(Bug?)Passive Xenomorph Spitters

[player1]

Anyone notices that Xenomorph Spitters, alien equivalent for artillery unit, pretty much never use their range attack.

This is especially obvious when attacking hives. They just sit there, instead attacking.

Makes no sense, since their attack would not cause retaliation.

[fortydayweekend]

Yeah I have noticed that too. I remember getting attacked by them the first couple of times I played, then nothing. Not sure if there was an update in the middle.

[jdmillard]

Wow. I didn't even notice that they had a ranged attack because I never looked closely at them. I guess you're right, they should be attacking.

[Apheirox]

The aliens need some work in general. As was pointed out in another thread it doesn't make sense that the queen is first to defend the hive stack, dying and so stopping to spawn more bugs. If you go disturb an ant nest it's the soldier ants coming out to defend, not the queen. If the queen had less strength than the workers (or just was hardcoded to always defend last) clearing nests would be a little more challenging. I do hope the aliens concept gets expanded upon because other than the 8.0 critters walking around the aliens don't pose enough of a threat to be really interesting (see: Fallen Enchantress, where monsters are truly lethal). Hopefully in the future the game can be more like the original Alpha Centauri where Planet really reacts and gets dangerous as the level of pollution and general mayhem rises.

[jdmillard]

When you "discover" a queen, the information says that the Queen is extremely protective of her offspring (or something to that effect). I think that they did give this dome thought. If they were to change it up so that the Queen defends last, they would also need to change that in the description.

I personally don't have a problem with the Queen defending first because they aren't necessarily supposed to mirror the behavior of Earth lifeforms. But I do think that she should be made at least twice as powerful as she is now. She should be a considerable threat to anyone wanting to attack a hive. The "healing device" she has should be given to another type of alien that is weaker and subsequently defends last. That way the healing could actually be used since it wont be the first unit destroyed.

[boulugre]

I think this problem is linked to the use of artillery by the AI, it's not specific to this alien unit. If I recall correctly I had the case of a human faction with an artillery unit that could have bombard my army stack but just sat there doing nothing.