Pre alpha, a magical time(question thread)

[Joe4444]

gather round the fire kids, gonna tell you a story about a time called "pre alpha"....a magical time that whilst alotta people played, not many did.

this Thread is for people that want to know something about pre alpha, It can be abou anything from the LO lines to what the gameplay was like.Ask away!

anyone is free to answer the questions left by people in this thread, you can also leave any funny stories about pre alpha you might have, be it about banter bravo or a epic last ditch effort to charge into the hive and winning.

[Casany]

I played pre alpha bruh!

But I didn't play when corroders were there...

What was that part of the game like

[KingKire]

uncle joe, how did people play aliens without evolutions?

[Casany]

uncle joe, how did people play aliens without evolutions?

There were always evolutions bruh, even in pre alpha

[NescauComToddy]

Uncle Sam, How salty was the Community In the old Days? I Heard tales of Salt and glory among the ancient Ones of the Age of Fire, They were glorious!...

[Telegnats]

Uncle Sam, How salty was the Community In the old Days? I Heard tales of Salt and glory among the ancient Ones of the Age of Fire, They were glorious!...

As far as I remember it was of the same degree, but over different things like aliens stripping marines of all armor/equipment.

[Helgraf]

gather round the fire kids, gonna tell you a story about a time called "pre alpha"....a magical time that whilst alotta people played, not many did.

this Thread is for people that want to know something about pre alpha, It can be abou anything from the LO lines to what the gameplay was like.Ask away!

anyone is free to answer the questions left by people in this thread, you can also leave any funny stories about pre alpha you might have, be it about banter bravo or a epic last ditch effort to charge into the hive and winning.

Tell me everything interesting about it Uncle Joe.

[LordLoko]

You are all plebs. i played in the pre-pre-alpha times! When NSS Gamers ran the show and the map was very retarded, we all weared those stupid colored jumpsuits and there wasn't even a LO! We used CR-20 SMGs and we were happy about it

[Casany]

You are all plebs. i played in the pre-pre-alpha times! When NSS Gamers ran the show and the map was very retarded, we all weared those stupid colored jumpsuits and there wasn't even a LO! We used CR-20 SMGs and we were happy about it

Those guns were bae

remember the room full of lockers? See, we got no squads, just a giant locker room with tons of lockers with gear

[Retro]

Let me describe logistic lines, every single briefing 10x, people would fight over if they were an SL it was funny, roles were handed out via ID machines and it was cancer. Trust me, you don't want to catch the bad said of an LO. Attachments were never a thing until the very late Pre-Alpha, and we had the warrior song, the best song ever as are lobby music.

[NescauComToddy]

Warrior Song best fuckin' Song!

[Peachy2912]

Trying to push into the alien hive in virology through a one tile corridor without grenades led to some pretty impressive improvisation.

[nerocavalier]

I remember leaving to find some oxygen tanks once during a Virology assault. I returned to find the last surviving marine dragged into it. Yeah, we lost that round.

[Reuben Owen]

ALL XENOS COULD PLANT WEEDS, additionally there was no caste that got less than 10 plasma a tick
I remember being the lone runner on sulaco weeding and surviving in the hangar for an hour

2 square tile melee range for ravagers, they had a different version of charge but it was worse than useless

no crushers or boilers, or upgrades

there was something with an acid that worked through anything in literally 5 seconds i forget if it was the prae or the corroder or w/e

there were limits on how many xenos could evolve... but it depended on the amount of weeds planted or some shit i have no clue how it worked exactly, everyone just assumed you needed to plant more weeds

there was no cooldown on queen death, so you could literally have 4 queens in 1 minute

at roundstart there were only drones, not larva or any other caste

yes xenos could strip you naked and would once you were nested, a lot harder to escape back then

sentinel castes could stun far away

vent systems were instant and bae, was easy to collect monkeys (although still wouldn't gather them all some rounds)

xenos would be captured and cuffed, they could acid the cuffs but it'd take a minute or so time enough for the xeno to be trapped behind a forcefield and sit there and be gawked at unless it could acid the barrier (hint: usually it couldnt) sometimes (like, every 20th game or so) the last xeno alive would be the caught 1 and it'd go queen

no attachments for guns, no spec weapons

a round without a breach was a rare round

could be janitor easier

could actually use toilets against xenos

nostromo when?

[Joe4444]

uncle joe, how did people play aliens without evolutions?

do you mean upgrades? ayys were really stronk back then so they didn't need em.

[Monoo]

Praes could talk to humans telepathically, just like the Queen.

Using a riot shield made you a god, you were essentially immune to sentinels.

Runtime was named Jones.

You could put regular combat knives onto your M41A, and it gave you the message "you affix your bayonet LIKE A BADASS"

You could dual wield LMGs.

Always a mad dash for the CO's secret egun.

COs weren't allowed to go outside of the FOB when visiting the Nostromo.

Briefing was right next to the hangar, and let me tell you... the very, very best last stands and pitched fights happened in that briefing room. Engineers would turn it into a maze of walls and tables, and there were multiple doors with shutters that the xenos did hit-and-run on. But once they melted through to the hallways on either side, it was game over.

Xenobio was the meta.

I believe we had to usually set up engineering, just like on Lazarus. People used to grab hardsuit helmets to protect their faces.

[Bigchilly]

The rush to medbay or research was real, i remember playing queen once and looking out the window of genetics into medbay to see a whole platoon of marines, good times.

The ol' syndicate nukie guns because we didnt have spriters, joining late to find no LO's to assign you, being in medbay when aliens arrive so you were cut off from everything.

Xeno cuffs, hell yea.

[apophis775]

Can I join in?

[Retro]

Can I join in?

no

Uh I am pretty sure you have the best stories I mean you created CM LMFAO

[MrJJJ]

Do you know how usually bio-hood's were great against huggers? i do, any time you lost your helmet, we just popped them back on until they nerfed them.

CO had a fucking amazing armor and a egun, making him not only almost mutiny-proof, but also a effective xeno killer on his damn own, one could live under 5 marines attacking him and win the fight.

Ravagers, as people said, had 2 tiles melee range, unfortunately, because of the fact that xenos could see through walls, this meant that you could suddenly be dying from a ravager that was slashing you from a wall.

There was no hunter or crusher back then, but there was corroder and warriors, corroder was essentially able to acid anything and everything, and if it got on your armor, it would get really, really bad if you didin't take it off. The warrior was the absolute perfect caste out of most, while some had weaknesses, like runners being low health, queens being slow and etc, warrior had next to none, it had a great amount of health, taking almost half a damn Pulse Rifle magazine to actually kill, and we had no burst fire back then and no attachments, they had probably the second fastest speed, the first being runner, which made them able to be battle chariots for the queen, since there was no pull speed reduction until really much later, when we were becoming Alpha, their damage was also one of the highest, maybe even higher than queens, allowing them to quite litteraly, fuck everyone and everything very, very quickly and get away with it easily, imagine a ancient warrior...

We also had stunprods, which if you some of you memers remember, where found on ice colony as well, research used to start with them, like, 3? and a bunch of cuffs, this stunned ANYTHING and EVERYONE, for a human, it was like a weaker version of a TG stunprod, for aliens, it was a stunbaton of doom, aliens were often dead by a researcher or a HIT, who would grab them, stun xenos and then murder them.

We had no ERT, only Heavy Infantry Team, which was essentially people in death squad armor and advanced laser guns, this made them tough to kill and very deadly, think there was even a bug where you could get 2, but there was also another type that jones made, which was ANGRY heavy Infantry team, who would rek the shit out of xenos 90% of the time.

There was a L6 SAW, which you could dual wield, too bad it was crap, its damage was too low for it to be worth it.

Because of how the ship worked, there was 2 sides, the left side, which contained research, medbay, security and something weird sometimes, while the right side had the spawn, the guns, the bridge, the briefing, etc, so it was always defended, and holy hell were some fortifications in briefing godly.

Queen and CO used to play ping-pong with each other using shuttles.

Back then, there was no armor deflection on xenos, all of them were essentially armorless, to compensate, their health was gi-fucking-gantic, even a runner would take a lot more than 3 bullets to kill than it does right now (it took like, almost 6 or so, but back then we could fire much faster with rifles), this also meant that the Queen didin't had to spam screech on one person, and could just fuck his shit up with no problem, there was also no pheromones, infact most of the time i never used screech as a queen.

Oh yeah, the queen's screech was a literal ear-rape, it was like a psionic attack and not it actually screaming, 100 volume on with headphones is fun when she screeches.

There was Ammo Boxes and Machine Gun Emplacements, which were glorious, i always loved the ammo box since i often ran out of ammo (don't ask how)

There was no AP ammo, only normal ammo.

Revolver had easier reloading, but Shotgun had a much harder one, you had to click on the box, and manually click each shell and then load it in, it almost made it worthless due to how hard was it to just reload.

People actually rarely got decapped suprisingly enough, and most of the time you would live through a lot of injuries, i don't know how or why, i think its because aliens focused more on infecting than killing, due to much smaller map and easier to travel, and no ancient memery of 100+ damage each slash.

We had no mines, no precious metal barricades, and because of a smaller pop, we were much more organized, and even RPed when having a LO line, no seriously, i would often go behind the line, sit in a chair, chat and drink coffee with Osalaa Wookie, and you know how much usually people forget about you if you get kidnapped? we always tried to help each other, even as far as to rush and point blank a fucking queen, not all of us, but most of us did, especially since every number lost was preety bad for us.

I actually played a lot more CO there than i ever did in Alpha (let alone ever), and one of my briefings...went very well (hint, 8 people died in that same briefing from chocolate)

Pods were small as shit, but because the only strong acid was prae, this would mean most xenos had to wait a truly long time before they could get in if they prae died, so we just often placed a ton of walls when we were escaping, and welded the doors.

Knightnades, enough said.

There was no lifebag for medics, so you didin't always had a huge medical supply with you, and the vendors in medical weren't ever touched, since they didin't had anything really useful and power was out (we couldn't even restore it really), although you almost always had enough medicine for the poor lad that got his shit fucked up...if someone would look back, those supplies wouldn't last long in Alpha.

And to finish it off, it was fairly lovely to assign people and try to get into the same squads as your friends kek!

[Boltersam]

You all covered most of it, but I'll send a tingle of fear and dread down your spines with two words.

Hugger tsunamis.
There'd be an innocent locker blocking the way into the hive. We opened it. Bye bye Alpha squad.

And there was the time I punched a Xeno to death as a HIT, or when the researcher actually captured us for once and we broke out. Stuff like that. I actually remember playing a Spitter on a Sulaco attack. One acid spit meant you'd better rip that armour off or be paincritted.

[Swagile]

I remember playing a /tg/ version of CM (not this one).

I believe it was already discussed, but we literally had C20r's, syndicate clothing + armor (tacticool jumpsuits, etc).

We have no RO or anything and you got assigned your job from the same desk you got your equipment so lines were huge. Like the only round start jobs was the Commander, Cargo, and thats it if my memory serves well.

We had modified box station (what you all call nostromo), and a LOT of things weren't patched out. By that I mean rushing Research and Cargo on the station was a viable tactic because you could do RnD + mine and then make combat mechs. Yes, tactical battle mechs was an actual strategy and you had to defend two locations from hoardes of xenos while someone mined and did RnD before marines could finally push back with mechs.

Then there's the atmosia strategy; push atmos, repair it, then pump the entire station full of plasma. It got so bad that experienced xeno players went to atmosia and acid'd down vital canisters to prevent us from doing this strategy.

My favourite strategy, though, was the disposal FOB. We'd make disposal loop traps, disposal networks across the entire FOB for quick transport, and false chutes that looked like they led somewhere but if an alien took them they'd drop into a unescapeable cage with marines pointing guns on the other side, ready to blast them to hell.

There was so much variety to the gamemode and when people didn't hop on to grief the server, it was hella fun. I still miss the variety of strategies we could pull off and the amazing last stands made by great engineers.

[Halinder]

Xenos used to metabolize chemicals. Since at the time we still had genetics, it wasn't entirely uncommon to see monkeys defending Sulaco medical with hyposprays of chloral hydrate, beating queens to death with fire extinguishers.

You could grow diona nymphs, the type with hands, but they couldn't evolve into the big guys. That said, they could crawl on tables and wield machineguns.

You weren't a true survivor until you solo'd the queen and all of her drones, which was startlingly common.

Engineering was mostly changed cosmetically at the time. We still had the singularity engine, and because our pop now is nothing like it was before, you'd have standard marines in EVA gear hooking up the containment field.

Adding on to the lack of pull reduction, runners used to be able to tackle you and then speed off down the hall with your body, and you'd never see your squad again.

Hivelords used to be able to build resin floors, and could make entire hives out of space. Try fighting in that with bay atmos.

The bomb testing lab was HUGE, and you could fit entire hives in there. Marching through them with Durands was good fun.

At one point, larva would only burst if there was a ghost with xeno prefs on (or the infected had their prefs on). If no one was ready to become a larva, you simply wouldn't burst. Still, it would constantly knock you out and do some damage.

If you ghosted out of a xeno, the only way to get someone into that xeno again was through admin intervention. Some salty marines, after dying, would set their xeno prefs on and go from larva to larva ghosting them all.

Xenos used to nest in the AI core, forcing marines to fight through stun turrets to get them.

Admins OBSESSED over first contact. For a time they forgot that xenomorphs were, well, xenomorphs. So until a xeno attacked you, you found their hosts, or a survivor told you about them (and even then sometimes there would be the "so you're shooting them on hearsay?"), you couldn't attack them. It became a slight meta-tactic for the hive to pretend to be nice to ambush the marines later, and there were times when Queens using psychic whisper would peacefully visit the Sulaco.

[Feweh]

Opening Virology airlock only to have 30 AI facehuggers run out and hug everyone in the 1x1 maint halls.

Good times.

[Joe4444]

Can I join in?

feel free to.