A Solution for Queenless Hives:

Development Ideaguys
1

A common problem for xenos on low/deadpop (and sometimes mid and rarely highpop) is nobody wanting to become a queen, and an unwilling player required to fulfill this game necessary role being pigeonholed into not having fun for the next hour. So… if nobody wants to go queen, and the only way to have a round is to solve the mechanical and power vacuum having no queen presents, so how can you do this?

So, here’s my solution:

3 minutes into a round without a roundstart queen player - a minute before passive evo disintegrates - a vote is cast across the whole hive to become a queenless hive. If this vote passes with a 75% majority, the following happens;

Every hive member is transferred to the Forsaken hive.

  • This comes with a host of benefits, primarily in increases of health and armor for individual xenomorphs (as per Hive Additions, Part 1; Hive Stat Modifiers + Making Forsaken Threatening by TheKillfish · Pull Request #10987 · cmss13-devs/cmss13 · GitHub) and helps offset for the lack of a queen presence against marines.

  • On top of this, a set of four (forsaken) leaders are automatically assigned to random hive members.

    • Forsaken leaders are able to be tracked just like regular hive leaders, can emit (moderate) pheromones autonomously, and have access to the hive construction ability, letting them place cluster and egg morpher blueprints.
    • Forsaken leaders are also the only xenomorphs with access to the tacmap, and are the only xenomorphs that can call hijack via the dropship computer.
    • If a chosen leader does not want to stay a leader, they can abdicate in the Alien tab to assign a leader to another random player in the hive. Doing this lets them select the next leader in the hive, or randomize the next leader. Performing this takes a 5-10 second doafter.

The leader system comes with the following set of drawbacks:

  • Forsaken leaders are visually communicated to marines. (How this is done is not too important, but ideally a noticeable sprite alteration, like a purple jewel on a leader’s cresthead).

  • When a Forsaken leader dies, it takes 3 minutes for a new leader to be assigned at random.

  • When a leader dies, the hivemind is disrupted, and xenomorphs lose access to their tracker and radio for a period of 90-180 seconds. This makes targeting leaders meaningful, and encourages the hive to select and abdicate based on frontliners, and group up on their leaders and protect them.

  • If all Forsaken leaders are dead, the hivemind shuts off for a total of 10 minutes, and leader reassignment is delayed by five extra minutes.

  • In exchange for the general buffs the hive gets, and a combined ability to be autonomous, the hive loses access to royal resin and King. Hive pylons can still be built- but they only provide the regular CAS immunity and lesser slots.

This shouldn’t have an impact (primarily due to the vote) on mid/highpop player counts, but should provide a meaningful alternative to lower player count rounds where fighting xenos doesn’t feel like it rests entirely on killing one member, and fighting marines doesn’t rely entirely on the competency of one player.

Please give feedback, or just reply if you hate the idea and want me to pass away peacefully.

6 Likes
2

The idea has potential…..but there are a few minor and major problems with this. I will at least point out some of the obvious ones that come to mind after reading this.

  1. Xenos might purposely want to trigger this mode because you made it OP. How do you stop it?

  2. Some go queen because they feel the pressure to stand up when on one else will. This idea will lead to less willing to go queen. Sadly I don’t think this particular problem is solvable by your idea.

  3. Removal of queen from the round is huge, especially with a minimum number of xenos. How will you be adjusting the benefits of xenos? Will it scale with pop? Losing 1 queen to buff 30 xenos is a bit different than buffing 5 xenos. At highpop it might be better to start with no queen. Also keep in mind it doesnt take much buffing to turn a T3 that occasionally dies to sadar etc into a T3 that no one can kill.

  4. Leader assignment cannot be fully random. Having some XX die and disrupt the hive is annoying to say the least. Or an afk xeno gets it. On top of that, some classes also do not have, or have little plasma. Is the hedgehog rav with no plasma the one getting build options? Or is the hivelord who sits too far back out of the fight for the pheros to matter the one to get it? There should also be auto reshuffling of leaders depending on what classes evolve. Don’t just keep it on the runner the whole game. Or maybe one backline class gets it as there is no queen to give a leader to the backliners, but still needs to shuffle when it gave it to 4 runners at the start. Sure xenos can get rid of their leader but the system should at least try to be smart to avoid potential problems.

  5. Reconsider the pylon’s royal resin, or at least King. King exists to break the stalemate where xenos cannot break into fob, and yet marines cannot leave fob.

  6. There are certain combinations of xenos getting leader that you just made to be really broken, although it is hard for me to think of all edge cases. For now I can think that you just made a burrower capable of hijacking the dropship, and a runner/lurker who made it shipside can run around placing cluster and egg chamber combos all over the ship, allowing for infinite huggie shipside fun.

  7. new xenos rely on tacmap to navigate the map, or they hang out with queen. Removing their tacmap for the whole round so they can only follow random leads isn’t wise.

  8. Right before you die as a xeno leader you can just abdicate the role, avoiding the leader death punishment. At least this can be easy to fix: you have to be full health to remove your lead.

  9. Someone has to code this, and it is not a quick and easy idea to code, let alone take the iterations to balance it properly.

2 Likes
4
  1. Xenos might purposely want to trigger this mode because you made it OP. How do you stop it?

A poplock would be the obvious solution (and would solve problem #3 by proxy). This is ideally something aimed at midpop and below, as that’s where lack of a queen becomes a common problem, though I think it’d be really hard to reach a balance state by accident where a hive is better off without a Queen with the way the role has been designed for so long.

  1. Some go queen because they feel the pressure to stand up when on one else will. This idea will lead to less willing to go queen. Sadly I don’t think this particular problem is solvable by your idea.

Yes, and I feel like that’s the exact problem I’m addressing: people feeling obligated to play a role they don’t want to, but the game’s balance dictates as entirely necessary. It might be bad to discourage people from playing Queen a lot of situations, but I think most everyone would appreciate having the option to forgo needing a queen if nobody is willing to especially considering this absolute necessity isn’t shared by XO/CO roles.. If a player wants to go up against the odds and play the role, all they have to do is queue it, or take the role up roundstart. I doubt we’ll reach a consistent point where xenos would rather not have a Queen in the hive and are willing to dissuade people outside of the novelty of trying this mechanic out.

  1. Removal of queen from the round is huge, especially with a minimum number of xenos. How will you be adjusting the benefits of xenos? Will it scale with pop? Losing 1 queen to buff 30 xenos is a bit different than buffing 5 xenos. At highpop it might be better to start with no queen. Also keep in mind it doesnt take much buffing to turn a T3 that occasionally dies to sadar etc into a T3 that no one can kill.

As stated above, a poplock would be the easiest and most elegant way to go about this. Queens are not lacking in highpop and midpop, and the more xenomorphs there are, the easier it becomes to offset the mistakes a queen makes, making the round impact on a queen dying a lot lower.

  1. Leader assignment cannot be fully random. Having some XX die and disrupt the hive is annoying to say the least. Or an afk xeno gets it. On top of that, some classes also do not have, or have little plasma. Is the hedgehog rav with no plasma the one getting build options? Or is the hivelord who sits too far back out of the fight for the pheros to matter the one to get it? There should also be auto reshuffling of leaders depending on what classes evolve. Don’t just keep it on the runner the whole game. Or maybe one backline class gets it as there is no queen to give a leader to the backliners, but still needs to shuffle when it gave it to 4 runners at the start. Sure xenos can get rid of their leader but the system should at least try to be smart to avoid potential problems.

This is fair. The encouragement of a random system is to give unlikely people an idea of what it’s like to play queen without necessarily being the round’s only clutch. You give tactical orders, callouts, pheromones and generally have more of a round impact than the other members of the hive with your ability to place clusters and the like.

A good way to give more people agency in what castes get leadership would be to set it to a collated vote like King, but instead of selecting the first highest member, selecting the four highest instead.

  1. Reconsider the pylon’s royal resin, or at least King. King exists to break the stalemate where xenos cannot break into fob, and yet marines cannot leave fob.

Also fair, though I don’t have many comments either way. It mostly exists as a concession to the powercreep that is giving all current xenos forsaken stats. I’d rather xenomorphs not have access to something that might arguably be better than Queen with no meaningful detriments.

  1. There are certain combinations of xenos getting leader that you just made to be really broken, although it is hard for me to think of all edge cases. For now I can think that you just made a burrower capable of hijacking the dropship, and a runner/lurker who made it shipside can run around placing cluster and egg chamber combos all over the ship, allowing for infinite huggie shipside fun.

This might genuinely call for some kind of resource similar to royal resin or some other requirement that prevents burrowers from cheesing the game, but at the same time- I can’t really find the specific fault in a lot of castes having potentially broken strategies if it comes in exchange for Queen. Lurkers being able to make clusters autonomously is something I’d genuinely be interested in seeing in a match. It might call for stricter limits on where and how many egg morphers can be built for forsaken hives, though.

  1. new xenos rely on tacmap to navigate the map, or they hang out with queen. Removing their tacmap for the whole round so they can only follow random leads isn’t wise.

Making forsaken rely on leaders for directions is partly informed by how Queen plays off ovi, and the balance surrounding it. Forsaken don’t really have a push/pull the way Queen does- but removing tacmap might be too much of a swing in the opposite direction when it comes to keeping this fair for marines. The other intent of this is to also prevent scattering the hive too much, and encouraging xenomorphs to bunch up on leaders and to make them meaningful (and meaningful to target) outside of the pheromones and constructions they provide. Probably too much either way, and given the population levels this mechanic is targeted at, not really necessary.

  1. Right before you die as a xeno leader you can just abdicate the role, avoiding the leader death punishment. At least this can be easy to fix: you have to be full health to remove your lead.

Answers itself, but also why I gave it a doafter.

  1. Someone has to code this, and it is not a quick and easy idea to code, let alone take the iterations to balance it properly.

Nope. But it’s also an everpresent issue with CM at low/midpop and consistently a source of xenomorphs being unfun to play (among a lot of other things). It’s also good practice to introduce and see ways Queen can be phased out of the current gameplay loop without destroying xenomorph balance.

Obviously considering I’m putting the idea forward I’ll also be planning how this would work from a technical standpoint, which is why I’m workshopping it right now.

Thanks for the input, very valuable.

2 Likes
5

Idea sounds hella cool hope it gets traction and balanced so what kind of hive type marines face is unpredictable.

Theres been a mechanic where too many humans planetside prevents a hijack so that shouldnt be an issue.

Super curious how the lurker egg strat could go as rarely does morphers work shipside but otherwise could promote a more intense bughunt.
Mechanical prevention? Maybe they’ll need a bursted body to create it, smuggle one planetside or raid the morgue

EDIT: forgot to mention, a limited pool of morphers already being used planetside would prevent too many being placed shipside

2 Likes
6

I really like this idea, I think it has potential.

Although instead of having random leaders, you could set aside a certain amount per hive role. So 1 or 2/4 can be drone caste, 1/4 backliner, 1 or 2/4 frontliner, etc

2 Likes