Humans have too much health and heal too fast

[Stooberton]

Humans have way too much health. They have, effectively, 200 HP as a naked human (Comparable to a dragoon) and far more when they have armor added and they heal incredibly fast, about 2-5x as fast as an alien on a booster. Humans can also abuse healing super fast while defending their base. Meanwhile, Aliens cannot even get assisted healing if their buildings are on fire.

Aliens heal far slower than humans and it slows down as they upgrade. They are also more easily interrupted from healing. Humans effectively heal faster as they upgrade (they start out healing faster than aliens) and cannot be interrupted while healing.

[Viech]

Hey @Stooberton, there are more than 200 open issues tracked here and most of them are not even debtable but actual bugs or problems that need to be dealt with eventually. An issue tracker can hardly double as a forum for balancing discussions. These discussions are necessarily subjective, in particular when it comes to in-detail balancing of a game with asymmetrical teams. By taking them to an issue, you are effectively forcing us to discuss your opinion/proposal just so that we can manage the load, which is why this is generally frowned upon by developers even when your feedback as such is good.

(I'm not closing because I'm not really active on the team but I suggest to not allow balancing discussion at all on this tracker. Maybe a separate tracker only for balancing and ideas can be opened, though.)

[Gireen]

..I suggest to not allow balancing discussion at all on this tracker. Maybe a separate tracker only for balancing and ideas can be opened, though

yeah that's a good idea. 😀

now we can goo more into detail about this @Stooberton what concrete makes you think that way? i guess you play as alien, so you mean humans are too hard to kill? or are there bases harder to attack? as witch alien against what humans?

[Viech]

The alien and human health/armor/damage values are still very close to their values in Tremulous iirc, which was reasonably balanced around fights between equally skilled players based on years of experience.

The alien healing aspect was changed, introducing group healing and potentially tweaking the numbers. Personally I feel that both aliens and humans have to return to base after winning an equal fight or performing a base attack at the current state of things. For humans returning to their base is relatively hard due to their low speed, they will often not make it. For aliens it depends on the map, with long corridors giving humans a chance to finish the kill, but in total I feel that aliens can manage to return to their base for healing more reliably.

Usually, if you attack the alien base as a human and hurt an alien on your way, you will get a chance to kill them on their booster, which is a nice interaction that gives the game more tactical depth. The other way around doesn't happen as much because the human doesn't get to flee unless the alien also aborts the attack. So I don't even think booster healing and medipad healing are comparable on a general level.

Should we make it so that aliens have to return to their base less by giving them better in-the-field healing? I'd say no, because it would capitalize even more on their map control advantage. Should we actually do the opposite thing and make it easier for humans to operate away from their base?

For me, another question is: Is this issue posed in a way that we can reach a conclusion? When do we close it? Do we have to give humans less HP and aliens faster healing beore we may consider it dealt with? If not, who will eventually say "Thank you for your input but no."? Even with an issue tracker of its own, we may want to require issues to be posed in a way where they are by definition clear and undeniable. Something like "I felt frustrated because every time I tried this it failed with that result." is clearly an issue but maybe something like "The result I have had is incorrect." remains problematic even on this new tracker.

[illwieckz]

Personally I feel that both aliens and humans have to return to base after winning an equal fight or performing a base attack at the current state of things.

That may be the main issue. The underlying problem reported there is that aliens can't anymore put pressure on human bases. You can't wait behind a door, healing until the next human attempt. Aliens then become just humans without long range firing weapons, then people starts to say “humans have all the advantages” and they're right.

[illwieckz]

Humans have to return to base to heal, so they can fail to make it, but on the other hand they heal very quickly on medipad and may even camp the medipad while defending (with one drawback of each medipad healing only one human at a time).

On the other hand aliens had mobility, not requiring to return base to heal, but to hide. They would heal slower but would be able to heal anywhere, even by running away from humans in a place there is no alien base, even the opposite direction, making them able to maintain pressure on human base from every direction.

If that slow healing was done to force the alien to return base, then we figured out the root cause of the bug.

Slowing down self healing not only slows down healing, it just impacts so many game play mechanism and strategies. Not only it turns aliens into humans without long-range high-rate firing weapons, but they still heal sower than humans even in alien base.

It explains those people writing repeatedly in chat while playing games “humans have all the advantages” that just reveals aliens and humans are compared on the same topics where they must be different, which is an issue by itself.

Also mantis did not get the basilisk healing ability. So aliens are just made weaker, and lose what made them more than humans with more legs and no weapons.

While basilisk healing was removed, healing was added to any creep so that's still possible to build a creep in strategic places, but building creep in the wild requires a vulnerable granger to go there, so, while creep healing is good, this is clearly not enough. Also, creep healing is costly: building a creep that would be destroyed is costly.

I believe we have found the root cause of so many problems: the idea aliens have to return base to heal. This looks to be the underlying issue of many things people complain about. This is the bug.

@Viech you talk about “group healing”, this is something that can (at least partly) fix that “aliens have to return base to heal” issue if it works, being a viable alternative to basilisk healing and more efficient than creep healing, effectively encouraging team play. But, while in the past I believed I was healing as goon near other goons, that seems to not work anymore in a way I then believed I may have been illusioned by some creep presence… but then you talk about group healing… Are aliens expected to heal by grouping together? If yes we have another bug.

[illwieckz]

In Tremulous, it was possible for a brave advanced goon to win the game even if all his team mates were all dead and the base was wiped out, thanks to the ability to self-heal fast enough to maintain pressure on human base.

Changing gameplay in a way aliens have to return base by making self-healing a joke is just reducing the number of different outcomes to the game.

Reducing the number of different outcomes to the game makes the game more predictable, in the ends it turns real players into bots, which is not fun.

This meets another problem I already talked about some weeks ago: I played as alien for hours and it was a really bad experience, because, as I said at the time, “I was doing the bot job to enjoy the human team”, no more.

[Viech]

Are aliens expected to heal by grouping together?

Yes.

Can you please edit your posts into one consice contribution? The issue is already of questionable scope and you are making it hard to have a concise and fruitful discussion by being so verbose.

[illwieckz]

Can you please edit your posts into one consice contribution? The issue is already of questionable scope and you are making it hard to have a concise and fruitful discussion by being so verbose.

I'm afraid this is concise. There is so many implications, what I wrote is very concise in regard to the wide of the topic.

Are aliens expected to heal by grouping together? Yes.

So maybe we have something broken then.

[Gireen]

Is this issue posed in a way that we can reach a conclusion? When do we close it? Do we have to give humans less HP and aliens faster healing beore we may consider it dealt with? If not, who will eventually say "Thank you for your input but no."? Even with an issue tracker of its own, we may want to require issues to be posed in a way where they are by definition clear and undeniable. Something like "I felt frustrated because every time I tried this it failed with that result." is clearly an issue but maybe something like "The result I have had is incorrect." remains problematic even on this new tracker.

@Viech thats the meaning of my above questions. 😀 to get more details to this problem. and a broad scope also allows much interpretation for making this as solved 😈 but yours and illwieckz's discussion shows at least that there are strong opinions about this topic.

Now i think about this: i don't like waiting 😩. As alien healing seems to take ages, even when hugging the overmind. Same but not so horrible is it with meditations witch can only used by one at a time. So i think that should be at least addressed. On creap or cuddle healing(thats the official name for this now 😂) sound good in theory but are not so useful in realty with no one using or knowing about it.

I believe we have found the root cause of so many problems: the idea aliens have to return base to heal. This looks to be the underlying issue of many things people complain about. This is the bug.

@illwieckz No to any part of this statement. Firstly it is no bug, on a syntactic and mechanic level. (witch was discussed more then enough in irc 😩) This would be as if the existence of the booster is also a bug cause for using it aliens have to reach it. Retreating to the base or outpost is no problem as also not mentioned in this issue. The waiting time at the destination is to long.

In Tremulous, it was possible for a brave advanced goon to win the game even if all his team mates were all dead and the base was wiped out, thanks to the ability to self-heal fast enough to maintain pressure on human base.

As thrilling as this last man standing situations are/where. All other aliens have to wait (i don't like that 😢) so without any other changes this is not so desirable, but that can be the topic of another issue. Regeneration of health that would enable a single alien to attack and destroy a enemy team and their base would be a bit problematic to say the least. 😄

[illwieckz]

On creap or cuddle healing (thats the official name for this now) sound good in theory but are not so useful in realty with no one using or knowing about it.

I'll give my go for cuddle healing. 😅

About no one using or knowing about it, that's the role of the tutorial. We currently tell human players to use medkit when low on health, we can also tell alien players what to do in such situation.

I remember having discovered group healing by myself just while playing. I also remember having told players about group healing later, then they told me it does not work, and I tried to reproduce it and it did not worked anymore. I then discovered creep healing so at some point I believed I was confused by some creep that would have been near.

I believe we have found the root cause of so many problems […]. This is the bug.

Firstly it is no bug, on a syntactic and mechanic level

This being called a bug or something else, the important thing is the “This is the \<something>” wording (I would even have emphasized “the”), or the “root cause” expression. It appears that many things follows from this. Reducing self-healing rate cannot be problematic by itself, but it looks to have many effects in cascade if many other things are not changed accordingly, or something else having effect on all those other things is not tweaked accordingly. It is very likely that fast self-healing rate was balancing multiple things, so tweaking that lone thing would have introduced multiple imbalances.

I don't see group healing working while in the past it was obvious enough to make me able to discover it while playing. Such feature may be good enough to rebalance the various things that can be imbalanced by the slow self-healing rate because it has effect on same things.

[Gireen]

Wow i thought we are joking but it is really there 😲 https://github.com/Unvanquished/Unvanquished/blob/32bfe2c0a04028706631a2b6f751592598104342/src/sgame/sg_active.cpp#L1635-L1640

If you are close and in line of sight you get SS_HEALING_2X for one and SS_HEALING_4X for more teammates Creep gives SS_HEALING_4X and booster SS_HEALING_8X

But for low player count this is not so useful and bots will just run away 😐

[Viech]

Alrigt, this issue seems a bit hard to get on track now.

For a start, there are two very distinct opinions tracked in here. Humans having too much HP is a straightforward combat-balance opinion (one that I think we will not agree upon, at best this would be controversial). The other opinion is that aliens should have conceptionally more HP regen than huamns, which is a fundamential opinion; one that is controversial at this point but which could potentially be accepted based on an effective discussion.

@Stooberton would you be fine with dropping the part where you claim humans have too much raw HP so that we can focus the dicussion on alien's need to return to base/forward for healing and whether we want to keep that or change that?

[necessarily-equal]

With https://github.com/UnvanquishedAssets/unvanquished_src.dpkdir/commit/c1dbbf36ec480c637a84c546c0fe6d345c0baedb, I think we can close this. Feel free to reopen if desired.