Although the buildup was a tad childish, I like the ideas, and not all of it is `Tremulous 2.0' material. Changing slash from hitscan and aligning it with the animations would be nice, although I think we should wait until we have HUD animations for the aliens
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`Advanced Dretch' is something that comes up alot, poison sounds like an acceptable way to do it, although there are ten thousand other suggestions for that in the Feedback section.
Aliens can also be armored to areas important to their mission. A tyrant's frontal armor should be quite tough, but there should be gaps available even from a slight angle, and areas that are totally unarmored.
and
Tyrants should drop fast when running straight into human fire.
seem to contradict. I'm cool with some Tyrant nerfing, and making them more defensive sounds great. They take less damage (armor) up front, but are slightly less lethal, and are vulnerable when retreating? Sounds like an interesting combination. It should get tested
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Aliens should be able to gather some resources from resource points, and some resources from sitting on their butts; But the bulk should be gained from eating and/or dragging off corpses: their own and the human's.
Resources should be set into a basic resource pool, and members of a team "earn" a piece of their team's value. Structure costs are taken from this pool as well. Efficient players who don't go max-whatever will contribute to the structures that improve their teams resource gathering and thus essentially gain interest for their team.
Aliens or humans who drag a buddy's corpse back to base should recieve half the worth of the equipment/evolution the corpse possesses, the original owner gets the rest. If the original owner drags it back, they get a full refund.
Aliens who eat humans increase the worth of their body: This can be cashed in at full value for the whole team at the home base or used on the field at a reduced value for the alien, but require a time in a vulnerable state which won't happen with using team evo points.
Resources brought home by an alien give the alien a right to a larger portion of them than the rest of the team.
This sounds great... for an MMO. But the fact is, this is a first-person-shooter. People expect it to be fairly fast-paced. Dragging spare bits back to base? Mining? This sounds like a huge timesink. And ignoring the gameplay impacts, technically I'm not sure it's workable. Keeping extra models around, doing collision detecting for them, etc. takes alot of resources. There is a reason you can't play Quake IV at full speed with a slow processor. And I, for one, enjoy playing Tremulous on slower computers
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Moving through the rest of your suggestions...
The melee combat improvements look interesting, though some of that is probably 'Trem 2.0' material.
The aliens only way of destroying the human team is by getting through their defenses. This is not an issue. What is the issue is the way it's done.
I agree, though I don't think your suggestions would actually fix this. Am I the only one looking for an alien class that can just chew through turret farms, but is helpless against real opponents? Maybe I've played too many RTS games.
A bolt based gun like the lucifer should be fast, and not have some giant unwieldy charge but fire for great damage at some uncharged rate
This is usually referred to as a 'pulse rifle'.
Make several classes of grenades, and give humans a Halo style grenade toss that actually reaches something. Make grenades less insta kill; actual explosions lose energy quickly (cube of the radius of the area), but fragments can reach out. Cheap frag grenades could pepper the area with harmful shrapnel, but not insta-kill a higher level alien unless they sat on it. Plasma grandes would throw volatile plasma balls that hurt like hell, but cost a lot. Allow humans to carry more grenades, so that they can clear corners like a real military would.
Interesting but perhaps hard to balance. One of the things about grenades is that hardly anyone buys them regularly, so making them more useful could screw things up
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Make a double barrel shotgun that knocks aliens backwards
Point blank with the regular shotty does an assload of damage already. I think I've heard 75 at point blank range? It 'feels' weak, but that's more of a HUD and sound effects issue than anything else.
Anyway, it's nice to see someone put real thought into a set of ideas, but ye gods, the way you introduced them was awful. Hopefully you've learned your lesson, everyone else has mentioned it.
