Kharaa Commanding - Strats

w@flz

w@flz

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*Post your commanding strats, back up your choices, speculate :D
 
Kharra - Any map - Quick finish

#1 - upgrade a shade hive and get 1 res node.

#2 - upgrade cloaking and get your ENTIRE team to group up (cloaked) out side the marine main base.

#3 - get them to cloak into the marine base, kill the 1 or 2 marines that will be there and finish off the command chair.

3b - If there is an observatory already, YOU MUST KILL THIS BUILDING.

This strat requires an organized team, make sure you tell your team whats going on at the very start, the less marines dying at the start, the better.
This strat is considered CHEESE, and only really works in big games. But it does work and it finishes the marines faster.

I run this strat when marines are stacking and are over confident.
 
Unfortunately, on 24-player servers, getting a 2nd hive or a shift is more or less mandatory first, for eggs...

I like shade first or third hive, usually second is kinda fail, because it doesn't help all that much in the mid-game when the marine buildings are already in place. If you go shade first you more or less MUST go crag hive second, unless you're absolutely sure you can get a 3rd hive. Oni and fades without carapace are an epic fail against marines who know how to play and shoot :-D .

If you go shift first, it can help greatly to put the shift in some central location (like hub on ns2_tram), and it can pay off immensely. However, it can also backfire if your team is bad and they lose the shift and the eggs around it, leaving you with nothing. Shifts are also fragile, so keeping them hidden or having a gorge with hydras around them is nice.

Other than that, just get stuff and win :-P . I find chamber upgrades to be generally less of a priority than hive upgrades, depending on things. I mean, carapace and celerity are always useful from the very start of the game, but everything else can be delayed until leap, bile, spores, and blink are up or researching.

Bone walls help escaping oni or gorges survive so that can be nice :-D . Drifters are situationally good (less good in a 12-player game though) for vision and the occasional troll enzyme.

Generally, alien com is a bit easier to play: time your upgrades and expand everywhere where marines are not.

Oh, and yes, base rushes are extremely powerful on alien side, but if you want to keep them a secret, the team has to have PERFECT discipline (i.e. go somewhere quietly, hide until all or most of the marines leave, and then rush), and you gotta find and kill the obs first before the beacon goes off. So they don't guarantee a win, but they can be extremely powerful, especially early game, and can cripple a marine team to the point of not being able to come back (if they're bad enough) in the first 2-3 minutes.

P.S. It's also Kharaa, not Kharra :-P .
 
New speculation: Some alien commanders SPREAD CYSTS EVERYWHERE, even tho they know they are going to die, like spreading into a spot on the map you know you cant hold. I understand that you can deny building. But ive seen 30-50 res wasted on cysts that are going to die anyway.

What are your thoughts?
 
Cysts are pretty cheap, so I'd definitely do this later in the game, after both hives and most if not all upgrades are up. There's a definite benefit sometimes in keeping marines aimed at cysts, or having them axe cysts while they get attacked. The split second to switch weapons and aim makes a huge difference sometimes.

Even if there are no aliens around, you can "keep marines busy" in some area shooting at cysts, wasting ammo and time (if they're not next to an armory) while the aliens are pushing some other area. However, it can get out of hand, so if it's not helping it shouldn't be done.

At the beginning of the game, until most upgrades are up, I prefer to play very conservatively as far as cysts go and only cyst to somewhere where aliens can get RTs that will likely stay up.
 
Yea i feel the same Heat, but a few people have mentioned spamming them at the start... i see how it really lets the alien team know where marines are ect.. But... they add up, people underestimate how much res they are actually spending. Even early whips i have a hard time dropping if your against a decent marine team, they will snipe them almost 90% of the time.
 
I think early game it is just all about the economy, you want to spend as little as possible to get as many safe resource towers as possible, then when you hit the mid-late game cysts become easier to mass produce for scouting reasons, "not that drifters can't do the same thing!:) "
 
I enjoy finding places to put structures that are hard for marines to see, or to reach. One prime example is the vents in Glass Hallway, where if you angle the camera when placing stuff under the vents, they go into the vent itself, sometimes above the vent as well.

Before I get flamed for exploiting the game, I need to clarify that the bottom of the buildings can be seen, and a marine can still shoot at it, if they manage to get into the vents and look, as well as being seen easily by scan. Usually I like to place a shade in there, as well as 2 crags and/or a shift. The crags are in case your troops can't hold GH or Xroads, as they will keep your cysts and buildings around it alive.

Drop a cyst in there and it becomes an ideal place for Chamber upgrades that marines usually won't think of looking. Only downside is if your team has trouble holding the area, or if it gets scanned.


I wish that there was some way for aliens to remove structures tho, so I can experiment more with odd building placements. Maybe one day I'll write up a post about the odd/strategic places for alien buildings along with pictures.
 
I like the three single coil, 5 way selector switch Stratocasters. The humbucking picku... oh wait, different subject. Nevermind.
 
54 skulk bites to kill a power node. 34 bites to kill a IP, 80 bites for a comm chair.
 
I think ultimately the best strategy for aliens is to just grab as many resources as they potientially can at the beggining of the game and respond accordingly to whatever the marine team is doing, after a lot of runthroughs commanding many different games it just seems to always be the most flexible and more inclined strategy to success.
 
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