Natural Selection 2

The first Natural Selection was a pretty great Half-Life 1 mod of aliens vs. space marines. One team would play as the marines, who would have one player playing from an RTS perspective, buying upgrades and dispensing items, and another would play as the aliens, who would get the ability to evolve into more and more powerful alien forms.

I can tell I liked the first game because at some point far back in the mists of time, I paid them money for a pre-order of Natural Selection 2, a standalone, retail sequel which just unlocked on Steam last night. I haven't played it yet (it is still downloading), but the first game was such a blast that I feel I have already gotten my money's worth. And at $25, it's hard to go wrong, in any case.

My circle of friends are all over this and it's still selling at #1 on Steam, even during the Halloween Sale. Natural Selection 1 was my personal favorite Half-Life 1 mod ever, and I played a lot of HL1 mods.

I played this at PAX in September and it definitely has the same good combat feel. There are a TON of little changes, but most importantly:

• Both teams now have a commander that can shape your odds
• Resources pump up team resources and personal resources both
• Team resources = team structures by commander
• Personal resources = weapons for marines, evolving for kharaa
• Kharaa have upgrade traits now
• Dynamic infestation/light changing for levels

Played it for a few hours last night after it unlocked, and it's a good time. Fast paced, significantly different play styles for each team, infestation is outstanding.. I'm glad I picked it up. Servers are flooded but for a launch day it's still been pretty good. My only major complaints have been how badly inexperienced commanders can screw you, and everyone's new to the game so everyone's still very cautious in endgame which can cause dragging matches.

There's an okay beginner's guide on their wiki and a dedicated new player forum.

We fucked around with it a bit last night and it seems like it'll be a blast once I have a better handle on it. One thing that strikes you about it is what a difference a good commander makes. We almost got our shit pushed in immediately upon starting, and then an experienced commander took over and we started to win. An hour in it was still anyone's game, but I had to go to bed.

I didn't play the first one, but it reminds me a lot of Nuclear Dawn. I wish that game had caught on better.

I loved the first one. Finally released this huh. I'm buying it at lunch!

I had a blast being a commander, disappointing that they added a commander type role to the alien side. But maybe this is a good thing. There is no doubt that a bad commander can ruin it for everyone, I'm hoping the vote option is still enabled to remove bad commanders.

Does it have in-game voice support? Any of you running teamspeak and/or playing later?

You can still vote to eject a bad commander. There is in-game voice. Those of us playing it are using Mumble in the usual places. I personally will be wanting to play most evenings for a while.

I am still quite bad, but with some help from my side I've played as alien commander once and marine commander once and won both times. I harbor few illusions, I had to ask my team how to do stuff a couple times and I'm forever asking them what upgrades they want, but in each case they felt I did a creditable job for a first-timer. I need to watch more of the training videos but the fact that they're literally just YouTube videos is a bummer.

Marines seem easier to play, both as a commander and as a grunt. I am shit at both, of course.

The aliens were fun too, just from the climb up on a wall and jump down onto unsuspecting people perspective.

Damn. This game is trying to compel me to purchase it.

I'm going to chime in and say that anyone interested in this with a twitter should follow theirs: https://twitter.com/NS2. They've directly responded to a few of my questions and seem to be pretty great about engaging the community. First post release patch:

Code (text):

1. Build 228
2.  
3. Fix
4. - Fixed issue where the game would run out of memory on 32-bit Windows.
5. - Fixed bug where unicode characters could not be deleted in text inputs.
6. - The server browser scroll bar now resets when the menu is displayed and when the "Refresh" button is pressed.
7. - Fixed server crash caused by getting a new ability in the same frame an Alien was destroyed.
8. - Reduced bloom flicker (thanks slime!)
9. - Reduced visual noise when ambient occlusion was enabled.
10.  
11. Improvement
12. - Added server list filter option to display favorites only.
13. - Added option to disable camera animations.
14. - Disabled automatic sorting of server list during refreshing.
15.  
16. Optimization
17. - Reduced client and server memory usage by 200-400 MB

And a report indirectly related to balance, which looks pretty good:

Since our launch 36 hours ago, we've already had 15,986 games played! 51.2% alien wins, 48.8% marine wins.

— Natural Selection 2 (@NS2) November 1, 2012

That's interesting. Our experience has been a significant tendency toward Marine victory, which obviously isn't reflective of the overall numbers. That's a really good outcome.

Yeah, that's been my experience too.

I'm less excited about the specific numbers at only 36 hours in and more satisfied that they're paying attention from day 1 and the tools are in place to watch that (and hopefully a lot more) over time.

Yep I wish I would have remembered to purchase and start downloading at lunch.

What a lot of fun this game is. I couldn't tell you the last time I stayed up to 3:30am playing video games.

Anyone playing this run into this particular problem (Yes I've searched for it to no avail)

When I bring up the server list, sometimes it's not there. No refresh, no nothing, then I check my internet connection. This game is literally knocking out my router when I refresh the server list and it takes approx 3-4 mins to come back online. Even after I shut down steam and the game completely.

That's an old, old problem when it comes to online games. You're basically flooding your router. Check for firmware upgrades for the router (or get a meatier one :))

I'm going to be kind of screwed in that area, it's an Arris Gateway for my whole house DVR ,which acts as my cable modem.

Yeah it doesn't run the best for me either, but that sounds like a core driver issue.

My impressions are that it's really strong on teamwork and tactics, less so on the combat itself. I keep coming back so the latter (remarkably for an FPS) hasn't put me off.

Runs well for me on an Nvidia 460.

Steam tells me I've played ~15 hours in the last week. I'm still into it, so money well spent as far as I'm concerned. Combat itself is solid on both sides, but the marines will feel weird if you're used to military manshooters with recoil etc.

The Combat Mode servers are worth checking out if you want to play a more COD style game without commanders. It's not my cup of tea, but it costs nothing to try.

Just attempted a few rounds and I'm completely lost and having never played the first one isn't helping matters. I watched the general overview video but I still don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, much less being either commander.

Can't help you as far as commander goes. To have a properly good game you really need a commander who knows what he/she (ok never heard a she but y'know) is doing, preferably with a mic. Having said that...

Marine: The general idea is to expand out from your base capturing resource locations (the grey circles on the map) which also require power to work (the yellow triangles on the map). The commander has to drop them, at which point they will appear as blue see-through outlines. Go up to these and hold E to build them. If you reach a room with an unbuilt resource node you can press x and click "request order" to let the commander know. Otherwise it's basically a question of territory - the aliens will try to kill you and set up their own stuff, you should try to do the opposite. The actual choosing of buildings is all the commander. The main building which should concern you is the armoury - you can heal yourself there and buy new weapons when they are researched.

Aliens: Their main goal is to prevent the Marines doing the above, generally by ambushing them. The skulk is your basic alien and remains useful throughout the game, and in my opinion is the best if you (like me) aren't very experienced. You can hit B to choose what alien to evolve into and, crucially, to pick upgrades for them when those are researched. Remember to check if upgrades are available for skulk, they are a big help.

Overall: Listen to what the commander (and players) are saying, hopefully over voice, which will generally be "capture X" or "they're attacking X", X being a location labelled on the map. You can't go far wrong following those orders and trying to kill the enemy there.

There's waaaaaaay more that could be said, but that's the basic gist of it.

Watch the other videos. They're really helpful.

Play on servers that are green. They're for newbies. Anyone with a green name is a newbie also. Newbie servers, They'll help you learn the game and won't berate you for making mistakes. I've been going to them to learn the maps and try my hand at commanding. Also only be a commander if you have a Mic and enjoy leading the flow of battle.

Here's a few things I've gleaned from playing this past week that might help:

1) A primary difference between marines and aliens is that the marine commander can only place where he wants equipment to go - he needs to have soldiers physically there to stop and build it. The alien commander drops stuff and it just builds itself. This makes the aliens generally be more on the offense (since they don't need to stay back to build stuff) and the marines be on the defense.

2) There are 5 major nodes on each map where an alien hive or marine command post can be built. Having multiple hives/posts unlocks more advanced upgrades. This is somewhat important for the aliens, but absolutely critical for the marines. Marines need to tech up to being able to get access EXO suits to stand a reasonable chance of fighting back against alien Onos (the ultralisk beasts).

3) There are also a bunch of resource nodes around the maps where both sides can place extractors. The more resource nodes your team controls the faster your personal resources go up. 75 resources is the magic number where aliens can become Onos and marines can become Double-Minigun EXOs (although the marines require the tech to be researched). If one side build enough of a lead that they hit this threshold before the other they probably will win the game.

4) The main thrust of the game seems to be built around this idea that the alien playstyle sets them up to be on the offense from early on, but the marines are actually the ones that need to be on the offense early to win the long game. If they turtle up the aliens simply get to 75 and stampede them with multiple Onos that they don't have the gear to deal with. To some extent this makes having a competent marine commander more essential to their success than the aliens having a competent alien commander, because the marine commander absolutely needs his forces to work together and accomplish objectives, whereas the aliens probably win by default if the marines never get their shit together.

A competent alien commander means upgrades - I've had a few games where the aliens never really got much in the way of upgrades and were steamrolled as a result.

That pretty much goes for both commanders.

Kind of. Even un-upgraded marines are nasty for aliens to deal with. Un-upgraded skulks are sad pandas. But yeah, it's pretty well balanced. It's also easier for the marine commander to intuitively understand what they need to do.

I'd sort of like to get even a 3v3 or 4v4 going of community peeps from here so that people can take some turns getting used to the commander screen and seeing what it's like.

After a failed game last night that was definitely a loss, I jumped into the abandoned commander's seat and just start learning the icons and build requirements and stuff... and also how to drop ammo and medkits. I built some turrets and even with my shitty knowledge and lack of voice commands (because I was concentrating on learning the UI), my team managed to hold off an Onos for a little while at a choke point and I got some stuff built.

Hit me up I'll help out

I'll join too, just let me know when.

Tentatively we'll go for 9pm EST. I'll stay signed onto Steam friends list, you can find me in the Broken Forum steam group.

I should be around. I'll jump in if the ping is playable.

I'm down like clown and in like Flynn!

I bought this today and played maybe five minutes before admitting defeat and doing explore mode training for an hour. In those five minutes I did get to bite an exosuit a couple times, so that was something.

The only other thing I noticed was how clear the in-game VOIP was, and how not-douchey the people who were talking on it were. It bodes well for future attempts to actually play the game.

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh SHIT!

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh WHAT?

I could've sworn this was going to become vaporware. I'm going to buy it RIGHT NOW.

I was on but didn't see anyone else, you guys want to meet up some other night?

Yeah I was on a bit later and messaged Pogo but seems no one else really showed up, and this is one of those things were we'd need like 8+ guys for it to work. I'd be up for trying again though.

Just posted requesting an invite to the Broken Forum Steam group, but http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197992145876/ is me and I'll be up for playing (usually 9+ PST, or weekends).

I could try again tonight, I was in the broken forum chat last night, but it was just me and Lhowon.