Subscribe to download
Blast to the Past

This is Blast to the Past (B2TP)



A vanilla-flavored Natural Selection 2 mod aimed at addressing perceived Marine domination in the current vanilla build of the game under 8v8 conditions.



While stats on ns2panel.com show an almost 50-50 winrate (which is a good thing), in our experience most players have a higher marine than alien hiveskill, a rare 5 sight years ago.

This is a sympthom of how the game is a bit too marine sided at the moment.

As a consequence, the hive skill system, using the per-team-hiveskills feature that didn't exist back them can simply solve these imbalances by slightly stacking the alien team with better players. This, in turn, creates a 50-50 winrate.
However, if teams were to be sweapped then it would be expected the stronger, now marine team would crush the opposition.

In conclusion, while the game can be 'balanced' for single rounds, it's not truly balanced until a 50-50-ish winrate is achieved after teamswaps.



This mod aims to attack the causes of this, by doing the least amount of changes whenever possible in the most impactful places. Most of these changes revert some values to what were vanilla values years ago (PvE costs, welder costs, lerk timings, hence the name of the mod).



Changes are as follows:



**Aliens**

Crag, Shade, Shift, Whip cost 10 Tres (was 13)
(we have no idea why this was never re-adressed since this was changed circa the world championship and there have been multiple other related changes, like harsher supply limits and Tres tunnels that cost 16 total Tres to build)



Lerks cost 20 Tres (was 21)
(starting at 15Tres this brings back the old Lerk pop up timing. From 3min to 2.30 min at 2 RTs)


**Marines**

Welders cost 3 Pres (was 2)



Marines start with 1 IP (vanilla!) but

+5Tres on 7v7

+10Tres on 8v8



This serves as an interpolation between 1IP and no bonuses for 6v6 (vanilla behavior) and +1 IP for the arcade clusterfugg that is 10v10, which is essentially +20 Tres. The only way to give "half an IP" is to give Tres. Giving a straight IP for 8v8 ammounts to nonstop early marine pressure and can snowball easily into marines choking out the aliens.