Who: Everyone Where: [url=unv://74.91.17.250:27975]Development & Testing Server[/url] When: Saturday, June 15, 2013 @ 21:00 UTC (find out when in your timezone)
What will be tested
Subtle changes to the confidence system that should decrease the chance of a slippery slope.
Building a structure will always yield 60% of its confidence value (formerly 0.8 * 0.9[SUP]number_of_neighbors[/SUP]). Killing a non-naked enemy now gives a confidence reward when both you and the enemy are not inside your own main base. The code that checks whether a player is inside a base has been improved to return less false positives.
The advanced granger spit can now be used to put out alien buildables on fire.
Communication
Join our Teamspeak 3 Server at 46.38.234.31, password »unvanquished«.
Ok, so I hopped in the server for an hour when we played thunder.
Thunder
The thunder is WAAAAY too loud. In a game like Uv that is based partially on stealth/suprise, it is very important to hear the sounds of fighting. When the thunder is on, NOTHING ELSE can be heard. Nothing. It's ok if you can't hear some quieter sounds, but if a rant's charge is almost inaudible, something is wrong.
It's too dark. I understand how the aliens are supposed to be able to sneak around and crap, but it's stupid when you're a nice big human shooting a a tiny dretch that you can't see against a black floor/walls. Of course, the dretch has a nice easy time, since you're silhouetted against the oh-so-dim lights on the ceiling. All the dretch has to do is bump into you, while you spam bullets look for it and it has a kill in the bag. Now I can understand making some hallways darker so that aliens have a slight advantage, but humans should still be able to see aliens.
The map is too big. I understand that this map is supposed to be played with a larger amount of people, but that doesn't counter one important fact: beyond a certain point, the larger a map becomes, the more alien-biased it is. The reason behind this is that aliens are less tied to their base and that it is harder for humans to set up bases. Aliens need no ammo, they regenerate health, and they are much faster than their two-legged opponents. This causes them to need to return to the base much less often, and to take less time stocking up when they do. When humans create a foreward base, they must build a repeater, and armoury, at least 2 rets, and a medistation. On the other hand, aliens are usually fine with an egg and a booster. This means aliens can create forward bases in about 30 seconds while humans create them in over 60. Taking this all into consideration, as the distances between bases grow ever larger, less and less humans will reach the alien base before they must turn back, yeilding more and more alien advantage.
The invisible walls need to be fixed. The invisible walls defining the corridor between the human base and outside are very human biased. Humans can shoot through these, but aliens cannot jump through them. It is possible to take off 120 hp fom a goon before it is even able to make contact with the defending human. This may very well be intentional, and an artifact of open space, but if this is intended to be an open area, the invisible walls have to be removed. The other option is to wall off the area and make it opaque. This would make the physics make sense and remove the need for invisible walls.
General
It is much harder to play the game without binds. In many games, it is possible to play from a non-competetive to low-competetive level without any sort of keybinds that cannot be configured outside of the gui. In trem and uv, however, you cannot be effective without binds due to the amount of time it takes to traverse the menu system. I understand that this is being fixed with the implementation of libRocket, but a number-based menu would definitely be appreciated in the meantime.
Arm/medistation suggestion At the moment it is very hard to establish a fwd base, due to the amount of structures that need to be built. I suggest that the repeater/rc create a healing aura, and also dispense ammunition. Upgrading will be handled only by the armory. This would make it easier to build a forward base by providing basic support to help construct it.
It is much harder to play the game without binds. In many games, it is possible to play from a non-competetive to low-competetive level without any sort of keybinds that cannot be configured outside of the gui. In trem and uv, however, you cannot be effective without binds due to the amount of time it takes to traverse the menu system. I understand that this is being fixed with the implementation of libRocket, but a number-based menu would definitely be appreciated in the meantime.
Implementing a new menu just before the introduction of librocket seems like a waste of time to me but I started working on a new set of default bindings.
seana11 wrote:
Arm/medistation suggestion At the moment it is very hard to establish a fwd base, due to the amount of structures that need to be built. I suggest that the repeater/rc create a healing aura, and also dispense ammunition. Upgrading will be handled only by the armory. This would make it easier to build a forward base by providing basic support to help construct it.
The new human building system allows you to build two turrets and a medistation before you require a repeater. At this point the forward already has good defense and no weak spot. With someone defending it, it already requires a suicide attack to take it down. You can now position your repeater and build an armory and telenode. It is correct that aliens only need a single egg to get the effect of node, armory and repeater but their building system has drawbacks, too. Most importantly the egg is the weak spot of the forward and you would want to build another one as soon as the forward gets bigger. The human forward I described costs 50 BP, a comparable alien forward with two eggs, one booster and two acid tubes costs 48 BP.
I do agree with the general criticism that human bases need more buildables to be functional but I think forwarding got rather powerful with the recent changes and I don't want to boost it even more just yet. I have the feeling ddos will be wiping out entire teams with ckit and blaster on the summer tournament.
The ammo aura idea you have is an interesting idea. It makes sense that if you are near an armory you will buy ammo... But it is less realist (honestly... I do not play games for their realism, and it is probably why I usually prefer sci-fi games).
Well, it doesn't make any more sense than the current arm/medistation does, where the medistation 'magically' heal people, and the arm teleports guns..
Your comment also makes me thinking that energy weapons could see their ammo regenerated by repeater: after all, the repeater sends energy to near buildings, so why not to energy weapons? But to avoid making this feature too unbalanced, it would consume some power (so the risk of putting buildings out of power to regen your weapon creates a drawback to that kind of weapons.
You can already do this by pressing b next to the rc or a repeater.
Alien buildings explodes when the egg is removed, unlike humans' ones.
Humans have long range defenses at stage 1, unlike aliens.
So, yes, humans needs more buildings to make a forward, but their forwards are really stronger imho.
