on the fate of facehugging

[RobBrown4PM]

A) This breaks all sorts of lore and is just dumb. The whole idea behind the Xenomorph is that is reproduces through the violation of other species. It's supposed to be terrifying and puts haste on the victims to see if they can't remove the egg.
B) There's very little annoyance as is dealing with captives. The people who complain about this can't keep their attention on something for more than 5 seconds without getting bored, wigging out or screwing it up through incompetence.

[misto]

sometimes the lores get sacrificed. the lore is sacrificed and compromised in dozens of various ways.
burrower xenomorphs are a cm-original invention.
so are barrel chargers.
does a drone ever instantly morph into a fully functioning queen 3x its size after a few seconds spent shaking in any movies?
do they transport people by swallowing them and regurgitating them?
how long does it take a xenomorph larva to develop and burst, really? hours? about day? and here it is of course sped up, breaking the lores, else it would be useless to the timeframe and structure of the game.

i agree that seeing dudes walking around suddenly drop, shake and pop is cool, and the concept of taking live captures is faithful and atmospheric

but it rarely generates worthwhile gameplay

[Evdakimos]

If body dragging is possible only after defib time, it would still reward xenos paincritting, neurospamming and tacklespamming marines to be able to drag hosts to a safe location just to be able to finish the kill. Frankly, that does not differ much from the current situation - mainly xenos wouldn't need to guard captives and marines won't get their last stand escaping their nest anymore.

i agree that seeing dudes walking around suddenly drop, shake and pop is cool, and the concept of taking live captures is faithful and atmospheric

but it rarely generates worthwhile gameplay

Worthwhile in case of random bursting or worthwhile overall? You yourself wrote that:

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

Infecting, at the moment, involves plenty of meaningful gameplay decision for both marines and xenos regarding how to secure hosts, what to do when infected and how to react to larva playing hide-and-seek shipside. Some of these, if not all, happen every (non-event) round, so gameplay situations regarding infections are not rare either.

"Bitching" is still an issue, I'll give you that. I'd love to see better solutions for getting more positive relationship between the queen and rest of the hive.

[Steelpoint]

Lore is a odd counter argument as we've already irrevocably altered the lore in making the removal of a chestburster a very easy medical procedure with no long lasting consequences.

The existential threat that a facehugger represents becomes nothing more than an inconvenience assuming you can walk to a surgical bay.

[misto]

hmm. reviewing the poll numbers is a bit discouraging. something with such a divided opinion on it would probably not be suitable to apply to the main hive. i hope it gets some use for the corrupted aliens though.

maybe i will try to think of something else, something simpler. would you participate in another poll if i made one? polls are very useful tools for this sort of thing

[Jonesome]

Removing the whole reproduction cycle makes playing against aliens pointless.

[misto]

alright. ive thought of something much simpler and hopefully more elegant. do you suppose i ought to make another thread so that it can have a poll too, or put it on the gitlab, or what?

ok ok.

so we hate having to spend a lot of time imprisoned or guarding prisoners.

but we love the thematic idea of aliens capturing and imprisoning people to make more aliens.

we just dont want to ever actually -be- those people or be the xenos who have to keep them in line.

how to compromise ultra simplified edition

1. hugger k.o. time is much shortened. this is important because the current long hugger k.o. time would interfere too much with points 2 and 3.
2. prisoners can struggle out of resin nests faster. for example, twice as fast.
but
3. nests accelerate larva growth even more than they already do. for example, double even the current rate.

you spend less time imprisoned either way because you'll either pop way sooner, or, because you can struggle out of nests faster, you escape sooner! (good luck). since you can struggle out twice as fast it offsets the nest accelerating the growth twice as much as it already does, doesn't it? so it's a fair trade, isn't it?

nest guards may find it more annoying to deal with people who can struggle out faster, however, but they also have to put up with them for a shorter period of time, so its a fair trade on that front too, isnt it?

you can experiment with this even further. as long as you scale the nest escape speed along with the larva growth nest acceleration bonus, doesn't it even out?

this isnt -removing- the annoying nature of the current system, but it is at least speeding it along

[Steelpoint]

I've added a gitlab suggestion for this idea, I think it merits a proper review at the least.

https://gitlab.com/cmdevs/ColonialMarines/issues/6860

[BeardedWall]

Wrote it in the gitlab, but will summarize here.

I don't like it and the reason is because it will just encourage more viciousness from aliens.
Right now aliens have to make a choice between capturing or killing. Hives that are overly brutal killing everyone often deplete their own reinforcements. A hive that has no captures wont survive and that is great, it makes the interactions between marines and aliens more interesting knowing you might be taken alive and be able to be rescued.

If you implemented this.. no attempt would ever be made to take hosts alive ever. Aliens will just kill everyone. There would be no point in nests, or secure nests. Easier to just murder the person, wait for brain death, then infect them.


The way to make it more interesting would just be to allow marines MORE tools to escape, with rewards for aliens if they capture them again. Fix the current system. You need to do two things.

1. Encourage aliens to capture healthier hosts.

My suggestion: Tie multi bursting directly into the amount of activity that a host does after infection. You spent a lot of time running/struggling/ shooting a gun? Those larva appreciate your elevated heart rate! Thanks for supplementing them. Rewards aliens who capture healthy hosts that struggle, punishes marines that get hugged then run around for 30 minutes. You slashed a guys legs off? Enjoy your single larva. It makes sense lorewise as well. Healthy hosts are better for parasites.

2. Provide nested people something more interesting than just "struggle".

My suggestions: Give marines better tools for escape, let them use their boot knives to saw out. Give them escape knives. Hell allow the fulton to be attached to yourself and allow an extract anywhere. You managed to get up, attach one to yourself and another guy, and then boom you get airlifted out of there. Allow the researcher to collect samples enough to provide marines with a nest dissolving tool for quick escapes. Imagine 4 marines all timing it and escaping at the same time, maybe making a break for it. Allow marines to "play dead". Requiring more guards on more nests OR risk taking a guy out that might be alive still and faking.

I DO like the idea of playing with dead bodies though.. but do something with more risk. For example, larva can now hide inside dead bodies (why not?). The queen can send up some larva in bodies.. which will then have to escape and fight the ship crew. An easy counter off the top of my head is body bags. Larva inside a body bag have to chew their way out. Have it make a noise and a take a bit. The cold of the morgue kills larva. So if they lay in wait too long and get morgued.. they are dead.

[VynalDerp]

I also am posting from the GitLab. Going to reiterate it here, hopefully with less of a wordcount. No promises though.

I agree with the idea of remaking fachuggers, or at least re-evaluating them. It's pretty annoying to be a marine and left for dead by everyone that isn't a xeno, because in spite of the dead facehugger, stripped helmet, and stripped facemask, it isn't obvious you've been infected. The stun is long enough that xenos have plenty of time to drag you off while you're completely helpless.

I don't really agree with the inability to use huggers on conscious marines though - a hugger can only be applied on a downed marine, conscious or not. Exceptions including eggs, thrown huggers, traps, etc. The ability for huggers to be applied allows for teamwork between flooring classes/abilities, like Crusher charge, Queen screech, Pounce, Neuro, etc. and support classes like drone and carrier. One floors, and the other infects, allowing the marine to be dragged off to be killed in high-intensity combat areas or dragged off to hive in lower intensity combat areas. I definitely think the stun time could potentially be reduced. Maybe enough time to devour, but not enough time that it's frustrating for the marine who's involvement in the round is literally out of their control, snd a good portion of the time, over.

Allowing non-defibbable corpses to be infected, I think, is a generally bad idea. With 100+ players on, frequently, and a good portion of them never being revived due to the ever-present lack of medics/first responder kits, Xenos could easily be getting upwards of 30-40 essentially free larva if a round goes on for, say, 2 hours. It sounds like alot, but in a recent round I played I counted somewhere around about 15-20 (In hindsight I may have double counted) non-revivable corpses in the push into a xeno hive, as well as significantly more as I traversed around the map as the round ticked on. I know I likely missed alot of corpses as well, ones that were sent up via the DS that I never even got to see. Consider that most infected sent to medbay are infected via things like traps during a marine push and survive due to xenos having fallen back (or various other reasons). Medbay is usually swamped with patients and end up having bursts because they can't get to everyone in time. Compound this with potentially, on long rounds needing to take care of tons of corpses, all of whom need to be scanned, and many of whom will likely need surgery, and I can't see anyone willingly playing as doctor anytime soon. I suppose they could go through an alternate solution, like burning a body, but I only see that leading to triggerhappy marines with flamers on the ground more than happily burning all the corpses away, defibbable or no.

If I had to revise this idea, the best option would be to make it exclusive to defibabble corpses. But, make it so that if the defibbable corpse went brain dead, then the larva would stop gestating and thus be nothing to worry about. If the marine was revived, though, the larva would continue to gestate as normal. This would mean only a small portion of corpses would actually have burstable larva in them, and thus mass-burning corpses isn't justified, and medbay wouldn't be even more swamped with stuff to deal with. Ideally, xenos would infect defibbable corpses if they thought that marines would be able to recover them as well as revive them. They wouldn't need to bring the marines back to a nest or anything, heck they might not even need to drag the corpse away either, and wouldn't be encouraged to drag marines far off from the frontline before slashing them to death. In theory, the closer to the frontlines, the better. Although it might end up devaluing captures, I don't think it would be by much. Consider that a defibbable corpse is by no means a reliable way to get a burst, assuming the larva stops gestating after brain death. Most defibbable corpses are never recovered and end up going brain dead for various reasons. An actual full-on capture would be much more valuable, pretty much a guaranteed burst if you have xenos guarding nests.

I think, probably the biggest value of this system would be in two ways - an infected marine would not have to worry about being dragged off to a nest and struggling, due to them being dead, and being defibbed means they get to continue the round although with a guaranteed trip to medbay (one they will likely already be taking anyway due to IB, broken bones, or missing limbs, which are very common among dead). Secondly, it would allow xenos who are smarter about captures to play around bald xenos who simply do nothing but slash. If a marine is slashed to death because someone is slash-happy a drone can still infect the defibbable corpse incase it is recovered by marines, at least giving it a chance at turning into a larva.

Another potential positive of the system would be allowing infected marines who are alive (and then die) be able to continue gestate larva while they are defibbable, potentially letting them get to bursting point post-mortem. Corpses are a lower priority (for non-medic marines) compared to living marines, especially ones infected. This would give larva a more decent chance at bursting planetside, rather than in medbay with six marines and two MPs waiting in the lobby. I am going to +1 the idea of marine burst dependent on how healthy they are, with dead marines perhaps taking longer than normal and healthy marines taking a shorter amount of time. Although with the latter I can already feel even more salt coming in from xenos slashing infected hosts in order to paincrit/unconscious them for easier transport.