Killing the alien queen should have more of an impact

[onleavedontatme]

So the queen got a bunch of buffs, was made huge, etc, with the idea of it being a final boss of the aliens.

And I think it generally fills that role pretty well as it usually takes a grand fight to take down.

However the aftermath of this bossfight is one of the minions instantly turns into a new boss with pretty much no delay or even any real cost to the aliens. Killing the queen of a hive has about the same impact as killing a drone.

So any ideas on how killing the queen could reward the crew or do people not think its a problem?

[Steelpoint]

If people think its a problem here are some solutions that can be added to make the death of the Queen very impactful for the surviving Aliens.

• Without a Queen the Aliens cannot use the Hivemind to communicate with one another.
• There is a five minute (or so) timer that has to elapse before any other Alien can become a Queen, to put a timer on how long the Humans have before a Queen may arrive.
• Take a cue from Aliens media and make the death of the Queen 'paralyse' any living Aliens. Translate this into either stunning Aliens for five to twenty seconds, or by forcibly making Aliens 'drunk' and very hard to control, as well as being slowed down considerable, for ten to twenty seconds.

Either way or all these ideas would make the death of the Queen a very impactful event, which would not only leave the Aliens vulnerable but also highly disorganised until a new Queen can form, if given the chance.

It also makes it easier for Humans to stamp out the Alien infestation after killing the Queen.

[Zilenan91]

CM makes it so that there can't be a new Queen for about 5 minutes but that's honestly just an annoyance since it's a 50/50 on if it makes it so you can't make a queen for 5 minutes, or bugs and and makes it so you can't make a queen for 5 weeks.

tl;dr we need a cooldown based type of thing for this if any at all.

[Davidchan]

I'd prefer a longer molting period for a would be queen if the previous one died. Something akin to Shadowling hatching where the cocoon is vulnerable and the hive would need to protect and safeguard their new leader while they morph and evolve for a 2-5 minute window, making them exceptionally vulnerable to bombings and such.

In CM, losing the queen is... largely an annoyance. If the Queen was doing their job, well then there is plenty of eggs and jelly left over for the rest of the hive to just blood lust through the marines. If the queen was shit then good riddance and let a new drone take up the reins and try to guide the hive to some level of success.

The arbitrary cooldown doesn't make sense since it just hinders the hive without there being a reason for it. If the molting drone/praetorian had a longer cycle to go through where they have limited mobility or usefulness while still able to direct some level of control over the hive, it'd probably play out better than just having to count to 600 before pushing the button to instantly pop up as a queen.

[Super Aggro Crag]

killing the queen now causes the station to flash colors and vibrate while dubstep plays

[invisty]

These are all really good ideas, particularly putting the hive into disarray and discouraging murderbone-mode in exchange for hide-and-seek.

How about a "hive life-cycle" of sorts?

• Hivemind is disabled.
• All eggs die.
• All aliens take a big hit to their stored plasma and plasma regen rate.
• Existing weeds no longer regenerate health or plasma (this can be signified by the weed hubs losing their glow).
• Drones can evolve into queens (or however that shit with praetorians works), but they're going to have to regenerate their plasma under the new conditions.
• This should give humans 10-15 minutes to purge out the remaining xenos, and encourage the xenos to run the fuck away/protect the drones.
• When the new queen hatches, aliens and weeds return to their original state.

This mostly works off the existing mechanics and can be simply explained to aliens via an IC message telling them to run and hide.

A primal scream shakes your body as you feel your attachment to the hive-mind slipping away...
[Drone] The queen is gone. Survival is all you know. The task of a new hive falls to you, but it will be an immense burden to carry alone.
[Hunter/Sentinel] The queen is gone. Survival is all you know. Perhaps the hive can be rebuilt, but you will have to find and help a surviving drone.

[WJohnston]

Invisty that's a bit too big of a strike to the aliens. There's a number of things that are already at play between xenos when the queen dies:

Waiting for a new queen to grow (if there are no praetorians, and MUCH longer if there are no drones, longer still without larvas!)
Having a new nest be selected (the old one is usually on fire and being cleared out, if the queen managed to die)
Everyone regrouping and kept up to date on the new nest location.
Queen laying new eggs and having those grow (that already takes 5 minutes)

NOW you can start fresh again. This is already borderline a 10 min wait period between queens.

Don't worry though, I already have various time-lengthening plans awaiting. These include molting, ovipositor creation/removal times, and possibly a major stun/slowdown for all other aliens.
Destruction of eggs, removal of hivemind, health and plasma regen etc is just brutal. At most, this affects mid-game aliens as it lets you clear the remaining two or three. Late game aliens are still too powerful to stop with that, and early game aliens don't even have other aliens where they'll be hit by that.

[PKPenguin321]

wjohn i disagree, while it is a hit to the aliens overall power, it encourages regrouping and making a new nest. as it stands, once the queen dies either a new queen immediately pops up with zero delay or the aliens all wander around murderboning until they get lasered to death. if they all got nerfed so hard when the queen died that they HAD to regroup or else face certain death, they'd do better in the long run.

[invisty]

...

Fair point about it being too harsh. I just think Aliens could do with a bit of behavioural "encouragement" to protect the hive, in the form of punishing those who treat it as SOLO ANTAG POWER LEVEL 9001.

But there have been recent changes and to be honest I haven't played it in a while. You'd have a better judgement on this than myself.

[firecage]

This thread makes me think of the round yesterday. Normal round. Suddenly there were xenos. Their main base was science. We kill the queen and a sentinel. The entire science department is set on fire(with humans inside...by the AI...the fuck Asimov AI?)....Moments later...a new queen, and an even bigger swarm of xenos.

[Steelpoint]

All well and good WJ but don't forget that we're talking about the Aliens. If the Crew are good enough, or the Queen is incompetent enough, to locate and kill the Alien Queen. Then I think that should give the crew a good reward for their efforts instead of another Queen popping up elsewhere within minutes.

Aliens are extremely powerful in their own right, which is why I think it would be acceptable to have such a harsh set of conditions imposed on surviving Aliens when a Queen dies. Since wiping out a infestation is a monumental task.

[Davidchan]

These are all really good ideas, particularly putting the hive into disarray and discouraging murderbone-mode in exchange for hide-and-seek.

How about a "hive life-cycle" of sorts?

• Hivemind is disabled.
• All eggs die.
• All aliens take a big hit to their stored plasma and plasma regen rate.
• Existing weeds no longer regenerate health or plasma (this can be signified by the weed hubs losing their glow).
• Drones can evolve into queens (or however that shit with praetorians works), but they're going to have to regenerate their plasma under the new conditions.
• This should give humans 10-15 minutes to purge out the remaining xenos, and encourage the xenos to run the fuck away/protect the drones.
• When the new queen hatches, aliens and weeds return to their original state.

This mostly works off the existing mechanics and can be simply explained to aliens via an IC message telling them to run and hide.

A primal scream shakes your body as you feel your attachment to the hive-mind slipping away...
[Drone] The queen is gone. Survival is all you know. The task of a new hive falls to you, but it will be an immense burden to carry alone.
[Hunter/Sentinel] The queen is gone. Survival is all you know. Perhaps the hive can be rebuilt, but you will have to find and help a surviving drone.

I can get behind the hivemind being blocked, or at the very least scrambled. It makes some sense as the queen is the hub of the hive and implied to be the link that keeps them together. Having a Praetorian but no queen could allow the hivemind to function but with words blotted out or something. Having drones would just allow members of the hive to make their presence known without communicating.

Plasma and health regeneration is... iffy. It's brutal to take that away since aliens in crit NEED weeds to survive. A slight nerf, 25-50% maybe. But absolutely taking that away means that once the queen is dead the aliens can not heal even basic wounds till a new one births.

The eggs all dying makes NO sense what so ever. The eggs exsist soley to restart the cycle. In the beginning of Alien and Aliens, there wasn't a queen, or even active xenos. Just eggs. From the small clutch on the crashed alien ship the hive in aliens was able to rise up and take control of the colony. Having them all die is a huge blow to the aliens since it means if the Queen and all the drone caste dies without any infected hosts, they have 0 means to repopulate even if the entire nest or tunnels around the nest were full of eggs to infest the crew 4 times over. Its actually pretty ambigous in the canon if the facehuggers/eggs are even sentient or able to communicate with the other Xenos, just acting as a sort of symbiotic relationship to create a chestburster/new xeno.

[MisterPerson]

Nobody gives a shit about the movie. If something makes sense thematically and mechanically, we should do it. Period.

[Zilenan91]

Yeah, that's the hole that CM fell into and is probably never going to get out of. They care more about their game being more authentic to the movie than actually being enjoyable to play.

[Cheimon]

But the thing is, the eggs dying with the queen doesn't make sense thematically. Eggs are a time bomb that exists to be dangerous even in the absence of aliens.

[invisty]

But the thing is, the eggs dying with the queen doesn't make sense thematically. Eggs are a time bomb that exists to be dangerous even in the absence of aliens.

Sure. Perhaps it doesn't make sense. I'm only presenting ideas here, and I'm not afraid of being wrong.