Alien Caste Shuffle

[Davidchan]

Suggestion Title:Alien Caste Shuffle

Summary : Moving/Cutting Alien Evolutions to better fit the canon as well as better facilitate gameplay. Certain breeds/varieties of Aliens used make little sense or don't fit will with the rest o fhte gameplay. Specifically Tier 3 Aliens (Ravenger, Hivelord, Praetorian)

Benefits : More balanced Tiers would offer a better rounded Alien castes without such dramatic variation of play upon molting from certain species.

Details:

The Ravengers. They are sourced from one (bad) RTS game in which they were created just to be the heavy unit. I dislike them, they don't really fit the Aliens canon. IMO, we should remove them entirely, I know we don't want to trash something people have worked on, but they are basically a stand in anyways.

The Praetorians In every (credible) EU canon, Praetorians were the biggest and most dangerous Xenomorphs save for the Queen. As such, I feel they should be moved from the Sentinel Caste to the Warrior class, replacing Ravengers. Remove their Corrosive Acid and probably their spit as well. I would suggest giving them a short range range stun, akin to the Queen's Screech but make it a Stomp (could even damage the floor tile for extra effect.) In almost all their appearances they are resilient if not immune to small arms fire and almost always require heavy weapons to deal with reliably.

Hivelords I've gone over this before. I don't like Aliens bigger than Praetorians, and especially not anything as big as the Queen, it dimishes her value and effect she should have on the Marines when they find her. Really, I only want to see two things happen with Hivelords. 1) Shrink them down to Praetorian size or a little smaller, being bigger than drones and warriors is just fine by me but it's ridiculous how how we have 2 alien Castes the same size as a Queen. 2) Rename them. Hivelord is misleading and deviates away from what the Drone caste really is, the workers and servers of the Queen and her warriors. Brood Tender seems much more appropiate.

Spitter/Corroder. I feel we should bring back the Corroder as the Tier 2 Sentinel and Push the Spitter up to Tier 3. A larger Plasma pool than the Sentinel and a stronger acid. As Tier 3 Spitters could have Super Acid and their Spit could destroy Marine helmets/Armor or do damage to the marines who failed to dodge it. A Tier 3 ability that put a slime over the floor would also make for interesting traps. A short lasting debuff to a tile (or grouping of tiles) that hamstrings a marine or sticks their boots/feet to the floor, would function similar to a bear trap but without damaging the Marine, Spitters could help ambush marines or split them up.

Empress. Queen Evolution, Empress are Mature Queens and show it. They are bigger, stronger and slower, but better at what they do. An Empress would have a plasma pool similar to Hivelords (~1000-1200) and Super Acid to quickly melt through doors. They should be SLOW, heavy hitters and discouraged from ever leaving their hive without escort. Evolution to an Empress would have an evolve timer like Larva, though MUCH longer. ~25 minutes (1500 seconds) if she stays on Weeds the entire time, up to 50 minutes if she's out expanding her hive away from plasma instead of making her Drones do it. Basically she should have roughly twice the hit points of a queen, but half the movement speed. She's not meant to hunt down humans. One final Ability to add would be 'Ovipositor' which allow her to grow/form the egg laying tube, letting her make eggs at half price, but reduce her speed to slower than a one legged Marine. Tearing free from the Ovipositor would take a minute of her remaining motionless and she'd have to pay the Plasma to grow a new one.

[speedybst]

Actually, within the Accepted canon storyline, there was but a single Empress, and she was no more mature than a normal queen, she was merely a queen of queens. As for the intended speed for her, I'll agree she needs to no be a runner, but making it so that she barely can move doesn't make much sense in a canon sense, as she was able to outrun a flying shuttle in her first appearance in the canon. The rest of that is fine.

You refer to the ravager as nothing more than a placeholder, from a bad RTS and that they are not canonically valid. Actually, they were originally floated as an idea in the production of Aliens, but were scrapped because of production and filming reasons, nothing more. They are considered a canonical creature, and have appeared in several of the Steve Perry novels, on one of the xenomorph "Homeworlds".

You talk of removing a placeholder caste, yet would bring back our worst place holder, the corroder? And keep the same abilities for it? There is a reason it was removed from the game. They were very unbalanced, tended to melt every single marine they encountered and were too easy to become.

As for the Prae, yes, they may have been much large in the canon, we're using them in the sense that they are the more powerful version of the normal sentinal xenomorph, as a logical evolution that fits with the canon, albeit in a much small amount of time than they took to evolve in the cannon.

Now, finally, the hivelord wasn't intended as a sentinal, to sit and keep the marines nice and safe in their nests, they are intended to be more robust version of the drone for creating Hive and nesting points at the front line areas, as opposed to the drone who are supposed to provide for the queen's needs within the nest. As for your point about the sizing, making them that sizes wouldn't reflect the size difference that they're supposed to. As this is a grid-based texture system, they're either as big as the queen, or as small as the humans. Since you like to quote the canon, the defenders of a queen's hive on the unidentified xenomorph world that appears in the early Steve Perry novels were of a comparable sizes to the queen. Lastly, the queen was only 12'-16' tall, which means that she was not as large as you would make out.

[coroneljones]

The corroder....really....they are bugged as hell and can melt SPACE ITSELF!no joke...
Pretty sure the devs will deny the corroder part

[TopHatPenguin]

The corroder....really....they are bugged as hell and can melt SPACE ITSELF!no joke...
Pretty sure the devs will deny the corroder part

Well the ripley can drill space :/

[CampinKiller]

Corroders can literally melt Marines. Which shouldn't happen.

[apophis775]

Denied.