Rework the Xeno Upgrade System

[Surrealistik]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary):

Per subject.


Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole):

Gets rid of the toxic/perverse incentives currently baked into the time-based upgrade system which penalizes late joiners egregiously (and makes people even less likely to roll Xenu after they die), and broadly encourages cowardice/camping/defensive play/stalling and other unfun things.

Also gives the Queen more of a leadership and management role as befits her; makes Xenus more likely to actually listen to her without admin intervention.

Prevents the death of a Queen from irrevocably destroying Hive progress (as there's no time based accumulation of upgrade points that is halted by her death), but her death is still relevant because it prevents the allocation of pool points (see details below), preventing them from being used until a new Queen is spawned/evolved.


Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc):

Xenomorphs now have a pool of evolution points.

Evolution points are earned when a host successfully chestbursts/hatches. Half these points are distributed evenly among Xenos possessed by players, the other half is put into a pool for the Queen to distribute as she sees fit via the Hive Management Interface: http://colonial-marines.com/viewtopic.p ... 585#p79585 | this has the added benefit of making the Xenus more likely to listen to her. A Queen can withdraw allocated (not auto-distributed) points from a Xenu back to the pool and can allocate points from the pool to Xenus.

The Queen _cannot_ distribute the points in this pool to herself; to compensate for this she has time based point generation in addition to the even distribution mentioned above; this encourages her to stay at the backline and remain in safety rather than taking aggressive roles on the frontline; a positive rather than perverse incentive.

All Xenos have their ckeys visible so the Queen can know who best to allocate points to; however, to prevent favouritism from being too problematic, each Xeno can only receive a maximum number of points in this way that scales with the total size of the pool before distributions (as the pool increases so does this maximum).


Xenos can spend evolution points on either modular upgrades that enhance a specific aspect (movement speed, melee damage, armor, health, plasma regeneration, health regeneration, etc), or to evolve to a higher tier life form, allowing for greater customization that keys to the role they want to assume in combat. An aspect can be upgraded up to as many times as a Xeno has upgrade slots to expend. Upgrading or evolving requires a Xeno be on weeds with full health and plasma, and is done after a short delay during which it must remain stationary.

Lower tier life forms have more upgrade slots than higher tier ones. A Xeno can choose to reset their upgrades and/or de-evolve one step by expending all of its plasma while at full health on weeds after a short delay while remaining stationary, getting a partial refund (75% of invested evolution points).

Limits on the number of T2s and T3s are either abolished or significantly relaxed; higher tiers are roughly balanced against lower tiers by both having substantially fewer upgrade slots, and generally being slower/unable to vent crawl.


Finally the Queen can be voted out via an anonymous simple majority (51%+; the Queen can't vote) if she's a shitler and there's a Drone to replace her (yes, Hivemind is not a democracy; ICly it's the will of the Queen Mother; OOCly it's aliens taking a vote); if deposed, a vote will then commence for another Drone to become Queen, which it does immediately upon receiving the most votes (draws go to the person who has an older BYOND account). The old Queen is reduced to a Drone, and all of her upgrades are stripped from her as she receives a refund of all of her invested evolution points. All evolution points the former Queen received from timed based point generation are then given to the new Queen. This vote has a considerable cooldown period that is waived in the event the current Queen is SSD.


Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):

Lotsa coding.

[LocalizedDownpour]

Overall I like this, though I personally would change afew things.

1. The Hive is not a democracy. It's a Hivemind. No voting the queen out, shit queens are apart of the game just like bad marines are.

2. I wouldn't be for modular upgrades for the sole fact that'd be ALOT of work. I'd say keep the same age system we have now but with your points function, and of course only allow age or evolve.

3. With persistent numbers, I don't see Ckeys needing to be given out as this would help with meta issues. Like what if a queen didn't want to give points to someone that killed alot of ayys before dying ect.

[Sarah_U.]

I actually wished for the modular upgrade to happen, but I have another system in mind. I really think you put effort into all this, but I'm mostly so-so with it and I really only neutral due to the simple fact I would love to see modular upgrades AND I also think it's still a legitimate system even with its small flaws here and here.

Reminds me of AvP:Extinction.
-> System you could check: Natural Selection 2.

[Surrealistik]

Overall I like this, though I personally would change afew things.

1. The Hive is not a democracy. It's a Hivemind. No voting the queen out, shit queens are apart of the game just like bad marines are.

2. I wouldn't be for modular upgrades for the sole fact that'd be ALOT of work. I'd say keep the same age system we have now but with your points function, and of course only allow age or evolve.

3. With persistent numbers, I don't see Ckeys needing to be given out as this would help with meta issues. Like what if a queen didn't want to give points to someone that killed alot of ayys before dying ect.

#1: Shit Queens have more of an adverse impact on the game than any individual marine, including the CO (who can be ignored or mutinied against if shitty and often is). With Hive Management in place, and this, a bad Queen is even more of a liability than it already is; some way of kicking a deficient Queen is essential. Think of it as the will of the Queen Mother rather than the individual Xenus (votes are merely the OOC execution/implementation).

#2: Worth it. The generalist upgrades that exist now are completely boring, and don't allow Xenus to specialize/generalize/shore up weaknesses/adapt to specific situations and so on.

#3: Meta gonna meta; if it's acceptable for the marines to feature plausibly deniable meta enmity it is acceptable for the Xenus (and it can and does happen anyways within the Xenus due to things happening during the course of a game). The risk of meta enmity/favouritism is fairly low in practice (if it's crippling/problematic the Queen can be voted out). This is also obviously against the rules and punishable if detected.


@ Sarah_U: This came to me in about 10 minutes. What problems do you have with it that makes it 'so-so' in your opinion? Also it was partially inspired by Natural Selection; in all honesty it's something of a hybrid between the Kharaa and Marine systems (which work pretty well).

[Toroic]

I like this idea quite a bit, particularly the aspect of decreasing anonymity among xenos.

+1

[InterroLouis]

Neutral. I don't quite know if the balance could handle all the xenos min-maxing. I mean never putting points into anything but armor for super high deflection rates.

[Surrealistik]

Neutral. I don't quite know if the balance could handle all the xenos min-maxing. I mean never putting points into anything but armor for super high deflection rates.

Depends on the extent of the bonus and whether there's diminishing returns; there are _tons_ of levers to prevent broken overspecialization into one attribute.

Beyond that, I believe deflection is also being reworked.

[Sarah_U.]

Bump, this is still relevant imo and would be interesting to some regards.

[TheMaskedMan2]

Eh, -1. I think time is already a pretty good way to balance Xenos. Also seeing ckeys? No way.Also I'm not rally a fan of upgrades that just increases a stat of their choosing, just ripe for min-maxing and ruining consistency among Xenos. "Oh this runner has crazy armor for some reason" "This boiler is speedy as hell"