Alien Adjustment I'm thinking of making...

[apophis775]

So, there's a LOT of crying about how aliens aren't strong enough and how people have salty tears after they die.

Thus, here's my idea of a change:

Instead of a timed "growth" process, Larvas instead eat jelly to evolve. The jelly, is produced by the queen, to turn a larva into whatever class the queen wants. The exception being, that larva can ALWAYS evolve into a drone.

The idea is that, this will move the queen to a more support/command role and out of combat, as well as give her the ability to quickly replenish lost xenos and generate strong forces.

For example, say the queen wants a ravager.

She lays a Runner Jelly, Hunter Jelly, Ravager jelly.

A larva consumed the Runner jelly and is stunned for 10 seconds while he evolves, then the Hunter Jelly, and stunned for 20 seconds while he evolves. Then a ravager jelly, and is stunned for 30 seconds while he evolves. This means, a ravager can be evolved 1 minute after revive, instead of the current time.

However, the limiting factor, will be the total population. The more active aliens, the more T3 and T2 jelly that can be laid. My current thought, is for every 5 non-queen aliens you can have: 1 t3, 2 T2, Unlimited T1.


I might need to rethinking the "limiting" system.

Also, the jelly will be produced by PLASMA COST.

Specifically, to make a ravager jelly, costs the full amount of plasma a hunter would have. That being said, all castes minus Queen will evolve and start with 0 plasma. (the goal of this, is to give the aliens themselves some say, as they can dump plasma into the queen to ask for a jelly).

finally, you will only be able to consume jelly, if you are at full health.



Thoughts?

[Azmodan412]

Interesting. It would be remarkably impossible for a hivelord jelly, because they have ~850 plasma capacity.

[Lostmixup]

This would be good to test a bit. I'm not sure how alien players will feel about having their choice in the matter taken away, but this will certainly make the queens job a hell of a lot easier.

[CabooseFox]

I believe this would help with the alien population problem, since a lot of people are turned off by the weakness and high mortality rates of t1 classes. The only problem is that if the alien pop doesn't increase we could see marines stomp as the aliens don't have enough pop to make t3 and t2 aliens

[Lostmixup]

You know, after a quick thought I think I'm all up for aliens being less in number, but way stronger. It could prove more interesting.

[forwardslashN]

Not a bad revision. I'm all for limiting the number of tier threes running about. I do think more should be done to bring aliens closer to their lore, rather than dual wielding hugger slingers. Right now the aliens aren't at all weak, and anyone who says that probably hasn't spent enough time playing xenos. The glaring alien weakness is that they are outnumbered with a bunch of SSDing larva sitting around, rather than fully manned like the marine team. Part of the issue is that larvae require people to play them, so unless there are ghosts observing, after the start of the game, the aliens are forced to infect/kill marines to have someone bolster their ranks.

[Feweh]

Extremely dependent on competent Queens though.

[Siserith Vassada]

this change is neat, however most marine victory's come from shuttle camping, and secondly late round cryo rushes where copious amouts of marines spawn late game and can massive change the tide with a late round hive attack,

xenos however can spam too many high tier xenos recently there was a round with fourteen, you heard right, fourteen, carriers, which utterly roflstomped the marines with no capability to fight back upon landing, this has happend repaidly since, or too many other t3's i think t3's should be tougher but limited in number, theres also a thing with weeds, as they should be xenos are vastly tougher on weeds and marines are weaker, the diffrence is so vast that is can make some fight lop sided but rightly so with the current way this game is played out,

it's really a problem where it's extremely difficult for either side to assault anothers "fortified" position, xenos really should be individually stronger than marines in individuall combat even if it's a single runner, xenos could use a speed boost when running in straight lines,

the skewd balance in game comes from the odd tactic or game mechanic or abuising certain things to gain a upper hand in a way that really shouldnt be possible.

the balance changes week to week as players change in skill level and use diffrent tactics or play diffrently.

[GGgobbleCC]

The current problem is that no one wants to play aliens because they are slow, easily murdered, and barely do any damage-aka shit

By limiting the amount of higher tiers(which really aren't that great to begin with), you then further limit the chance for ayylmaos to make a come back.

Making weird changes to alien mechanics won't fix anything, fixing the overbloated and overpowered marines will net you the best results. (Utter blasphemy to suggest nerfing your beloved marines Apop, I know. Also nice not showing your complete and utter marine bias with the salty tears bit, really professional)

[Davidchan]

I honestly preferred the old hivemind strength method from pre-alpha.

[Siserith Vassada]

yeah, that could work.

[RoswellRay]

I see this as doing more damage than good. If there arenèt many players willing to play alien in a round and we end up with only 5 aliens they lose any chance at become becoming a powerful tier 3 force and having a chance against the marines greater numbers,instead being stuck permanently with low level aliens that will all be whiped out in seconds during a marine attack on the hive.

[Arachnidnexus]

I'd be fine with shifting balance towards lower tiers being more powerful and prevalent and having higher tiers be a "reward" of sort that would be limited in a similar way that specialists are limited.

[Toroic]

I like this idea but you are going to run into issues with favoritism amongst xenos.

As in, halinder may be a ravager the moment marines touch down.

[Arachnidnexus]

I like this idea but you are going to run into issues with favoritism amongst xenos.

As in, halinder may be a ravager the moment marines touch down.

As long as metacommunication and metacliquing using LOOC doesn't occur this shouldn't be an issue. One upside of xeno numbers is that it's hard to do favoritism.

[Toroic]

As long as metacommunication and metacliquing using LOOC doesn't occur this shouldn't be an issue. One upside of xeno numbers is that it's hard to do favoritism.

Yeah, but I hate random numbers because you can't trust anyone to be competent unless you recognize their playstyle. Xenos should trust allies /more/ because of the hivemind. In reality, it's like a team of random baldies. They could be great or garbage.

The current system stops favoritism already because a queen has no reason not to provide jelly to everyone.

What the end result of this change would be is a massive nerf to xeno late game, and make tyrant queens go on even more massive power trips for xenos to "earn" their jelly.

Huge advantage to meta communicate to get fast t3 into the hands of the best players, too.

Like I said, I like this idea but ultimately it has a lot of problems.

[Ninjah!]

For the simple reason that this is a reliable way to get T3's without holding off some aliens to just sit around and wait to evolve.

There are some issues tough as previously stated:
1. Senitels become obsolete. Spitter is just a beter version of the senitel if I'm not mistaken so either Senitels become unusable or some people get stuck with senitel becomes the limit for T2's has been reached.
2. Limits: having a pop dependent limit seems bad, you either have ravagers in Nexus before marines even land or barley anyone to assault Sulaco. A solution for this would be to reintigrate the hivemind strength in combo with the limits comming from population.
3. Queen dependency: this change makes aliens Berry dependant on the queen. A notification saying that it is VITAL you understand how the game works before evolving into a queen might help with this.

Also you probally want to lower the join as larva timer. No one really wants to sit around for 15 minuten just doing nothing (10 Byond minutes).

[Arachnidnexus]

As is a Queen can totally screw over aliens by not producing enough eggs or jelly. This would merely make it even more explicit that the alien success rides on the Queen being at least competent.

[forwardslashN]

What Toroic and Ninjah basically said. It's not a bad idea at all, but that's not the end of it. Given the issues posed in the thread, here are a few more:
1. Forcing people to play certain castes that they may not want to play. Not in a strict sense, but it would largely be up to the queen. This says nothing of actually following her orders after that.
2. Giving a lot of micromanagement to one person without any easy means to carry it out. The queen verb tab, without macroing, is anything but user friendly.
3. Siphoning plasma from the queen for jelly when they could be laying eggs or building up the hive. Most xenos do not donate plasma when they are idle.
4. If the xenos actually DO donate their plasma to the queen for about five minutes straight, you could see a bunch of tier threes running around before the marines even get into briefing. This may not be such a problem with limiting though, so I am uncertain. Xenos can already bounce back from near defeats.
5. The queen is a powerful combat unit when she actually takes the field. Screech + supporting xenos = a massacre. Hiding her away to micromanage takes away from this role.
6. When the round gets going and it's a back and forth battle, there is little time for the queen to actually make jelly unless on demand.

[Ninjah!]

What Toroic and Ninjah basically said. It's not a bad idea at all, but that's not the end of it. Given the issues posed in the thread, here are a few more:
1. Forcing people to play certain castes that they may not want to play. Not in a strict sense, but it would largely be up to the queen. This says nothing of actually following her orders after that.
2. Giving a lot of micromanagement to one person without any easy means to carry it out. The queen verb tab, without macroing, is anything but user friendly.
3. Siphoning plasma from the queen for jelly when they could be laying eggs or building up the hive. Most xenos do not donate plasma when they are idle.
4. If the xenos actually DO donate their plasma to the queen for about five minutes straight, you could see a bunch of tier threes running around before the marines even get into briefing. This may not be such a problem with limiting though, so I am uncertain. Xenos can already bounce back from near defeats.
5. The queen is a powerful combat unit when she actually takes the field. Screech + supporting xenos = a massacre. Hiding her away to micromanage takes away from this role.
6. When the round gets going and it's a back and forth battle, there is little time for the queen to actually make jelly unless on demand.

I'm just gonna give my toughts on each point one by one:
1. Aliens are supposed to follow the queens orders anyway, wheter they like it or not.
2. A certain skill level would be required from the queen but the keys shoudn't be a problem all that much.
3. Again, if you tell one to come give you plasma he has to. If he doesn't just ahelp it and have him orbital'd
4. See my previous post
5. Right now the thing crushing assaults the most is a screeching queen. Forcing her back a bit will likely ballance out some of the buffs granted here. Tough we would have to field test this I guess.
6. Again, forces the queen to be a bit more stationary. Also she can just produce the different jellys in the hive allowing for all larvae to chose their tier 1

[Wickedtemp]

It's an interesting idea, it's new, but I'm not sure if it will actually benefit the xenos in any way, shape, or form.

I mean, for one, we have the population caps. When there are rounds with less than 12 players on the xeno team, what would that mean for the T3 population? Yes, you may have a balanced team within the xenos, but it's in no way balanced against the massive 40+ marine side. Also, the xenos that are unable to evolve to a T3 are doomed to die from five bullets.

I'm not sure what this change will be attempting to fix. You're essentially doing EXACTLY what you did last time. "Marines got a buff, but xenos evolve faster." Now it's "Xenos have the potential to evolve faster, but it's all heavily micromanaged by a Queen. If the Queen sucks, you're out of luck."

That won't change the fact that lower caste aliens die from a few shots, or the fact that marines can out-run every xeno (I think with the exception of runners and crushers) which makes a retreat impossible at times, it won't change the fact that marines can pop up an impenetrable fortress in the hangar in five minutes, and it won't change the fact that xenos are sometimes outnumbered 8 to 1.

This is more or less missing the point. Nobody that I know of is saying "Maybe if xeno evolve times could be shortened even further? That'll fix it!". Out of the MANY suggestions made to help improve xeno gameplay, that hasn't come up. A speed/health buff and individuality are the ones that pop up the most, from what I see.

[forwardslashN]

I'm just gonna give my toughts on each point one by one:
1. Aliens are supposed to follow the queens orders anyway, wheter they like it or not.
2. A certain skill level would be required from the queen but the keys shoudn't be a problem all that much.
3. Again, if you tell one to come give you plasma he has to. If he doesn't just ahelp it and have him orbital'd
4. See my previous post
5. Right now the thing crushing assaults the most is a screeching queen. Forcing her back a bit will likely ballance out some of the buffs granted here. Tough we would have to field test this I guess.
6. Again, forces the queen to be a bit more stationary. Also she can just produce the different jellys in the hive allowing for all larvae to chose their tier 1

More stuff to follow = less fun. We don't have enough people on the xeno team as it is, and forcing xenos to do one thing or another can be detrimental to that. Also, I rather be playing the game as queen rather than a-helping aliens who are disobeying my orders. But that's just me.

[GGgobbleCC]

It's an interesting idea, it's new, but I'm not sure if it will actually benefit the xenos in any way, shape, or form.

I mean, for one, we have the population caps. When there are rounds with less than 12 players on the xeno team, what would that mean for the T3 population? Yes, you may have a balanced team within the xenos, but it's in no way balanced against the massive 40+ marine side. Also, the xenos that are unable to evolve to a T3 are doomed to die from five bullets.

I'm not sure what this change will be attempting to fix. You're essentially doing EXACTLY what you did last time. "Marines got a buff, but xenos evolve faster." Now it's "Xenos have the potential to evolve faster, but it's all heavily micromanaged by a Queen. If the Queen sucks, you're out of luck."

That won't change the fact that lower caste aliens die from a few shots, or the fact that marines can out-run every xeno (I think with the exception of runners and crushers) which makes a retreat impossible at times, it won't change the fact that marines can pop up an impenetrable fortress in the hangar in five minutes, and it won't change the fact that xenos are sometimes outnumbered 8 to 1.

This is more or less missing the point. Nobody that I know of is saying "Maybe if xeno evolve times could be shortened even further? That'll fix it!". Out of the MANY suggestions made to help improve xeno gameplay, that hasn't come up. A speed/health buff and individuality are the ones that pop up the most, from what I see.

Marines can actually out-run runners/hunters/crushers with the next update, they are nerfing their speed

[Wickedtemp]

Marines can actually out-run runners/hunters/crushers with the next update, they are nerfing their speed

... You can't be serious, I knew there was YET ANOTHER POINTLESS ALIEN NERF but the devs can't possibly be that stupid to take away one of the runner's ONLY advantages as an evolution tree.

[Egorkor]

No. I could not even catch up to a runner or a bloody sentinel (weeds tho), so no. Not true.