BDT Community Balance Mod revision 3.6 (dev)

What it does

• Before the round starts, the alien commander sees a "SELECT STARTING LOCATION" panel listing every hive location available on the map.
• Whatever the commander selects becomes the alien starting hive.
• The marine base is placed at a different start location, chosen at random from the map's valid opposing spawns for the alien's pick.
• The selection is highlighted in green and syncs to the alien team so everyone can see the chosen spot.
• The alien team gets a chat message announcing the pick, tagged "[Hive Spawn Selector]" in magenta, naming every legal marine spawn for it too (not which one actually won the random draw) — configurable to the commander only, see Server admin below.

Recommended setup

• Strongly recommended: run a "ready up before the round starts" plugin, such as Shine's Tournament Mode, so both teams lock in and the countdown only begins once everyone is ready. Without one, the alien commander may only get a few seconds to pick before the round starts on its own.
• Specifically avoid the common setup where the round auto-starts a fixed countdown (e.g. 15 seconds) as soon as both teams have a commander, with teams shuffled partway through (e.g. 5 seconds before the round begins). That leaves no good moment to pick: choosing before the shuffle announces the pick to the current alien roster, and the shuffle can then move roughly half of them onto Marines — so part of the enemy team sees the pick before the round even begins. Choosing after the shuffle is too late either way, since spawns are resolved almost immediately alongside it.

Server admin

• sv_spawnselect true/false — enable or disable alien spawn selection (enabled by default).
• configs/HiveSpawnSelectorConfig.json — set "AnnounceToWholeTeam" to false to send the pick announcement to the alien commander only instead of the whole team, if your server can't avoid the shuffle-timing issue above.

Compatibility

• Do not run alongside NSL — it drives the same underlying spawn setting and the two mods will fight over it.
• Works alongside Shine's CustomSpawns plugin (from Shine-Epsilon) automatically. If it's installed and configured for the current map, the picker restricts itself to the locations CustomSpawns allows aliens to start at, and pairs marines using its own legal combinations. No configuration needed here — it's detected automatically, and every other map or server falls back to the behavior above.

Additional Credits

What it adds to tooltips

• Research time — an hourglass and a number on every research and upgrade. Armour 3 reads "40 res, 120 seconds" instead of just "40 res".
• Cooldown — a stopwatch on commander abilities: Bone Wall, Power Surge, Nutrient Mist, Rupture, Heal Wave, Cyst, and the rest.
• Health and armour — for anything you drop, build or manufacture, on both teams.
• Movement speed — for the things that move: ARC, MAC, Drifter, Whip, Shade, Shift, Crag.

The "In Cooldown" panel

The alien hive panel

• Biomass — one icon per +1 biomass research that hive has completed. A fresh hive shows none, the same way it shows no hive type icon until it is upgraded, and each research adds its own button's art.
• Researching — the game's own rotating "working" ring with the DNA glyph inside it, on any hive researching anything: biomass, a lifeform ability, or a hive type upgrade. The same pair you see in the world when you look at a busy hive.

Fixes to vanilla display bugs

• Simultaneous biomass research. With two hives researching biomass at once the tech map lit up only one icon between them, because the team collapses every hive into a single number before drawing. Two hives now light two icons, three light three.
• Supply icons. The supply figure on a tooltip was marked with a MAC or a Drifter while the HUD's top bar used a different pair of icons for the same thing. The tooltip now uses the top bar's. The MAC and Drifter icons are untouched wherever they stand for the units themselves.
• Uncoloured biomass icons. The biomass icon was drawn as bare greyscale art wherever it appeared: on the commander tooltip, on the spectator counter, and so on the hive panel too. Nothing else in a tooltip or in the tech tree stays uncoloured, so it read as unfinished rather than deliberate. All of them now take the tech map's own colour for researched alien tech.

Live values

Works with other mods

Servers

How to use it

• Join the alien team during the pre-round.
• Hold the scoreboard key. Every alien has a lifeform icon on their row, defaulting to Skulk.
• Click your own icon. A menu opens at your cursor: Skulk, Gorge, Lerk, Fade, Onos.
• Pick one. Every alien and spectator sees it immediately.

Who sees what

• Aliens — see all picks, can declare.
• Spectators — see all picks, cannot declare.
• Marines — see nothing. Picks are filtered on the server, so the data never reaches a marine's machine at all rather than being sent and merely hidden.

Requirements

• Requires Shine. It installs as a normal Shine extension and is enabled by default; toggle it with sh_loadplugin lifeformpicker.
• Must be run on the server.

Credits

The Defense mod gameplay and rules

Special 'hell' waves you can vote for

• Skulk hell wave
• A wave with only skulks, a lot of them


• Skulk hell wave (extra hard)
• Same as the regular skulk hell wave, but with a much higher skulk count and mechanics for skulks to spawn closer to the front line for extra pressure.


• Lerk hell wave
• A wave with only lerks. Lerks will fly high before peeking down on open maps so watch out :p


• Mixed hell wave
• A remix of wave 10 with slighty more pressure and closer spawn


• Survival hell wave
• An infinite, single wave with an ever increasing amount of bots. This wave is working but not fully balanced or tuned out.

List of gameplay and QoL changes

• Weapons
• Increase rifle ammo count and clip size.
• Infinite shotgun ammo, along free catpack upon reloading with an increased duration.
• GL has a secondary fire mod: right click is throwing a pulse nade
• Pistol has secondary fire mod: flare
• Axe and rifle melee damages increased to 100 and 70.


• Misc
• RFK (Res for kill). With a small part spread around nearby players and assist.
• Welding rate increased
• The armory resupply rate is increased, and also weld armor
• Increasing the amount of sentries allowed for each battery
• RTs, meds, and ammo packs are automatically dropped around the map.
• Jetpack fuel slightly buffed


• Mechanics
• Doors can be locked and welded, until destroyed
• Sentries can be picked and redeployed by players

Balance changes between low and high player count

Major optimizations in place

• The mod is using a bare-bone version of hallucinations to move bots along the map and reduce. Those hallucinations are replaced with fully fledges bots once in combat or close to marines. They are as light as a pack of MACs moving on the map and simply following the pathing mesh. To compare with vanilla ns2, "hallucinations" are fully fledged bots and are considered player entities. That's why they are rather heavy.
• Removing some sounds on crownd areas, like skulk footsteps, jump sound, bite sound if they miss, etc. Reason is when you got 20 skulks making a ladder, the amount of footsteps can become high really quickly and stress the client.
• Rework of the AI thinking rountine and update tick rates for bots, along with cached pathing queries
• Adjusting on-the-fly relevancy distance for newly created entities. Ranging between 16m if the server is heavily loaded and 45 if it is fine.

Custom maps to play this mod on

• ns2_tow_biodome
• ns2_tow_combi
• ns2_tow_summit_defense
• Note: Be sure to pick the map named ns2_tow_summit_2021 in it, the other one is the original with the broken pathing mesh.

• ns2_def_troopers
• Unlike vanilla or tow maps, you start with a well established base already and a lot of sentries. Be sure to group them up and don't let the aliens in.


• ns2_kf_farm
• A remake from a KillingFloor 1 map, with 2 gameplay changes: You do not have the option to command (researches are done automatically): lose the prototype labs, and say goodbye to jetpacks. Aliens also spawn all around the edges of the maps instead of the hive only. You spawn split from each others, evenly, inside the different buildings.