Natural Selection 2

For me, it's annoying, it creates a haze, blinds other teammates, gives away position around corners, and is really, imo, only useful when power nodes get knocked out. If you're on your own go for it, if you are working with teammates it's best to turn it off. I could be missing something, but that's what i think.

I spent much more time playing this game over the weekend than I probably should have. I actually won a few times as marines too. The general consensus is that Aliens are far too OP. If the Marines do not have good shooters with decent teamwork in the first 8 mins... the game is almost surely over.

I'm starting to wonder if that isn't inherently the problem. Marines require much greater teamwork to be successful. However since the marines are a very familiar race to play and Aliens are well... alien to most. Most new players choose marines, while more seasoned players will likely be on the Alien team. Which leads to a skill imbalance.

What skill imbalance?

6 Minute ONOS RUSH!!!!!!!! :D

It still feels like it's the alien's game to lose. Marines have to be coordinated to hold off even an uncoordinated alien attack. Even a loosely coordinated alien attack requires the marines to be extremely coordinated AND skilled shooters. At perhaps a very high level of play with very skilled aliens and very skilled marines maybe there's some semblance of balance, but at the levels the majority of the community plays at...

It reminds me of zergling rushing on small maps back in SC. There's not a lot of skill needed to do it, but it takes quite a bit of skill, experience, and preparation to deal with it. The main difference here is that at least in SC if you lost to such a rush the game was over in 5 minutes. In NS2 the same principle applies but the game goes on for an hour anyways.

The victory distribution on pubs is 60-40 in favour of the aliens.

I think the biggest problem is that without two bases, the marines have no proper way to combat several onos at once. So once they get locked out of that second base it just turns into a waiting game until the aliens gathered enough resources to do just that.

I think moving the jetpack up to first tier would help provided the flamethrower goes to second.

The biggest problem is that the aliens have vastly superior map control, and it's easy to use. Most players have no conception of fortifying space so what you end up getting is two marine bases, one the original and the other at another tech point, and they are just islands in an alien sea. They're connected by a phase gate but both continuously besieged from all directions, and eventually one of the endless alien attacks will get in and destroy something you can't afford to lose. I had one game where we killed something like SIX Onos without ever being able to push out of our base. Alien players are equally clueless about controlling space, but it doesn't matter because they're much more mobile and even an idiot can figure out how to take down isolated RTs with a skulk. As far as I can tell, pretty much all the alien commander has to do is shift hive and plant a pile of eggs in a somewhat central map location, and the aliens will be occupying most of the map in no time.

I believe that 40% marine victory business was a number from before builds 230 and 232, released November 20th and November 21st respectively.

You can see there were a LOT of nerfs to the aliens in those patches (and an Exo buff), so I'd be very curious to know today's rates. Haven't found current numbers yet.

No patches since then, and Flayra's balance mod page is quiet.

ETA: Yeah, the 60/40 stat was used as part of their announcement of patch 230. Not relevant to today's balancing concerns, I'm afraid.

Well, I've been in quite a few more marine victories lately. I'm not exactly sure of the cause, since I didn't hear of any patches, but either marine players and commanders have gotten better or the alien teams have been afflicted with a case of the stupids (also, I did see aliens get trolled a couple times).

Out of curiosity, are we still playing this game? It feels like there aren't that many servers in operation, and nobody's said anything about it for a couple weeks now.

I am still playing and steam numbers come out at around 2000 players per day.

Game needs to be in the winter sale to get a player base kick. There are around 800 + servers, sadly only around 30 of them servers are active with players.

I've been playing off and on, just downloaded planetside over the weekend so that's been taking up a lot of my game time.

Christmas patch! $300 spent on DLC unlocks presents!* :D

*this game has no dlc!

http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/news/2012/12/build_234_is_now_live_on_steam



Snowballs!

Wow , some really good map changes!

Build 236 is live , flashlights fixed! And Docking map has been redone between Terminal and Departures. (East wing is all new).



http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns/news/2013/1/build_236_is_now_live_on_steam

Build 240 is out today!



BELLY SLIDE!

Are people still playing this? When planetside 2 came out I kind of forgot about it. Although I did enjoy playing.

I will probably get some time in this weekend , but with Tomb Raider / Sim City / Heart of the Swarm / Bioshock Infinite all coming in March , game overload!

Do the map changes make it suck less to be a marine?

not really... I found the changes on Docking actually made the game easier for aliens. :|

I don't play every day, but I'll hop in from time to time and I usually have a blast. Lately I've been having a lot of fun playing as a gorge. Bile-bomb raids are the best.