Match MacGuffin - Royal Jelly

[misto]

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

yummy royal jelly, aliens and humans alike love the stuff, put some hidden in RANDOMIZED places in the map that either team can snatch and bring home for a boost.

http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/Royal_Jelly

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

a tasty treasure treat that provides a wrinkle to the gameplay other than search and destroy, a useful treasure for teams to bring home to power up their side.

perhaps royal jelly-based drug abuse or research gone wrong, thus zombifying human users, could be your explanation for this weird new zombie mode i keep hearing about, but lets not get sidetracked.

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

the royal jelly is sort of a plot token item that the teams will want to grab.

in the interest of fairness, the jelly should appear only when the marines set foot on the planet/the fog drops/etc or else aliens would grab it all easy peasy. how did the jelly get there? maybe it was hidden there in the olden days by an old hive who was wiped out or went dormant, maybe it was hidden by human smugglers, or human researchers, who knows!

aliens will want to bring it to the queen for her to eat. this will boost her own evo points or let her boost the evo points of a favored child(ren?). or, if you want to tuck it away somewhere, it could serve as an insurance policy in case of queen death - a drone who eats it during the 5min queen death cooldown period should skip the cooldown period and have a buffed evo status. drones of course would not be able to eat it and waste it while a living queen is still around, that would be treasonous!

in human hands, it gets more complicated and more possibilities arise. sell it thru cargo for bonus points, give it to research to make juicy combat druggs (make sure you dont overdose on it or VERY BAD THINGS will probably happen! maybe youll get plugged into the alien hivemind and turn traitor or turn zombie or something, thats for you all to debate about and decide) or perhaps even xeno-targeted confusion pheromones/poisons. have the CL always want to steal it and be an asshole about it to the point of threatening to call in PMCs. mercenary ERTs who get called to the ship and hear royal jelly is aboard should also want to acquire it. so many possibilities!

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): it would be best if you automated the allocations of these bonuses as much as you can so that you do not have to have admins hand feeding them to the teams every round

HEY MISTO AINT ROYAL JELLY BEEN SUGGESTED BEFORE YOU DUMBASS?

yeah but it was some lame suggestion about making marines who snort the jelly immune to facehuggers, or focused solely on grinding it up for drugs, or focused solely on it buffing alien evolution, not my much better suggestion with a wealth of lovely possibilities for both teams to enjoy

[WinterClould]

I remember wiki diving a month or so ago and learning about Royal Jelly. I wondered if its something marines could RP knowing about the drugs made from it like Xeno-zip. Sadly I don't think we are in the right spot in the timeline to have any clue its a thing. If marines find some they'd have no clue it's important at all. CL might be able to find out if he reports the xeno to W-Y and they tell him but good luck ever getting the marines to bring it back before the xeno get it unless they meta the fuck out of it. W-Y would probably also want the queen captured the moment they find out royal jelly is being made down there.

Really I think this will just cause trouble with metaing marines/xenos just getting a free buff item. -1

[misto]

hm. the timeline difficulties you raise are significant, youre right. well, please keep it in mind if you ever wish to shift the timeline

however, couldnt you put it in as a w-y addendum? like, the cl bullies command into "no damaging the colony" crap all the time. so just have him say "hey guys, we have canisters of VALUABLE MYSTERY SUBSTANCE down there, please bring it back"?

[Bronimin]

I guess it would be cool if the Xeno Queen produced this stuff and Drones had to harvest and store it for xeno evolution or something but that is a different suggestion entirely. New queens could require drones to feed the stuff to a larva, as opposed to the current system.

Anyway, -1.

[Snypehunter007]

We removed royal jelly from the game a while ago.

[WinterClould]

We removed royal jelly from the game a while ago.

It used to be in the game? What did it do?

[Casgair]

It used to be in the game? What did it do?

It was necessary for evolution -- unlike now when the evolution ticks as long as the Queen is alive, used to be you needed to eat Jelly first (which the Queen made at a cost of 300 plasma, if memory serves). It's one reason you'll sometimes hear xenos at roundstart hassling the queen for jelly, just a throwback to how things were.

[WinterClould]

It was necessary for evolution -- unlike now when the evolution ticks as long as the Queen is alive, used to be you needed to eat Jelly first (which the Queen made at a cost of 300 plasma, if memory serves). It's one reason you'll sometimes hear xenos at roundstart hassling the queen for jelly, just a throwback to how things were.

Ah alrighty thanks

[misto]

well then, that doesnt have much to do with this idea besides the name. this isnt meant to heavily augment or be an integral part of xeno evolution, this is simply an optional side-objective treasure for both sides to compete to secure, not a critical mechanic

[dylanstrategie]

Any change even remotely related to evolution can make or break the Xeno balance, so we tread extremely carefully on that side

The main issue with royal jelly as it was before being removed is that it encouraged Xenos to wait in the hive for the Queen to distribute jelly to everyone. Xenos that missed out on it would literally NEVER evolve or upgrade, which punished Xenos that took the initiative and roamed early in the round to fetch monkeys and hunt the survivors unless the Queen was quick on the trigger

This was replaced with an automatic evolution tick when the Queen is alive, which is obviously the current system

We tried to change it recently so Queens could boost evolution with pheromones, but this just led to the same problem surfacing. Xenos camp in the hive for their evolution ticks until they are either fully evolved and upgraded or HAVE to leave to defend the Hive

As for the Marine side of things, we are fine with the idea of giving Marines objectives while planetside outside of "shoot up dem Xenos", but I doubt just some sort of jelly powerup is gonna do it

As for the suggestion itself, it has a wealth of problems. Xenos would immediately dart around the map round start to secure all jelly caches and would destroy/waste any that would obviously fall in Marine hands, the rest would act as free Xeno powerups. The few caches the Marines manage to find would be hunted down on landing and used for cargo points (which would be super powerful, we balance our cargo points carefully already, just a small trickle) or drugs (which would have to be OP to be better than some of the stuff Chemistry can make already)

[misto]

i understand your concerns that it may upset balance. which is why i included the line in my post "in the interest of fairness, the jelly should appear only when the marines set foot on the planet/the fog drops/etc or else aliens would grab it all easy peasy." and that they should appear in randomized places to make it difficult for them to be gathered up.

do you feel that is still too soon for the jelly canisters to appear? what kind of additional conditions or limitations could be placed on them to help keep things fair?

[Snypehunter007]

Going to run through this with BMC, tomorrow. Please do not post until after Monday (07/03/17).