Natural Selection

[Nitro]

Anyone here play it?

 

It's a heavily team-based strategic Half-Life mod that's similar to StarCraft. Available from Natural-Selection.org, you can play as either Marines or aliens.

 

As an alien, you can evolve from your basic form (Skulk) into a builder (Gorge), a flyer (Lerk), a fighter (Fade), or a massive beast of an alien, the Onos. You start with one hive, and must expand to the other two hive locations. These 2 extra hives are important, as the availability of upgrades and advanced evolutionary forms is determined by the number hives you have. Also, the more hives you have, the faster you can respawn the dead. To win, however, you must eliminate the Marines and their ability to spawn. Along the way, the builders can build various other buildings providing upgrades, resource gatherers, healing of nearby units and structures, and autonomous turrets to keep the bad guys out.

 

Gameplay as a Marine is slightly different. The team has a commander, who views the action from a 3rd person RTS-type view, and is reponsible for spawning buildings, which a Marine must then weld together for it to become operational, giving orders (which come up as waypoints on the Marine's hud), and keeping troops in the field healthy and armed. The Marines must eliminate all alien hives, and do their best to protect the open hive sites.

 

The dead respawn at a rate of one every ten seconds per spawn point. As an alien, each functioning hive counts as a spawn point. As a Marine, the commander can build Infantry Portals, each one of which counts as a spawn point. This may seem unbalancing, as the Marines can have as many spawn points as they can afford, but the Inf. Portals are just about the easiest thing in a Marine base to destroy, and go down rather quickly if an alien finds his way into your base. An example of the spawn system in question, would be if 3 guys on a team died at about the same time, but only one spawn point was built, then after 10 seconds, one would spawn, then the second in another 10 seconds, and a third after a further 10. Now, figure it again for 2 spawn points. After 10 seconds, the first two respawn, and another 10 for the third. As a Marine, you always want to have two portals up. More are a waste of resources early on, and only having one will cripple you if it goes down.

 

The game is over when all the members of a team are dead, and have no spawn points from which to get back into the action.

 

However, I've seen games where the aliens lost all three hives, and the lone remaining player evolved to builder, and built a hive. 3 minutes as the only player, waiting for the hive to finish, then a full team again, and Marines wondering what the hell happened. we came back, got a second hive up in about 10 minutes, and ended up winning.

 

And don't be discouraged if you spend a lot of time dying at first... It happend to me, and if it doesn't happen to you, I'll be surprised, and declare you Complete Lord and Master of the Quick Stop.

 

All in all, a great, addictive game, and a sweet-ass alternative to CS.

 

http://www.natural-selection.org/

[Loki GM]

nope never even heard of it

[RpTheHotrod]

Awsome game.

[GonkH8er]

It is. It's a fantastic mod. Totally addictive and fun as all hell.

 

 

 

Nothing beats a 3 hive fade with cloaking, adrenaline and regeneration....

 

Bile bombs for all

 

 

I suggest everyone downloads it. I've been playing it since the day it came out. Cant stop

[Ratmjedi]

I've seen the game at the LAN Cafe that I go to. Looks pretty cool but I would rather play it at home then there. There is to much noise and I really can't figure out the game and what is going on but I've seen guy's play it looks very sweet. Reminds me of Turok 2 when you go to where the bees live. Don't know the level name but there are huge bees and there is a queen. That's what it reminds me off.

 

[RpTheHotrod]

I was playing NS and it's A W E S O M E. I love the Marines side the best. It was like being in a movie.

 

The rest of the team did offense, and I volunteered to stay behind and defend. The commander was such a good one. I did excelltn on defense, keeping everything at bay while he built and upgraded...well, I built them after he set them up. Once we had a good base of operations, he built a warp gate and we prepared to protect a hive room. He started upgrading us with armor, and giving us weilding guns, and everyone machine guns except for one, wehich had a grenade launcher. We warped into position and were being lead by the commander by waypoints (move to your waypoint, soldier) every 12 meters or so. It was awesome. We're all walking slowly, covering eachother as we walk waypoint to waypoint, making sure to keep the guy with the grenade launcher alive.

Once we got there, we had a guy weidling the vents close as we kept anything from coming through (just like Aliens!).

 

It's so awesome when you have a good commander. It's like you don't know what's around the corner, but this guy over the voice intercom does know, and is leading you step by step, where to go, and what to do.

 

If you're the commander, you switch to an overhead view, and get to play Dungeon Keeper all over again ...except you can't slap your marines around.

 

 

Well, I'm enjoying it. The guy that was the commander was really impressed and appreciated me staying back and covering our main base while he commanded. He even gave me a few "rewards" for a job well done.

 

Best team game I have ever played in my entire life, period.

[Nitro]

Anyone know any good servers? I've only got one I play on, and I'm looking for more.

 

IP: ela2.eastlink.ca

 

PM me for the password. It's not a private server, we just want to keep the in-game browsing retards out.

 

The password might change from time to time, but the new one is always posted in the NS section of the forums at Eastlink Gaming. The server is run by the good folks at Eastlink HSI (High Speed Internet), the cable provider for Nova Scotia, Canada.