Simple Alien Balance Changes

[killinkyle]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): A few changes to Hivelords/ The Evolution System to make things a bit more fluid and less... Gamey.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): Makes it a bit harder for the aliens to do certain tasks, but retains the purpose of the game being a more high speed high action playstyle.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): Two Simple Changes: Queens, Drones, and Hivelords cannot build within X number of tiles of Uninfected marines. This prevents things like spamming walls behind marines and forcing them into a corner, which is incredibly unrealistic to the source material and promotes super meta.

Secondly; Aliens gain progress towards their Jelly by being near Marines only. Once the first marine makes landfall, alien jelly is locked and they have to actively be near marines to evolve/gain mature, elite, or ancient. To balance this out, make it far faster to Evolve/Gain Status, since you now have to play a more dangerous role and being near marines at all times is rather difficult.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): Hours of tireless coding.

[completelynewguy]

+1 on the first change, neutral on the second.

While I do support the possibility of more combat, it would be completely against the point of the Evolution system (in my eyes anyways.) - to punish the marines for turtling.

[killinkyle]

Its a double edged sword, because Aliens can turtle just as hard as marines do, except Aliens get bonuses for turtling, while marines get... A few fancy weapons to take on ungodly strong hives of death with rows and rows of up to 100 huggers.

[Ithalan]

Its a double edged sword, because Aliens can turtle just as hard as marines do, except Aliens get bonuses for turtling, while marines get... A few fancy weapons to take on ungodly strong hives of death with rows and rows of up to 100 huggers.

Marines benefit from turtling through the additional reinforcements from late-joiners and cloning of casualties. Absolutely -1 on the jelly ticker requiring proximity to marines

I'd support preventing building of resin structures mid-combat if they were made a lot harder to destroy in return, possibly even requiring explosives to breach or heavy melee weapons (optionally with an increase in build time/cost as well). Marines systematically dismantling hive walls with gunfire and knives is just as removed from the source material as mid-combat building.

[Iatots]

Both of these sound quite taxing on the server.

The jelly thing, -1, it's really bad, xenos need to lick their wounds sometimes, and depending on the range drones, hivelords, praetorians, queens and maybe even boiler would be left hanging, especially noteworthy the vicious cycle of young queen staying away from fights because its weak, but not getting to grow stronger because it's away from the fighting.

The hivebuilding aspect, I too am not a fan of the cheesy antics some xenos pull, but I don't see your option being viable.I think a system like with snow would work best, where xenos can click multiple tiles to build X, and have to sit vulnerable for a time depending on structures. I like my idea better because a marine needs to actively stop your building process, his mere presence isn't enough. No drone should have stage fright in front of a braindead marine, or be too embarassed to plop down a nest behind a tree, out of sight, while a marine is actively fighting a hunter five tiles away.

[Boltersam]

This sounds hard to code, and having something to check if a marine is within X tiles near the Xeno...For every xeno...

Laggy.

As for mid-combat building, it's a tradeoff. Xeno structures are much more fragile than Marine ones, but are faster to make.

And once again, you'd need to code in something that checked for uninfected marines within X tiles of a builder caste, for every builder..

In short, both options are very, very laggy, and even if they ran smoothly, I disagree with removing combat building unless the resin structures were tougher, but cost more.

-1.

[Toroic]

The jelly thing will force a lot of strange gameplay from xenos, and I think the downsides outweigh any potential benefits.

I also disagree with limiting building within range of marines because combat building A very powerful but risky technique.

I think this would make playing alien worse for the sake of nervou I think this would make playing alien worse for the sake of nerfing, which is the obvious goal of the suggestion.

If we are going to talk about nerfs I would pick different things

[killinkyle]

I agree with the idea that instead of checking for how many tiles a xeno is to a marine, they have to spend a considerable amount of time to build resin "structures" (Not nests, but things like walls/doors). It's very silly that an alien can just build a wall behind the marines and makes no sense from a lore standpoint that an alien can instantly erect a wall twice their size out of hammerspace. It takes marines time to build things and leaves them extremely vulnerable- Why should aliens be given extra treatment when they have an infinite source of materials to build with?

[Toroic]

I agree with the idea that instead of checking for how many tiles a xeno is to a marine, they have to spend a considerable amount of time to build resin "structures" (Not nests, but things like walls/doors). It's very silly that an alien can just build a wall behind the marines and makes no sense from a lore standpoint that an alien can instantly erect a wall twice their size out of hammerspace. It takes marines time to build things and leaves them extremely vulnerable- Why should aliens be given extra treatment when they have an infinite source of materials to build with?

If that was true for xenos then their structures need to be made a ton more durable. Most marine structures need to be destroyed in melee range, xeno walls are destroyed in a handful of bullets

[Reuben Owen]

Um, aren't these both just nerfs?
You're preventing Xenos from building before where they could anywhere, and you didn't really specify how close 'nearby' is. If you mean they can't build while there's a Marine on their screen, thats horrible. They could be snug behind walls of their hive and unable to make nests for a infected they caught midassault.

The second thing, maybe could work. But you'd have to keep the same jelly rate when they're not near marines. And then when they're near em, it could go up by 2-5 every tick instead of 1. Just note that the Queen's upgrades are not jelly-induced (I think), so it wouldn't affect her. If it really was only jelly goes up 'near' marines, Boilers would never reach Elite or Ancient. Maybe Mature once in awhile.

Really these both seem like a pain and not much fun. -1

[SPACEpotato1]

Um, aren't these both just nerfs?
You're preventing Xenos from building before where they could anywhere, and you didn't really specify how close 'nearby' is. If you mean they can't build while there's a Marine on their screen, thats horrible. They could be snug behind walls of their hive and unable to make nests for a infected they caught midassault.

The second thing, maybe could work. But you'd have to keep the same jelly rate when they're not near marines. And then when they're near em, it could go up by 2-5 every tick instead of 1. Just note that the Queen's upgrades are not jelly-induced (I think), so it wouldn't affect her. If it really was only jelly goes up 'near' marines, Boilers would never reach Elite or Ancient. Maybe Mature once in awhile.

Really these both seem like a pain and not much fun. -1

Queen upgrades ARE jelly induced.

[Snypehunter007]

viewtopic.php?f=59&t=7075#p122569

Locking.