Since there’s currently a big survivor discussion going, I’ve decided to rewrite my old survivor rework proposal that I had on the Discord a few years ago. I still believe that this is the best way to make survivors fun for everyone involved. So here’s what I’m proposing:
All survivors spawn with a disease called “extreme stress”. This basically makes them unrevivable if they die, like hardcore would, but goes away 25 minutes into the round.
Instead of long timers for xeno evolution, there’s actually a strict limit on the number of combat castes. We can start at say 3 to 1 ratio of survivors to combat, but maybe it should be even lower.
At say 20 minutes into the round the xeno slots reopen as usual.
As for what to do when xenos die I see two options:
Not give xenos the slot back when they die. So survivors just need to kill 3 combat xenos and nothing more is gonna come at them.
Give the xenos the slot back when they die, so there’s always going to be a fixed number of combat castes coming at the survivors no matter how much they kill. In this case we can limit the number of one time combat xenos more than in the option 1. Maybe give the slot back after say a minute delay or so so that there’s not going to be a constant evo train.
In addition maybe it’s worth to give xenos a percentage of the xenos that die to survivors back. Maybe even the whole 100%. This is so that queens won’t have to go “stop hunting survivors” and survivors getting a few kills won’t upset the round and make marines speedrun when they deploy. Lets just let the xenos go full ham here.
Another problem is how to make it so that survivors getting capped won’t upset the round for marines? Maybe make it so that capturing survivors only gives larva 25% of the time.
Survivors goal should be actually surviving and we should balance it in a way so that it’s very hard, but doable. And beyond all that, give them engineering skills back and allow them to powergame as much as they want.
I really dont get what this is trying to achieve other than making fighting survivors near impossible. Survivors also dont need any handholding, any half decent team will get more than three combat caste kills per round.
If combat caste’s are limited then every single xeno player that did not intend on playing a support caste is gimped for the round from the start.
What is the goal of your rework? Seeing as “powergaming” is just an umbrella term used by some players to dictate the playerbase as somehow being rulebreakers and that people can choose to play engineer if they wish for skills I dont see a lot of direction or purpose here, instead it looks to me just changing for the sake of changing?
I’m saying that the number of combat castes is limited just until 1220(or even 1225). The only way it’s gonna affect anyone who is not hunting survivors is that you may be late on your evo click and someone else would take the T2\T3. Which is not a big deal. Like you can even code a lottery system akin to the ERT one.
“Three combat xenos” is a very provisional number. The fundamental goal here is to give survivors enough xenos so that it would be a challenge, but not make it impossible for them to survive.
Fundamentally there’s a problem in that the hive is balanced to fight the entire USCM force. So survivors have no chance fighting it straight. The approach taken so far was to prevent the xenos from attacking survivors en masse until survivors get their hold ready. And by then the xenos can still do that timing push and kill them.
So I feel like we need to break that meta completely - survivors should not be completely safe while they’re gathering stuff in the colony. But also they should not need to depend on the crazy cade or rwall forts to survive the defender hordes or the T3 timing push.
Xenos evolving and AFKing in the hive is not a big deal, there’s queen devolve and this can be made ahelp-able too.
What if there was a system where over time xenos get more powerful we could call it ‘maturity’… and maybe an armour system where if a xeno gets shot with AP rounds they lose that armour… yeah imagine…
Yeah, I understand some of what I’m proposing here may seem really counter-intuitive, but if you really think through it all, my perspective shouldn’t be that hard to understand.
I like some of these ideas but I think implementation would need to be careful not to fall into being too ‘gameified’. If that makes sense.
The idea of minimizing round impact isn’t terrible. We’re all there to play a full round after all (unless you perma or get fragged obviously), but I think the concept overall is very dissimilar to the current round-flow so I’m not entirely sure how well it would go down.
There’s also the awkward situation this might create where survivors decide to roam (which they often do) but the hive doesn’t have combat oriented castes to protect their builders while they build up the map.
This idea is alright, I just think it needs more input and concrete ideas for implementation to see how it would go down and if it would be enjoyable.