Set up Xeno evolution so that all Xenomorphs must first evolve into a Drone before they can evolve into any other T1 xenomorph.
To compensate for the change the evo time to go from a Drone to any other combat T1 should be reduced from 60 evo ticks to 20-30 ticks.
The idea behind this is to better encourage more Xeno players to evolve into a Drone initially before making their choice of evolving into a Combat caste or becoming a T2 support xenomorph.
I suspect we’ll be more likely to see more people at least dip their toes into being a support role if it was mandatory to first evolve into a support drone.
Weird idea. If I don’t wanna pay drone tax I won’t. Even if you force me to evo into drone. You are already “encouraged” to evolve into drone because other castes aren’t available for about 5 minutes. Yet some people still just afk for their evo. This won’t solve anything but will annoy people.
Sadly i concur with ihatethisengine. trying to encourage more drone/support xenos this way is not going to work out that well. like how its set up now there is really not much of a reason to not go drone round start but you still get a Lot…no most player don’t pay there drone tax.
also drone tax builds are always wonky, always too many doors and one tile halls.
frankly i think a better way to get players to play drone or tip there toes into it is to give them a new t3 line or let the drone line go into Praetorian.
The concept of being able to evolve into a drone, then devolve back to larva, is not extreamly well communicated as a mechanic until its stressed, ergo making people have to evolve into Drone may help introduce people into the role in a more natural way.
We have to remember a fresh new player is going to have no clue how anything works, so if they are forced into the role of Drone it’ll be better than someone in hivemind screaming Drone Tax which infers no real information.
In any case, this suggestion won’t force people to doing the Drone Tax work, but it will make the process of becoming a Drone mandatory and thus increase the odds someone will do Drone work early on.
No force on Earth will compel someone to do Drone duty if they don’t want to, but this at least makes the system more intuitive and might convince some people to take on the role
The drone also makes sense as the “default” caste in that it’s the face of the franchise and it’s the basis of every other caste. Every Xenomorph has been a response to /iteration upon the drone design from the original film. Having the evos branch out from there is quite intuitive (and makes way more sense from a biological standpoint too, IMO, when it comes to switching between caste trees).
New people don’t even know how to de-evolve. Needing to de-evolve from drone back to larva to evolve into something else is extremely counter-intuitive and poorly designed. It will be just a nuisance.
New people don’t even know how to de-evolve. Needing to de-evolve from drone back to larva to evolve into something else is extremely counter-intuitive and poorly designed
I’m glad you agree with my position. As we note this proposed change would eliminate the need to de-evolve from Drone to a combat caste since now it is a built in-mechanic to evolve into Drone then evolve into a combat caste.
This will be a big boon for new players who are already overwhelmed. Veteran players won’t really be inconvenienced.
The biggest negative I can ascribe to the change would be changes to xeno evo times in regard to getting combat castes and T3s online.
Pre-marine drop this is a 100% non-issue. Combat castes are locked off to a timer thus the only castes someone can evolve into is a Drone, initially. The proposed change would actually steamline the evo process since you no longer need to de-evolve to become a combat caste if you are a Drone. This actually becomes a buff to people playing as a Drone.
Furthermore, T3 unlock times are set that Xenos, especially roundstart, are guaranteed to have more evo than they need to evolve into a T3, ergo the addition of a slightly increased amount of needed evo is unimpactful.
I do think the evo time from Drone to T1 combat caste should be reduced to 20 to 30 evo however, which is a genuine piece of criticism for regular gameplay.
Some discussions make me think the concept of this, while I think is sound, might be harder to implement than desirable, or at least require some revision.
Someone could exploit the ability to freely evolve and devolve from Drone to a combat caste to, for example, tackle a marine before evolving to a runner to get them back to the hive faster, or become a Gardner, make some resin fruit, then evolve to a combat role. Or devolve to a Drone to make weeds before re-evolving back to the combat caste.
Perhaps a fix to these issues is that all xenos have to initially evolve into a Drone, but that once a Xeno evolves past being a Drone that they can not devolve into a Drone (outside of support xenos naturally), but they instead devolve as they do currently (runner devolves to larva for example), at the very least this removes most forms of possible abuse.