Hi all. I'm an occasional player and last night I tried 1.2 for a few hours. I am mostly a human player, so my opinions will be in light of that.
I have both positive and negative impressions about the new rules, I like some of them, I don't like others and some are just confusing.
Let's take the base and constructions first:
- turrets - they become almost useless. In 1.1 a skilled dretch could destroy 1 lonely turret. Now, 1 dretch can avoid or destroy 2 turrets easily. That is just not right. I am pretty noob player with aliens, and even I was able to jump through a human base guarded by 4 turrets.
- turret sounds - it's cool to hear turrets moving, that is a good idea, however the sound is just too loud, it's even louder than the sound from the shots of the turrets
- DC - finally, there is a reason to build a DC. However the compromise for a DC is still too big. To have a decent auto-repair speed you need 2 DCs, meaning you have to give up 3 turrets or 2 Teslas.
- Teslas are now much more useful than turrets. That's good.
- BP recovery after destroyed buildings is too slow. I agree with this time-based recovery, but it should have a faster rate. In the current gameplay you have no chance to rebuild your base after a rush. But maybe I am just seeing this as a problem because I am used with 1.1 style bases. Anyway, 1.2 will require a hole new strategy of building bases.
- repeater - it's nice it has it's own BP now, but 20 BP is just not enough. Let's see what can you do with that. You can build 2 turrets which are mostly useless, even against dretches. You can build 2 Teslas also, which is better, but at stage 3 they are also almost useless against goons and tyrants. The only combination I see somewhat acceptable is 1 Tesla and 1 DC, but again it has little effect on the aliens, and requires constant guarding/repair. After I've red the new rules I thought humans will be able to put out some kind of "outposts" with a repeater + something, but in the current configuration they are just useless. I think increasing a repeaters BP to 30 would help, though.
Conclusion: I like the new building rules, but there are some stuff which are useless or very rarely usable.
Now, my impressions about the guns and firepower:
- higher firepower against faster aliens - I think this just aggravates the situation. I always thought that dretches are too fast, especially when I started playing Tremulous. It took about 2-3 days of playing to have my first kill. It is not helpful to have a more powerful MD when you can't even hit running dretch. I consider myself an average player, better than noob but far far away from pro. Before, I could get a dretch, hard, but I could. Now it's much more difficult. And just to be sure, I played with the aliens too. Being a noob with aliens, it was always hard for me to kill a human as a dretch (obviously a level 1 human), now it became much easier. This gives the aliens a quite big advantage at Level 1 and 2.
- faster pulse rifle - that is a good one, I always thought it was too slow.
- faster but smaller lucy - that's a compromise, it is good and bad also.
Movement:
- this is very different, boost and dodge ... are very useful but also hard to control. I am a little confused about the usefulness of these new stuff ... And stamina consumes too fast.
Overall conclusion:
- even if there are a lot of things I see strange or useless, I think these new rules will bring better gameplay to the game. We just have to figure out and get used with the new stile. It is obvious that a strong 1.1 base design is much less good in 1.2, we need new strategies and designs, we will have to play as a team, rogue actions are mostly useless.
- feeding is much worse than before. 1-2 feeding noobs can now destroy the hole game.
