for open larva spots

i really don't like the instantaneousness of the larva popping up from pop jumps, i preferred just chill checking join xeno every few minutes and seeing all those mature larva
and if the queen detaches early then those ground larva build up
when she ovis later she gets many larvs at once, but usually they end up stuck as t1/2 bc queen doesn't have the luxury to stay ovi long from that point on

[Reuben Owen]

thoughts on reverting ovipositor queen back?
been noticing I start as a marine much much more lately, does that mean more ppl want to play xeno? anyone have input on this?

ok first I'm okay with how much xenos are losing
are they still losing too much? yeah but it's still not as bad as it was early this month
anyway poor looking tl;dr post time

I will say that just due to current population logistics xenos get fucked
'lowpop' has shifted from around 40-60 players to 80-100 with a starting pop of ~10 xenos
'highpop' has shifted from 90-120 to 160-200 with a starting pop of ~20 xenos

but from constantly spamming hive status throughout every round I've ever played I can tell that an hour or so in every game the number of xenos at that point are kinda the same, 20-30 at the first engagement, the compositions might be different but that really never changes

what t3s are the most important currently? ravs + boilers although ravs are more important
however, all t3s suffer from 'get chased down and die like a dog' syndrome

boilers are important for their defensive abilitiy, wide hitting but it's just 'vague', most likely to get chased and die due to being slowest and glowy
but if the hive falls at all they can't survive, they need a buncha sisters nearby to protect them from getting overrun

ravs are also great defensively as they can tell that 1 marine to GET BACK BIC BOI, and pop around the corner and knock him back minus a arm
, they have to rely on dodging/waiting around or behind something to approach for defending, also least likely t3 to die from being chased however they're still slower then marines until elite, where they kinda move the same speed, which means they need to rely on pounce to get away usually + only xeno that doesnt care about fire which is big when marines open up mojave desert level heat on xenos

crushers can't do much except sit in a marines way, and only for a bit unlike before, charging marines is usually not worth it (exception:prison) unless its an absolutely huge group that didnt see you comming, even then you'll probably die, and fire turns them into frightened little puppies really only good boiler shields, they can sorta run away but not really

praes are decent defensively but again, only in certain spots where they can snipe without getting chased, since if they need to retreat they're going to die since they're slow, and unlike boilers they're usually close enough that they get chased down (or flamed) more... stickyresin counters this a bit but they needa plant it beforehand, and a lot of it

now even on highpop games you usually don't see more then 2 of any T3 at once, and since T3s are the main defences, they defend inadequately from numbers alone, factoring skill not even necessary to calculate into it thats why sometimes you see queens declare no crusher rounds, because they want more t3s, otherwise you usually get a balance of 2/2/2/2 (1/1/1/1 on lowpop), with sometimes -1 of a certain t1 + another (usually -1 crusher +1 rav or -1 boiler +1 prae)

what maps do xenos do the worst on? and why?
in this order from worst to best is
big red, prison, lv624, ice colony
gonna say my piece about each map

big red
by far the worst map for xenos ever since it got changed
basically the whole lambda/research/southeast caves aka anywhere the xenos hive up is one huge dead end (the western caves/viro are an even worse deadend), the moment marines fortify the small gap entrances it's pretty much the attrition to end all attritions which takes ballstothewall levels of work for xenos to break through, at the same time marines get netflix and chill levels of control (+/- a few hunters/runners) over the rest of the map since they have control over the only holes to the caves, more than 50% of the map under their control, the caves themselves are very wide allowing quick movement by many many marines at once so even though they are big, they are easily run through and if they miss any xenos it's only because the xenos are faster or the caves confuse a lil after you blitz them, also they can OB in the caves to an extent
on highpop they have enough numbers to check/push the 2 major hive paths to the buildings (research+lambda) and send a group to that middlecave entrance near the water treatment plant, which everyone seems to forget about
hardest lz1 to break straighton they just make it so BIG (and red)

lv624
smallest map, most open
due to the way fog is positioned and relative speed/slowness marines can always get tablefort first ergo, they get everything but the caves themselves
on high pop this map is death as squads can flank rush the west, while tablefort keeps the center/east in check
the caves themselves are pretty open + smaller than bigreds or icecolony, but they're all connected by small gaps so that stems the marine tides for a little bit more than something like big red, this may also be due to PTSD of previous lv624 rounds where xenos were different
easiest lz1 to break

prison
marines can put an OB anywhere, at the same time the "doors" offer no protection (at this point fighting starts before the second doors comes down) since marines rush past them north or south, on highpop they go north AND south, or center and south, etc fighting xenos until they get fucked on one side
on the plus side robust crushers can still do work there, there's many long tight straight lines to run through like leeroy jenkins, or spit as prae
another plus is weeds aren't nearly as important here to spam in absurd ammts + they're hard to destroy on all those corners with flamers and they tend to still exist in nooks and crannies after being cleared (unlike bigred/lv)
conversely, destroying walls is the most important on this map to break new paths for flanks which crushers can do here (although not as well as spitcastes, but they need weeds) without doing any wall breaking xenos get boned here bad
probably the toughest flanks for xenos to deal with, also marines hypercluster here which can be good or bad, hardest lz1 to deal with

ice colony
even on the highest pop xenos do the best here by far, ladders serve as a check to rushes where you even see dchat bitching at them to get those 3 last xenos but they can't, because the underground is HUGE and dark and spooky senpai and unga dunga no want to go, full of twists and turns and runner420 can live there forever, ergo xenos get the most time to grow/spread before marines attack and if for some reason they get overrun they can run above ground or someplace really, really far away also SNOW (aka SLOW), add in the fact that hives on this map are usually ooc unguessable locations (anywhere in the underground, really), they shift every game sometimes by far and attempting to use elevators end up 90% of the time as salt midis
coincidentally ice colony is the biggest map by far (counting above + underground), even on 200 pop games there are non-deadend areas of the map untouched by both sides even on 4+ hour rounds where the xenos make comeback wins after playing hide and seek

guess what I'm saying is xenos need room to graze? like... sheep... ?

lots of times I see rounds where I join from the first monkeys and theres very little sentinels, like 1 boiler + 2 sentinels + 0 spitters thats badbadbad, spitters/praes are helpful when the marines are fresh to scratch em up, so thats also bad

also everyone bitches at xenos for 'going out' early
but then everyone ALSO bitches at xenos for delaying i.e. 'not going out at all'
i mean ffs we have the 20 minute timer to prevent delay but yet erry round i see them xenos rip and tear early at admin pressing or just get straight up boomed, i unno might make xenos more aggressive then they would be otherwise

[HKO20006]

Another Xeno disadvantage on LV is that some monkeys (like 4/5) are locked away by fog, meaning they will burst at like 1330 the earliest. Hive might be dead already.

[KingPhilipIII]

LV also has far fewer monkeys than any other map for some reason.

[Butlerblock]

Xenos best map strategically is LV and ice, which both have about the same amount of monkeys. (A lot of LV’s monkeys are in the caves or stuck in fog). Prison and Red aren’t good for xenos, so they are much more monkeys.

[Ranged66]

Played Praetorian for the first time yesterday, once you get to mature and especially elite you can just cover entire open spaces in sticky resin aids, and stop any marine push dead in its tracks. I see very few praes doing this though.

Let alone when they are trying to push through 3 or 2 wide corridors, just fill that shit up with resin. They flame it away? Well they can't walk through flames, put it back right after the flames wear off. If they are foolish enough to try and walk through 5 or more layers of sticky resin just acid spit them to death.

[TheMaskedMan2]

I'm honestly convinced most Xeno Mains just don't play as much anymore. I have a hunch that most of the Xeno playerbase currently is just Marine players that feel like mixing it up for a round. So obviously they are a lot less skilled. Where did all the Robust Xeno mains go? Sure, there are still a good amount that play occasionally, though it feels like there was definitely a tank in Xeno player quality.

Did they switch to Marine because Marines are getting a lot of new content? Something else? I don't know. I'm half asleep and rambling.

[KingPhilipIII]

I imagine that's a good possibility.

Xeno gameplay hasn't really received an overhaul except for the Queen since hugger combat was removed. It's only been minor tweaks, not all of them good. Marines on the other hand have been getting lots of fun new toys.

[HKO20006]

I chose the slower approach: fixing the wiki, check this out, from this to this.
And more importantly, you can help too! And don't forget to become a wiki contributor at Discord.

[Symbiosis]

I'm honestly convinced most Xeno Mains just don't play as much anymore. I have a hunch that most of the Xeno playerbase currently is just Marine players that feel like mixing it up for a round. So obviously they are a lot less skilled. Where did all the Robust Xeno mains go? Sure, there are still a good amount that play occasionally, though it feels like there was definitely a tank in Xeno player quality.

Did they switch to Marine because Marines are getting a lot of new content? Something else? I don't know. I'm half asleep and rambling.

Getting starting Xeno is hard, it’s less than 50% of the time - waiting and “hoping” to get a Xeno is no fun. You’re stuck as a T1 most of the time. I’d rather go Marine and pew pew/RP. I’d say that is a big part of what’s driving Xeno players off.

[Toroic]

I'm honestly convinced most Xeno Mains just don't play as much anymore. I have a hunch that most of the Xeno playerbase currently is just Marine players that feel like mixing it up for a round. So obviously they are a lot less skilled. Where did all the Robust Xeno mains go? Sure, there are still a good amount that play occasionally, though it feels like there was definitely a tank in Xeno player quality.

Did they switch to Marine because Marines are getting a lot of new content? Something else? I don't know. I'm half asleep and rambling.

I've been trying to come back and play more, but honestly the experience is a lot less fun now.

Not only is it harder to get in at roundstart, your evolution is frequently interrupted if you're part of the second wave putting you even further behind roundstart xenos. Queen is far more of a combat monster than she ever was before (she used to be more flexible and more vulnerable than other t3s to explosions and due to slow speed) and it's attracting some of the most godawful queens I've ever seen.

The last round I played went like this

-Ready up at roundstart. Oh cool, third time in a row not getting in.
-Wait for 20 minutes when the larva start to burst, get unlucky again and then larva don't burst for another 5 minutes or so while I think about not playing
-Get dropped into a larva, queen immediately drops out of ovi and orders the entire hive to walk across big red to establish a new base.
-I evolve to drone and am heading to where the queen says the new hive is going to be to start weeding and building (xenos are asking for direction which she is ignoring at this point)
-I run into freshly dropped marines and yakety sax ensues which ends up with me dying along with several other xenos as I flee across several screens on stumpy drone legs trying to get away and finding the xeno caravan.

Fun stuff.

Basically the queen is so powerful right now that if she reaches empress it doesn't matter what sort of terrible commanding she's done nor how many times she's caused half the hive to die. A few aged hunters and the queen can wreck entire squads with ease, and as she has no weaknesses other than massed ap rounds she can just delay until she's strong enough to win the game.

Xeno mains have always been secondary considerations when it comes to changes with CM, things have been made more casual and there are entire gamemodes (tribes, WO) where it's clear that it's considered nothing more than a ghost role. The queen changes and roundstart larva nerfs mean there's never been so much reward for every selfish idiot to go queen and get a unit that starts stronger than any of the T3s and also has more utility and time to age. Queen used to be vulnerable enough in combat that most queens either let their allies do most of the fighting while they laid eggs and helped build defenses, or attacked only in organized pushes. Everyone continuously accumulated evolution progress unless the queen was dead, so if t3s died t2 were ready to replace them immediately.

Queens who gave bad orders could be passively resisted because if they said to attack foolishly, they couldn't actually watch what you were doing from the safety of the hive.

Playing xeno used to feel like a team effort where the queen was constantly communicating and encouraging from home base and trusting the scouts to know when to attack and when not to. If queen was dumb she'd charge in, die, and we'd get a new queen. The hive was dependent on the queen, and the queen was dependent on the hive. Now the hive is even more dependent on the queen while she is less dependent on them than ever before.

The most successful queens used to be those that encouraged careful play, solid defenses, and building up a mass of xenos because she was slow and vulnerable to nade spam, so if there wasn't a strong follow up to her screech she could easily die.

Now as a xeno you feel far more expendable than ever before and not only is getting in at roundstart (or at any point, since the queen needs to ovi to for larvae to unburrow) less reliable, evolving is also less reliable and could easily be delayed as much as multiple queen deaths did.

Even if everything goes right, you got in at roundstart, you were able to evolve to t3 right away, you're still going to be upstaged heavily by the queen who is only interested in her own fun most of the time.

[Simo94]

Playing xeno became so inconvenient compared to a marine, which defeats the whole purpose of xenos to begin with. basically you need to win the lottery to get a larva and then stay T1 for 30 mins cuz no ovi Queen, fun amiright.

[Reuben Owen]

saying the queen can solo marines herself endlessly is nice and all but this thread is about xenos losing too much
so queens are dying too
if at the elite/ancient stage queens are unbeatable, then xenos are pretty much losing games where they get overrun before she reaches that point, which is usually what seems to happen when xenos lose, and secondary queens never get to that point either
on rounds where they win after losing 1st queen its generally bc 1/2 robust xenos from the original starters (or the monkeybatch) still alive took care of a bunch of them and that stopped them from searching out the queen, young queens who fight at that point will have marines shout out her locations on their myspace pages

also trying to get to be roundstart queen is just like gl
unlike commander they're the strongest thing xenos have and not whitelisted and blahblahblah

also if you think about the beginning of rounds now, xenos lose a buncha evo ticks compared to before when they started as mature larvas, 50 waiting just to mature to larva and then maybe more waiting for queen too

teamwork still unreliable at best
and yeah xenos are not fun the first 30-40 minutes of a round
thats why survivors get beaten up bc bored xenos have nothing else to do, queen tells you to stay safe, etc besides get monkeys which is the most tedious but important task ever that occasionally everyone slacks off on

[Toroic]

saying the queen can solo marines herself endlessly is nice and all but this thread is about xenos losing too much
so queens are dying too
if at the elite/ancient stage queens are unbeatable, then xenos are pretty much losing games where they get overrun before she reaches that point, which is usually what seems to happen when xenos lose, and secondary queens never get to that point either
on rounds where they win after losing 1st queen its generally bc 1/2 robust xenos from the original starters (or the monkeybatch) still alive took care of a bunch of them and that stopped them from searching out the queen, young queens who fight at that point will have marines shout out her locations on their myspace pages

also trying to get to be roundstart queen is just like gl
unlike commander they're the strongest thing xenos have and not whitelisted and blahblahblah

also if you think about the beginning of rounds now, xenos lose a buncha evo ticks compared to before when they started as mature larvas, 50 waiting just to mature to larva and then maybe more waiting for queen too

teamwork still unreliable at best
and yeah xenos are not fun the first 30-40 minutes of a round
thats why survivors get beaten up bc bored xenos have nothing else to do, queen tells you to stay safe, etc besides get monkeys which is the most tedious but important task ever that occasionally everyone slacks off on

Here's the thing though, bad queens make (relative to before) other xenos lose a ton of evolution ticks, and if she detaches and dies in the first attack xenos also lose their hivemind and thus can't continue to coordinate a defense and get routed.

It's never been so difficult to be part of the starter batch and at this point I've changed my prefs to just be dropped as a marine if I don't get in at roundstart.

[Reuben Owen]

what would you say to how many ppl wanna play xeno at roundstart?
and queen?

[Toroic]

what would you say to how many ppl wanna play xeno at roundstart?
and queen?

I would say it's a masochistic gamble that won't pay off because you're competing with too many bald xenos and about a Brazillian queens competing for the slot.
Also, that the game wasn't really designed with xeno mains in mind, which is why it's become increasingly inconvenient and unrewarding to be one.

[Reuben Owen]

I would say it's a masochistic gamble that won't pay off because you're competing with too many bald xenos and about a Brazillian queens competing for the slot.
Also, that the game wasn't really designed with xeno mains in mind, which is why it's become increasingly inconvenient and unrewarding to be one.

I mean as to a guess towards how many people have xeno pref on at roundstart
but still your opinion is interesting

yeah I mean cm xenos are still just a fancy antag role

[caleeb101]

I think Crushers are just more reliable on support. They need boiler gas cover to be super effective now but they're great corner tacklers and they can still soak damage as long as it's not from Flames or AP.

As a stand alone xeno though, holy fuck you're shit.

[Jonesome]

I actually like that Crusher is more challenging to play and forces you to work with other xenos. It's boring being an unstoppable murderbone machine

[Toroic]

I actually like that Crusher is more challenging to play and forces you to work with other xenos. It's boring being an unstoppable murderbone machine

Just lol at this whole comment. You might as well have said “I don’t play or understand xenos.”

I think Crushers are just more reliable on support. They need boiler gas cover to be super effective now but they're great corner tacklers and they can still soak damage as long as it's not from Flames or AP.

As a stand alone xeno though, holy fuck you're shit.

The issue isn’t that Crushers can’t contribute, though I haven’t seen them accomplish anything significant in the last half dozen games I’ve been a part of after a long absense.

The issue is that with equal skill, a crusher will contribute less than any of the other T3 and probably less than the t2 castes as well.

[Sulaboy]

You guys are getting crushers all wrong. Crushers are roleplay roles, like researchers on the marine side.

[Jonesome]

Just lol at this whole comment. You might as well have said “I don’t play or understand xenos.”

Stop being so pretentious,

I've played enough to know that just because crusher has lost some buffs doesn't mean you can't still be effective in the role. You just have to play smarter is all, instead of rampaging in recklessly.

[KingPhilipIII]

You guys are getting crushers all wrong. Crushers are roleplay roles, like researchers on the marine side.

So if I walk up slowly to the marine do you think he will pet my giant face and we can share some memorable moments together?

I really agree with Toroic about all this nonsense, especially about how the game isn't designed with xeno mains in mind. Apophis and the other staff are always talking about how the marines are the heroes of the server and the xenos are just the faceless horde to battle but you can't forget that your entire story hinges on this faceless horde and we're still a sizeable chunk of the playerbase so ignoring the needs of xeno mains is a one way ticket to disaster. Eventually it will get bad enough marine mains won't have fun fighting the xenos anymore and everyone loses.

Once upon a time people used to fight to NOT be the Queen. Can we go back to those days? Atleast I could reliably be the Queen in that time.

[Sulaboy]

So if I walk up slowly to the marine do you think he will pet my giant face and we can share some memorable moments together?

No, I mean roleplay with Xenos. If you don't express your want to crush things to the hive while playing then you're playing crusher wrong.

[HKO20006]

XENO ARE WINNING THE B BALL GAMES! RUNNER STRONK!