I’ll try to keep this short because of the average attention span of CM players
Jingles a keychain in front of you
So recently I started to play research.
They got an amazing system for making improved splints, armor upgrades, autodoc upgrades, etc.
But it never gets used because the resources you use (xeno organ juice) can be turned into points for making stims (which is a different resource).
So the meta is to save up xeno juice points to spend it all converting it into stim points so you can make godstims.
I know there is a discourse about stims being OP right now (from the xeno players pov) or that it is too RNG (from marine players point of view), but wouldn’t keeping those two resources separate more healthy for the game? That way research does more cooler shit than just rolling dice till they get a godstim.
Dunno, I’d like to hear other players opinion in general, as I said, I just started to learn research, and I’m just sad to see a cool mechanic like being able to manufacture experimental shit thrown out for just more stim points.
PR is in dev hell for now with the research rework PR up tragically, I’ve been wanting this merged for so long… just imagining actually getting nanosplints as a HM… peak…
OMG, my pr is getting noticed by Stalin senpai UwU ?!?!
(btw, it doesnt nerf godstims in any way. It just changes HOW you get chempoints. It migth even give more chempoints. Im working in the number range 1-4 there. Its hard as balls to balance.
Also i need to scrap that pr and make a completly new one after Kivts rework is merged. They dont work at all together.)
So like I remember that being tested with our new system. It in fact ended up making Godstims better.
Towards the OP.
I was a research main like 3-4 years ago. It used to be you could do multiple projects then the dev team tried to crack down on stims which lead to them only being able to do one project and that project usually became stims.
Over the course of the failures to utilize pattern recognition and crack down on things it’s only really ensured that marines have a higher chance of getting them. The other things research can do is only situationally useful and you know research now HAS to divert it’s resources back into one project so a lot of the time the other things get overlooked because why wouldn’t they?
Once you learn the synthesis machine some more you’ll be able to play around with minmaxing point spends to eke out an extra chemical or buy more biomass stuff.
The stim heads will spend 80-90 points on OMB8 NST8 NGN10 ACR10 HDN1 NRS1 etc etc, but all you really need is 30-40; NST1 (amp to 4-5), HDN NRS, NGN8 if you’re feeling fancy, with a neutral thrown in there (OMB1, NTR1, AHL1) to keep the amps cheap.
That’s around 12000 biomass in disks if you want to do it right when you hit 5X, as long as you keep that banked you can do whatever you want with the rest.
For lowpop BTW don’t even bother with stims, just make chemical weapons and bioprinter stuff. The round 100% won’t last long enough for stims, and you won’t get any corpses.
While I find lists to be a cool way to quickly make a point, I have to disagree on that part, while stims are still very powerful and still need actual more nerfs, they are already much less oppressive than what they used to be (you can’t stack NST/MST anymore, huge). A lot of research mains, which I suppose includes me, nimiety and more despise stimulants for how they pollute the research meta.
On another note, I think all this talk about finding a way to make stims more expensive, harder to get ingame etc to be a bit pointless, what ought to be done is to make these powerful properties come with hard coded downsides to reflect how dangerous stimulants are IRL especially when abused.
This could range from heart/brain damage unable to be healed by chemicals, addiction, muscle tears, seizures, vomiting and much much much more. You need them as to stop marines from chugging stims if they are abundantly made by research.
Taking a stimulant should be an active decision to gain a quick advantage over your enemy, not some passive stat buff that you just refresh from time to time with a new pill.
Yeah, it has been bothering me for a good while. Because research can just make a stimulant in an hour, that does so much revolutionary shit, WITHOUT ANY DOWNSIDES. Like imagine if meth (panzerchokolate) just didn’t have any downsides. That’s what research stims are.
Give me addictions. Give me overhealing into cancer cells. Give me severe muscle mutations since my arm heals up in less than a second.
While stim side effects are a worthy thing to discuss, I just don’t think you can realistically make them severe enough to counterbalance the stim oppressiveness. If me and my 30 marine buddies can stim up and kill the hive in 10 minutes, do we care that say 30% of us would die in 15 minutes, then be revived by the medics?
I think if stims are kept in the game, the only realistic way is adding scarcity to them. Since we’re doing biological research, make stims require chemicals produced in xeno bodies in limited quantities, say each xeno body has only enough for 3-4 stims.
You can even go further and tie different effect chems to different xeno castes, like you can only get bonemending from crushers, NST from queens, MST from ravagers. Maybe the lower tier xenos should get the stim chems too, but a T1 corpse only has 1/2 of a portion, and T2 has 1.
Since milking the corpses is going to be tiresome, research should get some kind of xeno body chem extraction machine, so they can just throw the corpses in it and everything gets transferred into a centralized dispenser.
This also would add a new reason to breed corrupteds, some potential for research causing incidents shipside, so that would need to be balanced too.
On the unga side, this would make stims a very limited resource that marines would have to use tactically. And xenos can just wait them out, since they know that they’re not unlimited.
The downside is that this approach would a have distribution inequality problem, akin to the old “command giving spec kits to metabuddies\robustos”.
Further thinking about such a system, here’s some more ideas:
Since some people may point out that xeno bodies requirement may make the stims too scarce, what if research had some supply of a chemical that allows you to dilute the stims you have 2 times. Maybe allow even more, by making it dynamic? Req would be able to order more of that chem, but it’s gonna be really expensive.
But, of course there’s a catch. Lets reuse another pet idea of mine, which is adding a permadeath chance. What if any pure stims would give you a 5% perma chance on death. But, a diluted stim would start at 20% and even more, scaling with as much it was diluted.
Imma break it own.
As long as research gets any kind of interaction with xeno corpses we will get xenotears 24/7 because xeno A will get punished because xeno B, C, D, E… died like clowns and then researchers harness the rewards off the corpses just to indirectly beat the shit out of xeno A which kept himself alive through most of the op, then xeno A and whatever xeno was left alive will bitch and whine in the forums and Dchat because “STIMS BROKEN THEY JUST INJECTED THAT SHIT AND THEY RAN STRAIGHT AND ME ANRASDOMASMDOMSA”.
That’s because corpse dependant stims are either accidentally or intentionally designed to punish xenos as a team. So xeno A will get the stick for something that isn’t even his fault (5 T3s and 11 T2s dying and gifting biomatter), much like how rines lose landside because some 8 robusto wannabes thought they were the new tank moore just to get solocapped in the backlines.
So honestly you gotta start from the very beginning in order to get a decent answer:
You want xenos to be a team? If that’s the case then punishing them as a team it’s the intuitive answer, if the answer is no then you’re in for a BIG rework.
Xenos statwise are stronger than marines, that’s why there are more marines to balance them out. However, xenos can kill marines OR they can cap them, which adds one more xeno to the xeno side. Marines have to kill a xeno, hope that it doesn’t gets gibbed, they take it to research and then researchers rip out their organs for biomass. Something noteworthy is that while marines get more steps in between they aren’t really risky steps to take, the usual gameplay loop is trying to kill each other to make the numbers of the other drop to zero, like that you win, but if xenos want more out of each individual victory they gotta try to capture a marine alive, which is noticeably harder than just take to the almayer the side-product of the usual gameplay loop. Maybe there is the answer, you could try to make it harder for marines to get corpses in order to get additional benefits from fighting, maybe you could make xeno gibbing more frequent or you could implement a “body is too damaged to derive biomass” feature unless marines jump through some hoops in order to get a salvageable corpse.
Or maybe xeno deaths shouldn’t have additional consequences, but given that the game is supposed to be even-ish in terms of winrate (If I’m not mistaken the idea was making xenos win about 60% of the time) just removing the benefits that marines get from research will make marine winrate sink through the floor. So you must think on an alternative. Maybe xenos can’t get salvaged for biomass but there is more research intel in the ground and marines get an additional IO (also you could make it so regular marines suck at gathering intel but you also buff IOs skills and gear for being more efficient at gathering intel, a common xeno complaint is that anyone can gather intel, if you make this then you make it evident to xenos that there IS a counterplay to research, and it would be killing IOs).
Also on a sidenote, the only truly useful and/or reliable buys from the biomatter reclaimer really are research credits and ceramic plates. Autodoc upgrades unironically suck, doctors and nurses play med roles because they wanna interact with marines, the autodoc upgrades make their existance meaningless (unless almost the entire medical department deploys, but this strat is yet to be polished, mostly because I’ve never seen it done), but on top of that there is a better alternative to autodoc upgrades, and it’s stims again: IB? Hemostatic lvl1. Bones broken? BNM lvl4. Pregnancy? APS lvl6. Organs fucked? This is the only valid one, there are properties for fixing organs but they are like pokemon, you gotta catch them all or you gotta hope for the legendary roll that HGN is. Almost all plates suck (except the translator, but you can also replace it with a stim lmao). And god knows how incinerator tanks are, but the “research making fun stuff for flamers” is complicated because it’s absurdly expensive most of the time and then you need req to buy a ton of expensive as hell flamers because those are needed in order to make use of what research cooked, the issue is that by that time, req tends to be dry on budget, so your xeno-killer-fire-4000 will go to waste because maybe only some 6 guys can use it by the time you pump it out, and let’s not talk about the xeno laughing gas that research can cook, it’s the coolest idea and yet it sucks HARD, it kills marines through 8 IBs, it melts their coveted helmet with stolen NVs from dead IOs, it’s an FF machine, it’s absurdly expensive and it’s not even good at fighting xenos (not a single one of the properties harm xenos).
A chance to grow an extra appendage that randomly attacks nearby players.
@sg2002
I’ve never really liked a roll for big negatives to happen. I think it should deffo do damage or cause significant harm, but i dont think itd be fun for anyone to get round removed on a %chance roll.
yeah it’s also an issue with “win-more” as killing a xeno is already a positive outcome on its own for marines, and now you are getting stims on top of that. And as opposite, it’s “lose-more” for xenos, you lost a xeno and now gonna suffer stims.
Not to mention every 4 months they rework it or break it entirely. So its constantly a mismatch strangeness
Ill never forget the massive complete research rework that relied heavily on IOs finding recipes… then having defcon and IOs removed like a month later.