^^^ to armhulens point
Spiders are under maintained with terrible code (
recent fix of how re-webbing a person allowed you to spam eggs because a exploit was never patched up), while xenos are obsessively over-maintained, we can alter xenos literally forever but they are still going to be strong, fixing spiders is as easy as properly giving them UI buttons rather than having to work over the 'Spider' tab, and reworking the mechanics.
- Spiders are simple mobs and not carbon with their own suitable loot table, eggs foodtype is already dropped by spiders as well as legs & meat, we can probably find ways to make clearing out spiders profitable besides eating them.
- Story and narrative wise if you look at the native place where Aliens exist, they are not in the film Alien & Alien 3 onwards designed to be 'beatable' and more as silent solo antagonists that pick off the crew 1 by 1 (given that a entire crew cannot defeat 1 double esworder without a lucky circumstance)
wheras the film ALIENS is a enjoyable but lore fallible movie where a heavily armed & gearchecked PMC blow away xenos into gunk shattering the illusion of the first movie of a invincible antagonist akin to what happens on Colonial Marines, it might be the wrong format for us.
Spiderlings reportedly are as structurally strong as webs due to poor coding.
> On xeno balance im leaning towards whether we should
revert & remove carbon based xeno mobs entirely (carbon Drone, Queen, Sentinel) that promote base building and instead manufacture the xeno hunter to be much more reliable and balanced as a antagonist that acts by itself with the same kind of role as a Ninja but somehow objectify that the hunter needs to consume/kill X amount of people to greentext given that it will trigger a shuttle call if panicking crew doesn't do it itself.
Sligneris's suggestion of a hunter based mode would be a good idea to model this on, highpop drop 3 hunters during a "Bughunt" round and 1 hunter as a summoned admin button antagonist. Push the facehuggers/regular drone etc mobs either out of the code or so far away, nowhere near to close to the current events of the round and only in references so they don't cause such a shitstorm.
1 hunter antagonist that gets cut into a million pieces for tech, brains, organs plus a 1 time selloff of 15000 point hide when put through a meat processor that can also be caught & contained inside xenobio seems like a good trade rather than marking the station for death every time someone finds a facehugger like what used to happen on asteroid.