they do too much damage

gorges cant help against them very well now

it takes like 30 seconds to kill a hive from relative safety

ARE YOU TELLING ME THERE ARENT 32 PEOPLE ON YOUR SERVER THAT COULD HEAL THE HIVE!??!!?!?

2 gorges is all you need!!!!! Although 32 seems tempting!

(times below aren't exactly accurate, but just for example)

It takes 30 seconds to detect a dropped hive, 30 seconds to get your men from marine start to a seige point, 15 seconds to build the TF, 15 to upgrade it and 10 seconds to build each cannon.

Now add up the time for dying, building phases, reloading and resupplying, scanning, respawning, beaconing and phasing, waiting for res flow and so on and you'll see that the marines have way less than a minute to get the hive down before it goes up and the alien strength increases 5 fold. If your second hive is already up the alien team can delay seiging for much longer and prevent it from ever starting much easier.

The point isn't that seiging can be done quickly. The point is that the aliens should know way ahead of time when a siege is going to occur and have plenty of time and power to disable it.

Seiges are overpowered indeed.

The old seiges that harmed lifeforms and structures were NEVER this good. They were simply support weapons used to take down a hive and make it easier for marines to invade the hive.

The old seiges of just pinging and shooting the hive took probably twice as long as the new seiges did, they did not have huge problems of gorges healing the hive, and the seiges themselves were still immensly useful.

The new seiges on the other hand; it's like taking the sentry turret, making it so it can't hurt structures, doubling it's dmg, and lowering it's cost by 5...
Today, seige turrets do ALL the work involved in taking down a hive. Before, marines HAD to go in to really kill the second hive, plus seiges, and at the very least they would need HMG's.

Seiges are overpowered as hell, there isn't a reason to go in the hive room anymore... just plop down 3 inexpensive seiges within a minute and if the aliens let the seiges go up the hive is going down. In fact, it goes down before you can kill the turret factory or the seiges or the phase gate. Hives get demolished by the new seiges and it's not even funny or fair. These seiges remind me of the old 1.00 seiges which never required a ping, or line of sight, and fired automatically... they just were thrown down and created an instant "no alien zone".

Lets do a quick comparision of why the old seiges were great, fine, and almighty, and compare them with the new broken seiges:

Old seige:
- Support weapons, killing the hive with them alone took almost two minutes. (3-4 seiges) and if the marines never went into the hive, just have a gorge stay under the hive healing it, and the hive would never die unless the gorge was killed, which needed to be done by marines. Therefore marines couldn't camp on the seiges like they do now.
- Gorges could still heal the hive but only if underneath it, because of lifeform damage the seiges did.
- Seiges hurt aliens around the hive, so nothing could camp on top of it, allowing marines the ability to attack the hive in person.
- Old seiges gave marines a deadly advantage but were counterable in many ways.

New seiges:
- Main weapons that obliterate a hive room in under one minute.
- Marines just have to defend them and not worry about attacking.
- Line of sight isn't nessesary, but rather overkill on the hive.
- Gorges cannot heal the hive to stop them from going down.
- The only counter to seiges now is to not let them go up.


The last line is bolded because it was the same problem with the old 1.00 seiges. The only way to actually prevent them from destroying everything was to not let them go up. Once they were up, it was too late for aliens to kill the seiges before they killed the hive due to their auto-fire status with no line of sight requirement.

Solution to the seiges: Change them back to the old seiges that worked just fine.

But of course, this brings up the question, why were the seiges ever changed in the first place? They were not broken, they were not frustrating, the new sieges have become twice as good as the old ones could have ever been...

Things really have to go back to the old way, it was a lot more fun for both sides (at least compared to now) and not to mention much more balanced.

I prefer the new style of the sieges since random blast damage isnt very fun. Just lower the damage caused.

no blast damage is a very good thing. thx

The siege damage itself can be tweaked by changing its damage...

lance

We recognise that siege damage is probably a little too high at the moment and will add it to the agenda for the next balance patch.

Adding back in siege damage vs player is not on the agenda at the moment, but we never say never.

The problem with adjusting siege damage lies in the fact that the "Effectiveness" of sieges progresses in steps and is not gradual.

If the hive has a certain amount of health it takes a certain amount of seige SHOTS to take it out. The number of shots is then divided by 3 to get the amount of ROUNDS that need to be fired from 3 cannons.

Adjusting the amount of dmg is meaningless if it doesn't affect the number of shots fired, and the number of shots fired, is largely meaningless if it takes the same number of rounds.

I think that the sieges are going faster now because they are taking out chambers in 1 round instead of 2. And taking the hive out in a or two rounds less. These rounds add up to a considerable time difference.

also before, you couldn't scan as much, the obs only had 4 scans in it when it was full and now it has 5, and if you built a new obs it only started with one scan, instead of the 2 it starts with now. This meant marines had to sight the hive, and aliens could prolong by keeping the marines out of sight.

Thats how you have to think about sieges when you adjust their damage.

NGE so the marines have to go INTO the hive to kill the gorges? I thought this was exactly the way you wanted siges to work?

Uh they're called sieges for a reason, try not letting the most obvious constant in ns rock your face because you don't know whats going on. If marines secure a siege location and they're going up that hive SHOULD die, otherwise you'll make static offense/defense
100% garbage. Maybe make sieges more expensive, so instead of affording 3-4 sieges the marines can drop only 1-2.

Balancing seiges is difficult because of the unpredictabilty of gorge healing. Let me explain.

Gorges heal about 64 hp per tick, right? And they heal maybe 1.5 times per second. For sake of argument, lets simplify that to this--each gorge heals the hive for 100 hp per second.

I don't recall how fast seiges fire, so lets pull a number out of thin air--each seige fires every 3.5 seconds. Lets arbitrarily assume a patch that puts seige damage at 350, for ease of calculations. Now seiges (with constant line of sight) deal 100 damage per second.




Now how long does the hive last? Well, with 3 seiges, the hive loses 300 hp per second, with 7000 hp this means 24 seconds. Kinda quick, but not bad.

Now add 3 gorges healing the hive, with a MC in the back to provide constant adren. The hive is now losing--oh look! ZERO hp per second. It doesnt die. At all.

Now lets patch seiges to 130 damage per second (not even bothering with damage per shot). The hive being healed by 3 gorges now loses 90 hp per second, and dies in about 80 seconds. Thats not unreasonable, considering the effort being made to keep it alive.

Now look at the same hive with no gorges. 18 seconds. That hive is just about dead before you can even finish evolving to gorge. You can't hardly kill an undefended TF in that time.


Basically, the problem is that balancing seige damage is hugely dependant on the very high hp gain afforded by gorges, and balancing for any number of gorges produces skewed results with a different number of gorges. THIS was the primary benefit of the old seige cannons--while killing the hive much more slowly, they made it extremely dangerous (though not impossible) for gorges to safely get close enough to heal the hive. So you could accurately predict about how long it would take for x seiges to kill a hive, and balance around that. For this reason, seiges ought to do some damage to aliens around the hive.

Couldn't you just make gorges evolve faster and this entire problem would be solved?

Then still games are rarely so stacked that one team outnumbers the other 32:0. Well, for aliens at least they rarely are

and in cxwf's example, in a clan war, 3 gorgies = marines just walk in and shotty the hive to death after scaring off the fades and dealing with the skulk or 2, and thats if the aliens are already stupid enough to not have a skulk killing marine rts.

Gorges heal about 1 percent, per second, per gorge. If the alien team can delay your attack for 25 seconds, they can heal the hive from 50% to 100% with 2 gorges. My guess this is about the time it takes to beacon+phase twice for the marines. So kill enough marines to cause a beacon and you've got your hive back.

Meanwhile all the marines are sitting at the sieges doing nothing, just sitting around waiting for a shotgun to come by or something.

No, but I proposed to lower the siege damage to 380 or whatever it was before 3.04, then you complained about marines having to go into the hive and killing the gorges.

NOW what am I missing?

Just to clarify sieges have always been dealing 330 damage. This was then increased to 380, followed by an increase to 400.

AT NO POINT IN TIME HAS SIEGE DAMAGE BEEN DOUBLED. This confusion could be due to the fact that siege dealt 175? damage to lifeforms, were given blast damage to deal double to structures.

Up until 3.02? 22 shots were needed to kill a hive.
This then dropped to 19.
Which then dropped to 18.

Gorges in the old days were usually splattered by siege splash, meaning barely any healing was done.

imo the obs changes have improved sieges more than siege damage. In the past, if you had a fully charged obs and quickly dropped a new one for more energy, you would only have 5 scans.

Now, you have 7.

This 40% increase in siege time probably has helped marines more than siege damage has.

what if pings made alien buildings show up only long enough for 1 seige volly, so you either have to build a second obs or go in or something

Perhaps if damage was to be done, it could just be done to things stood on top of structures. It would be good if you could just damage things standing right on top of an entity hit by a siege cannon. However, what you'd get is gorges pretending they had skipping ropes, trying to jump so they were in the air each time a siege hit the structure. A better solution would be to take the coordinates of the extents of the structure, then run through the linked list of players and see if they lie within that range of coordinates, and within a certain distance of the top of the hive.(Stuctures are already taking damage from sieges, and anything else that could take damage, well, gets skipped, is never destroyed by sieges).

For example, if the hive measured 2 x 2 x 2, and was at (4,2,1), you'd check to see if any player was in the range (3 1 2) and (5 3 3). That would give you a cuboid 1 unit high and 2 x 2 square, and anybody with an origin in that range would be damaged.
The cuboid wouldn't be an exact match to the chamber/hive, but it wouldn't be bad either. A vertical cylinder would be about as easy to do, and would probably be a better match. This would always ignore obstrucing surfaces/bits of map/other players, but that's what sieges are for, right? It would be consistant, at least. You might have to make the radius a little larger than the actual extent of the structure to make sure they couldn't sit on the edge and take no damage, since you're checking the origin not the bounding box, but that's just a detail to be tweaked.

The advantage would be getting back to the situation where gorges couldn't heal a hive safely from on top, but if you stay away from the top of a structure then you'd be assured of not taking damage the way the old, less reliable damage radius would. Gorges could still heal from below the hive without being killed by sieges, but then they'd be vulnerable to marines attacking.

You guys all need to quit bitching about little individual things. Sure sieges are overpowered, but aliens are overpowered mid-late game. *snip* Let the marines have the one advantage that they have (because we all know when hive 2 goes up, it's just about gg, so marines' only chance to win is getting hive 2 down before it goes up) and enjoy the most balanced NS version in a long while. I can't understand you people who have such an inability to see the big picture.

PS. You lose these sieges and we go back to ramboing being the only way to take down a hive.

Edit: What I mean is: First you complain about SG too powerful, then about sieges,athen about HMG, then about HA. Common. Just because it's a challenge to work against these doesn't mean they need to be nerfed. There are the ONLY things marines have going for them. You want all alien wins with no rine hope??? End rant.
Chill down, mmk?

MistenTH has a point the obs has changed it, not the sieges really

Well, if 3.1 fixes the healing cones of heal spray (the area where you heal ) , so you can actually heal the hive properly then im one happy gorge

Aliens are overpowered so who cares.

Nobody has mentioned what I thought would be the most obvious way of balancing sieges. Even before this most recent buff if a marine team was able to get their sieges up the hive was going down, in most cases. The big fight over the siege spot occurs between when the marines enter the area and when the siege cannons finish building. If you want to give aliens a better chance of saving the hive vs a siege, increase that time. The easiest way to do that would be to increase the research time on the turret factory.

I don't know why people think that "the old model" is superior to "the new model," when in both cases gorges are irrelevant. I think sieges with no player damage and 400 structure damage is, from a purely theoretical perspective, better because they're more consistant and reasonable. Try considering a realistic gun that does half damage to people and whole damage to non-people (not even considering the fact that, in NS, alien structures and aliens are both made of the same compounds -- hives and DCs are just as much alive as skulks and gorges).

Ok, even if you don't buy that argument my first point still holds water. The battle for a siege spot has always been decided before the siege cannons are up and firing. In fact, the only cases I can think of where this hasn't held are on gigantic servers like SCHamptons where the aliens can afford to have 5 gorges on top the hive healing continuously. This certainly wouldn't happen in a 6v6 competitive where you could barely afford to have one or two gorges, let alone expect them to live healing the hive when marines know that their best chance comes when the last gorge dies.

if u give rines enough time to set up sieges next door to your hive ...YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG.

i dont think they really need to be changed, they cost a lot of res and rines have a more of a chance, its not an alien beatdown 95% of the time anymore.