Some preemptive explanations / frequently asked questions.
omgwtfhovelThis was a matter of editing. Hovels served no purpose not covered by other structures, and we couldn't think of and didn't receive any good ideas for it, so I decided the best course of action was removing it altogether. Think of it as an extra model for modders to use.
What's with the weird alien regen values?Alien health doesn't return in chunks one a second at a time anymore, it now returns one point at a time at varying intervals. Since this allows for greater precision in defining regen values, I defined them in terms of percentage of a class's max health per second:
- Granger - 4%
- Dretch - 5%
- Basilisk - 3% (not counting their healing auras)
- Marauder - 3%
- Dragoon - 3%
- Tyrant - 2.5%
Attack width? Height? Repeat?Width and height are basically how accurate you have to be in order to hit with a melee attack. For most attacks the width is used for both the horizontal and vertical axes, but the tyrant slash and painsaw now have a separate vertical value so that tyrants can still hit teles/medis with their shorter range and battlesuits can now finally saw dretches. Repeat is how long you're forced to wait between attacks, so lower means you can fire/slash/etc. more frequently.
Those non-locational damage modifiers make no sense.Well, they make more sense than they did before. I didn't want any armour to be of wildly different value for locational and non-locational damage so we made the formula for non-locational damage take into account what regions a piece of armour covers. Light armour, for example, leaves you vulnerable to non-locational damage because it doesn't cover your head, so I didn't think it was appropriate that it quadrupled the number of pounces you could take before dying. And now a battlesuit is actually better than wearing light armour with a helmet. Crouching produces different modifiers because light armour and helmet have different
locational modifiers/coverage when crouching (the old formula just averaged everything together). I felt that having a formula that used the locational modifiers was better than arbitrarily maintaining two different sets of numbers.
Why no fund reward for destroying structures?The tradeoff with awarding funds for structures is that it allows builders to feed, badly. At one point in development we awarded funds for all structures with the hope that it would encourage players to be more aggressive, but it didn't really accomplish that enough to warrant severely punishing teams for trying to build forward, or for just trying non-standard bases.
We might have kept funds for spawns/reactor/om, but the choice seemed arbitrary. Overmind/reactor might be equivalent enough to each other, but if the reactor goes down it's very unlikely that the 3 frags it'd award would make a difference in the outcome of the game. Eggs and telenodes are not equivalent since aliens need to put eggs in harm's way if they want forward bases. I could maybe see doing it for repeaters in addition to eggs and telenodes, but I'd rather see builders unafraid of being aggressive (especially since one successfully aggressive builder can set up a platform for numerous teammates to go on offense, as opposed to giving one reward to one attacker for killing an enemy structure).