Accelerated Jelly Evolution

[Ninjah!]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): When the humans have retreated the aliens gain faster evolution.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): It'll prevent a stale moment where the Aliens succesfully beat the humans but cannot go any further due to the lack of offensive Aliens.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): Recently I noticed that there's 3 offensive stages for the aliens: Hunting, Sieging the main dome (I honestly have no clue about it's name), Sieging Sulaco. The issue here lies in the last one. Sulaco has a verry alien unfriendly hangar, making it tough for the aliens to break out of it and into Sulaco itself. To actually do this the aliens would require to have stomped the defenses in the main dome at the colony without taking any casualties in the higher tiers. Otherwise they're stuck with 2 choices, A) wait untill the lower tiers finally evolve (which currently takes verry long) or B) still charge Sulaco and get destroyed.
This addition will allow the aliens to recover from the assualt on the main dome if they managed to infect enough people. It will also give the marines an incentive to make a counter attack if they have enough forces. If they don't have enough forces they have the chance to setup defences which would make for another interesting battle to finish the round.
For balance reasons the acceleraction should be x(?) the normal speed (I don't know what would be best here, I guess science will have to be done). Also it should check to be past the 1 hour mark so the marines aren't faced with 5 ravagers 10 carriers and a praetorian when they land.

ADDITIONAL: Some time between the leaving of the humans and the acceleration would be nice so marines regrouping on sulaco for a counter attack isn't massively punished.

ADDITION #2: After reading some reply's it seems like it would be best to setup the delay timer for it to kick in and the factor by which the speed gets upped should probally be finetuned so that staying and growing is an OPTION for the aliens. This means that once the marines retreat the aliens have the choice to press the attack or wait and let the marines set up but get additional tiers. Right now the timer is so slow that waiting isn't an option at all.

ADDITION #3: As a counter buff: add the option for the marines to disable all shuttle flights comming in. This way they too can decide wheter they want to fight now or setup and lick their wounds first.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): We already have code for checking for live and unhugged marines so slight adaptions to this script so it checks the colony Z-level (and also for the predators?). Then is would be just using the code for the larva's evolution and slightly adapting that. I ain't no coder tough so that might all be impossible.

[Jeser]

-1 from me. This time is needed to treat injured marine and ressuply, while aliens involving and preparing. Things pretty balanced right now, no need to change that.

[andre1999]

-1 from me. This time is needed to treat injured marine and ressuply, while aliens involving and preparing. Things pretty balanced right now, no need to change that.

Did you read it fully? Cuase that's not what he said, he was talking about when the marines retreat to sulaco and don't come back down due to their FOB being overrun.

+1 here.

[Jeser]

Did you read it fully? Cuase that's not what he said, he was talking about when the marines retreat to sulaco and don't come back down due to their FOB being overrun.

+1 here.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. When marines making full-retreat from planetside, hangar area usually has nearly 10 full bodybags and Medbay has up to 20 marines with broken ribs, hands or in queue to embryo removing. Delay between full-retreat and aliens invading is needed: for aliens to gain power; for marines to get treatment and resupply.

And I'm not even talking about situation, when 1-3 aliens sneaks on leaving shuttle, making slaughter on it. In that case, there will be even more corpse for cloning.

[Ninjah!]

That's exactly what I'm talking about. When marines making full-retreat from planetside, hangar area usually has nearly 10 full bodybags and Medbay has up to 20 marines with broken ribs, hands or in queue to embryo removing. Delay between full-retreat and aliens invading is needed: for aliens to gain power; for marines to get treatment and resupply.

And I'm not even talking about situation, when 1-3 aliens sneaks on leaving shuttle, making slaughter on it. In that case, there will be even more corpse for cloning.

That's why I added in the additional time between departing and the acceleration kicking in. This gives the marines plenty of time to recover from the assualt and setup defenses. With acceleration I don't mean that after 2 minutes you have 6 ravagers (see original post).

[Jack McIntyre]

Jeser does have a point, granted I would say that marines if we got regeared should make another push planet side and some marines do try that it if we actually have the numbers, but I can tell you last night for example when bravo squad withdrew from the alien hive where both sides had duked it out and had been bloodied it took a while for me to help them get the supplies to rearm at the FOB, and get their wounded treated at the med bay on the sulaco which was another annoyance because no one was sending the drop ship to the planet to pick them up. So you have a good point, but I think it can cripple the marines if the command is not done with some basic knowledge of how to actually do the job. Now if the marines just abandon the planet it is completely alright with this to stop marines from just camping the sulaco unless of course they don't even have the numbers for a assault. So I guess I'm netural on this.

[Ninjah!]

Jeser does have a point, granted I would say that marines if we got regeared should make another push planet side and some marines do try that it if we actually have the numbers, but I can tell you last night for example when bravo squad withdrew from the alien hive where both sides had duked it out and had been bloodied it took a while for me to help them get the supplies to rearm at the FOB, and get their wounded treated at the med bay on the sulaco which was another annoyance because no one was sending the drop ship to the planet to pick them up. So you have a good point, but I think it can cripple the marines if the command is not done with some basic knowledge of how to actually do the job. Now if the marines just abandon the planet it is completely alright with this to stop marines from just camping the sulaco unless of course they don't even have the numbers for a assault. So I guess I'm netural on this.

Made some additions based of your and Jeser's reply

[Jack McIntyre]

I like addition three, would also allow marines to know that it wasn't command that send the shuttle or some survivor on the planet so it could remove or help with the whole meta rule. So I like the additions, I would be willing to try this a few rounds to see if this is something we would want to keep.

[Mycroft Macarthur]

-1

it may suck that aliens have to wait forever for their lower tier members to evolve, especially if too many die early on, but allowing them to suddenly show up after a brief period with a metric fuckton of tier 3's WAY sooner then would be the case now would be the same as giving aliens the victory on a silver platter, if you want to win you better earn it and if the marines slaughtered you on their own ship then thats too fucking bad, there are 3-4 different sets of ladders to attack from and i guarantee not all of them are being guarded very well, PICK ONE, this is made worse by the fact that marines currently have a shortage of flamers (due to flamers being spec only) and marines having no way to get new specialists mid-late game in spite of needing them specifically to deal with tier 3 aliens, never mind this will make it even HARDER for exhausted marines returning from the surface, in effect this will force marines to never ever roleplay again because it will force marines to behave in a very powergamy way.

howso?

doctors will have to stop prioritizing surgery and treatment based upon who is wounded the most and start prioritizing players who are simply better because so many marines need MULTIPLE surgeries it can be difficult to treat them all in an expedient manner even now, marines will have to adopt a very greedy attitude because they NEED every second to go get food, fresh magazines and mods for their weapons and we'll have to start punishing marines who roleplay because marines who are roleplaying are marines who ARENT fortifying the sulaco by planting tables, mines, creating barricades and shit like that, because if we dont we're going to get steamrolled by the infinite wall of tier 3 aliens every damn time.

i can understand why you'd be impatient, aliens hardly have anything to do as is which isn't combat related and now that whisper is gone we cant even troll the humans we captured anymore, but cutting out the waiting period will fuck up the gameplay mechanics, so either wait and take it like a man or rush the marines early and take your chances.

[K0NFL1QT]

Sulaco has a verry alien unfriendly hangar, making it tough for the aliens to break out of it and into Sulaco itself.

This is untrue. Marines can't set up defenses anywhere in the hangar, and there's at least two other pathways out of the hangar and to the upper level that do not require going through the ladders. You can go up through Cargo, or up through Engineering. Also, Telecoms is on the lower level and for some stupid reason the APC is accessable from the outside so Aliens can slash it and disable comms easily. As a primarily marine player, I'd say the hanger is very much weighted towards the attackers favor. Speeding up Jelly evolution would just make Aliens steam roll even harder at the early and mid-game stages, and then be utterly unstoppable by the end-game because of an excess of T3's.

[GingerCultLeader]

A good alien invasion of the hangar or if they go through Engineering can be a complete slaughter for the marines. Especially if some xenos don't kill infected hosts.