killing time wrote:Devolving near overmind sounds good.
Devolving near overmind or egg sounds good because of outposts. Since there is a need for an living overmind to evolve/devolve in any way, this seems ok to require the overmind to be alive and to be near an egg (or the om itself), so dretch spawner can devolve to overmind if spawned in an outpost.
Gireen wrote:Disallowing aliens to evolve near humans has its reasons. Without it a small alien could easily rush into a human base and turn into a tyrant.
It looks like the idea for a small coutdown that leaves the alien vulnerable would be effective against such trick.
I agree with the fact a full refund would be too favorable for aliens and that spending as most evo to devolve than to evolve is a too strong penalization if we consider the evo points spent to evolve at first are definitely lost.
killing time wrote:I think giving a full refund would be too favorable for aliens.
Sure, with devolve refunds aliens would just be able to rebuild their base without any counterpart: no feeding the human team, no evo point losing, with their ability to heal everywhere and their speed, they would be overpowered.
Or when you have low health, devolve, deliberately die, and then respawn, instead of waiting for healing.
No need to die, It's faster to recover 100% of the health as a dretch. People would devolve, heal, evolve.
How should a countdown for devolve and/or evolve work? Are you unable to move? Move, but not attack?
That would stick the player in place, a bit like a caterpillar has to nest in his cocoon to become a butterfly. I'm not saying we have to implement some GFX for it. The idea is that the alien player has to find a safe place to evolve. This behaviour (looking for a safe place) would be up to the player instead that to be up to the engine, thanks to the game mechanic itself. The engine would not have to decide if it's a safe place or not, something it's not very good at, knowing it's the right place and/the right time to evovle would be a player skill.
The only drawback seems that the countdown must be short because the game is fast and players would be frustrated to wait if they wait to long, but long enough so the mechanic teaches people the behaviour to have (finding a safe place/moment).