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-It's good to say why it's a good mod
-A download link?
-What did you think of that other dude(ette)'s choice?
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Marines and aliens are two entirely different teams. More than that, they're even two entirely different games.
First, a few basics. In the future, mankind spreads out across the galaxy encounters alien blah blah. Natural Selection maps are set on space stations, research stations, industrial colonies and other dank, unfriendly - okay, with a few exceptions, hi KungFuSquirrel! - places, clanking, dripping, droning and rusting in on you. Each map has ten resource nodes. These need to be capped with a tower (not actually a tower, bear with me) to slowly provide resources for your team. Obviously a huge part of the game is killing off the enemy's resource towers and defending yours, as well all know that resource points mean prizes.
The marine team functions basically as an RTS. You spawn in at a predesignated point with your pistol, rifle and trusty combat knife. At your spawn point will be a command chair, which one player can hop into and use to live out their fascist fantasies. With a view identical to every RTS - http://www.unknownworlds.com/images/ns/screenshots/ns-comm-ayumi.jpg - the commander can drop structures, which marines must 'use' to build. While every marine spawns with the same equipment, they can be individually given better weapons, welders to repair buildings and players' armour, mines and special armours.
Every RTS has its research buildings and tech tree and NS is no different. Your armoury, as well as doling out extra ammo to marines, can be upgraded to allow dropping of heavy machine guns and grenade launchers. Marine observatories offer the ability to respawn the entire marine team at once in return for a chunk of resources and can be upgraded to give motion tracking indicators on the HUD (both commander view and on the marines' HUD) and phase gates- teleporters. The arms lab allow weapon damage and armour amount upgrades across the entire team. The tech lab can let you drop jetpacks (oh yes!) and heavy armour (think Fallout power armour, it's awesome).
So, you give your marines orders to go out and cap nodes and they of course head straight for where they think the aliens will be and die horribly. Ah. This is a problem. This time, you drop a handy little waypoint indicator down on their HUD and they... head in the opposite direction. Eventually, by bribing them with promises of mines, shotguns and upgrades, you cap a node or two by sheer dumb luck and maybe even kill some alien nodes. You slowly tech up, fending off alien attacks and pushing into their side of the map, before finally you have their hive in sight. You fight to build a phase gate so reinforcements can teleport in, fight to hold it, fight to build a turret factory to defend your position, fight to upgrade that turret factory to siege turrets then fight to hold out long enough for your siege turrets to destroy the hive through the wall, while aliens heal the hive and kill your marines and buildings. Or you give your marines shotguns and jetpacks and loose them into a hive room you have filled with medpacks. Or march in an entire team of heavy armour marines decked out with grenade launchers and machine guns. It's your choice. In the end, the hive goes down, everyone cheers, someone plays C + C Music Factory over voice but... oh. The game hasn't ended. They must have another hive. Oh dear.
The alien team is in ways more selfish but also relies heavily on teamwork and collaboration. Aliens spawn from a hive, a big fleshy womb hanging from the ceiling. This putrid uterus spreads bacterial filth around it, it's awesome. This concept from NS2 shows basically what a hive would look like: http://www.unknownworlds.com/images/ns2/screenshots/hiveconcept.jpg . Each map has three possible hive locations, one of which will be chosen at random for you to spawn in. You can eventually build all three hives and indeed you want to for each hive gives every alien an extra ability, leading up to some downright awesome skills at three hives, but they are expensive and take a long time to build.
All aliens spawn as a skulk, basically a dog made of fleshy bacterial scum which can neatly walk all over walls and ceilings. This is great fun but also crucial to master as while skulks' bites do massive damage, they are extremely fragile. You can then 'evolve' into another class - turning into a cute little egg http://www.unknownworlds.com/images/ns/screenshots/ns-gestation.jpg - for a chunk of your resources. I should mention the aliens' resource structure. While all of the marine teams go directly to the commander, points from alien resource nodes are distributed evenly among all players. Each alien has their own resource pool and can gain extra points for killing marines. Anyway, back to the various classes.
First up is the builder class, the gorge, a cute pudgy little fellow who makes squishy noises and purrs when happy. As well as having a healing spray attack and eventually a building-demolishing bile bomb and entangling webs, the gorge builds everything for the alien team. He plops down wonderful organic stuctures in the shape of resource-collecting towers to hives, spike flinging offensive chambers to crucial upgrade chambers. Ah yes, the upgrades. Gorges can choose to build one of three types of upgrade chamber, each allowing every alien to evolve one of three traits. The defensive chamber gives upgrades of extra armour, regeneration or a chance to be teleported back to the hive when close to death. Movement chambers offer a speed increase, silent movement or increased energy regeneration - energy beng used for all alien attacks and abilities. Sensory chambers allow the ability to sense marines through walls, higher attack damage but lower attack speed, or a cloaking ability. You can choose a different ability every time you respawn or die.
The next class is the lerk, a flying creature who spews poison gas and also makes cute noises. Then we have the fade, a large and monstrously terrifying lifeform who 'blinks' quickly into battle, swipes down a marine or two then zipping out again. The marines' game really needs to change when the first fade appears because fades have so much destructive potential. Killing a fade is a huge achievement and will buy you a fair bit of breathing room. Last up is the onos, a mahoosive space rhino cow. Onii (the pedantic squad love this) have teats even though all lifeforms are fully-grown. Worrying. An onos is a gigantic problem for marines, easily able to kill several at once, and can demolish an entire base extremely quickly. Hunting onos is a favourite sport of jetpack marines everywhere, as they are slow and have no ranged attack.
Each team basically wants to wipe out the other, killing all players and their spawning structures. Which is a simple enough objective but in practice, well, think how long an RTS game can go on for. Now throw in individual people playing every single unit in the game, each bringing their own personal playstyle, plans, priorities and strategies. It's an RTS played by two players with godlike micro skills and a myriad of different personalities. Sure, sometimes these personalities will come together for a single goal but even then they will go about it in an entirely different way. That is what makes NS so fantastic. Games can last for a single minute or for over an hour and both are just as fun.
Natural Selection played different across each of its three major release versions, each changing both teams' priorities, goals and methods in fairly big ways, but it was consistently fun. Alas, most of the players moved on and Natural Selection is not what it used to be. But once, oh once my friend... The upcoming Source-based Natural Selection 2 sounds promising. Some beautiful concept art has been released as well as this incredible tech demo of the bacterial infestation that spreads around hives: http://www.unknownworlds.com/ns2/videos/
I cannot even begin to properly explain Natural Selection and so shall leave you with this odd, rambling, poorly-structured and basic explanation. Hopefully this incomplete account is enough to show that NS has a whole ton of stuff and is pretty darn complex.
All I can say is that on a good server with good players, Natural Selection was the most fantastically tense, exciting, fun, challenging and rewarding mod.
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