Pylons I believe are high impact on changing the outcome of the match. I think the recents changes of pylons able to create earlier 1 hour into the match highlights just how strong it is. It used to be that even when the xenos get the map control, it would take too long to get pylons up before they get out attrition by marines. Since pylons larva production scale by total xeno population it is a win-more modifier and leads to a steamroll.
My main issue with pylons is I think it goes against the theme of the aliens. From what I’ve gathered (I could be completely wrong on this) your life as a xeno matters greatly. A loss of a T3 xeno is a tragedy. Lost of life of T1 can affect the amount of T2 and T3 slots available. In contrast to the marines where your life means little and the more important part is that your body is reachable and revivable (ignoring specs/sg’s). This is a big reason why xenos need to focus on taking caps to replenish losses and makes it an interesting strategy between killing vs taking caps.
Pylons make caps irrelevant and I argue can solely sustain losses. This allows focusing on killing marines which is easier to do than trying to take caps. This also makes fob defense a losing play, you simply cannot kill enough xenos to actual make a push out. I think this makes matches very stale as there is little chance of a turnaround when xenos get map control over both comms units.
My suggestion would be to change how pylons work and remove the larva gain mechanic. This makes taking caps always relevant and important for xenos. Maybe make it so pylons increase the evo point gain or allow evo point gain even when queen is out of ovi. It could add an additional 1-2 T3 slots for xenos. Something that benefits the xenos but makes it so that their life is important and cannot throw away.
Here are my cherry picked images just to illustrate how ridiculous it can be.
Pylons are meant to discourage Marines from hiding within the FOB for extended amounts of time, it’s really hard to get caps when a marine is in a fortified position, and you usually won’t have both pylons unless the marines are pushed back to the FOB.
Also while there is no such thing as pylons, I think it’s fine for gameplay. In lore the queen could care less about her drones, but they care greatly for their eggs and larva.
literally push out and take the pylon?
have marines defend it instead of sitting in FOB and waiting until you whittle down every single xeno too impatient to wait 30 minutes for marines to leave it? call in an OB on it? so much you can do about pylons (ESPECIALLY ON LV WHERE ITS 99% UNWEEDABLE)
Fuck i forgot how genuinely great aliens is as a movie, fuck it i say we return to hugger combat and 80 percent xeno winrate if we can add that fucking tension level back
The pylon timer I feel is kinda low. Losing the first engagement now generally means that marines will lose now as trying any FOB siege is meaningless as xeno numbers will very much not go down. You might consider it a gotcha for trying to MegaFOB, but culling the xeno numbers in a siege takes a while presuming xenos are not literally being braindead enough to stand very still in CAS/OB/Mortar/Gunline with 9 morbillion bullets killing them, such that a xeno dies every like 4-ish mins on average.
Lenina the other day did push out with the marine force, and managed to kill several xenos and took down a pylon. But it didn’t matter as our numbers recovered faster then marines could ever hope to patch their losses.
Various queens i’ve been playing with have switched their plans to doing a sit in hive and do a murderball into marines as soon as they get in 10 meters of the entire hive, so they can kill as many as possible and then just sit on pylons to regain any lost.
I feel that some comms locations are probably the issue, as they can be in the most ass locations possible, but that is a map issue rather then a mechanics issue. It’s (partially) the reason why Shiva’s got removed as trying to nuke on Shiva’s was a big good luck as comms were half way across the map from each other.
TLDR; maybe increase the pylon timer/nuke timer a tad bit as rounds are going a little too fast. Maybe make the foxtrot squad a tad bit cheaper. Or something I dunno.
