This is my analysis of trem 1.2.
I personally feel that trem 1.2 is unbalanced. In fact, I believe it is less balanced than trem 1.1. And the criteria I am using to measure balance is the following.
Tremulous will be balanced when the number of people wanting to play humans = the number of people wanting to play aliens. You see, if you actually think about it, there is much more to balancing a game than just making sure that each team has an equal chance of winning, which I don't even feel is the case in trem 1.2, because I would say the humans have the upper hand, and that is just not going to be a winning recepie for tremulous in general if it is going to be a game that people will actually want to keep playing.
In trem 1.1, there where still slightly more people that wanted to play humans, but there was also lot of people who like aliens, because they knew that they could kick but with them. Now aliens in 1.2 are wimpy. The goon is to slow, the tyrant is to week, the regen is to slow. Now the problem your going to have is this, people are going to join a game, and at the very beginning be clicking as fast as they can so that they can join humans, and then when they cant get it, begrudgingly join aliens and hope for better luck next game, spectate, or just quit.
You see, think about it, it is really fun to sit back and be able to just kill things at a huge distance with awesome weapons, however, it is not half as much fun to try and get close enough to use a melee weapon to kill a bunch of grouped up humans. In 1.1, you might have a chance to escape, but in 1.2 it is do or die for a goon. Either it prevails, or much more likely, it gets the players 3 evos wasted.
And now I will say the following: OVERPOWERED ALIENS IS WHAT WORKS
It is because aliens where overpowered in 1.1 that the game took off like wildfire. Why because everyone by nature wants to play their own race. By overpowering the aliens, you gave aliens something where they could still be fun as heck to play.
Also, by overpowering the aliens, didn't it make it just that much more rewarding when you actually killed one? I know I eventually got great at killing aliens in 1.1, and it felt awesome.
Also, aliens in 1.1 weren't more powerful than humans, if you had humans who worked in a team. Actually, even 1.1, a group of humans working in a team where actually the more powerful species.
Anyways, here are just a couple of thoughts. I by no means am trying to criticize the developers of trem. Just about everything they have added to tremulous are things that I thought would improve it myself, but I realize that I was wrong. Trem 1.1 was a fluke. I say it was a fluke because it is those things that a rational human being would think that would absolutely destroy the game, that actually made it work, though we may not have realized it back then. It is those things that people thought sucked about it, that in reality made it that much more intense.
If trem continues down the path it is going, then lets just make it human vs. human, because that is the only team people will want to play on. Or make human teams with the aliens as their fighting pets.
