Alien Swarm

[Trippy]

Thanks, downloading now!

Seems that at least one of the achievements awards a hat for TF2

So help me god if it's a facehugger...

It is!

More like scalphugger.

On the Pyro it actually is like a face hugger (except turned around). On the rest it is more like a top of head hugger.

[Trippy]

Does anyone know if its better practice to constantly push forward and fight as you move, or to try and completely kill the waves of aliens before moving forward?

Finished my first Hard campaign. Moving fast and using the flame throwers and telsa cannons seemed to be the best strategy for our group. Both weapons seem somewhat overpowered given their "AoE control" abilities.

I ran as a pure support medic (heal gun + heal beacon) for all of the missions. I find it difficult to actually heal teammates with the heal gun especially if they are moving at all. Flame thrower/tesla cannon + electric armor helps cut down on infections which made my life easier. We actually had more infections on our Normal run through (same group).

[Malakili]

People are already hard at work creating engaging new levels for this game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwtFuQ_gA1E

[Morfiend]

So my little group got to the "kill the eggs and biomass" level on hard last night. We had an amazing good time, but that level just shut us down. I was playing as my male medic, and infestation just destroyed us. I could basically heal one, maybe two before being totally out of juice with the heal gun.

We had a good time.

If anyone wants to play, just add me to your friends, I am in the f13 group as Morfiend.

[Malakili]

So my little group got to the "kill the eggs and biomass" level on hard last night. We had an amazing good time, but that level just shut us down. I was playing as my male medic, and infestation just destroyed us. I could basically heal one, maybe two before being totally out of juice with the heal gun.

We had a good time.

If anyone wants to play, just add me to your friends, I am in the f13 group as Morfiend.

Yeah, taking the female medic on that level is key, she heals infestation better than the male medic,.

[bhodi]

To be cheezy, try 3 tesla 3 medic 1 tech w/ tesla.

There is a bug right now; If there is an alien nearby, the tesla will arc to and kill any infestor even if he's on a person.

[Hoax]

Alternatively have one person take flamethrower + flashlight and let him deal with every egg area while you stay the fuck away from them.

[Prospero]

I made it a good chunk of the way through last night on hard. I hope Valve makes more maps and does some bug fixing on this. It's a great way to spend an hour.

[K9]

To be cheezy, try 3 tesla 3 medic 1 tech w/ tesla.

There is a bug right now; If there is an alien nearby, the tesla will arc to and kill any infestor even if he's on a person.

eh, you can't do 3 of the same class 

[Typhon]

Why are you being pedantic, clearly he means 1.5 tesla, 1.5 medic and 1 tech, which gives the maximum 4 people.   

[Sjofn]

I did the OFFLINE PRACTICE and uh. It seems fun! I like punching the aliens to death though, that's probably bad.

[Trippy]

I did the OFFLINE PRACTICE and uh. It seems fun! I like punching the aliens to death though, that's probably bad.

No actually that's good, especially if you decide to be a medic*. On the easier difficulties I'm disappointed if I don't punch/kick 30 - 40 aliens each mission.

Edit: that's punch/kick *to death* ... there's even an achievement for 20 melee kills

Edit 2: * to clarify one way to setup a medic is with two heal items in your "weapon" slots (2x heal beacons, 2x heal guns, or one of each) and so you have no gun to shoot aliens with.

[ezrast]

Just trying this out, seems like something I might not be terrible at once I'm used to it. An invite for ezrast to the f13 group would be nice.

[Trippy]

I'm working on getting admin rights to our f13 Steam group (<poke>schild</poke>) and then I'll invite people.

[Segoris]

They really do need a "request invite" option for groups in Steam, that would be handy for private groups.

Anyways, I'm on as Segoris. I'll be sending out  friend invites to people with this game to get some games going as I'm not in the f13 group as of now.

[HaemishM]

Did anyone else have the game flip out on them tonight? I was in a PUG tearing through one of the tougher early missions (the one where you have to stay in the gunship's spotlights) and my connection dies. Get in another game and it's lagged to fuck and the camera just spins and spins around at the worst times. Decided that was a time to leave.

[Trippy]

Yes I've had that before with the freaked out camera and you "move" by jumping around on the screen. That's what precipitated my "netcode needs work" comment above.

[kildorn]

I roll my medic with a gun, but mostly because most of my teammates can't shoot or protect a medic to save their lives. So hug my beacons or die, bastards.

My usual way to deal with infectors would be a flamer or a smartgun. Or if you see the nests, put a rifle grenade in them.

Also: Freeze Grenades are hi-larious, as is the mini tesla sentry.

[Sjofn]

I don't have the medigun unlocked yet and I didn't want to ONLY be able to punch, so my medic had a gun/heal beacons. We failed that biomass/egg mission. I blame myself. :(

I got the "punch aliens to death" achievement though! 

[Trippy]

That mission is a problem because it's not as linear as some of the others so it's very easy for the team to get split up. Even if people stay together curing infections takes some practice since you need to be able to judge very quickly how many beacons you need to drop to keep somebody from dying from an infection. If it's just a single parasite and you, as Faith, are nearby, then only a single beacon is needed if they started at or near full health. If they have more than one, however, you'll need at least 2 beacons and you have to do it really quickly cause their health will drop like a rock. That's why pre-heal gun I would "double-fist" heal beacons on the egg levels just to be on the safe side.

[Segoris]

Couple things I noticed:

No lag/fps drop, but I do bounce around a bit as described above. That got annoying but was rare enough to not be a bother.

The heal gun switches targets a little too fast when someone comes next to the person you're healing, otherwise playing a medic is a good time. I had 3 teammate deaths tonight, the first was when we found out aliens can knock you off edges/cliffs, the second was due to people being infested while split up and made it impossible to save both (argh, pugs ><), the third was at the end of the last level (I wish I was kidding here) as the last person was walking onto the ship he got killed.

I used the charged armor while I was infested and it didn't remove it, so either something was messed up and it's supposed to, or it's only supposed to be a preemptive prevention of stuns/infestation.

For the welding door shut topic from before, I finally got around to testing that out in online play and it's 5 seconds for Crash, 3 for Vegas, and about 10 for anyone else. So having a tech have their accessory as a torch is worth it, anyone else....not so much.

Also, duo'ing is good fun and makes for a nice challenge. Special weapons + tech and we were able to do the first 4 missions before time became an issue. 2 of those levels came down to one of us being less then 20% health and on our last clip of ammo when we finished.

[Trippy]

I used the charged armor while I was infested and it didn't remove it, so either something was messed up and it's supposed to, or it's only supposed to be a preemptive prevention of stuns/infestation.

I had that problem the first time i tried it too. You have to activate it with "1" and there are limited number of charges.

[Trippy]

Insane is insane

[Kail]

Did anyone else have the game flip out on them tonight?

Something was definitely screwy tonight, I couldn't get anything to run for a while for some reason.

[Prospero]

Play Alien Swarm in first person

Seems like it could be fairly awesome.

[Megrim]

Did anyone else have the game flip out on them tonight? I was in a PUG tearing through one of the tougher early missions (the one where you have to stay in the gunship's spotlights) and my connection dies. Get in another game and it's lagged to fuck and the camera just spins and spins around at the worst times. Decided that was a time to leave.

In console, asw_camera_shake 0 or something.

Also, read stuff here.

Shock armour takes about three ticks to knock a facehugger off you. So if you start on 10% health, lolno.

[K9]

Alternatively have one person take flamethrower + flashlight and let him deal with every egg area while you stay the fuck away from them.

I did a few missions with the flashlight last night. I expected it to be useless, but it proved very useful in a few situations where spotting infestors quickly is useful (Residential and Timor Station in particular).

[Segoris]

I had that problem the first time i tried it too. You have to activate it with "1" and there are limited number of charges.

I did activate it, didn't seem like it worked at all though. I'll try again tonight.

Shock armour takes about three ticks to knock a facehugger off you.

I'll watch for this as well when I try it out.

[Sky]

Seems like a decent enough game. I didn't care for the controls and then the game crashed on me in offline practice. It was a diverting 0.2 hours.

[Segoris]

Also, read stuff here.

Nice link, thanks for that. Some really useful ones imo (that aren't directly effecting gameplay):

Move the reload bar under the marine:

Change color of flares:

Bind emotes/calls for help to different keys:

Edit: Game Bug List that is pretty helpful. Some of it may have been fixed in the last patch, but otherwise there some helpful info here.

[NiX]

Can't wait for resources to pop up on creating maps. I suck with Hammer, but I'd try again for this.

[Segoris]

Similar to this thread that contains guides for each step?

Edit - there's even a guide for working with Hammer (I haven't checked it out and don't know how detailed/good it is, I just see that it is one of the parts of that thread).

[Mrbloodworth]

I don't think I'm a fan of this shooting system. With all the stuff flying everywhere, I seem to end up killing my team mates a lot.

Perhaps I need to play with other players.

EDIT: Why does it keep making me do the same level over and over?

[Trippy]

Practice mode is just the first two missions combined -- you can't do the full campaign that way.

[lesion]

Howevercomma you can use these console variables to run the full campaign with bots or solo online:

asw_ignore_need_two_player_requirement 1
asw_show_all_singleplayer_maps 1