Xenomorph Changes

[monkeysfist101]

 

As of yet, xenomorphs are almost impossible to defeat and need to be rebalanced/rewritten.

 

 

 

The Facts

 

For simplicity’s sake, I will be discussing the four most important xenomorph types: the facehugger, the drone, the hunter, and the queen.

 

The facehugger:

Possibly the most important stage of the life cycle. These ambush hosts and attach themselves to the face. While they have no true "blood," they have a highly corrosive poly-acid stored under pressure between two layers of skin. If someone attempts to remove the facehugger from a host, the host will die from either the facehugger crushing the host's esophagus or from the host's brain being dissolved by poly-acid.

 

The drone:

The drone is a feeble creature that is highly susceptible to damage. These are the workers of the hive as well as the collectors of hosts. From their mouth, they can secrete a liquid resin to coat the walls and floors to provide grip for the queen to lay eggs as well as to bind subjects for impregnation. The drones have a somewhat stronger acid for blood, capable of melting through normal floors and walls. While effective in groups, a lone drone is not a force to be reckoned with.

 

The hunter:

A crowd favorite, the hunter can bring down entire crews singlehandedly. This beast is neither fast, nor agile, but is well armored and extremely deadly. The hunter is not concerned with the propagation of the species, but rather with the extermination of all other living creatures. This xenomorph uses natural weapons such as a serrated tail and strong jaws to stab, rip, mangle, crush, and eviscerate hapless victims. It has one goal and one goal only: kill.

 

The queen:

Big, ugly, and a bit of a bitch, the queen stands almost twenty feet tall. She is the only fertile xenomorph in a hive and is born from a royal facehugger. Despite her stature, she is rendered completely immobile by her large egg sac. In situations where the hive has been destroyed, she will detach from her restraints and pursue the hive's assailant(s).

 

 

 

Discrepancies

 

There are some things in the game that have never been seen in the Alien canon.

 

Acid spit:

While the xenomorphs have a highly potent acid for blood, their saliva is actually a liquid resin.

 

Neurotoxin:

While in the original script, the xenomorph had a scorpion-like tail, the ability for the xenomorphs to spit toxin from a distance has not been in any of the canon works.

 

Pounce:

The only time xenomorphs pounced in the movies/canon games was when they dove from air vents. As it is now, one hunter can infinitely pounce, bringing down entire ERT units and Death Squads with ease.

 

Marauding facehuggers:

In the movies, facehuggers never traveled more than a few yards from their egg until the host was carried away.

 

Lack of acid blood:

Currently, dead xenomorphs don't drip acid blood. This should be the only way that xenos can melt through walls. In addition, it would make shooting them at point-blank range dangerous. As seen with PFC Mark Drake in Aliens, having a xenomorph die in your immediate vicinity is a good way to have your face melted off.

 

 

Infestations

 

There seems to be two (canon) discernible kinds of xenomorph infestations.

 

The first is the lone hunter.

This is the xenomorph seen in Alien and Alien: Isolation. The lone hunter is brought aboard by an infected crewman via facehugger. This lumbering brute is a nigh indestructible one-man-army. It is infertile and can't spit resin, but it blends in well with darkness, can crawl through vents, can't be killed by conventional methods, and can kill with reckless abandon.

 

The second is the hive infestation.

This is the infestation seen in Aliens and is the one currently in the game. It begins with a queen being born and exponentially grows to the point where all living creatures in the area have been impregnated.

 

The third, and perhaps the least dangerous is the diner infestation:

Imagine yourself as a ne'er-do-well with your best friend, a mog. You go to Gus's Galaxy Grill. It's not the nicest place around, but it's cheap. After ordering the special and flirting with the staff, you look over to your left and see the crew of a transport ship joking about voyages passed. Suddenly, one of them starts coughing and gasping for air. He gets up but falls backwards onto the bar. You friend asks the waitress what he ordered and is replied with, "Oh, he ordered the special." You quickly change your order to the soup. A sickening tearing noise echoes as a small monster erupts from his chest. Looking up, he utters, "Oh no...not again," and seizes up, his eyes dead and lifeless. The monster snarls and looks like it is ready to attack but instead dons a hat and cane. With a passion, it sings out, "Hello, my baby! Hello, my honey! Hello, my ragtime gal! Send me a kiss by wire. Baby my heart's on fire! If you refuse me, honey you'll lose me, then you'll be left alone. Oh, baby, telephone, and tell me I'm your own!" In the confusion, it runs into the back room to begin its life. Check Please.

 

 

Game Mechanics

 

Mechanically speaking, the round would begin similar to a blob round with one crewman starting out infected and have a few minutes to play around. Ideally, the crewman wouldn't even know that they have been infected and would take control of the larvae. Anyone within five tiles of the chestbursting would have a similar stun effect as throwing up, preventing the larvae from being ganked. CentComm would declare that they will not allow an ERT or an evac to maintain quarantine. At this stage, the xenomorph is very vulnerable (more or less identical to the way it is now.) From here, it can go one of two ways.

 

Lone Hunter (One xenomorph: Hunter)

After a brief wait, the xeno is ready to hunt. At heart, the alien is an ambush hunter, relying on darkness and wit. While the xenomorph can not be killed conventionally, it can be brought into critical repeatedly. While it is in critical, it is at the mercy of the crew who must attempt to space it. It quickly regenerates and the crew must bring it back into critical before having another chance at killing it. If the crew can send it into deep space (off the z level) or if it is caught in a nuclear explosion, the crew wins. If it kills off the remaining crew, the xenomorph wins.

 

Hive Infestation (Many xenomorph, no hunters)

The queen matures much faster than the hunter and, at least for a while, must pull the weight of the entire colony by abducting and securing several crewmen on her own. Even though she is leagues and bounds more robust than your average drone, she is still small and could be easily brought down by a well armed security team. After strapping several crewmen to the walls of her shiny new bachelorette pad, she must settle down and raise a few dozen kids. At this point, she evolves into the egg-layer stage where she gains an egg sac at the expense of her ability to move. After a few drones are born, she becomes a mission control of sorts, being able to look through the "eyes" (Xenomorphs have no eyes) of her drones. While they are a larger force, in a one-on-one fight, a drone can be brought down by a robust crewman, requiring them to blend in with resin and ambush potential hosts. If the queen is killed, then it results in a crew victory, but if all crewmen are killed, it's game over, man.

 

 

 

Tl;dr:

Break xenos into two game types.

The movie lore was already balanced, no need to add stuff.

Get away from her, you BITCH!

 

[Earthdivine]

 

Posting from a phone so excuse any terribleness.

 

First off, while the gameplay is far from the lore in a lot of cases, it has a lot to do with that lore =\= good gameplay. Take the doors should not be melted through example. Currently when the crew hears XENOS, everyone and their mother grabs a welder and welds the nearest vent. In real life scenario that is impossible because just using a welder once would make you possibly blind, not the 5-6 times you can do it in SS13, which is why the Xenos in the books and movies didn't need to melt through things. In game however, taking that away isolates the entire hive very quickly.

 

As for marading facehuggers, I'm very sure they still don't do that, that was never included even before Ponies changes, so I'm going to ignore that one for the Acid blood. I do agree that they should have that, as that was an iconic thing about them and helped reinforce the "don't go near them" mentality. How that would translate into game however is another story. Melt through the armor/hard suit? Those things are irreplaceable, while Xenos are, so Xenos could suicide charge to get rid of protection using that blood.

 

Neurotoxin versus the tail. I for one don't know why it is like this, more then likely because animated sprites back then didn't work, and the ones that did were super fincky. It would look very weird to get knocked down from a distance and not see how, the text box can only convey so much. If we could make moving sprites then the tail would be a great replacement but for now neurotoxin has to take its place.

 

I'll write more about the Xenos themselves when I get home, hope this helps

 

[monkeysfist101]

 

I wrote this off and on over the course of four hours, so I forgot to finish up the solutions to the marauding facehugger issue, acid blood, and neurotoxin.

 

I propose that the eggs must be controlled by the queen where she chooses when they emerge. From there, the facehugger only lives for about two minutes before latching onto a host or dying of old age.

 

Regarding acid blood; destructible objects within one or two (testing would be needed to see which one is more balanced) would take damage. Normal walls, airlocks, and tiles would be destroyed, while reinforced walls and tiles would only take damage.

 

I was suggesting removing the neurotoxin altogether as it is currently overpowered.

 

[Fj45]

 

One of the problems with xenos is they move so damned fast you can barely hit them, combine with lag, barricades and destroyed stuff for extra fun.

 

They can dodge your lasers, you can't dodge their insta stun neurotoxin.

 

It also seems like they can just spam neurotoxin all day, maybe it should just slow slightly or not work at all on hardsuits/biosuits.

 

[Earthdivine]

 

One of the problems with xenos is they move so damned fast you can barely hit them, combine with lag, barricades and destroyed stuff for extra fun.

 

They can dodge your lasers, you can't dodge their insta stun neurotoxin.

 

It also seems like they can just spam neurotoxin all day, maybe it should just slow slightly or not work at all on hardsuits/biosuits.

The neurotoxin travels in a line now, that's far better then ye days of old where it WAS unndodgeable

 

[Fj45]

Oh yes, but its still pretty bad.

[Earthdivine]

 

Oh yes, but its still pretty bad.

It is, neurotoxin is 20-30 plasma per shot I think, and it stuns for as long as a thrown stun baton, I would suggest to up its cost but the Sentials don't use plasma for much anywas...

 

[Wintermote]

 

I mentioned this in my previous post on balance suggestions - remove neurotoxin. It was OP when it was first introduced and it is still OP.

Aliens shouldn't be ranged, at all.

 

Additionally:

Remove their ability to acid doors/equipment

Give them the ability to force open powered and unpowered doors, but not bolted or welded doors, as a trade-off for not being able to acid through everything; or give them some ability that allows them to bust down even a bolted door with some time.

 

Barricading yourself somewhere should only buy you TIME, not immunity.

 

Get rid of the sentinels - their gimmick is the neurotoxin spit and without that they might as well not be there. Aliens won't be suddenly unrobust without the spit. Buff up the drones and turn them into the new defenders of the hive as they should be.

 

Have facehuggers supply people with air while they are hugged, like they did in the movies.

 

Give xenos their resin doors back. They're the only way to make a makeshift airlock and without them you can't keep areas from being unpressurized due to alien players constantly leaving/entering from space. (You think walls and windows will do? Players just break them so they can leave/enter)

 

[Fj45]

Meh, resin doors made walls far too powerful.

[Wintermote]

 

Meh, resin doors made walls far too powerful.

Explain your reasoning please.

 

[Plotron]

 

Meh, resin doors made walls far too powerful.

 

Currently instead of building walls all made of doors (a huge door resin mass), I build wall mazes that force people into CQC. Sure, it is a bottleneck for 3+ aliens, but it works wonders. And I find it way more useful than doors.

 

[Fj45]

Exactly, and that's far more fun for the crew then screwing around with xenos that keep poping out of doors while you try to bust a hole into their nest. Having no doors means you have to use some basic thinking and strategy when making a nest.

[Plotron]

 

It's not like the gamemode isn't completely broken at the moment. It is broken. I can't really tell how valid my technique is. Currently there isn't much strategy involved in this gamemode - aliens are way too powerful 1 vs 1.

 

Regarding door abuse: I loved spamming the doors as alien when the crew wanted to bust in. Every door they took down was replaced by two new doors. It made breaking into the hive a bit harder. AND you could simply use a backdoor and stab the person in the back if the guy went in too far.

 

Now it's more like "Oh, they're shooting. Pooping a wall here!" - and you're done, they can't reach you and you can hide. Or even make a maze and lure them into it. But that's the point of drones, isn't it?

 

[Wintermote]

 

Aliens were always meant to be powerful 1vs1...

If you are doing that, you SHOULD be dying. It's a situation where only preparation, surprise, or dumb luck, ought to keep you alive.

 

If aliens cannot easily win 1vs1 fights, they will quickly be destroyed by the human players and the balance swaps the opposite direction. Right now the balance is not so bad from personal experience.

 

I do think aliens have an edge, but I don't think it's a big one. Just needs some polishing and small balance changes - some of which I suggested earlier.

 

[Fj45]

 

Aliens should have to work together to survive, it should be extremely hard to just solo everyone. Think of a dynamic like nukeops, each member of the team has a place.

 

The biggest thing that shows how unbalanced xenos are is a vid where about three xenos were able to take down two DS and ERT members with no causalities. Neurotoxin is a big part of that, if it was removed completely I would love to see how that would change xeno rounds.

 

[monkeysfist101]

In an ambush, xenos should be able to bring down an entire deathsquad, but in a one-on-on fight, the humans would win. My case in point is that in a matter of seconds, the marines in Aliens was brought down to three active members. They were then able to kill +80% of the hive before the atmospheric processing center detonated.

[Wintermote]

 

Trust me, if you make the aliens easy to 1vs1 it'll be even worse than what we have now. They'll be pushovers and ignorable. Assistants toolboxing aliens to death? Seen it happen before when aliens got massive nerfs on /tg/station because people thought the same thing about them.

 

Right now, they're dangerous enough that people panic and big guns get taken out. That's how it ought to be.

 

If they're easy to 1vs1, aliens will get bumrushed by a pack of people, and quickly die. This already happens: 2-3 people with welders can easily kill one alien - you can't keep them all stunned, and as an alien you'll have trouble killing humans before they kill you when their welders are doing 30 damage per hit.

 

Do not forget the aliens begin outnumbered, must attack the station and cannot set up any decent ambushes immediately, and have no good methods of dealing with exosuits or cyborgs. Both of which are immune to stuns and airloss and can hit pretty hard back at the aliens. If you make the aliens weak enough for assistants to conceivably 1vs1 them, I can easily see a single person in a ripley, or a single cyborg, destroying entire nests on their own.

 

[Fj45]

 

Oh sorry, greytide shouldn't be able to just 1v1 xenos, but they sure as hell shouldn't be able to take down ERT alone.

 

Hardsuit plus E-gun sound like a good base to balance them on?

 

[monkeysfist101]

 

Reading back over my initial post, I see that I left out the part where even in her juvenile state, the queen is STRONK. While still stealth, she is a force to be reckoned with. Despite this, she will still need to start out by ambushing crewmen in the tunnels or coating a room in resin and ambush those brave enough to wander in, lest she be slaughtered by the security team.

 

My theory (1v1 head to head):

Drone>crewman

Drone=well armed (improvised) crewman

Drone=Normal security officer

Drone

Drone

Drone

 

Lone Hunter>crewman

Lone Hunter>well armed (improvised) crewman

Lone Hunter>Normal security officer

Lone Hunter>Red security officer

Lone Hunter>ERT

Lone Hunter=Deathsquad

 

Queen (Juvenile)>crewman

Queen (Juvenile)>well armed (improvised) crewman

Queen (Juvenile)>Normal security officer

Queen (Juvenile)=Red security officer

Queen (Juvenile)

Queen (Juvenile)

 

Queen (final form)>crewman

Queen (final form)>well armed (improvised) crewman

Queen (final form)>Normal security officer

Queen (final form)>Red security officer

Queen (final form)>ERT

Queen (final form)>Deathsquad

Queen (final form)

 

[Deanthelis]

 

So basically, the Queen's final form would take pretty much the whole round to attain, right? If it's meant to be >DS, and the only thing that can kill it is the nuke, then it's got to be powerful enough to deal as much damage as the OTHER biological threat that warrants the nuke or a DS - the Blob.

 

This would be a rather difficult thing to achieve, though forcing the Queen to be immobile for a while IS a good way to balance it. I could see the difficulty of the gamemode being tweaked by adjusting how much time it takes for the Queen to reach that stage - I'd wager somewhere around 30 to 45 minutes, since the Queen would probably spend 30 to 45 minutes gathering up crewmembers for her babbies to face-love as well. Not to mention however much time it takes to go from a royal Embryo to a Queen. All of that added up affords a round that is over in an hour to an hour and a half, approximately - good time for a Xeno round, since ones that stretch beyond the 2-hour mark are generally unfun and the crew transfer shuttle is called anyway.

 

Come to think of it, it might be possible to reskin and reuse some of the blob mechanics to boot - allow facehuggers to be NPC's controlled by the Queen once she's rooted in place, but instead of blob zombies from blob spores, you get new drones.

 

Food for thought.

 

[Fox McCloud]

Still keeping an eye on things, but the hunter pounce is very likely going to get nerfed; hunters are the most egregious culprits of the mode at the moment due to them being the primary individuals to bring back people to infect.

[Wintermote]

 

Oh sorry, greytide shouldn't be able to just 1v1 xenos, but they sure as hell shouldn't be able to take down ERT alone.

 

Hardsuit plus E-gun sound like a good base to balance them on?

 

The only way a xeno wins a fight against anyone with a laser, is that the person with a laser misses or gets stunned.

 

Remove neurotoxin spit and it gets significantly more difficult for aliens to kill anyone with a ranged weapon without dying. Hunters have their leap, which allows them to murderize anyone caught alone, but that's as it should be. The leap should only need a lengthened cooldown, as it's basically the only way for a xeno to bridge the distance gap to a ranged opponent.

 

The problem is more that eguns don't have enough ammo and once you're out, you're fucked. Also problematic is recharging once aliens have a foothold and are destroying APC's. Playing as ERT during an aliens round, I never felt seriously threatened until I ran out of ammo, because I moved with a buddy and we covered each other when fighting aliens. They'd either die or run off seriously injured; in 2vs1 the aliens didn't last.

 

I think the only buff that's necessary for humans are magazine capacities in all weapons being increased.

 

Nerfs for aliens should only be leap cooldown increase, and removal of neurotoxin spit.

Buffs should be facehuggers keeping people alive while hugged

And the queen being tougher in someway - perhaps more like an exosuit in movement, size and capability (tail attack?). Right now the only thing going for the queen is egg laying and neurotoxin spit.

 

[Earthdivine]

 

In an ambush, xenos should be able to bring down an entire deathsquad, but in a one-on-on fight, the humans would win. My case in point is that in a matter of seconds, the marines in Aliens was brought down to three active members. They were then able to kill +80% of the hive before the atmospheric processing center detonated.

This is where movie and game scenarios are the absolute worst thing to base anything off of. How great would the movie have been to see those last three guys go down as easily as thir crew mates? How good Alien vs Presator would be as a game if you go swamped by the Xenos rather then fighting 1-3 at a time, when aliens usually hunt in much larger packs?

 

They are written and shown like that to induce an enjoyable experience for the audience. The biggest example of this is Alien Isolation. Aliens have heat sensing organs, but you can hide right in front of it in same cases as long as you had something between you and it.

 

You use the lore as a baseline, not as a strict guideline on how the game should be.

 

As for the DS dieing to 3 Xenos, as stated the Neurotoxin travels in a line from where the Xenos was. If they died because one or two got hit by that, then they would have still lost against most other antags. You can shoot diagonally, Xenos need to aim very carefully and position themselves in the correct direction. Only the Pounce is the most broken stun tool they got and that's being needed hard and more then likely wasn't meant to be that spammable

 

[monkeysfist101]

 

The only way a xeno wins a fight against anyone with a laser, is that the person with a laser misses or gets stunned.

As it should be. Every time the xenos charged the marines, they were killed easily. When the xenos blended in with the resin walls and floors, they became almost invisible and were able to bring down ultimate badasses.

 

[Fj45]

I will say, the facehuger changes are amazing and massively improve xeno, no more spam and no more "nobody left but us engies."