Stims. Every Xeno player hates them, and they really dont have a hard counter (especially god stims, not even just anti stun.) But, what if we punished researchers for success? Now that may sound bad, but it’s actually quite a good idea if we’re looking at it on paper.
let’s say this…
Anti-Stun Level 6
You get muscle spams, and maybe a seizure. Your heart might race too fast and you mght get a heart attack.
Bonemending Level 7
You get Stone Man Syndrome, as your body freaks the fuck out and every hit you take slows you as it’s replaced with bone instead of flesh
Oxygenating Level 6
Your blood cells can pop rapidly, causing IB
Now, I don’t know if that’s what would actually happen but it’s a spessman game, let’s all be friends and find a way to make it so that God Stims aren’t the end all be all.
Also, if you say “just push” what if they get fucking Bonemend at roundstart… yeah bub… explain that you unga…
It’s always occurred to me, especially now that research rework has been proclaimed as finished, that stims are a direct punishment to xenos for taking too long and/or for leaving intel alone. If its 2 hours in and god stims appear then you should have won earlier / have forced marines into a evac (from king/fob hold). If godstims are rolling out by an hour in you obviously let intel roll the map with 0 counters, can guarantee you. If you’ve made the mistake of either these two things then you’ve either got to rush king AT THAT POINT IN TIME, or you base your defence around boiler neurocapping (dont underestimate that 2u per tick) or sent plinking the marines.
RE: your suggested changes. Need more definition on what you mean by muscle spasms and seizures, is that perma stuns your suggesting?
Same thing with what your suggesting with bonemending, is that permanent? are you suggesting that people shouldnt fight while being bonemended and wait it out? Flesh what your suggesting out.
As for oxygenating, oxygenating is largely a fluff addition to any stims, oxygen damage is restricted to a few situations. People will just not add it to the stims making it a noob trap.
As for my own thoughts on how research is right now. I kinda like it. Sure researchers every 10 rounds might have enough roundstart for a nice gift for the GP, something that fixes IBs, and maybe some shit bonemend. Anything really oppressive takes time/IOs not being harassed to be made. Dont disagree that bonemend is the most useful early research thing they can make, wouldnt be too upset if bonemend takes longer to formulate.
Stims are tough cuz they serve a purpose in closing out stalemated rounds, but at the same time are kinda cancer and crutchy. What’s more is they also encourage marines to turtle in FOB and camp all round since they inevitably scale over time with tech options and nuke. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that you have a wide disparity of skill levels in research and intel acquisition. Skilled researchers will get you god stims around the 1:20 mark these days which is nuts.
There’s a ton of ways you could address it, but ultimately in my opinion it comes down to the fact that marines are wayyyyyy too comfortable just retreating to FOB to camp out the round until their automatic win buttons become available in nuke or stims. Retreating to FOB should not be a favorable option for the “attacking team” as it encourages boring stalemates. Xenos have VERY limited options to siege, while marines have numerous sieging options at their disposal at roundstart.
I believe there have been or are efforts to rework FOBs, not really sure. What I do know is that most FOBs are insanely OP simply due to the fact that they dont allow xenos to weed up to the cade lines, creating MASSIVE no mans land’s around the fob making it damn near impenetrable without a ridiculous numbers advantage. If I were the tyrant of balance I’d remap most all FOBs to not have dead zones for weeds at a minimum, and probably reduce the available no man’s land around them.
Ultimately 90% of stim rounds I see go like this; for some reason or another, marines beat up the xenos, but cant finish the job and fall back to FOB. Xenos rally and try to siege FOB, but can’t because sieging almost all FOBs is impossible without a numbers advantage. Marines turtle, xenos cant do shit about it, and eventually marines get stims and close out the round. Now sometimes it is on the xenos for fucking up and playing like crap for not closin rounds, and in that case they deserve the eventual stim roflstomp. But that should only happen because marines played well and defended their fob. As it stands now, FOB defense is child’s play if marines are trying at all, and it damn near guarantees a stim or nuke victory in the event of stalemate.
Overall I think the main issue actually revolves around FOB gameplay for the above reasons, although the specifics around stims still matter too.
the marine incentive could be that, larva pool overtime if they hold a stagnant position for too long without rushing, forcing them to actually make plays or eat the consequences, but that might be too OP (which it almost certainly is)
it’s really hard to identify the solution because there just isn’t a solution since it’s kinda hardbaked into CM at this point, but maybe marines lose intelligence if they sit at FOB to prevent “we’re nuking the place and ungaballing comms first”
the core solution is near unidentifiable and I’ve failed to really think of anything that wouldnt just snowball the xenos
nothing will make them balanced in a way that is fun for both sides, and they make the game pointless and less fun when they arrive for everyone
“i can brainlessly walk in and kill everyone” vs “wow my combo did nothing to that guy”
the hardest part of stims btw is that research players don’t ever make anything that isn’t the god stim of doom instead of just an OK stim that lets marines win
by the time research/marines get stims its the baldos using them cause the good players died/got capped or cryod. So theres literally no point in nerfing them.
I would get it if you guys would complain about the godstims we had years ago ROUNDSTART that is transmitted with 2 points for almost 1-2 days
1st off, Antistun received a massive nerf no one has mentioned yet. When you are stunned it removes a large amount of stim from you. Queen scree is like 10units, a tackle is like 15-20u. So now an Antistun stim saves your ass maybe 2-3 times and then no god stim, no super healing or anything. Average stim uses 15u or 30u injectors.
2nd, Research isnt the problem lack of development of the xeno’s side is. The Marines faction has a whole shipside layer consisting of many and varied support elements. What do xenos get for hiveside logistics? The most a skilled hiveside xeno player can do is what? Hivelord gud and place speed resin everywhere? Give xenos actual scaling beyond at the 1 hour mark we can get resin which is only used to buy 5 extra players. Seriously that is ALL the scaling xenos get into the late game. Maybe in old models that was ok but with the level of feature creep marines have the xenos faction feels threadbare.
3rd, Research does do things other than God stims. If you have ever seen “QUICKCLOT FS IBCURE” sitting on the Alamo pre drop that was me. Now we see the other issue of research because while that QuickClot was sitting on alamo since round start, you will see it still sitting there at round end. Or the bonemend pills we made got lazily sent by REQ just to fob with no announcement and are sitting unmarked in a random corner. Outside of the 5 good Corpsmen players in a given round NOBODY CARES THE SLIGHTEST ABOUT bonemend, quickclot, the low power shit, unless they happen to need that pill. You try calling command to announce a better healing drug
I cannot stress how difficult logistics is for research, how many other departments have to be on the ball for anything to get shipped.
This core issue is that unless the thing research is shipping is massively impactful, like a god stim, no other department/player will actually put in the effort to make sure it gets to the intended users.
About the only reliable way to get medicine to the front is catching an alamo cycle and handing a backpack to a competent looking marine or HM.
I massively prefer support researcher seeing them as a cool way to simplify triage, but I don’t find Godstims cheesy in the current balancing and will become quite manageable if we expand on the tools Xenos have to remove them. But really I wish my closing statement to be “Give Xenos more development, especially hiveside logistics” Give me sweaty xeno researchers and maybe a counter their counter meta can evolve.
As if tanking 3 screeches is nothing. More than that, stims are basically FREE as soon as you make the recipe. The ONLY bottleneck is power. You just keep producing them for the entire round. Queen screeched your three times? Just hit another dose.
This is the definition of powercreep, if you suggest to give xenos more stuff to make up for stims. We already been there during techwebs, it wasn’t very cool.
Gonna be honest, as an avid sentinel and boiler player, the amount of stim you reduce by spit is inconesquential and next to worthless considering that sentinel needs to actively frontline against stimmed marines in order to have a minimal impact ( Only 2u per spit with godstims typically being 35u or so ) and the boiler neuro cloud is too unreliable to consistently drain stims, especially when typically marines are at best only gonna experience 2 ticks of the neuro cloud effect especially with speed stims ( 4u btw )
It’s silly how much better marine defense is then offense, even for experienced players. There’s no point doing the more risky but fun maneuver when you have an objective that requires almost 0 difficulty, 0 moving, and wins instantly upon completion - especially since you need support of teammates to do anything (all of which, don’t know how to frontline very well so are more comfortable with playing safe). It’s horrible and completely unfun game design.
I do feel like a large amount of the misinformation/displeasure of stims from the xeno side is largely in part due to the poor communication around stim interactions.
Newer/novice players might be confused as to why their attacks are doing nothing until its explained to them
While in the middle of a fight it might not be clear that your stim removal is doing anything. With enough sents, and provided frontline logi is slow (commonplace) its not unheard of to drain the front of stims. Boiler neurogas removes 2u of stims every tick, and ive seen my stims just dissappear from running through a boiler cloud. Theres kings who arent even aware that their scree removes stims and neglect it. Yet it can be really hard to in the midst of battle notice that a marine is now walking slower, can be stunned, etc etc, and it feels like your doing nothing.
I do feel like some arbituary HUD on the marines showing a ring of stink or something to represent “the hive sense this marine is using unusual chemicals” or something, would go a long way in communication of stims to xeno players. Perhaps tie it into certain properties or lvls, so that stronger stims will show up, and weaker ones wont.
hi hello can we not try to say stims are fun, fair or balanced, the last time i got my hands on any decent NST stim it was free game to walk into xeno lines, kill a runner, a warrior and make the others flee because they cant do anything to make my stim run without dying for it, I shouldn’t be in a situation against multiple xenos where im winning alone because i had a tube of funny juice ready to go, stuns are a xeno’s main fighting component, put simply only benefits come from removing NST and other unfun to fight stuff, this isnt even mentioning how you dont even know if they are stimmed or not.
What they should be is in the background effects, like bonemend, hardening, anti parasite, not slop that forces them to slam into you and hope they can out damage level 10 healing while the marine is impervious to half of xeno movesets.
The biggest problem with stims is that you can get pushed back to the hive, get down to 6-8 xenos, play incredibly hard, cap enough to stop the push, but the game is over at that point anyway. Best case you wait what, 15-20 minutes for caps to pop, T3s, and the slow advance to the FOB, and at that point you’re fighting against marines you can no longer stun, kill, or cap unless you have a queen and three xenos tackling one.
If the point is to break stalemates, either flip a coin and buff either side so xenos aren’t demotivated by every round, throw up an optional vote to concede, or something other than marines become invincible. It makes playing xeno even more painful than it already is.
Instead of slamming your face against the marine wall before the inevitable 45 minute to 1 hour loss due to invincibility stims, I’ve seen queens recently just have everyone try to backdoor the FOB and end the match instantly. Why bother with anything else? There’s about a 2% chance the marines throw so hard you can turn it around.
I’d much prefer rounds with actual back and forth even if they do sometimes go into 3 hours.
The actual “counter” to stims is xenos have to win by 1 hour? That’s just silly.
, FOBs are fine as they are.