Xenos can be made fun like Marines! 🙂 (straightforward ideas, not a tank.)

Development Ideaguys
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Xenos, are functionally a network of humans, not actual xenos, or insects, each player is an individual personality-node of a hivemind you could say. Players can enjoy playing as a xeno more by adding round continuity, and personality which help a human’s identity, communication, and roleplay. Humans simply don’t remember or develop attachments to generic names. Instead of “A Cat” or “FF-125-U”, people remember Jones, and “WAR” or “MAGE”. Then, when these personalities do something notable they are remembered, when they die, Xenos can be sad and have fun saying RP things like 'NOOO, NOT WAR". When these players meet in another round, they can form long term memories, just like marines remembering each other’s names.

  1. Most importantly, allow Xenos, including the Queen to have full latin character nicknames/callsigns (like in TGMC, mine is Coals and just like with human names, I’ve not seen abuse of xeno names , just lots of cool or silly call-signs.) It’s for the same reason the “xeno hivemind” is actually just humans chatting to each other, it’s in order to accommodate that it’s just humans operating roleplaying, and to make it memorable and engaging for humans players. You can try and hide the names to non-xenos. If you have to, you could lore interpret the nicknames of each xeno the same way as the titles of Ravager, or Queen, as identifiers made by humanity.

Additionally, if it’s not a pain, implement a xeno flavor text viewable to other xenos only, although I don’t think it matters as much. For example, “You know Coals reminds you of the smell of lavender, and enjoys long walks on the beach, as well as ripping the feet off of ape-like creatures.”

Xeno names could also extend to player controlled facehuggers and lesser drones unless you want to keep them nameless. Thereby further making each xeno player a “hivemind split-personality-node” which does not die, but “respawns” to control a different unit of the hive-mind, be it the Queen, Ravager, etc.

Remove the xeno numbers added in the name. Then if able, have the number be the order of the xenos spawned in. If I am “Coals - 6” it would mean I am the 6th spawned xeno of that round. This can indicate they’ve been alive for a long time. Then fellow xenos can say “Wow, impressive.” and have seniority and such. Or the number could be how many times they’ve respawned as a xeno that game.

Other identifying marks could also be interesting such as a different colored name.

  1. Grant the roundstart and late joining xenos a free respawn as a marine, in order to stop punishing and discouraging a xeno roundstart or late joining as a xeno. Since it is very rare to respawn as a marine if you die as a xeno, but you can rather simply become a xeno if you die as a marine, players are incentivized to join as a marine first, and are punished if they join as a xeno. (Granting the respawn also increases player participation and reduces idling as a ghost. I read that not being able to play again easily, or having a long downtime, disengages players, from games.)

  2. Have capping hosts reward the capper and thereby discouraging slashing, by giving you some sort of a stackable buff that is kept through your xeno lives that game. Maybe you can get evolve points and healthpoints/speed or something? (could also add a roundend mention.)

  3. Xeno Profiles?, a xeno can right click on another or maybe there’s a xeno records-console like a medical records or something, and see their “records” which has the numbers of people they’ve capped all-time pasted in it, and various stats.

  4. After the xenos chase away the marines from the planet; instead of always hijacking every game, the marines can go have their mutinies and award ceremonies, while the xenos and coders can develop their own roleplay things in their own base. (Maybe some sort of xeno-furniture or xeno-food offering to Queen like ants, or xeno-minigame or royal-jelly ceremony.) Therefore a separate pre-built “underground xeno-headquarters” like the Alamayer is for the marines should be built, this Headquarters could have like a “Hive Heart” and a “Queen Mother fax messager” and stuff.

Xenos can choose to teleport or are auto-teleported to this Headquarters after marine command presses the “End the Mission.” button, which disables the dropships. (maybe you can have the button break the dropships if it’s hard to do?).

This then unlocks 2 new buttons. The round can end when marine command gives up and presses the “Return Voyage” button, which ends the round after like 15 minutes (or enough time for a mutiny and RPing). Or they can press the “Nuke the Planet (Warning: Could make the xenos desperate.)” button instead. Where xenos are then given the option to hijack from their cave-base.

If they press yes, a barrier wall breaks open and they can enter and launch a “xeno-dropship” (which is a xeno filled projectile launched from the ground) and crash on the Alamayer, but if the xenos refuse the prompt, the xeno-dropship’s entrance is not revealed and the round ends after some 15 minutes or so. The end-round text can say that after the nuke, the xenos survived deep in the cave systems unbeknownst to the marines.

Later on, the player-base if they wanted, could implement this xeno-base as an optional invade for the marines if they win on the surface like a reverse hijack.If the xeno’s accept, when the marines enter, the entrance text says it “caves in” so they can’t escape. But the xenos can refuse the invasion, and the text says it “caved in” the entrance before the marines enter and the round ends after like 10 minutes for post-roleplay, mutinies, etc.

  1. Lastly instead of just equipping for 20+ minutes every game and saying a few words about squads going somewhere (very long downtime), we could definitely streamline getting equipped more, and implement some sort of schedule or squad teambuilding exercise thing instead.
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allow Xenos to have full latin character nicknames

Simply giving Xenos the small prefix/postfix was controversial enough. I personally still am not a huge fan of it but I do accpet that it’s not a bad idea to at least give xenos a little way to self-identifying. I’m not so sure on letting xenos make full on names for themselves though, it makes sense for TGMC since that server is literally a TDM with no roleplay, our xenos are still meant to be a hivemind with no real sense of self.

Maybe allow coloring of some sort of body part

The issue here is getting someone to sprite all of these changes and then implement them code wise.

Also, I’d argue that readability is a critical part of the game. Knowing exactly what kind of xeno you are running into is important, I’d not want to risk obscuring a xeno’s caste just because they are littered with cosmetics.

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You also gotta remember that differently coloured xenoes is unbalanced, and will make marines in Dchat say it’s why they lost.

Unfortunately I am not being sarcastic.

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I’ve always wanted CM to have more immersion like aurora station ambience.
You can try finding a way of hiding the xeno nicknames for non-xenos. If not you can rationalize the nicknames as identifiers made by humanity or an AI. It’s the same as Ravager, or Queen but for nodes of a hivemind (human players). And of course like human names, you could add naming guidelines.

The nicknames I’ve seen on TGMC were already not really immersion breaking, to my surprise. Just call signs to be memorialized by a human, a name, for use by human players in a xeno community trying to emulate a hivemind. People liked to choose interesting nicknames.

Naming is too important. Xenos are not actual xenos they are functionally a network of humans, they need names, for the same reason they are not a hivemind on xeno-chat. Lol the players have essentially been dehumanized. You can interchange these 2.

“our xenos are still meant to be a hivemind with no real sense of self.”

“our human players are still meant to be a hivemind with no real sense of self.”

it’s not interesting for actual humans. there’s not many xeno players.

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If you want names like how an AI names their sub systems and such, alongside how an actual hive mind would name stuff, then we have the three digit number. It would probably have an RV In front for “ravager”, but nothing more complicated.

But in terms of “xenoes have no sense of self”, then yeah. That’s what you signed up for when you wanted to RP a hive mind. And I very rarely see people complain about it, other than people trying to add identifying details so other people can tell it’s you from a glance. But that does somewhat ruin the immersion, and the way marines see xenoes. Because as it stands if you see a lurker as a marine, there’s the same amount of chance as it being some young XX, that it could be BOO. Likewise with every other caste, and it makes it so newer players aren’t weeded out by marines from a glance.

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you have successfully described xeno gameplay
just make extended tags for xeno view only and keep (for marine eyes)/remove the old

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I don’t think that playtimes/tags matter at all and I will try and kill everything but infront of me regardless of playtime. A certain level of awareness about a certain tags/players skill level is always obvious but I feel the best solution to having this meta knowledge is to go all in for the murder attempt regardless of the players playtime. I hate to use examples but when I see people name drop a particular tag and then start fear rping in response I just think that the tags serve no positive end other than people being able to flex

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I prefer prefix postfix xeno names. It’s more immersive, still works as intended, and is easy to recognize xeno names.

Big plus, less lrp dumb names. Only reason xenos don’t have much name rules is BECAUSE of the limitations.

Imo tho, latin nicknames make some pretty stupid nicknames. “marine killer supreme” is a stupid name for a xenomorph. And so is “marine”, “killer”, and “supreme”. Short names is better for alien creatures, and leads to more creative use of names.

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  1. die as a marine
  2. rejoin as xeno
  3. go runner and run into the fob like a headless chicken
  4. respawn as a marine
  5. ???
  6. profits
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TBH adding “most caps” for an End of Round Fun Fact might be neat (provided only the first time an infected is nested to prevent nest/unnest spamming) might encourage less slashing.

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I don’t think this would make xenos fun to play like marines at all.

The core discrepancy between the two is the magnitude of interactions possible. Xenos can’t interact with much of anything - just build obstructions and kill people.

If you add more interactivity between xenos and their environment, you’ll improve the core gameplay experience and fun for xenos. An example of this kind of interactivity is being able to jump into and move through vents, albeit its very basic.

Add more stuff like that, design and redesign maps for it, and playing xeno will get a bit more fun.

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I don’t know how you would count someone capping someone. Was it when they pushed them down? When they swallowed them? When they nested them? When they spat an out onto the eggs? Because a lot of those steps can be done separately by different xenoes, and would be hell to code.

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Could try something like - Tie it to the marine being capped, flag ckeys of every xeno that tackled, devoured, regurgitated on egg/hugger, and nested a marine within n seconds of given points. (e.g. flag tackles within 10 seconds of devour, flag devour, flag hugged within 10 seconds of regurgitate, flag nesting - and finally only record as finalized capture when nested)

Record it in the fun facts list as, “ckey/name assisted with n captures”.

This way nobody is incentivized to ‘steal credit’ for caps - everyone who helped at every step of the way gets credit for it.

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I’d just go for an initial nesting flag that is refreshed after the time period of whatever the upper non-nested, unweeded, etc., marine burst upper limit is since huggers can be NPC or alter number per spawn, vores aren’t guaranteed caps either, tackles are even less guaranteed. he who nests a burster gets the point. “Nested” and “Assists” not a bad idea IMO

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I can’t even count the amount of caps I’ve nested without doing any of the hard work, people go “oh a full health runner, that’s convenient” and ask me to do it so they can keep fighting because they aren’t chasing some dumb points.

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I disagree: for most Aliens as the 4 letters are enough. I do wish the Queen was more identifiable though.

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Insane post. I personally think xenos are fun to play and I believe full latin nicknames are cringe (“coldkiller”, wtf is this?). Only point I agree with is that xenos should be allowed to re-join as marine once per round, that would be cool. Cap rewards are also a great idea on paper, but it’s kinda hard to track. If Queen neured a marine and then let a runner to devour the marine, who capped the marine? Or you want to force Queen to deliver the cap personally?

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Maybe it could have a list of criteria for ‘cap credit’ and multiple xenos could get it. Like any xeno who used disarm action within 2 seconds of someone devouring them, or hugging them, or nesting them. And of course, credit to those who devour or nest them.)

I don’t know the best system, but I think capping being incentivized more would be great.

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Capping is already incentivized very well, if you cap somebody the chances of you getting a larva after you die increase.

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Well, considering the amount of times I’ve been killed when I could’ve easily been capped, a lot of xenos don’t care about that.

Maybe a buff that improves your success rate when you disarm-stun - seems fitting that a reward for capping would make you better at capping.