Homegrown NS1 website NSPlayer.net have managed to tie down workaholic Flayra and get him to answer a few questions regarding NS2. Focusing on some of the competitive aspects of NS2, the info will be sure to calm the seemingly ruffled feathers of those in the organised play scene. Also be sure to check out the info on the alien commander!
Theirs [sic] been abit [sic] of talk about the Alien ‘overlord’ is this going to make the balance better as well as keep the teams different in perspective to NS1? and whats the RTS view going to be like for the overlord?
It won’t be an “overlord” per se, but an alien Commander. In fact, each team can have multiple Commanders if they want! This is one of the biggest changes from NS1 and I think it’s going to improve the game a lot. The biggest reason there is an alien Commander in NS2 is to improve the balance. NS1 was designed and balanced for 6v6 play. It wasn’t designed from the very beginning with this in mind, but happened later after I realized that there were some fundamental balance problems due to the asymmetrical resource model. The marines have only shared team resources and the aliens have team resources that are split among all the team members. This means that as the number of players in the game changes, the resource model on the aliens changes. In bigger games, this could mean the by mid-game, aliens could need to wait a long time to build a resource tower, because incoming resources come in so slowly (due to them being split up among everyone in the team). It also means that the early game changes because every alien starts with 25 resources – so even the starting resources change due to team size. The way to resolve this for competitive play was to choose 6v6 as the target and balance it for that. This was somewhat manageable in NS1, but it’s not something we care to repeat.
Jump to the full interview at the NSPlayer website
Update: our megalist has been updated with all the salient new information!
