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Thread: Xeno game design question

  1. #1
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    Xeno game design question

    Xenos used to be weak early game and take a long time to age/evolve but they got immensely powerful the longer the game went. This caused marines to have to do serious damage to xenos early/mid game or they would be overwhelmed and attritioned into defeat.

    Yall then decided to half aging/evo times and reduce the power curve by making young stronger and basically making ancient do nothing. This didnt last long because of mutators, when you nerfed xenos into the ground instead of just removing mutators. You never corrected that so now young is just as worthless or more worthless than ever and ancient still does nothing.

    You then thought it would be a good idea to make marines win the attrition war by giving them defcon which gives them massive reinforcements (including waves of engineers/medics/smartgunners), way more supplies, way more ammo for CAS, and gave tank back LTB. You also added ASRS which makes ammo infinite and gives all sorts of other shit like sentries and can even give entire new specs (imagine if xenos just got 8 t3 out of nowhere). Ontop of all this you made capturing harder with tackle nerfs, you removed combat hugging, and you destroyed neuro so xenos struggle more than ever to get reinforcements. This has completely swung the attrition into marines favor. Any long round will see marines whittle xenos into nothing.

    You refuse to enforce any kind of meta rushing rules or put anything in maps that will prevent meta rushing. You literally put holes in the fog on LV the only map that had meta rushing prevention mechanics so that you could meta rush.

    So my question is why are xenos still so weak at young if we were scaled to be stronger earlier and scaled to be weaker at ancient while making marines win the attrition war? You have literally made the game where xenos lose early and late and arent stronger middle game just not as weak as the other two phases.

  2. #2
    Senior Member Spetr's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MasterShakeEZ View Post
    Xenos used to be weak early game and take a long time to age/evolve but they got immensely powerful the longer the game went. This caused marines to have to do serious damage to xenos early/mid game or they would be overwhelmed and attritioned into defeat.

    Yall then decided to half aging/evo times and reduce the power curve by making young stronger and basically making ancient do nothing. This didnt last long because of mutators, when you nerfed xenos into the ground instead of just removing mutators. You never corrected that so now young is just as worthless or more worthless than ever and ancient still does nothing.

    You then thought it would be a good idea to make marines win the attrition war by giving them defcon which gives them massive reinforcements (including waves of engineers/medics/smartgunners), way more supplies, way more ammo for CAS, and gave tank back LTB. You also added ASRS which makes ammo infinite and gives all sorts of other shit like sentries and can even give entire new specs (imagine if xenos just got 8 t3 out of nowhere). Ontop of all this you made capturing harder with tackle nerfs, you removed combat hugging, and you destroyed neuro so xenos struggle more than ever to get reinforcements. This has completely swung the attrition into marines favor. Any long round will see marines whittle xenos into nothing.

    You refuse to enforce any kind of meta rushing rules or put anything in maps that will prevent meta rushing. You literally put holes in the fog on LV the only map that had meta rushing prevention mechanics so that you could meta rush.

    So my question is why are xenos still so weak at young if we were scaled to be stronger earlier and scaled to be weaker at ancient while making marines win the attrition war? You have literally made the game where xenos lose early and late and arent stronger middle game just not as weak as the other two phases.
    Very, very,very true.

    Xenos will win the game not based on their skill level but more so based on how badly can the tallhosts fuck-up. If the CAS/OB/Turtle are on point and your hive is on point as well, you can't do much but pray they run out of ammo, even with the experienced Beno mains on your side. The only hope for a victory is the Queen's plays

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    Instead of xenos winning the attrition war marines would instead be the one winning it.
    By having cryo reinforcements we tell marines to just go die instead of them being careful since its their only life.

    When i always play queen in LV/Solaris ridge you always have to take a gamble if you want to defeat marines early on and not lose the attrition war. IM forced to deovi since i know if i dont deovi the FOB will just get harder and harder to breach and xenos will just lose bit by bit until you dont have burrowed larva.

    Im speaking here as a person who always play both sides.

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    I think a lot of your points are valid and I have brought it up with the team.
    We're working on a few solutions for attrition already, but I value the comments you've made in this thread.

    These upcoming changes should hopefully answer your question too.

    Thank you.

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    Thanks for this post. We are looking to improve our balancing considerations, and we hope you will see effects soon enough

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    Something not brought up is how cheap mortar shells are, a slight nerf to 30 points for HE and incin might balance the mortar a bit. Would make reliance on asrs drops more. Otherwise xenos right now are totally based on having good players to carry the team, if they die or not in the game or not on there OP build aliens can be in trouble. Other thing is how disgusting flak sniper is, needs to be affected by armor so tier3 excluding the boiler aren�t murdered by it

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    My opinion is that more than anything the ability to actually capture marines has plummeted.

    Tackle mutators are gone, speed mutators are gone, a runner can spend ages tackle spamming a single lone human trying to devour them, actually capturing a marine in the middle of a squad is incredibly hard.

    Neuro is nerfed, you now have to land it a tonne of times on the exact same marine while being fired at, and then walk up to the marine and slowly drag them away while being fired at, which again is now incredibly hard.

    You now need to land a tackle to combat hug, which with tackle chance down and mutators gone is alot harder.

    Throwing huggers remains worthless, as they dont even hug a marine if they land directly on their face when you throw them.

    Carrier/acid traps are destroyed by random stray fire without marines even intending to hit them.

    Marines have started to adopt a meta alot of the time of "just stay behind the cades and slowly expand it while xenos bleed out". When marines are behind the cades the chance of capturing anyone plummets even further, and even perma killing someone is hard. I've seen rounds on LV where the FOB goes all the way from LZ1 to hydro and even into tablefort without a single uncaded gap to try and actually capture a marine.

    The most reliable method at the moment is for a carrier to follow a royal guard prae (or the queen) and hug marines as they get acid spray'ed, but carriers tend to get caught by a nade or rocket sooner or later espically while slowly dragging and die. But the big change imo is that it is now incredibly hard for a T1/T2 to actually capture someone.

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    Senior Member Swagbag's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by MasterShakeEZ View Post

    You refuse to enforce any kind of meta rushing rules or put anything in maps that will prevent meta rushing. You literally put holes in the fog on LV the only map that had meta rushing prevention mechanics so that you could meta rush.


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    Oh and forgot that currently the queen is so central for xeno combat that unless we got godlike xenos and trash marines and tank the queen will need to fight. If the queen cant screech or if she gets memed or makes too many bad choices it can hurt the hive badly. And it is becuase she has a powerful and cant be naded or burn to death. Got to actually fight her with good ol bullets. Would be nice to have a soft whitelist where whitelist queens get first dibs on the roll. Might help insure the xenos balance isnt lopsided due to totally noob queens that never even played ss13 much less xenos.

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    If its any constellation thought, the balance updates have been fighting there own attrition via the skill levels throughout the rounds. I believe what helped cause this wave is the fact that more advanced queen players were at the start of the year. Also the movement tactics have changed, where in example Big Red, you would find battlepoints staged from Lambda/Eta and reach uncommon fight centers (West of Bar, South of Offices, Medbay to Eta road route.)

    The way we played in 2018 left quite a mark, and the changes are reflecting both what would have added to the playstyle meta then, and the currently core players and needs now.

    When the overall gameplay gets more to its middleground ( hive making and preps/Req-Research-PostBriefing etc), I believe we get a unified update strategy that's not so based on the tug-of-war comparison style

    Personally I'd like it if a Queen could effectively "tune" the hive at the right point. Whether that is like special pheromone injection from largely excess stored plasma, or a strain effect gained after elder rank - with again some earned measure; that could be interesting way to softly offset the swing a round may be going.

    Afterall we are just trying to keep things interesting for each other
    Last edited by SunaLova; 09-02-2019 at 09:50 PM.

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