Balancing and Alien attacks

[icaro440]

hmm, I needed at least 4 to 5 jumps to kill a human with a helmet on. Maybe I didn't get the head.

As for balancing: I played multiple matches yesterday evening on the official servers. Sometimes on human sometimes on alien side.

To make it short: In all matches that I participated in, humans won and aliens lost. Regardless of which side I chose. Also human players consistently had much more points than alien players.

About this you're saying, I think you should also consider the quality of the players you were playing against, obviously if you are a beginner and you played against players like Anomalous, Vicious or Voltage, it is clear that you have a good chance of losing . ;)

Personally I think that day you were playing against some very good human players, you should take that into consideration before saying that the game is unbalanced.

greetings.

[janev]

There is some survivorship bias in the players playing unvanquished. The game has not changed that much since tremulous was released so you have plenty of people who have been playing for the better part of a decade in the mix. There are even a few people who have surpassed the decade mark. Did you expect to win? Really?

[Forty-Two]

Idea: Record some matches so we can see what exactly happens. This can be done using the '/record demoname' command.

[ViruS]

There is some survivorship bias in the players playing unvanquished. The game has not changed that much since tremulous was released so you have plenty of people who have been playing for the better part of a decade in the mix. There are even a few people who have surpassed the decade mark. Did you expect to win? Really?

:/

When you say 'decade mark' do you mean... players that have played trem until today for more than 10 years?

Anyway i recently watched a video about the 'best fps games' according to one guy, he rated NS2 as 5th or 4th place. The 'cons' side showed that newbies will have trouble getting used to the game.

I think it might have to do with our RTS system... Once we get the bots rolling and a simple single player mode similar to the old nexuiz/xenotic's (i've never played xenotic though, but i assume its similar) which is basically to give players skill before they enter the online games.
I hope the 'bot building' code is nearing its finish...

Nope. It was with full health. Headshots dealt 48 damage each hit on the human. So 2 headshots = 96 damage to the human wearing Helmet. Plus, the Light Armor doesn't effect headshot damage at all. It only protects the torso area.

Dragoon headchomps do 48 dmg to helmets silly. You might be getting the values confused.
Look up the data-1.1.0.pk3 armour files for the modifiers, look at the tremulous.h file in the tremulous(gpp or 1.1)/unvanquished source.

Also, oops, gpp helmet modifier is now 0.4 to counter for the x1.5 head modifier for gpp. so that makes the dretch headbites
0.4 * 1.5 * 36 =
21.6 dmg (same damage as 1.1)
₅ bites.

[janev]

When you say 'decade mark' do you mean... players that have played trem until today for more than 10 years?

Yes. Afaik trem started around 2001(I don't know when it first became playable), with the standalone released in 2006. There are a few names that have stayed the same through it all. If they have "played" the whole time I can't say but they are still around which is good enough for me. I started around the time of the standalone release and there are many familiar names.

There was also quake before tremulous that has some skill carryover. I recall that a large portion of the best players had a quake background. The best cfg's came from former quake players.

[WhiteTech]

Hi,

I played a few rounds of this interesting game and I've come to the conclusion that the Alien race is completely unbalanced.

1. Problem is how you attack someone: by touching them. That should be removed, if you want to attack something in an Ego-Shooter it has always been the left mouse button that has been used, why change that? Also it seems to me that if you stay in contact with the enemy, you don't attack again. You've to run away and close in again.

2. The attack seems to deal no damage at all. The human enemy survived ₈ touches, while my little alien died after 3 or 4 hits(!). How is that balanced? A ranged weapon must always be weaker than a meelee attack. ESPECIALLY if the enemy only has a meelee attack type.

Hmm have you ever played the original game, Tremulous? As of right now, most of the game comes from Tremulous, as of tremulous 1.1 a Dretch (the alien you start off with) was very powerful vs humans with no armor. they did 94 damage per head shot. They have since tried to balance things with Tremulous 1.2. With (some say) little success. So, people like the ones you see here took it into our own hands, and making games like Unvaquished

As for the touching attacking thing, only the Dretch does that, because the dretch is all about speed, and I wouldn't want to miss a single important bite. It's not a hit a run alien. It's kill and be killed eventually mostly with the dretch.

Not running in a straight line to a human always helps ;)

[ViruS]

Yes. Afaik trem started around 2001(I don't know when it first became playable), with the standalone released in 2006.

I already know that, but i wasn't sure about the game having released a 'decade' ago. I knew about the forums' first post through a person who decided to post on the oldest topic in existant, from 2001.

Only game versions i remembered was:
0.6 [maybe i was halucinating, maybe my memory's foggy, it's the one with the green overmind i think]
1.0 [Hovel still costs bp at the time]
1.1 [Standalone]
1.1-Lakitu7/Tremfusion/TJW/P-G-QVM etc. [Added features such as !help and !admintest and !slap etc.]
gpp(1) [A tremulous 1.1 mod accessed by doing /connect dev.tremulous.net or something like that]
gpp(2) [Requires another executable to play, and runs on /list2 on the masterlist]

---

TremZ [Currently failing to gather players, has no servers AFAIK]
Unvanquished [You're on its forum right now!]

Hmm have you ever played the original game, Tremulous? As of right now, most of the game comes from Tremulous, as of tremulous 1.1 a Dretch (the alien you start off with) was very powerful vs humans with no armor. they did 96 damage per head shot. They have since tried to balance things with Tremulous 1.2. With (some say) little success.
As for the touching attacking thing, only the Dretch does that, because the dretch is all about speed, and I wouldn't want to miss a single important bite. It's not a hit a run alien. It's kill and be killed eventually mostly with the dretch.

Dretch in unvanquished is the same as the one in gpp as far as i know. My maths are shown before this post somewhere.

Btw, i do have a tremulous mod where you have an optional secondary bite that is stronger than the primary "autotrigger" style, but works like a painsaw so you'll have to keep touching for it to actually do significant damage :D Trust me, the triggerbot style is easier. That is, if the human knows how to dodge and you have standard aim, unlike [H2SO4]PaN16 or UG*CHUCK.

Also, there should be something in the tutorials saying "any class below dragoon is highly recommended to dodge/strafe side to side in battle." On the other hand, the unlagged doesn't work well for me on NA1 so this doesn't really effect me if the dretch is travelling linear or not :/

[tuxator]

well, I won't argue against the 'the other people were better than you' thing, because it's very seldom that I'm the best player on a server (regardless of game). However, when I went human and the people that were humans before went alien, my team won. Those guys that managed to 'pwn' me before, suddenly couldn't do anything.

Now, you may argue that the human model is more familiar to a 'new' player than that alien stuff (I really, really hate that 'attack without clicking a mouse button', I know that trem did it, too. But I still don't like it.) but, to be honest, you really don't need any skill to kill a dretch with a pumpgun or even the default rifle.

And if the area is large an alien really has absolutely no chance in getting to the human.

And as soon as they manage to evolve, the table turns and it's the humans that have nearly no chance.

[KenuR]

well, I won't argue against the 'the other people were better than you' thing, because it's very seldom that I'm the best player on a server (regardless of game). However, when I went human and the people that were humans before went alien, my team won. Those guys that managed to 'pwn' me before, suddenly couldn't do anything.

Now, you may argue that the human model is more familiar to a 'new' player than that alien stuff (I really, really hate that 'attack without clicking a mouse button', I know that trem did it, too. But I still don't like it.) but, to be honest, you really don't need any skill to kill a dretch with a pumpgun or even the default rifle.

And if the area is large an alien really has absolutely no chance in getting to the human.

And as soon as they manage to evolve, the table turns and it's the humans that have nearly no chance.

And you base all that on... what? You should stop trying to suggest things based on your limited knowledge of the game and its mechanics. Just because you suck as a dretch doesn't mean that dretches are underpowered in any shape or form.

[danmal]

I'd like new players to detail their experiences and suggest improvements. Tremulous and by extension Unvanquished has a very steep learning curve and some of the design decisions that were made then don't make a lot of sense now.

We're currently working on larger gameplay changes before trying to fix individual classes/weapons. I agree that dretch not requiring left mouse button to attack is weird/inconsistent.