Would it add a useful option for strategic purposes to give marines the abillity to fast-track upgrades for a heavy resource penalty, say 1.5x speed for double the cost; and aliens the abillity to get a hive up faster for a hefty cost?

This would obviously be a buff to both teams as there are more venues and the old ones are intact. It would in particular cause competition for resources to be even more important and give aliens more of a chance to bounce back after losing a second hive to a sneaky shotgun rush or similar and shortly thereafter reclaiming the territory.

Oh well, this probably belongs more in the NS2 I&S forums as it would be a big change to fundamental stuff so late in the game.

More tactical options is good, but I think the res game is important enough already. Especially the res biting for skulks is a bit too mechanical action to be emphasized more.

Even now its very rare that you have loads of res but no time to tech something crucial. Maybe pg tech or so rarely, but you should have reseached it earlier if you had the res anyway. The hive and aa are the only cases I can think of.

I like the suggestion about the alien hive, but I don't know how that will play out.

Marines are fine imho.
You can already build two buildings of one type to get faster upgrades/stuff.

Good idea for marines.

As for the alien hive, I don't think this would work out. Because normally you drop the hive as soon as you reach 40 res (10 to go gorge of course). If you waited to drop a fast building 50 or 60 res hive, it would be impossible to make up for the time delay. What I mean is, by the time you got to 50 res so much time would have passed that you could have just dropped it sooner with 40 res and still had it done faster.

hmm, with RFK it might be possible for a really good player to gather the extra rez fast enough (it all depends on the balance factors).


TBH, I like the idea, but I don't think it is something really needed.

Good point, RFK might be able to make up that difference. But to me it would make the ability for aliens to use this new option too based on having one really good player. I guess it might work...

The point is to give marines less time to react on a dropped, more expensive hive.
So the hive will more likely finish growing, before the marines kill it and it will give the aliens an advantage in defending it or at least the opportunity to drop chambers.

The idea is good, but I see one problem:

A lot of times when I'm playing a strategy game, I bank my strat on how much tempo I have on the opponent. The logic becomes "if he has all the res in the world, but he's dead before he can spend it, I win." - That's a valuable part of a strategy game that would be a poor choice to remove, in my opinion.

With that said, allowing some tech to be expedited might definitely work.

True, you could cross A1/W1 off the list since you can just build 2 arms labs if you have that much res.