Good people of the forum. Some of you may not have been there for the golden era of the ‘xeno aging mechanic’ whereby the longer you stayed Alive as a certain caste, the tougher you became. Let me tell you. I played many hours as an ancient lurker, and it was the most rewarding experience.
I believe the mechanic was scrapped because it effected the game meta too adversely i.e. Xenos camping, marines rushing hives. I just wish there was a way to offset this so we could all have our cake and eat it.
Please, good folks, share your fixes, old mechanics you miss, or ideas for a more rewarding Xeno experience
Mechanic was not engaging for the marine side. Afk for 1 hour become insanely tough. Made waiting for full maturity effectively mandatory because why would you fight and risk dying while weaker? Hivelords filling literally all of caves with walls to stall for it, etc
The only way maturity can come back is if you started “maturing” 1 hour into the game, much like how pylons only work at 1:00 game time. This would incentivize marines to push out of FOB and assault xenos since if the xenos keep staying alive they get boosts over time.
And no, temporary pylon buffs are literally nothing burgers, who df cares about those they do not significantly boost xenos, plus you have to hold two pylons which is impossible on some maps unless your already winning (hence you do not need the buffs anyway).
I got told off by admin once for being mature hivelord and clogging the entire beach on lv with walls. Was glorious for my OCD. What if it was kill-based, Xeno get maturity status if they get a kill - I’m sure that would totally mess up hive capping lol, players can’t be trusted
Not quite, marines have no incentive to do it other than boredom before the 2 hour mark. With xeno maturity metarush was a big issue, when maturity was gone, so was the problem. If xenos are to grown in strenght in time, it is only fair that they are weaker at start. Thus buff for survs and more reason for command to drop ASAP and rush.
Now atleast you complain both about cadehugging and metarushing, which kind of balances itself.
Marines never had Techtree at the level we currently have when maturity was a thing. Nuke never existed.
So you can still camp all you want but if you wait till nuke your going to be fighting buffed up xenos that survived the 2 hour mark, so its a real fight to the death.
maturity was soul but also an awful fucking mechanic. It incentivised people just sitting in hive and not contributing much out of fear they’d die and ‘waste’ all their accumulated maturity points, while also just being bad for balance overall.
This system essentially buffed good players, while fucked over inexperienced ones. In a game like this, where everyone regardless of skill is smashed together in one lobby- The guy getting 70 kills (and is effectively propping up half the hive solo) does NOT require additional gameplay advantages or buffs.
Balancing around maturity buffs would mean nerfs overall, which would additionally screw over newbies who have the unfortunate tendency to kill themselves.
As such, a lot of people would sit in caves doing nothing. Fun and engaging gameplay, just like how sentinels were forced to babysit the caps for the entire round.
@BasilHerb What about the idea of Hive strains - where a queen can choose a strain which would shape the hive strat. So one strain could be the age mechanic, another could be… Idk acid-based, all acid is super effective, and acid castes buffed, acid cloud aoe massive etc - so marines never know what kind of Hive they’ll be dealing with. I suppose the point stands, any kind of specialisation is a hindrance for new players, but I believe it adds depth - the kind of depth that’s at least more manageable than multi-platform level maps - which I love the idea for btw, but to me (having broken both my legs many times by walking off a first floor roof) is more of a new player hindrance than some differing hives.
Introducing multiple new game-changing mechanics would be extraordinarily difficult to balance and would most likely make many many people very upset. Another major concern people had about hive strains was metaing, etc, people bullying queens for choosing a strain that doesn’t suit them. Regardless of the fact that it would have to be very shallow depth to avoid people having loadouts invalidated and upsetting the balance too much.
I personally have never seen the aging mechanic, but from what the people say it was extremely undeveloped beyond “sit in cave for an hour then win”. Off the bat I can already brainstorm a few ideas on how to make it work, for example adding a line of buffs from pylons that on weaker version age T1s and builders quicker, and on greater age the entire hive quicker. Something not overpowered, but like a 25-30% increase. Another is to base is off kills, thus forcing the battle castes to go to war again, while builders overall are slower to age but perhaps have the greater buffs from age to age.
Also obviously Queen should be able to banish xenos that afk in hive 30+ minutes and contribute nothing to the round.
Hive strains idea is quite interesting, adding different ways for xenos to play beyond “sit in cave choke and win” or “everyone in the hive goes to the backline and envelops the marines”. If anyone ever starts working on it at all, it will need many tests alike to multi-z. All the different hive strains could be fine tuned as people playtest them, to exclude the possibility of one being superior to all others.
This obviously would put more strain on marines and new queen players, but overall it will make the game less… meta? You can also code in a menu that pops up on 20 minute mark to force queens to choose hive strains without having to search for it right off the bat among the bazillion buttons and submenus.
Obviously if any of this happens, marines will need some kind of buff to offset the natural debuff of most marine players being clueless about anything going on in the round.
So marine strategy will deevolve into metarush ASAP xenos and if murderball fails, cadehug till nuke, because xenos only grow stronger. Rounds ending in hive wipe in half and hour and marine wipe in one and a half hour after FoB siege with barerly anything inbetween.
We already had it and it was called “mutators”. Queen just always took meta pick, which was nerfing disarming/capping and buffing damage.
Whatever you will came up with, xenos will metagame.
This kind of intended interaction already exist in a balanced state. Marines don’t know how much boilers, or crushers, or ravs, or praes xenos will have. As a Queen you could influence (if not outright demand) for hive to get 3 boilers, or something and this achieves pretty much the same thing of the unknown for marines than meta buffing prae spit to crit you in half the total spits.
It won’t add anything like that. How better acid, or better slashing damage, or more armor, or whatever stat boost will change xeno tactic of holding the most advantageous position for them, or harassing the most vulnerable targets?
The real only way I can see system akin to mutators work would be for queens to decide which new
T3 xeno caste to unlock this round and which regular T3 caste to disable.
T3 Defender/Drone hybrid using the old system of movable resin walls as a mobile shield for other xenos for example in exchange for crusher, or something like that. Benefits and drawbacks. While I assume charger would be locked every time if any of the new and exclusive caste were to be any good.
Other than that, no, statboosts over time will not magically make the game better, they were tested long ago and they were shit.
There were good things about maturity, as it was already mentioned, maturity system encouraged marines to play aggressively. And currently there is NO incentive whatsoever to ever push xenos.
And now it’s just cadehug till nuke but without “xenos grow stronger” part.
Not entirely true. It is always a march to the hive in usuall hive location and if that fails it is back to cadehugging. Marines don’t just decide to hug cades out of the blue, they only do it after their momentum is stopped and they fall back behind nearest caded chokepoint.
Line between “we gotta rush them ASAP they will become too powerfull” and “we can take things slow and cadehug” is super thin and I don’t belive that it can be realistically achieved.
That is, however, true. There is nothing that encourages marines to rush xenos other than boredom and that being a win condition and entire point of a game.
But I strongly disagree that maturity is a good way to encourage that.
Why we should even encourage marines to rush and kill xenos more? That is the entire point of that game, nobody needs to be told to kill xenos, that is a deflaut state of every single marine player.
Something akin to massive power-up for singular marines could do the trick. For example (big example, use it as a general idea, not literall to just start asking lore questions, or whatever, an example of a prize and incentive to something in xeno controlled teritory) combat loaders available for anyone who gets to them first and xenos can’t do anything about them till they are activated.
As mentioned, something akin to a power-up that those “combat loaders” would provide. Current sensor tower is incredibly too weak of a power-up to be a reason to rush, it is always used as a bonus if hive is on the way trough, or when there are few xenos left. Maybe a chest of fabled HEAP rounds, or some kind of button that activates ASRS to spew out them?
Something deep into xeno territory that will grant them massive boost, but is not necessary to win, so that they don’t feel like it is either that, or certain failure.