Give xenos King + all major boons at the 2 hour mark.
Its fair and balanced since marines can get godstims that negate almost all damage, all stuns, and even defib you or anti-facehugger before 2 hours, let alone past it. They also have CAS + Mortar and OT rockets / nades / OT mortar shells at this point if any half competent OT woke up.
If none of these features are going to get balanced, then might as well give xenos a chance because right now Queen gaming is rushing the round before 1:30 or else you die to super stims if marines have good support, or die to OT.
No I am not rage baiting, this is a genuine suggestion, because of the meta currently being so skewed to pushing as FAST and as HARD as possible as xeno or you die late game anyway.
I genuinely canât see this as anything other than baiting. Research is a huge category of gameplay on its own, requiring teamwork from Marines and Commands to function. The idea of âbalancingâ research with insane buffs to all xenos for doing nothing is poorly thought-out at best. The xenos also already get a buff at 2-hour mark called King.
Atleast you gotta have researchers willing to do the legwork for those âgodstimsâ.
So it would be only fair to require a âxesearcherâ caste to just get king and major boons.
They wonât, but that is not a reason to give xenos something for free. What if half-competent OT doesât wake up and researchers do jack shit?
In a perfect world OT would be practically removed alongside stims (that arenât bonemending/parasite killing) and Mortar/CAS/OB killing potential (they should be very obvious and almost impossible to not dodge, but should still be available in marine arsenal as area denial, battlefield clearing and such). But this is not a perfect world, so whatever we got now beats bashing the unstoppable rod into immovable object of one OP stuff if somebody gets RNG and some work done on one side and free OP xeno and boons because it is 2 hours since round started.
I hate that this rule of âimprove not removeâ gives somebody a wild idea to sidestep it by âsomething on the opposite side is OP, so give your side something OPâ.
The only thing I can think about fixing the âxenoes have to rush or they dieâ, is to actually give them something to actually hold out for. And right now, unless you do actually rush the marines and force them into a fob siege, you get literary nothing. Nada. Zero.
So as per mentioned before, what you would want is Xeno maturity, albeit one that doesnât require xenoes to just AFK farm in hive, so it would have to be a âglobalâ effect for the hive. So letâs say all xenoes are âdebuffedâ until XX:XX and then become normal, and actually get stronger then they are now after XX:XX. This way you could also argue that the hive hijackingâs before 00:50 would be much harder and games would go on longer.
But as it stands, xenoes do not have a late game. Just a game wonder for when the game is essentially over anywayz
I have been playing actively for months now and the only re-work put towards the Research department did not even nerf them in a significant enough manner.
Could give auto-nuke for marine side at 2 hour mark as well, so it becomes a desperate 11 minute fight till the end for both sides. That is much more interesting than the current meta of waiting for one side to kill themselves on either sides defensive position (Hive / FOB) anyway.
Again read above; literally been playing for months and have not seen a single change that made the insta kill tools or invincibility tools like Stims of marines go down in any significant manner.
Thats how maintainers want it, though, so thats why the state of the game is the way it is. Not much can be done about it.
This is not really a fair argument either because xenos have to work together for caps (sometimes even dying to capture a single person, making it a net neutral benefit to cap), yet they are only rewarded with one xeno that might be a XX runner that dies instantly. Xenos also have to capture both comms and hold them, sometimes on comm locations that are suicide (like LZ-1 comms on Fiorina that is easy to mortar and CAS spam) in order to call for King and even then it is not a guaranteed win since the King player has to be good as well or else a decent marine team can still pull it back (rare but its happened before).
This is my main gripe with the game currently on the xeno side. You are encouraged right now to end games as FAST as possible with the most try hard sweat strategies like instant queen deovi with meta T3 caste selections to try and bypass FOB as much as possible.
If you do not, you basically stand no chance late game due to their special departments; the only thing that really lags behind late game is Requisitions and a good Req can make do with ship deconstruct + using prep vendors to tide the game till 3:00 (3 hours in).
This is fair; giving marines the Nuke as stated above at 2 hours without needing to hold Comms, and a req boost perhaps so they can buy as much as they need for the final battle would be fair.
Not gunna respond to the rest since the rest of the replies do not add anything of substance.
heres a tldr and actual git links as to why xenos are losing as opposed to a 2000 word yap without the thinsgs that are just âlets give them nukes for freeâ
Double burst removal, i have no idea what the pr is because the pr was shadow merged or whatever
Adds the XM51 Breaching Scattergun by VileBeggar ¡ Pull Request #5086 ¡ cmss13-devs/cmss13 ¡ GitHub - Makes most normal buildings useless allowing majority of defenses built by non hivelords or queen BOOSTED building to be literally destroyed instanttly, allowing for more open ground combat in general. Yes open ground helps both sides, but it helps marines more because the walls just get destroyed even if somebody gets built.
Quite literally made it so xm88s can kill things with 4 bullets (considering offscreen because the falloff starts at 7 tiles, so the edge of your screen.
and many more like cas changes that quite literally made it impossible to predict it, the biggest issue with cas being that the âpromisedâ change of it not having NVG forever as per the ui rework was never actually implemented by the maintainer so they always have permanent night vision istead of relying on research to make it which combined wtih the new ui, gives them quite literally about 3-4 screens worth of access without an RTOâs help, reducing overall teamwork.
The techtree just straight up being more useful then the xeno endgame, bar the major evo and larva boosts, not counting king.
Engineers just getting omni sentries for some reason?
IOâs being babied by xenos being stopped from dragging bodies to prevent techtree points being given
Alot of the maps just straight up having very marine-focused comms units, for example the LZ 2 being surrounded by comms on lv624, like engi and north lz2 making it very hard for xenos to be able to hold either. If king can be gotten, majority of the time that round xenos were going to win anyway.
M39 Buff, while not too broken its still really good
Cass GAU buffs
Synth players basically no longer being moderated by the council, and still being as op as they were due to their heavy moderation, resulting in an op role with 0 moderation being just fucking stupid to fight against.
CO weapon
LZ Sentries, yes i do believe that if you cant push out of the fob because your marines are incompetent i think you should be punished for that.
UBS just being a weapon that went from âits supposed to destroy doorsâ to being a fast stun option that people rely on too much, personally i think its a noob crutch but people who are newer at the game usually die to it.
Marine vendors being jsut powercrept to hell again, everyone having access to grenades flames whatever, basically just ârestricted weaponâ powercreep (per req vendors scaling with pop)
Xeno evolve timers being balanced around survivors for some reason, allowing more xenos to die because people go in as drones.
Cades becoming stronger despite costing less materials
This pr literally solved the problems with stimulants, but then the maintainer who reworked research just decided to remove it for some reason?
This is basically the longest i can go without being annoyed by reading the shit on here, hope this helps
Real TLDR; Marines are being powercrept by one siders and nobody is maintaining the xeno side or keeping it up to date, marine players not understanding that somethmes nerfing themselves have a better impact on the game on the long run
This is actually one of the PRs which i thought wouldnât be that big, essentially turn the fucking meta. If you have 2-3 of those on the front, every colony building will just be gone in 10 miniutes, if even. It turned deconstructing walls, which took about a minute each, to 4-5 seconds. And has in turn, made big open areas much more common which is a straight marine buff.
I did not realize it allowed for that many. That is indeed a good point. Do you think it would help we limited it to one or two depending on pop? Or, in the alternative, increasing the time to removing walls?