counterpoint : you now have 5 t1’s who cant evolve without serious repercussions. if you try and say “boiler”, the only thing it’s good for is holding ground. it is marginally worse at taking it unless marines fragged CIC
honestly if stims were easier to make and produce but were less powerful as a tradeoff i wouldnt mind that at all
I’ve seen marines lose with NST. Does it make NST okay for the game? It does not. Full NGN + ACR + HDH combined are probably not as effective as humble NST6, but still tip the scales too much. Of course NST is terrible for the game. But even if you remove it, meta will just shift to full healing + MST and we’ll have marines running around at sub-acid runner speed and tanking all the incoming damage.
The core issue of research is powercreep. We have a semi-balanced game, then we have a role whos job and the goal is to break the balance. Why do we need this is the first question. Why is this deserved is another. You DO NOT need IOs to get stims. You need corpses. Everyone can move corpses and let’s be real it’s not that of a struggle that needs to be rewarded. In fact the research rework had it as one of the goals to make research LESS reliable on IOs. Because a lot of researchers complained that IOs dying don’t let them do anything. So now you don’t need IOs. There are few papers you can only find groundside, but stuff like NST you can get literally from the paper you roll in with. Many times we had situations with FOB sieges from roundstart, where research still was able to make stims because some xenos inevitably die on cades. By killing all the IOs you can significantly delay Foxtrot. But not stims.
Research mains are incredibly biased and seem to overplay everything they need to go through. Even something quite trivial like deploying stims is inflated to such a degree that I legit talked to people whos main point was “research is balanced because you need to move stims through req”. Same with moving corpses. This is just laughable.
potency is lvl/2
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Why are we here just to suffer and argue in circles about the same thing we have argued about time and time again across time and space and multiple forums. Make it make sense.
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its just salt at this point
this is what xenos had to deal with in 2021-2022 (and still winning) and now people are still crying about them despite research being 5-10x more RNG heavy and stim properties being nerfed.
People tend to forget that godstims require actual competent people to be on + IOs not getting capped + time
If you guys really want NST nerfed them do as kryth says. Make 5X expensive / Put NST in legendary.
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The nerfs received do not solve the overarching problems which allow research to commonly snowball and ruin games
Stim effects suck, they get old very quickly to fight but are overplayed constantly, and despite that have become a semi-reliable win condition which rewards boring play so much
Stim effects are too easy to acquire (too cheap in resources in comparison to their impact, if resources were easier to counter through xeno competence instead of relying on marine incompetence or RNG, its status as a genuine threat could be understood). Currently it’s the same as solving a singleplayer game (with noone interacting with the system) to create something that just sucks the fun out of the round by making it blatantly unfair.
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Researcher here
Stims are fair
Stims are no certainty and often cost blood, seat and tears.
Stims require immense sacrifice
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The sheer insane amount of knowledge, work ,pressure, lateral thinking and luck to make a halfway decent stim is uncanny.
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The minimum requirement to have a stim out by 1.15 is a for one competent , lucky and unwavering researcher to grind without stop until the mission is over.
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It’s for a researcher complete Botany ASAP, grind chemistry without self annihilating, communicating his finding to keep people motivated, creating a safe and useful chem, mass producing said chem and delivery systems and finally distribute then tell REQ and the CO even though they may be unaware or indifferent of your work
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A researcher must continue to produced and deliver stims without end, often without knowledge that they’re being put to any use.
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If there’s a decent researcher paired with an incompetent one who’s unwilling to help or learn, the stress is often significantly higher.
I’ve seen a researcher lose it, massively OD then stab a death a fellow researcher 47 times in a corner until his foot even fell off. Why you may ask? They stopped the production of stims in the Turing machine (Chem automaker) just to wasting the Turing’s precious energy on making methane.
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The certainty that there will always be one or more ODs in spite of clear labeling on said stim.
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The possibility the false rumor of said lethal stims will make marines not use them despite being perfectly fine.
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The possibility that stims have been ignored or that it’s simply too late.
There’s always this looming responsibility that you let everyone down if you don’t stop working. A researcher can never give up! Many do.
Being a good researcher may be the toughest job not just because it’s incredibly difficult but because of the sheer amount of pressure. It’s only easier if there’s another competent researcher working alongside you.
Research is binary. You get something out soon enough to matter to someone or the work you’ve put in is wasted. More often than not you feel totally unappreciated, even if what you made help contribute to a win.
On the positive side, to hear players complain about how OP stims in a perverse way is like being appreciated for our work.
You’re all very welcome
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False, precisely because:
Give xenos a caste that has to sit around in the hive for hour and solve a very hard sudoku puzzle. If they do it correctly, xenos get 2x health, speed and melee damage. Is it fair because one xeno had to put a lot of hard work into it?
Give marines a single-shot gun that to reload requires solving a pretty hard memory game, but when done it one-shots mature Queen. Is it fair for xenos? That guy with said gun had to solve a pretty hard memory game, though?
Let burrower play some sort of a quiz based on geological knowledge. If he can correctly recognise all various types of stones, the layers of earth and so on, then he gets to demolish any cade he moves under and fracture marines feet. Isn’t that fair? He had to have a lot of knowledge to pass that quiz, surely it is fair.
In all of those examples, if they fail, nothing happens.
It is not fun, not is it fair to get fucked, because someone from the opposite team nerd’ed the fuck out of some mechanic nobody else (especially from your team) had any say in that matter. Lets all toss a coin each roundstart, the side to correctly guess on which side it falls, gets a massive boost (lets just say quadruple burst for xenos, or all specs are turned to SADAR). Isn’t that fair and fun? Both sides had the same chance to guess correctly.
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I’ve seen one crusher and RAV kill 20 marines on their own all while there being less that 5 Xenos with the queen dead.
Xeno’s don’t think, do sudoku puzzles or research.
If Xenos were to get a buff, I believe that the queen should be able to NAME/Christen a promoted Xeno so that not only do they stand out to other xenos, but that they can outsource command and co-ordination.
What Xeno’s lack is communication and team work because aside from the queen they can’t tell each other apart.
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the crusher and rav are kinda designed to do that though? as long as marines hold the funny button and reload fast and stay… sorta together then that shouldnt happen
wow! I cant believe John Marine killed the Young Ravager!
wow! I cant believe Xohn Xeno the Prime Ravager fucked up 5 marines!
it’s either a tactical issue at the squad level for… pushing a death choke or at a individual level for not shooting 
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Marines have all the power to stop that RAV and crusher from killing more, by playing the game. What power does xenos have to stop that researcher from nerding out godstims? Just hijack before he finishes it, otherwise nothing. All that knowledge, all that stuff, all could be reduced to a coin flip where after one hour marines get a godstim, or do not. Nothing fair about it.
How is that a counterargument for stims being unfair and unfun? Just because a pair of xenos can kill 20 marines on their own excuses the existance of stims that other xenos can’t do shit about? What if we change getting and exploding nuke from holding two t-comms to puting a lot of work and knowledge (about nuclear physics)? Just as fair as stims. There are rounds where that pair of xenos kills 20 marines and nobody bothers with stims, there are rounds where xenos put a good and fair fight for an hour, but then some sweaty nerd pulls out stims.
It is called “giving a leader”.
They have the best communication this janky-ass game can provide. And they don’t require that much teamwork by just the virtue that singular xenos are stronger and more self-sufficient than singular marines.
But it is not a talk about buffing anyone, it is a talk about stims not being fair and/or fun.
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It is called “giving a leader”.
Yea but better. When you promote a leader, you still can’t really tell them apart. Give them a random affix like in shaddow of mordor, have them stand out from regulars.
then you can have 2+ xeno squads that are well coordinated instead of throwing themselves at a general line.
when you promote a leader they have the funny big text and a star next to pheros, it’s less “whos leader :(” and more “every xenomain is blind”
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Stims are not fair. From a xenos perspective, none of this means anything, because they never had a reason to get punished with a loss of all their advantage for bad performance - this is balance by player RNG, except the player RNG is weighed heavily in favor of marines (because to get skilled at research is either not an especially arduous process OR skilled researchers play a LOT of rounds and create a lot of gamebreaking stims, as stims are very common in the current game so that means people are commonly making them).
heres a quote from another post i made this thread that sums up part of what i think of this because i dont wana rewrite it
it’s both unfair, and really, really unfun anti-player design. Current stims are just massively overtuned for what it takes to create them, and their implications on gameplay (what it encourages is defensive play to wait out the main resource it takes, which is time) are actively harmful to the groundside experience. Fighting stims is not fun (it lacks sufficient counterplay/weaknesses), it’s an exercise in futility, alongside xenos having no control over the creation of stims.
Marines as a faction should not be rewarded with OP loot for time, not with the current system of marine defense.
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Stims are just unfun to deal with as a Xenomorph, it feels bad to fight against a decent stim.
I would also not fault a player for not knowing all these niche interactions or counters to a stim system that feels like it is designed around the expectation you are terminally keeping tabs on the development of the game to an excessive degree.
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Yeah they won in a PvP game against other players. It’s nothing close to solving Sudoku sorry.
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wait guys I think i just cooked
what if we give xenos an ability to steal stims somehow, either from injectors or from marines’ blood stream
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This is the same conversation as Xeno balance, change my mind
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Prophetic
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my conclusion
- research likes overselling how hard it actually is
- the hardest part about research for me is having the willpower to make X thing for another chem
my real actual genuine conclusion is that
- research rewards too much for so little.
- xenobros dont have any actual counter. if you bring up the point about sentinels im going to kick your ass. no hive is having 15 sentinels just to counteract stims my brother in fucking christ
- research is never impossible, its just a bitch. no its not blood sweat and tears, its playing a slightly easier minesweeper game. just do the botany bro
how can we make this not stupid
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make research require much more effort
wouldnt work, doesn’t solve the issue because the RNG is still there. also lame -
make research have some unintended consequences
might work, might piss off marines -
remove research
not possible anymore -
require at least one negative effect to have that much bullshit
might work, dunno -
FOB stuff
question for later -
make research much more IO-centric again
research would never accept it -
xenostrains that counter stims
would bring up a question on how to do them but would work
arguements against any solution that would make them more tolerable to play
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you can beat them bro
no we cant, thats why we have the discussion. do not bring up having 10 sentinels so help me god i will metagrief you -
stims are very hard
stims arent very hard as long as you have people with some form of cognition and someone okay with doing botany (its boring, not hard) -
other thing (reply)
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