we must come to grips with certain facts. marines, naturally, hate being facehugged, even if theyve been stunned by whatever means. xenos, too, hate the effort it takes to bring someone in alive and keep watch on them. queens hate having to restrict slashing and face the wall of bitching that results. hive chat is routinely full of complaints of inadequate secure nests. huge numbers of people on BOTH SIDES dislike how facehugging is currently handled.
we have already begun to see experiments in phasing out the importance of hugging, whether or not you want to admit that's what is going on, in the implementation of burrowed larva supply. the slippery slope is already being slid down. let us discuss what the next steps could be.
1. remove active facehugging of conscious marines. "active facehugging" means a player xeno places the hugger on an awake marine. this does not include eggs, thrown huggers and resin holes. ssd or marines fully unconscious for any other reason remain fair game. this paves our way into the next items
2. since eggs, thrown huggers and hugger resin holes can still get people, the KO duration of being gotten by them should be greatly reduced if not downgraded wholly into a brief knockdown.
3. make xenos scavengers of the dead - this will necessitate removing the pull restrictions, of course. (EDIT: HEY PAY ATTENTION! IF THE DRAGGING IS ONLY ALLOWED ONCE THE DEFIB TIMER IS UP THEN YOU CAN STOP QUIVERING IN YOUR BOOTIES ABOUT MISSING OUT ON DEFIBS) huggers can now interact with corpses to produce viable larvae. dead marine mains should pray that their allies recover their bodies for resurrection or else move on into the cryo-ert waiting list. if this makes marines too sad, throw them a bone by extending defib time - recovering dead bodies can be so much fun!
4. multibursting should be removed because rarely is there ever a shortage of corpses. burrowed larva can stay as a sort of virtualized storage space for larvae, but the amount of free larvae received for marine logons should probably be reduced to reflect plentiful corpse supply
5. resin nests should be removed because their only purpose is to keep living people prisoner, which isnt going to be a factor anymore.
6. you can now experiment with making larva growth take a lot longer as a balancing feature because you dont have to worry about a player being imprisoned in the xeno nest for half an hour or whatever you want to try setting it to, because theyre dead now
7. voila. you are now never going to be held prisoner paincritted, neurospammed, or tacklespammed in the alien nest ever again because you're fuckin dead.
8. this makes corpse recovery for defcon points extra important, he he he
9. what about the poor doctors? they need job security! dont worry! since eggs, thrown huggers and resin holes can still get people, your traditional skills remain relevant. in addition, now you have to screen the human corpses that are brought up to make sure they dont have no alien shit growing in them. i expect the crematorium to be getting a lot more use. have fun
what do you think of my genius, elegant solution to the fact that facehugging living people is a feature that basically everyone on both teams hates, while keeping carriers not totally useless
BONUS FEATURE: it also helps make the creatures in this game more distinct from copyrighted entities
ps.1. it occurs to me that marines may desire a way to "process" unrevivable corpses that does not require c4 or shipping it up to a crematorium, im sure that flamethrowers can do the job.
ps.2. if you set the larva growth period to a very long time, it may make it irrelevant to stock the stolen ds with infested corpses to bring up due to the time limit on almayer battles now. whether this is a good thing or not is up to you, but if it becomes an issue you could have larval growth speed accelerate during the almayer fight so that the corpses are not suddenly completely irrelevant
ps.3 if xenos being allowed to drag corpses is too much of a drag, you could work out compromises there. perhaps by making the pulling of corpses laboriously slow so that they are incentivized to stash them near to the site of death, or dragging only being permitted after the defib timer has expired