Hey all, I've just started playing tremulous. Incredible game I have to say. I used to play Natural Selection so the gameplay is not such a new thing to me but everything NS did wrong Tremulous seems to have done right. I'm a total convert.
I agree with you 100% Tremulous is the best game of it's kind, I like to see it as a excellent the sequel to Gloom. BTW what don't you like about Natural Selection.
Well, it's been quite a while since I played NS but when I did, the things I didn't like were:
limited Jet pack fuel (the speed which jp's moved in NS was incredibly fast so it needed some balancing but I prefer Trem's answer to that problem),
human weapons were wonky and few (pretty much if you had a shotgun and a jetpack you were going to do a hell of a lot of damage and it was really either the shotgun or the HMG because the LMG didn't do shit against anything but skulks. On top of that there was only the shotty, hmg, and nade launcher aside from the spawn weapons.)
The ono was jacked up (You could drop an entire hmg clip into an ono and it could still live. The only exception was with level 3 weapons. With level 3 weapons, two marines could take out an ono before they did a shit load of damage otherwise, seeing an ono was pretty much a sign the marines had lost.)
Base building for humans was ridiculous (There was a window at the beginning of every game where a crew of 3 good skulks could determine the outcome of the game. This was because the marines had to actually build the buildings. Good concept but it removed the marines ability to defend themselves. The process was kill the builders, which was 3 bites with level 1 armor, kill the half built building, kill the spawners, move to next building...)
there were set hive points (this meant once you got to know the map, you knew exactly where the hives would be and could camp them. Woohoo... every battle pretty much became the same)
That's all I can think off of the top of my head. NS did do a couple things really well though.
Flight (the lerk wasn't very tough but holy crap that thing could make ya freak out if the player was good.)
Upgrades (I never liked the whole increasing damage and armor thing but I absolutely love the added abilities. Stealth was one of my favorites.)
Anyway, Tremulous is much more balanced and doesn't make me think of Starcraft everytime I play. This is a good thing. Could use a couple things I think (like better maps) but overall, Trem is an incredible game which says alot because it's opensource and it's hard to find good opensource games.