Remember the last hectic time when marines were siege one of your hives?
And 2 skulks went to the hive for healing , someone turned into a lerk-egg and then you respawned. And

BLAM !

All 4 of you who were somewhat near the hive got sent back into the dust you came from. Would it not be nice if siege cannon only damaged buildings? I think this is a must do.

don't flame this thread if this got discussed before, the search function never gives me any answer ...

Totally agree with this, especially seeing as how the siege damage code is rather buggy;you can sit upon a structure being sieged and not take damage, but stand 20m away from a structure as it's hit and you're pummeled for 165 incidental damage (I believe that's the value...). Marines already can attack your hive from within a sheltered corner, and any other tactic to assault a hive have a much higher chance of backfirinf due to the risks involved; Siege cannons have virtually no drawbacks.

Solution: Stand well back

Ideas: Heal Spray from a small distance you will be suprised at the reach of the spray.

Beaing killed by sieges really sucks and doesn't make sense because!

Sieges are albeit quite buggy. I agree, the damage should either be fixed (you know when your going to get blasted to pieces) or be removed.

I think it was meant to damage players because tons of gorges couldnt camp a set of DC's or OC's and spam healspray it while the commander sieged from a far location. It kept them from doing that, making it all the more reason to just consider your OC's or DC's lost. Too bad.

well I think you should be able to counter the seige because when everyone is guarding it with a turents all around it aint that easy to counter! like something that makes it so you cant use the sweep on a hive room if there is something there like an OC perhaps? you would need to see it with a marine or have a stronger seige with more range and make it like a nuke in Starcraft with a marine placing a tracer on it i dunno
[(edit) fixed spelling and lil bit clearer to read]

If seiges can kill I'd atleast like something done to bilebomb, I mean if you spit a big bilebomb at a marine it should do something!

You can manually TARGET bilebombs. You can't manually target Seige turrets. Seige bases take lots of res to set up. Gorges costs 10.

Sieges should deal less damage to lifeforms. To compensate, increase seige damage. The result: gorges can more easily build distractions, but sieges would still be powerful.

How about make the blast radius of the siege equal to the observatory scan? That way, you could get a rough idea of how far you should be away from the structures, plus it would encourage marines to come into the hive (so that aliens won't be able to tell how large the siege blast radius is).

Why doesnt the siege damage marines,
I mean it says "the splash damage" hurts the aliens, well you can hurt yourself on splash damage of a grenade, why not siege?
This would stop marines comming in and standing under the hive, getting cover fire from sieges.
Just my suggestion

Certain weapons should always have friendly fire enabled...

since the range of the siege is so far, I totaly agree with this suggestion. sometimes the only way to break a siegespot is with an onos or fade rush - and most times you don't have enough room to back off from the hive and *blamm* - scrammbled eggs.

so: YES.

Make the seiges do 25 dmg to lifeforms That way it wont kill aliens unless there are like 8 seiges to do it. However it will be enough to make aliens fall back a bit.

We can test it for a build and see how it affects seiging. Only field tests will show whether it's balanced or not.

Actually...I have another idea. Instead of seige damaging aliens, how about the sonic waves overload the alien's eardrums (or similar body structure) and the alien is stunned for half a second or a second? Since seiges fire so slowly you can't get chain stunned unless there are like 8 seiges (which probably requires at least 2 adv TFs because of the stupid, stupid no build radius) in which case you've probably lost that spot anyways.

siege should not damage aliens, maybe if anything that shock wave from the gravational vortex ( or however the heck sieges shot threw walls it says in the manual something about rearragning gravity) and so maybe it could shock the aliens for a second or so tops, but that should be it. com gets plenty of kills from his electric fences and turrut farms, he doesn't need free kills from sieging

so I agree with meatshield

what about this:
aliens get thrown around when they are to near to an siege-impact!
(and nothing else, until they drop into a trigger_hurt pit)

So, let's take this into perspective.
There is this weapon.
This weapon can blow up a building in one minute.
However, this weapon can not damage a single person for three years.

Siege must do damage to aliens.
BTW: About your some weapons must always have friendly fire on. Make a server and turn friendly fire on, because your allies should take damage when you shoot them in the head 50 times.

From a physics stand point, the weapons shouldn't even be able to hurt the structures =|


As to why the siege cannons can shoot through walls, they use sound. Sound happens to have this whole thing with super sonic frequencies that's capable of moving through solid subtances. I imagine the waya real "Siege Cannon" would work, would be by matching the frequency of the sound attack to the harmonic frequency of the structure. (This is something that can really be done. A building was demolished with a small electronic device that made a sound that matched the harmonic frequency of the buildings infrastructure. It began to wobble, and crashed to the ground)

Perhaps a fair mod to the siege cannon, would be it targets a structure, and only hurts structures of this type in the area. (I doubt a defense chamber and a offense chamber share the same mass properties.) This would help with the OC Farms in some areas. As for hurting aliens, I think the fact it deals 125 (Double VS Structures) would be enough to keep you happy. Maybe if for some reason the devs want to get rid of a Sensory Skill, a good idea would be something along Selective Hearing.

I imagine sieges (using sound) would cause aliens (a highly sensitive race) to have bit of a twinge in the ear. That should deal some damage, but the Selective Hearing might lower the damage, or null the effect completely. of course, this would be useless in CO. So it's not too likely.

I totally agree with sieges dealing no or less damage to aliens, BUT only if healspray is nerfed to half of what it is now. (In relation to hives, mainly) Would solve the problem of the hive in combat being unkillable when there are some gorges (large teams) and the siege cannon would have a counter.

Btw, sieges use gravity, not sound.

Oh wait, on second though this doesn't seem to be so good for combat...

afaik is that what you hear already selected through the nano organisms crawling the environment. did you ever noticed ears on the aliens (except kylies hamster mod for the gorge if so)?
the nano-orgs transmit it directly into the brain of your current ingame-avatar, much like the hivesight.
and yes, sonic blasts are able to kill you in reality - but how can they kill you when you have no ears? the supersonic-building-crushing effect descriped up their could be effected by destroying the molecule connections through microscopic movements caused from the sonic waves - but this needs direct contact with the device and is highly inefective!
ever noticed the floor shaking when you turn up that subwoofer to loud?

<e>typos

sieges need to do at least 60% less damage to the aliens simply because sieges can wipe out respawned aliens to easily right now. there have been times ive played and there was only 1-2 siege cannons, no phasegate, no turrets. after the team killed off all but one marine the queue at our only hive began, but the cannons were killing off the reinforcements soon after spawning.

perhaps a compromise - only skulks are immune to the siege cannon. skulks are a minimal lifeform and only gorges do less damage, but gorges heal.

i do like the 'only deal the type of targeted stucture' but then i get to thinking will all the sieges target the same buildings or not, since sieging is more effective with 2-4 siege cannons, and if they dont then this idea is not going to change much.

...and the stress would kill the whole hull integrety and your ship would go *crash*

rest in pieces.

*bump* I still want my idea to be implemented The one about seiges only stunning aliens for a set amount of time instead of damaging them.

Some sites have mods that allow sporifying the res towers. How about something like an upgrade to a sensory tower that will effectively cloak all structures within its range against a siege (or set of sieges) until marines enter the area and decloak a structure by firing upon it. And if the marine stops firing the structures recloak against the siege.

Along those same lines... How about giving aliens the ability to upgrade an OC into an Alien OC siege structure for line of site structures and Marines.

I don't know how long it should take to upgrade the structures, maybe two or three times the amount of time to build a regular structure.

no, I don't support this;
1) sieges are barely effective now as it is, this is just another nerf
2) doesn't make sense to call them "siege" cannons if they can't siege a stronghold... in the olden mediaeval (or whatever) days, sieges ONLY killed the people, and didn't do anything to the structures
3) doesn't logically fit (big explosion, but no damage? wtg?)
4) killing players provides marines with a working tactic to oppose an alien turtle (ie aliens who hide behind D chambers)
5) sieges have been hurting players since the beginning. no need to overturn EVERY idea.

can't defend the hive if you die when you spawn in

my €0.02:

sieges should prioritze structures over players. just like with sentry turrets, but the other way around

i that way, as long as the hive lives, it's defendable

[c]oma, sieges don't target players. but if a player is close enough to a building when it gets hit by a siege, then the player will be hurt/killed.

hmmm, in that case... i like the option for sieges not to damage players at all. but cost a bit less res maybe. this doesn't hurt the game too much i think, as there will usually be some marines around the sieges to kill of the aliens that come to the hive under attack, anyway.

The reason why siege canons can hurt players is to prevent the gorges from healing the hive.

if the reason for siege to damage alien player is that of gorge healing hive then do this:

siege stun the hive! Hive self-heal stops and dcs and gorges can´t heal it for a 5 second period. (I think sieges fire every 5s).

This way , we can still have gorges, lerks and fades in the hive area without the fear of a random supersiege killing you. This will also have the effect of improved teamplay. Since hive does not heal when stunned, gorges are needed below hive to heal the fades and lerks that attack the siegespot.

I change my suggestion into this.
Siege stun hive, siege can´t hurt alien players, hive can´t be healed while stunned and hive can´t heal anyone while stunned.

Then the commanders will place realy MASSIVE amounts of sieges, after this formula:

siege number = ( damage to hive / time to fire )

the closer the actual number is, the faster the hive will go down because there is practical no time to reastablish the hive health.
its even possible that one tf is build, it's build range spammed with turrets, another TF build + siege upgrade, then this tf spammed with sieges, another siege tf and an turret only tf to secure the backside.... DO YOU REALY WANT THAT?

Instead of that, you could up the siege damage, but remove damaging players.

Fixed in B6.