freem wrote:* alien's wall climbing is hard to master. It could be made easier by having an indication about where is the roof (or the opposite, I do not know the name... earth? land? not sure... but I hope you'll understand). A solution to fix that could be to add an indication on HUD to give the player that information, like an arrow
This has been proposed before and I still find it a good idea. Someone would need to do it, though (our programmers are rather busy).
freem wrote:* the new building mode is really great
Thank you! :)
freem wrote:But is also unbalanced.
It probably is, testing and fine tuning requires us to observer a lot of non-bot gameplay. However, balancing isn't our main concern right now. If you think of balance all the time you are hindering yourself in trying out new approaches.
freem wrote:** avoid aggressive building spam (it does not include barricades, since they are only useful if they are near on many maps) with minimal distance between them.
Such spam is already a very bad idea since as soon as your enemy is on stage 2, they have access to grenades or adv. mara/goon and can do a lot of damage and get stage 3 easily. I see an issue though if stage 1 aliens have to fight a turtle base full of turrets. Not sure how to solve this yet, I guess aliens will need a stage 1 weapon for this.
freem wrote:** reduce eggs cost: human repetitor cost only 4 and allow to build turrets. Total cost is 12. For aliens, egg+acid tube costs 18... Of course, alien's egg can allow them to spawn, but acid tubes are far weaker that turrets, even with regen. (in my opinion, alien's def need real spam to be of any use before level 2, unlike human's)
I wouldn't reduce egg cost but we might look into removing or changing creep/power requirements for building stuff.
freem wrote:** improve egg's or leecher's efficiency and/or range so the higher cost of alien's outposts will not be as problematic as it currently is.
I wouldn't try to balance the teams by giving them different attributes in regards to resources or confidence. This will make further balancing very hard and will also just hide the underlying problem. I'm also not sure if there is any. Aliens get a strong forward with an egg and booster only while humans would need a repeater, a medistation, an armory and a node to get the same. (Not accounting for the fact that the egg also slows enemy, so humans would want to have a turret for better defense.)
freem wrote:** reduce barricade's cost. Seriously... they are useful, but cost as many as a turret!!!
Don't underestimate the use of a barricade. Alien defense is based on slowing humans down, not just making them direct damage. A lot of barricades can, juts like turret spam, make the bases too resistant and take pace from the game. Apart from that, I did make them more useful already, since killing a barricade will give just 10 confidence points to the enemy. So if a barricade protects two acid tubes (15 points each) from a grenade attack and dies, the build points were really worth it.
freem wrote:take a turret alone, and place an alien in front of it (a dretch or a granger). The alien might be able to destroy it (on training maps, I have destroyed some turrets as a granger) but it will take at least 5minutes.
Destroying a lonely turret with a basilisk or mara takes virtually no time and if you have good movement, you will take no damage at all. A single mara or goon can easily kill even two or three turrets in a few seconds if they are not in a very good layout.
freem wrote:Now, compare the behavior of the alien with the one of a human (with a blaster or their basic weapon) in front of a barricade alone... The human will destroy alien buildings without a problem, when the alien will risk it's life for that. Distance weapon on a wall, against very weak weapon on an aggressive building, which have the same cost?
A base that isn't defended by someone will almost always die to a single good attacker. I do believe that aliens are the stronger base killers, only compensated by the fact that humans are more frequently in their base. Furthermore, the alien barricade eats a lot of amunition before it goes down, so while an alien regenerates both life and ammunition when attacking a lonely base, humans don't have enough ammo to kill an undefended main base in a single rush.
I'm aware that the game often seems unbalanced to new players, but you will be surprised how often you'll be changing your point of view and think the other team is really stronger. That's often a matter of perspective. My current point of view (for Tremulous GPP) is that aliens have the overall advantage in public games but I've been told by more experienced players that scrims are rather human biased (good aim and coordination makes humans strong there).
I'll comment on the rest later! Thank you already for your good feedback!