Remember how you could actually escape the hive back in the day? Most of the time you’d just get stunned and put back in the nest, but every once and awhile you’d get a cool prison break where a handful of marines escaped the hive and lived to tell the tale.
Now, the ability to escape was removed with good reason. The queen had to always order sentinels to guard the captures, which was dull, dull work. Still though, the occasional prison break was fun, and lead to some exciting little adventures for the marines. I was thinking it’d be cool if marines had a small, one off chance to escape the nest. The hive would still have to keep an eye on the captured marines, but it wouldn’t be as bad as sentinel guard duty back in the day, and it would give the marines a faint hope of escape.
Any sizable chance of escape will require Xenos to watch the nested because if one breaks out all the caps break out. Not having to babysit nests greatly improved the quality of life for Xenos.
Being able to break out was fun as a marine, but I understand why it was removed. The only way I could see this working is if you gave it like a 0.01% chance or something like that where it is incredibly unlikely you will ever experience yourself or another player breaking out.
with all the zeno nerfs going on, this is something i could actually get behind. Bring back quality nest building instead of the lazy shit you often see these days.
You could use some simple mobs for observers to join as for guard duty to solve that, similar to facehuggers.
But there’s no way to make it fun for anyone involved though - breaking out and killing yourself, or even worse, other caps is too costly for current gameplay - back when this was a thing spitters could easily haul up to 2 caps at once and each could burst into up to 7 larvae. You’d have to be helpless and unable to grasp objects while the guardians would need to have tremendous advantage - any escape attempts would be effectively a pointless waste of time as they’d be impossible to begin with, even more so than before.
Now throw in a chance all the caps you toiled for the whole round (which you will never reap the rewards of due to larva queue) can just break out and wreak havoc in the hive…
Capping isn’t fun, now all the work you put into getting them could be washed down the drain because marines want a chance to have fun again
Like I get where you’re coming from, and it’s kind of a cool idea but presently with the state xenos are in I feel like this would be so ass for the xeno players
Quality best building? Even when marines could escape, you’d still have issue because 1. Anyone can be a drone and poor builder. 2. people don’t typically want to spend their entire round watching caps and you can’t even alt tan because a few seconds is all someone needs to get OB cords, plant c4, shoot the hive up, use max cap etc.
1 cap per host and you lose everything if they get out. That’s rough.
Add in we don’t have old nest types anymore and you really can’t recreate the traditional cell type nest structure (1 nest per room) safely… yeah
I’ve actually been a proponent of marines not being able to unnest and maybe one of the contributing voices to us having the current situation.
It’s honestly been more of a sidegrade than an upgrade looking back over the past few years of it:
Escaping nests was fun, you actually had a reason not to ghost
Xenos were forced to actually build interesting nest designs to help mitigate the risk
But still there’s the downsides:
Some fraction of the xenos have to babysit the nest constantly
When a nest is babysat by any room temp IQ xeno players you had no chance of breaking out anyway
More xenos in the nest mean fewer xenos fighting; a balance issue
Mass breakout in the nest while xenos are fighting is basically a lmao you completely lose situation for xenos
I think if we really want to have marines breaking free from the nest again you’d have to tackle the reasons we got rid of it.
Do we have xeno players who WANT to stay in the nest all the time?
Do we care about breaking free of nests when the inevitable situation will be 99% of the time you can’t? The lead up to preventing marines from escaping at all was a series of changes where being un-nested/spit out made you unable to move, shoot, grab weapons, free others, or do anything because players would instantly arm grenades or wield and use buckshot. It became functionally equivalent to being unable to escape the nest in practice even though there was that theoretical tiny chance it could happen.
And how do we balance it out with having 10-20% of the xeno force (depending on player pop) sitting in the nest instead of fighting? Every xenos is worth 2-3 marines, so just a handful of xenos having to stay in the nest is a significant fraction of fighting power that is now no longer harassing or killing or helping. A mass breakout can even completely end the game for xenos straight up.
The whole thing feels like a wash with no genuinely good solution for everyone.
What we have right now I think is the least bad choice.
What if xenos just got a larva added to the pool for putting an infected marine into a nest and the marine could escape.
The only reason to nest deep in the hive is to deny a marine out the round. It would be easier to just nest behind the front line. If the Marines escape then they aren’t deep in the hive and you have gotten a larva anyway.
You reward the xenos for getting a capture but don’t rule out the Marines for the round
Then they would nest the marine, immediately unnest and kill him. Wouldnt this also remove larva bursting out of the marine? Its fun to see when it happens in surgery rooms or when someone overstayed on the front and pretty core to an aliens game.
Best idea itt so far but even if the above is solved and we assume ghost mobs get to perform guard duty can staff babysit these players so they dont run to the frontline? how many would be jbanned and would anyone be left to play this role after?
As for nesting behind the frontlines, it definitely wouldn’t happen (aside from griefing) because you obviously want the marine to perma and you don’t want him to get up and start fragging resting xenos, they would all have to be kept in hive.
