Sunday, May 8, 2011

The Scrin. How the aliens do things differently.

As many of you know by now, the major issue Doug and I have had with the original 3 armies from a purly design stand point was how the Scrin were designed exactly like the GDI and NOD. Sure sure, I'm sure EF didn't want to "confuse" it's customers by making the different armies too different from each other, but isn't that the point? If they are going to be a DIFFERENT army then they should be more things about them different than just what units they are using. And an Alien army should be very different than the human versions right?

I'm almost done with the Scrin changes (how the heck did that happen so fast? Seems like it took me forever to do GDI.) and I think that with my new changes plus the old "new" changes that I did already things will be very different for Scrin.

You already know that the Scrin powers and upgrade systems are different than GDI/NOD. With Scrin you basically get to "pick and choose" what powers you want right from the beginning. You can't have everything, but you get enough that you can customize them to your playing style. This is even futher added upon now. Scrin can really be 3 kinds of armies. You can focus on their resource generating capabilites, a sure favorite if your playing team games as you now become "THE" resource force. Everyone will want you to play this type as it will allow you to provide them with money for free! Then there is the "Superpower" play type. With 3 different Motherships deployable now you can play those epic units hard and fast (especially if you have the cash to do it whenever you want) for maximum damage. Add in the Rift Generator that summons in a Mothership after the Gravity Well disipates (oh, did I forget to mention that? Yep, working on that power now.) AND the new Ion Blanket (still way to overpowering but thats the way I like my technologically advanced alien species, feels better when I kick their ass) and you can pretty much force your opponents hand as they can't just "let" you do what you want to. Finally we have the real "Ground Pounder" playstyle. You don't win with fancy weapons or by tricking your opponent. You win because your units are stronger, faster, and tougher than other scrin units. You have hardened shells and energy shields. Your weapons can take in Tiberium to make them stronger, and your plasma cannons are super-cooled allowing them to fire at a quicker rate. A wave of your troops moving across the field brings your enemies to their knees in fear.

But I digress, you already knew all of that right? Here is something else that really bothered me. Why do the Scrin need their tech building to upgrade their power plants? Gone. Now you can just upgrade your plants whenever you want, even from the very beginning. Why do you need to build the "scrin barracks" building to build the Stasis Chamber? Gone. Once you build your Command Node (to me this is a very important building for scrin) then you can build whatever advanced building you want, as it is the command node will be the only "required" building needed to build more advanced buildings.

Finally, Scrin infantry. It's no secret that I made infantry weaker with the last version of the game. I believe I went too far and plan on doubling their HP and seeing where they fall now on the newer version that I'm working on now, but the Scrin Infantry need more. The scrin ground force is very "low" on what it can deploy honestly, they have 4 vehicles really. And out of those 4 vehicles, only 2 of them are designed to survive long in combat. Thats not very good in my eyes, so I plan on giving the Scrin's infantry a further boost making them very tough (but still infantry) in comparison to other infantry units. I mean, I watched 4 swarms try and kill 1 GDI gunnery squad and they never got close! While that's fine, I then watched 4 disintergrator squads try to kill this 1 gdi squad and they were wiped out too. Then a Gunwalker tried and it died as well. That's not gonna cut it. Especially with GDI getting the other Pitbull now.

As always, I welcome your opinions.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cant wait for the release

tuix said...

GDI is better , scrin is better and how about the Earth Federation.