Well I would like to argue that this isn't so much an issue with Domination as it is with Tremulous in general. When humans are S1 and the aliens have goons, the humans' only chance for survival is camping to S2. Domination simply prevents camping which exacerbates this inequality.
That's why. In domination the human main base is very weak. They need to capture DPs for extra defense. They have to go even if they know they can't win. But humans need to leave at least 1 person to defend the main base and 1 builder has to go with the domination team to secure a DP which means two less people will be fighting in the front line. With the current build speed humans usually can only build 2 turrets near a DP at most with their first life. We used to have the domination patch over the relic timer which the building was about 2x faster. To hold off a goon for a few seconds 3-4 turrets are needed at least. Also the guy who is defending the main base can use the BP more effectively when a DP is captured. Generally faster building let a domination game to survive a lot longer in my experience.
Not just in HK, anywhere. Good players only join Aliens because victory is inevitable.
I wasn't really saying this. Actually we always have overall better human team than alien team. It is just that even the best human can't do anything to a tyrant with a rifle. Most of the time, when human survives past s2, they always win because our community is small and teamwork is always good. But only 1 out of many games human can live past s2.
Are you suggesting that the build timer should cooldown faster for Humans in Domination or in general?
I prefer 2x faster building for both teams in domination, while capturing all DP further empowers it by 50%. I would rather see both team successfully build up on at least a DP rather than no one bothers to build at all.
The best way is to !restart *BUILTIN* right now. If you are in devmap and people join and make a mess of things, you really don't know who built what where anyway.
That's alright. It is not something really too important. Actually I was asking if there can be commands to clear all DP or all relic fonts. In case I screwed up something and couldn't find it or didn't make progress save.
This is a thorny issue. I'm not entirely sure how to deal with it. The problem for a server operator is:
* I only want ? relics to spawn so I set g_relic* to 0 for everything
* I hate the translocate relic, I don't want ?s to turn into them
What's a good way around that? I don't want to add a second set of cvars that control what ?s can turn into.
Perhaps I should do it this way: the ?s will only spawn from ? founts or if it appears on the map in a random spot and some cvar is set. Remove g_relicUnknown and whatever the ?s turn into will obey the other cvars.
The problem right now is if you want to disable certain relic you have to disable unknown too. Making unknown relic only spawn on a unknown font is good. It can make map exploring more fun and rewardable.
He said "with share": without it this would be far less of a problem. Furthermore, I'll dispute the statement that humans need s2 to beat alien s1 - a team of shotguns seem to do the trick in most cases.
Without share it won't change much actually. The first goon usually appear in about ~30 seconds while humans go out to get the first DP and die. There are always 400+ ping people who doesn't know how to use an armory in case you need evo. With share you have a super alien player supporting the whole team with evolve point so even the worst player in the team can get a goon. Without it that super alien player still can pretty much own every S1 human himself anyway, Share generally is used to let late joiners be more useful earlier. And a team of shotguns won't make it: You are fighting the same number of goons with the same number of shotguns (or even less).
Some other things regarding relic balance:
1. Half relic makes damage truncated which gives alien a obvious advantage with it -- rifle only doing 2 damage each bullet to a 1/2 goon. If 0.5 damage is not possible to do, please make it round up the damage instead. This relic gives alien too much advantage in any situation and further worsen the s1 balance (all human ranged weapon in s1 except chaingun has their damage truncated to this relic). Also x2 takes into account before 1/2, a x2 rifle shooting a 1/2 goon will do 2 damage each bullet. Kind of a bug.
2. Vampire. This relic should work differently on both sides. I have done a test, using chainsuit with vampire and fight a tyrant head-on. The tyrant keeps attacking my head while I burst chaingun ammo into the tyrant. I win with 136hp left. something is wrong here. A human increases its defense by increasing its armor level while an alien increases its hp. Basically 1hp to a BS worths a lot more than 1hp to a tyrant. That creates an imbalance when a full luci shot can do like 250 damage while a tyrant hit is only 110 in raw damage. A lucisuit can take down windowroom with 160bp worth of defense himself with more than 100hp left, an adv.goon can do the same. But the main problem is in alien fighting human head-on with vampire, the alien absorb way less hp than the human absorb. I don't really have an idea on how to balance this..but currently it can't be used because humans instantly win if they find it.
3. Similar to 2., heal relic and resurrection relic should work based on percentage instead of a set value. Battlesuit healing 5hp/second is very fast but aliens won't have much advantage with this relic. Same as resurrection, resurrecting with 25% total hp would be better than only 25.
4. Radiation doesn't seem to take armor level in calculating the damage. Making it very useful for alien in damaging battlesuit while the damage done to a tyrant is too subtle to mention.
About t-saw:
I dunno if there is anything can be done to mod this weapon. We want to include it in this mod but this weapon is pretty much broken. A battlesuit with t-saw can easily win a tyrant 1on1. I dunno if we can add something similar to the basilisk grab time on it. Dunno how that value works actually. And whether one can quickly re-grab something after the grab time is reached.
