Humans go out at S1, deathmatch as usual, don't attack alien buildings, then retreat
Aliens hardly attack human bases at stage 1 too. I see nothing wrong with this.
This is incorrect, at least on servers I play. It is common for S1 aliens to attack human bases. Just watch what happens when aliens discover humans are moving reactor. Immediate alien swarm ! And because humans are so reliant on buildings, it can be quite hard to repel. Note that aliens almost always communicate the news (of RC being moved) to their teammates.
On the other hand, if aliens are moving OM, humans rarely bother to mention it, because it's so hard to capitalize on that. Aliens don't need (1.1) any specific buildings to heal, so a single dragoon can keep them in check. And if it comes to worst, they can be repelled with dretches even if it means a lot of feeding. A couple of humans in alien base = not so scary, can be defended against with some effort.
On many maps humans NEED to move base as soon as possible. Meanwhile even on maps with awful overmind placement like Tremor, competent alien team can defend the base and push humans back. It's not uncommon to see aliens win despite having no or bad builder. With good enough players, humans won't even reach such base.
Even when humans don't make any blunders and execute base move right, 2 good dragoons can mean the end of the base at S1.
(Note I'm talking mostly about 1.1, I would play 1.2 all the time if I could)
Poison is too strong and annoying. I'd reduce it's damage to half and completely remove / drastically reduce the aim bumping. Those bumps are only annoying and doesn't make you aim worse at all.
I feel like it'd be too weak if it did any less damage. And I think in the majority of cases all it really does is make humans waste their medkit, which they often have to use after a fight anyway. I could maybe see reducing the time it lasts.
While poison is thematically very fitting for aliens, damage-dealing poison is yet another force pushing humans back towards their base. Except for 96+poison hits, poison kills few marines, and it doesn't make those poisoned easier to kill.
How about making both poisons just slow down marines ? This way they wouldn't have to (couldn't, too...) retreat so much, especially when teammates around can support them. Slowdown from a single dretch might be overpowered, though. How about something different ? Screen flashes white and is completely obscured for 0.5 seconds if you're hit with poison.
No basilisk healing aura for other aliens - It makes building forward eggs much less important. Before the stage2 booster I think the alien team is too strong with the fast healing. Also i don't think you should force a fighting class to be a boring medic. The basilisk would still benefit from it's faster healing though.
Would it be better to have a healing class that doesn't fight? I don't think they're "forced" to be just healers anyway - it's not like they have to do anything to heal teammates; teammates just have to get close to them. And between the grab and the gas they're already the best support class for aliens, so giving them the healing aura makes the most sense. And I really don't want to just remove teammate-healing altogether.
You know my opinion. It would be better to give healing aura to a class which
already doesn't fight, and avoids combat. And no, basilisks aren't strictly forced into healing, but that's what optimal play dictates. Just getting close to basilisk, which is small, fast and can be easy to lose track of, can be hard. You may pursue a basilisk only to see it dying on turrets. Combat basilisk are going to be very unreliable means of healing. They move erraticaly and die often. Wheter a particular basilisk can be a healer for you would depend primarily on that player's personality (how cautious he is) and experience with Tremulous. And it's very hard to judge at a glance, unless you know all basilisk players personally. With healing aura on basilisks, you're going to find out healing aura you benefit from moves, appears, disappears randomly with no predictable pattern.
As I said before, with buildings healing themselves and base defence often relying on strong players, grangers can have very little to do. They're very bored.
Dretches being able to damage buildings. I don't see how it would make things horribly unbalanced. With a properly built base the dretches will die quickly enough nonetheless. The argument that dretches could take a base down completely doesn't hold. If you build a base like that you deserve to lose.
The problem is that you have be certain that every structure you have is covered by turrets from every angle. I don't think humans deserve to lose just because a fast, tiny class with wallwalking can find a blind spot to kill the armoury from.
I agree - often humans are very strict about the way to build the base. Often they argue and insult each other over which design does or does not suck. Human bases are quite inflexible, and I don't think it's very fun to play when you have only very limited number of ways to put your buildings. I enjoy building alien bases much more. I know egg spam is not a positive effect and would like to see that disappear, but choosing from between tubes, trappers and hives is fun. You can spot human builders in alien team by the way they build - very conservatively and defensively, booster only at overmind or very close so aliens assaulting human base have to walk across the entire map to reach it.
I think you could easily double it's repair rate to compensate for the previous idea without making it overpowered.
You could build two DCs. They're not really supposed to have an effect during attacks, they're meant to clean up the minor damage between attacks, so humans don't have to waste time repairing every little ding. I'll think about bumping it up a little though.
Have you given some thought to the idea from Enemy Territory: Quake Wars ? Like in Wolfenstein:Enemy Territory players are usually incapacitated rather than dead when 'killed', and can be revived by a medic. ET:QW took that a step further and introduced 'revivable turrets'. All buildings have huge health, but stop working if health is below 2/3 max. This means buildings are easy to disable, but hard to destroy completely. It is more cost effective to disable three turrets rather than destroy 1 completely. ET:QW may have its flaws, but that particular idea is great. After attackers are repelled, buildings can often be repaired.
To this I would like to add: human buildings should automatically repair to certain percentage, for example 50% (so you still need to repair a bit, but a builder doesn't have to spend hours repairing everything).
But it had a grapple.
It still sucked as a class, but you could basically warp around hallways unpredictably -- and by god you had to to survive long enough to get close to anything. I'm not saying I want to give the dretch a grapple (really, I was hoping to be done with significant gameplay changes, and to be honest I'd probably rather release 1.2 with the current dretch then spend extra time testing it), but if you're talking about giving it a skill-based way to dodge fire, that's the only way I can think of.
Is there perhaps any way to make wallwalking better ? Changing map architecture is probably out of question, but some maps have simply awful walls and ceiling and they're not good for anything except hiding. Nexus6, Karith are terrible for that.
Wallwalking makes you predictable in a way - you can't afford to jump.
