CM balance is plagued by the existence of combat stims. They are nigh-impossible to balance and the entirety of the game can revolve around one researcher.
As a solution, stimulants with use in combat by all marines should be nuked from the face of the earth and replaced with a set of tiered stimulants which can be made by research that are dosed out similarly to how we used to dose out techwebs stims. These have set values, and are not RNG based - meaning they can actually be accounted for in balance without it being actual CBT.
Stimulants in their current state can still exist, but should be limited in availability by being made only useable by medics with special injectors/packets of pills that ONLY people with medical training can use. This should cut down on the horde of 900 marines with unkillable juice in them and make it so that stims have a reliable counterplay (target medics). Also a medic can only carry so much stim, so this limits the amount of the front either way.
Xenozip replaces the widely available custom stim, instead being an injector any marine can carry and can be produced in a variety of tiers and quantities depending on intel gathered/server population respectively. It having a static set of properties will make it actually possible to balance.
Ideally this should keep research with all the content they have now but make it so that stims aren’t possibly the most unfun thing for our contribs to deal with. It also avoids nuking stims entirely.
And before someone says this is a xeno salt post….
