Have buildable health regeneration scale with the team's momentum.

[necessarily-equal]

The Problem:

In the early game, aliens can't do much damage to the human base. So aliens must wait patiently for humans to get out of their base to gather momentum: they must way for the dragoon to do any real damage to the sturdy human bases. This can can be quite frustrating for aliens, while the game would be more fun with short, rapid games. That means games must last long for aliens to have to have a chance to win. In tremulous, humans can easily be overwhelmed in the early game. This is arguably due to the removal of the battle computer; as the turrets now regenerate automatically, and pretty fast, as of tier 0.

The proposal:

Let's make the regen rate slower and more importantly regen delay longer for human buildings. Especially in the early game. The regen rate being mostly fine in the late game, but hugely powerful in the early game, suggests that we may try to fix the problem by having the team's building regen rate and regen delay dependent on the team's momentum so that a stronger team would have stronger buildings. Or rather, that the early teams can put pressure on early game bases.

Disclaimer

All problems issues are treated as opinions until agree upon Ideas without a related problem issue and lacking explanation or depth are closed after a certain time.

[necessarily-equal]

Variants

• we may or may not decide to apply that to aliens too, but the issue is mostly about humans
• we may adjust the numbers separately

Example numbers to give an idea:

at human stage0, the mgturret would have half as much regen rate and twice as long time to start the regen, which would mean a rate of 5/2 = 2.5 hp/s. And it would wait 2×HUMAN_BUILDABLE_REGEN_WAIT = 2×5000ms = 10s before regenerating.

at last stage, the mg turret would have the current regen rate of 5hp/s and 5s of regen delay before it starts to heal.

The numbers would scale linearly in-between. Again, those are example numbers, and note I'm fine with keeping a high regen rate if we keep the regen delay longer. 5s is really short.

Possible shortcomings

• The humans have bots with construction kits. That can also be pretty strong.

[Viech]

Although I am guilty of occasional number crunching myself, I prefer visible/feedback-y gameplay elements over a logic that is hard to communicate in the game world. I do not think this particular change would be confusing or introduce too much complexity. But I would still prefer a more direct solution to this problem which could involve having more human defense structure tiers or more early game alien anti-base attacks or anything of this sort. (Note that these alternates should not be discussed here, I only mention them to make clear what I mean with a more "direct" or "feedback-y" solution.)

[Gireen]

Bases should be strong from the beginning of the game and get easier to destroy with time. Despite that i think we could try this out. Cause early game it is also easier to rebuild.

We had already a discussion about tech trees and this could create a good stepping stone. With the stages being a pre defined order of upgrades. This could vary from health/damage/regen/ability upgrades for different things and give a more precise way for applying balancing changes to specific phases of the game.

For Visualization we could display a list of changes in the scoreboard and other menus for everyone to see. That way everyone can see what is unlocked and what effects it has. It would also be more readable that just the momentum bar.

In this case it would mean that humans can unlock better building regeneration with every stage or so.

[Viech]

Both the problem and idea report are at least midly controversial, so I'm flagging the combination as such.