Quality of life suggestions for Xenos

General Discussion
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@isdoghour ^^^^^To be fair, anybody can do this now in sandbox mode on the steam release

This is not true. You can still see who the queen was on the round end screen and from the lobby hive view, even if you have labelling turned off

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With regards to xeno mentors, it is a bit difficult since xenos don’t really have a centralized location like squad preps. I’ve suggested in the past just giving xenos access to XOOC to communicate with the random lost young xx on the other side of the map. Or alternatively a tutorial-style room to practice in as others suggested would be cool, can be made accessible to ghosts to pass the time.

Some things that reduced QoL for me personally playing xeno that I think could be improved:

  • Stop resin wall construction destroying weed nodes. It’s especially annoying when building as queen due to the delayed weeding. It was done to make deweeding more convenient for marines, but they have a plethora of tools to break weeds and walls, it really didn’t feel necessary and kind of just shifted the inconvenience onto xenos.
  • Revert queen building nerfs. Delay to building, even greater delay when a weed is broken while you’re building on it. Again, these changes weren’t really necessary and even marine players at the time objected, bringing up how many tools they have to deal with it. All this does is take away one of the few incentives to stay on ovi.
  • Let runners look between z levels while in farsight. It’s very annoying having to swap levels in a pinch, being unable to, having to reduce sight, swap and start sight again.
  • Get rid of lurkers losing invisibility on bump. This was done to solve a minor inconvenience for marines and ended up creating a major QoL and balance issue for xeno. Instead of a marine getting shoved a few tiles, maybe getting set on fire and having to take kelo at worst, it now leads to permanent round removal for a xeno if they misclick 1 tile. I’ve died from it too many times to count, and honestly it feels like it drastically reduced qol while not really affecting balance in any meaningful way.

These are just things off the top of my head which have made xeno quite a bit more miserable to play than it already is, but that I don’t think would really affect balance that much if implemented.

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63

2 QoL changes:

Xeno map (the one you can get to through the alien tab) force updates when the queen goes off ovi. — This tool barely gets used anyways with the new tacmap, and would be able to provide a snapshot of what the hive HAD the last time that the queen could provide it. This could be done by the queen manually, but I made it a point to ask queens to do this repeatedly and saw it happen maybe 5% of the time.

Along the same lines:

Clusters should be able to be tracked like tunnels currently are. If you asked me, I’d MUCH rather be able to track a cluster than a tunnel, which are basically useless at this moment in time

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Xenos should be able to make jelly recommendations for queen to skim through while going up for hijack, rather than asking the hive there and then. Any of my other immediate thoughts have been addressed somewhere in the topic.

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65

We should get rid of having to dig snow on snow maps.

Instead,

  • Make weeds weaker for being on a snow tile (with a sprite change ofc). This makes the node 1 tap with a knife, two with a gun and xenos heal and gain plasma at a slower rate while not getting any speed bonus for being on resin.

  • Increase the cost of spreading weeds on snow

  • make it so that the weeds don’t grow as large as they normally would.

Xenos can still clear snow and remove the weak weeds but this would save a lot of time and computer mouses with not having to go through M1 hell while developing arthritis in your pointer finger.

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Already a PR made to fix it.

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67

you know what, I really like this idea. I’ve always found it a hassle to write each jelly one at a time instead of just accepting a recommendation like I did as XO

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So, great news, I hope: I’m not sure if it’s being testmerged but I was in a round just earlier today where I noticed I was able to access the tacmap even with the queen off ovi, though I can’t see other xeno positions.

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necroing this thread to say i despise rejoining as xeno right as queen deovis and being disallowed from fun castes and i wish we had some solution for it

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The solution would be making T1 more fun instead of focusing everything around T3s but there’s no simple QoL change that will accomplish that

By the nature of the game not everyone can play T2/T3

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Acid rouny is fun

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72

you are like the epitome of idle hands being the devil’s workshop

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