Im just creating this little thread so I can see people’s opinion on the Lesser drone idea.
Some people are saying its TGMC styled and some are cool with it.
Personally I think its fine currently because of the fact that xenos are being struck with nerf after nerf which has already caused the xeno winrates to tumble down to near 50%. Encourages ovi gameplay with giving the casual gamers a free chance to respawn as a lesser variant to fight for the hive.
Remove ability to attack or carry marines.
Buff plasma capacity cause it can only build 1 Singular wall.
Honestly I was completely against it at first. It just seemed like a dumb idea. Now I won’t let anyone take them away from me, cute little gremlins. Memes aside I think it’s a decent change; sometimes people just don’t want to play drone and start complaining about weeds, so this helps a lot with building and weed distribution. Besides, I’d rather take a lesser drone than another sentient hugger on its way to throw itself against a sentry turret.
I think devouring should NOT be a thing, since they should be too small for that, although attacking could be fine; it’s not like they’d deal much damage (no clue about the actual numbers). Plasma reservoir should definitely be buffed, or at the very least make them defficient in some sense, since they can’t really help much as of now (decent plasma pool but very slow regen or viceversa).
I’m unsure as to what the plans are in regards of sprites and names; I think I heard something about better sprites being WIP but not sure if its that great to have a literal tiny drone instead of something else. There’s room for improvement; I’m sure someone will come up with a wacky design from the comics and whatnot.
I think it’s fine overall but I think lesser drones should be a lot less viable in combat if we want to keep the current game flow. Even the fact they can push marines around while not risking anything is not great. Yeah they don’t have damage but they can push marines in fire or just fish for FF.
I like lesser drones.
I think they probably need some fine-tuning, but we saw how they stopped the Marines from capitalizing on breaking a Xenomorph siege yesterday. Which frankly lead to a four-hour round. While part of this was Marines’ fear RPing, I do think they’re a little too strong in their current form.
If it wasn’t a free respawn, someone can hop in every three minutes I would probably be completely fine with them. I would argue for taking away their tackle ability and being able to push marines for a bigger plasma pool.
this would make the ability to struggle out of nests better
Oh no… You found out the real purpose of lesser drones…
I think mini drones are cute and funny, but I think we should keep them strictly AI controlled. There’s other ways to address the need for weeds and building, but I’m more interested in how we can use them to give the hive some bulk and keeping players strong.
I’d prefer if they were just swarms of underlings that can be directed by players to follow them or assault targets. It’ll give players on both sides a feeling of power, since we can keep individual xenomorph players as strong (Like a miniboss or hive commander) directing and fighting with their underlings while human players have that feedback of mowing down swarms of lesser aliens and chasing off the bigger ones that don’t go down so easily.
We’re playing a game about power fantasies if we’re being real for a hot minute, and giving the alien players a tool to use that marines can get off on slaughtering lets both sides feel powerful without turning this game into whiskey outpost.
Obvious ways to balance it include the respawn rate is affected by the Queen’s ovi status, or cut off if the hive core is destroyed. Maybe Queenie being on ovi increases the amount of minidrones each player generates before it caps out. Etc etc
we need mini rooners, defenders and sentinels
I think having ways to keep players out of dchat is good, I like being able to play the game.
God bless anyone that would be able to make an AI for Xenos, but I don’t see a reason to remove the ability for dead players to play as the little drones.
I haven’t been able to play in a round with the lesser Xenos, but I’m looking forward to it. It looks fun for both sides. Marines get to shoot the bugs and the lesser drones don’t have to worry about playing safe like normal Xenos do.
I guess what I’m wondering from your comment is why you don’t think they should be player controlled. Having a swarm be player controlled seems pretty rad.
Ehh, I think there’s no need to rely on AI. If we were on constant lowpop and roles like sentient hugger were underused due to more important roles having to be filled then yeah sure, let’s use AI, but honestly I don’t see why we should strip Dchat of a role like that; besides, the main point of the PR iirc was to give dead players something to do while they waited in larva queue, since it does not affect your time of death. AI has proven again and again to be pretty braindead, and given the fact that we have plenty of ghosts to spare, I don’t see why we should do that. Also, people complain about WO a lot (I do too but anyway), but it can be fun, and having a horde of sentient gremlins tear a private apart like a group of Compys does give that horde-like feel.
God bless anyone that would be able to make an AI for Xenos, but I don’t see a reason to remove the ability for dead players to play as the little drones.
I guess what I’m wondering from your comment is why you don’t think they should be player controlled. Having a swarm be player controlled seems pretty rad.
It’s not that I don’t think we should prohibit dead players from being mini aliens, but if we want to take this to its upper limits with actual, genuine swarms of lesser aliens, we will never have enough players to really create that swarm feeling. Which means they need to be AI controlled for the most part.
I don’t have qualms with people killing time as mini aliens, I just think if we want to really run with the swarm idea it’ll be a bit of a weird delineation.
AI has proven again and again to be pretty braindead, and given the fact that we have plenty of ghosts to spare, I don’t see why we should do that.
I am retarded and can’t code, but I can’t imagine coding a few buttons, one that toggles between ‘follow me’ and ‘stay here’, one that toggles between aggressive and passive behavior, and finally an ability style button that says ‘charge and attack this person/destructible item’ could be all that difficult to create.
I could see pathing being a little weird in very tight spaces but I don’t see that being a MAJOR issue.
I don’t like them. Dangerous slope that might outright kill CM as the braindead marine-only majority praises it to high heaven. It’s already damaging with how people claim it as a xeno buff to offset the nerfs when it doesn’t actually make playing xeno any better.
It’s a role with an identity crisis that acts more.like mini runners than drones and a big step towards TGMC arcade/WO on all maps - why ever bother leaving cades if you’re having fun getting neuron activation via shooting small drones? Anything that can make cadehugging fun should not be added since it’s a massive and constantly growing (compare last or 2 years ago to now) problem with marines refusing to play the game. It also makes queens enforcing any orders harder and will likely have to involve admins or constant banishments every round.
“Fun” features /=/ always an improvement else we would all be playing TGMC instead. Facehuggers weren’t exactly an improvement either, it’s just endless sprite hiding cheese and no one actually wants them to hug anything because it leads to awake marines tossing grenades in hive.
Imo the small drones should lose mob collision and be heavily limited only to weeding, placing the occasional wall, hauling captures back to the hive, dragging bodies to morphers, cleaning snow and other xeno janny chores. Potentially even unable to step outside of weeds. Basically having next to no influence on the round and no interaction with marines. Sadly we’re likely closer to reworking CM into xeno swarms than turning these drones into this.
Would cease to be CM. Also gives the feeling of power only to the marines - if you had a swarm of xenos with you, you’d have to be weaker than you are right now. What you described is just a mobile game of running around while your xenos horde plays and slashes for you - where’s the fun in this? Just be WO on more maps and with AI.
Would cease to be CM. Also gives the feeling of power only to the marines - if you had a swarm of xenos with you, you’d have to be weaker than you are right now. What you described is just a mobile game of running around while your xenos horde plays and slashes for you - where’s the fun in this? Just be WO on more maps and with AI.
Bit of a strong opinion there but more so the idea I envisioned is letting them be a living shield while you actually inflict damage, and sowing confusion. Not literally just sitting back with a point and click adventure.
Also I have heard the ‘bro it’s barely even CM where did we go wrong’ for literal years now, you can certainly argue it’s a big step in a different direction but CM is ultimately clicking people until they go sideways, sometimes while right next to them and sometimes from afar. It’s pretty damn hard to get away from that no matter what we do.
Well yeah, it’s barely what CM was initially so these people are right. We moved from RP to TDM, imo it’s a downgrade and it cost the server alot of people with pop being lower than it used to be. Changing faction dynamics would have an immense effect on the game - just look at WO if you need any proof. How many people actually play these xenos and how divided the playerbase is regarding it.
Also having AI mobs follow you around and act as shields would be infinitely frustrating if you had to rely on them, if you’ve ever played a game with AI companions you should be able to imagine how would this turn out in ss13.
I’ve gotten to play lesser drone now, and I had a great deal of fun. Not having to worry about taking up a valuable resource like a larva takes away a lot of stress from the role.
While the bug itself is very weak it is nice as a ghost role to help support some of the actual xenos. I pretty much spent the whole round in the hive building it up and planting eggs while the stronger builder castes built up the front. It gives the hive a lot more life, and makes the ground the xenos hold feel more populated.
I really want this to be a part of the game.
I’m against the AI idea. I’m not educated on AI, but I’ve seen enough to know it can’t be an easy thing to make. I really enjoyed playing as the little drone going on a suicide charge with other lesser drone. I am fine dying every round of this game if I get to die in a cool way. I had a lesser drone life where I was building some walls in the caves when a scout approached, I managed to tackle him onto the ground after a few tackles but another marine walked up and managed to kill me while I was getting ready to drag him deeper into the hive. I blew up onto acid on top of the scout, and got to keep playing when the queen OVI’d again.
This game isn’t about making the other players feel bad, it is about making a cool story. In this same round a regular drone was dragging off the CO who had been captured a while ago as the marines were about to overtake the nest. The sniper’s spotter managed to spot the drone, and began to chase him. The drone managed to outrun the spotter, but had to give up the CO. When the spotter returned to the CO a few seconds later the CO had already bursted. He drug the body back to a group of marines where they got to see their commanding officer’s bursted body.
Morale here is people die, but it makes a cool story. You temper your expectations as a drone, and just breaking a bone or managing to pull off a cap feels much more rewarding. You sometimes need to appreciate the other side’s story. If you want the marines to feel bad, get really good at whatever xeno you think kills them the best and try to make them feel sad. I can’t speak for win rates or balance, but this feature should be incorporated into there because its cool.
I feel like I need to say I really enjoy this, and could see myself playing as a lesser drone often after dying as a marine or xeno. I’d also be willing to play it if there were no spare round start xenos and I felt like playing a xeno round.
I personally feel like we should make this purely player controlled. If we go with AI with these lesser drones it would be no different from ‘Minons’ from TGMC.
My Suggestion to balance these would be.
Increase dchat wait timer to 2-3 minutes
Reduce their 20 slash to 10-8
Make it so every 5-6 minutes of queen ovi. Roughly 10-5 lesser drones are created for dchat to grab. (Limit their resources)
Increase their plasma capacity
And finally. Make it so the lesser drones can’t ‘devour’ people. This would help limit their capping power as they would be forced to tackle drag any one they capped to the hive.
Lesser drone of recent has been a CRITICAL player in preventing hives from collapsing as they became literal swarms that came out of the hive and slammed straight into the marine lines because of the fact they have near normal drone slash dps. Reducing their slash damage. Making them have less of an impact on the capping front and making it so they are limited in spawns (But able to still come in mass swarms amount every so and so minutes) is a way to balance these. Also increasing the dchat wait time. 30 Seconds for one respawn is absurdly low. Making it atleast 1-2-3 minutes seems fair to me.
Opinions?
there’s something super soulful about attacking the hive for a shitload of ghosts to spawn as lesser xenos to desperately try to slow the marines (even if futile) and that alone is so cool and makes it feel like an actual HIVE
Remove the ability to slash and tackle for them, and rename them to “Worker” caste xenos - which canonically exist as the lowest and by far tiniest xeno caste, who are among the only xeno caste that runs away and avoids combat - thus, fitting.