That does sound extremely broken and funny. But we do not need to bring it back like it was years ago. Re-imagining the mechanic and then adding it back in to put an emphasis on 1~ hour rounds. Make it so that xenos dont start maturing until 1 hour mark, from then on all xenos mature from normal xeno, to something like elders and ancients were in old time, but obviously tweaked to not be ridiculous as to have hedgehog ravagers survive OBs. Obviously cut out the immature phase for all but the queen and have queen be buffed the most for surviving long from there on.
Across the months I been lurking in forums - some devs and admins shared that CM aims to be around hour or hour and a half rounds, any longer and we get nuke and king, from then on even legal admin intervention is possible if round reaches stalemate at 3 hour mark. I honestly share the opinion, rounds that arent even an hour are usually over too fast due to one team outskilling the other, while anything longer than hour and a half keeps going only cause all of the semi-good players charged head first into the enemy, got captured\killed and then stuck around in observer or just left the game to skip the round, leaving mostly new\fearRP players behind who need simple numbers to secure comms towers and then win.
Marines have stims to boost personal marines after the round has gone for long enough(sometimes research gets lucky and juices out stims in less than an hour, but they arent as powerful as lategame stims), but what do xenos have? One-use larva surge, attack boosts and some utility bonuses from comms towers. Currently xenos simply NEED to either engage in wipes that remove most of the players from the game or to have elite capture teams in the backlines that round remove the marines to force-conscript them into the hive or gamble for a prime xeno bursting from their corpse. The more capturing becomes obsolete in the game, the better.
I am no coder, developer, maintainer or anything, but if someone decides to tackle the issue it’ll require a lot of balancing and tweaking I am sure. Of course, adding aging would again reinforce the defensive stance of xenos, but that is for good, because marines are the offensive faction and they perform best in an all-out offense on xenos. The more we actually force marines to push for the win - the better. Plus, aging would buff corrupted, especially the queen, and any greeno buff is a good buff.
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