Obviously I am really excited about the return of the Flood in a Banished Campaign. Was not expecting anything on the Flood quite this soon, but in hindsight it makes a lot of sense since playing the villains is more palatable if we are fighting to save the galaxy from Flood.
However, this casts some doubt on if the Flood will be playable as a faction. 343 said no in a QnA and Sketch on the daily show the other day seemed to be kind of dismissive of the notion. Which sounds definitive since generally speaking 343 would duck the question on if the Flood would return rather than give straight answers.
So I thought I would go through some of the main issues about creating a Flood faction:
1 - Recruitment: Technically speaking the Flood don’t recruit the vast bulk of their units in the traditional sense. The Zerg for example grow a specific combat form at their hive and this works. But the Flood get spores, have to infect other units, which then evolve into carriers and they make even more spores. This would take a lot of micro-managing for a player and would be a nightmare to balance. If they were to have the player recruit just purestrain forms, well, that sort of runs counter to the idea of the Flood. The vast bulk of Flood should be recruited via infections forms. Which is a problem if you want to recruit say human combat forms to shoot down planes and your crafty opponent has no infantry. This restricts what the Flood player can use and recruit at an instant; which again is tough to balance.
2 - Resources: Why would the Flood need to generate supplies and power?
3 - Lack of unit diversity: Both the UNSC and the Banished are meant to fit this rock, paper, scissors gameplay. This encourages you to have a fully combined arms force with artillery, AA, tanks, planes and infantry. But the Flood are supposed to be a massed infantry swarm. How can you invent loads of artillery, armor and AA before it doesn’t feel like the Flood. I don’t think people would be happy with reskinned Banished/UNSC tanks you train at your base. Whilst you could use some imaginative purestrain forms instead it still goes against what the Flood are all about.
4 - Lack of Commanders: They are supposed to be led by the Gravemind. All other factions have some sort of hierarchy and sub commanders but short of Gravemind 1 and Gravemind 2 theres not a lot that works. Even if they did MB he should really be using Forerunner weapons; not flood. Since commanders and their abilities are such a big deal in HW2 and they would likely want a lot of them for more variable gameplay I would be surprised if they could work around this.
Basically the main issue with the Flood is their recruitment of units being tied to their infection forms. This means they can’t operate like a traditional RTS faction like the Zerg in StarCraft can.
To add to your point about the recruitment- how would they balance a flood mirror? Just recruiting other infection forms with your own infection forms?
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> To add to your point about the recruitment- how would they balance a flood mirror? Just recruiting other infection forms with your own infection forms?
Oh yeah, wow I didn’t think about that. That would be weird. Does the infection form just shunt the other guy out of the body? 
The only way around this would be to simplify and just make Infection forms do damage like normal and combat/carrier forms are recruited as standard units. This would allow you to fight normal battles even against other flood players. But you would have to water down the Floods mechanics and lore.
First of all, I want to appreciate this post. It is nice to see that someone actually is trying to get in the pants of 343i for once. I agree, I was thinking for a while and I think it is a hell of complicate. That is the reason because I think the Flood should have the same system as the normal UNSC or Banished leaders. They should have, vehicules units, air units and infantry. It sounds crazy, but I think this is the only posible way without a crazy non stop balance situation. So up to this and following this idea there are few things I think can work out:
- Vehicules are just flood forms of bigger and unusual bodies. Imagine, like a Elephant body that throw darts through its horn (which for unsc or banished is considered a tank).
- Air units we already saw them in Halo Wars 1, they can work and get better designs. Balloon units that drops bombs, birds…
- Infantry is pretty easy since we know so many forms from previous games.
- About the buildings, again, there is no limit for the imagination man.
- I think about the resources are the same, I don’t see the problem. Even the names can change a little bit to fit more, bio-energy factory and harvester.
- Leaders, hero and all that staff, I mean, this is easy work with people with imagination as they did with Colony.
Thanks, and I hope you find some common ideas with you here.
They could easily train units and gather resources like the other factions. Making units and models for the full faction would be the really tricky part.
I agree that the Flood’s whole mantra is infecting other units instead of making their own. However, I think 343I can take a page out of what some community people are doing with the steam version of HW:DE. Flood is about overwhelming oyu enemy with shear numbers. Give the flood the ability to spawn their own units, but also give them shorter build times and a higher population. They don’t need to have tanks and planes, just massive numbers to overwhelm UNSC and Banished vehicular armies. Also the Flood thrasher form from HW1 is basically the Goliath from colony. So adding hulking beasts in place of vehicles works for me.
I think what seems to make sense is that the flood is almost a mindless, menacing, and basically a random enemy… To make them a playable faction would mean that you are putting them into a situation where they are strategic and calculated… I may be wrong, but it’s almost as if they are similar to zombies… To make zombies have strategy and play as a “civilized” unit (for lack of a better term) doesn’t seem to make sense…
Just my 2 cents…
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> I think what seems to make sense is that the flood is almost a mindless, menacing, and basically a random enemy… To make them a playable faction would mean that you are putting them into a situation where they are strategic and calculated… I may be wrong, but it’s almost as if they are similar to zombies… To make zombies have strategy and play as a “civilized” unit (for lack of a better term) doesn’t seem to make sense…
>
> Just my 2 cents…
I think they’re supposed to have something similar to a hive mind, once a Gravemind is around the Flood radically change. It’s a fully sentient being that’s supposed to have memories from all it’s predecessors, so if one was around the Flood are fully capable of making strategic and calculated decisions.
There are a lot of threads back from Halo Wars describing how the flood could work in a way that would appear true to how the flood works.http://halowars.com/forums/thread/487250.aspx
That is just one of them, but you can search in there and find at least a dozen more threads with good ideas. It isn’t impossible, it would just require a bit more thinking and to throw away the convention that a balanced game = identical gameplay across factions when we both know that isn’t true.
It could work, in Halo Wars they had several units that mimic UNSC/Covy. If they used the original base as a building block for design it could work out. As for turrets there was only two in Halo Wars, one was a spore turret and the other was a large earthworm thing that smashed the ground and strangled your units. Units would be a little tricky, but there has been many units made during the Halo days they could find a way to balance if they were just made at the base. I’m not to sure how the infection form would pan out in a mirror, influence of power, maybe?
You’re too attached to Lore in regards to balance and I agree the biggest obstacle to making a playable Flood faction is the lore, it’s not the impossible balance people claim it is, and of course I believe lore is an unsignificant obstacle. If you try to explain the Banished and UNSC using lore you’ll find nothing makes sense, and that’s perfectly fine.
The flood won’t be playable for reasons they won’t reveal but we can conspire, I just don’t buy it’s because balance, sorry I just don’t, I refuse to.
If you’re interested though, back in march I made this proposal, I hope you like it. In it I explained the guidelines to how we could have a Flood faction with very good unit diversity for Rock/Paper/Scissors and the like:
Flood Faction in Prima Guide Format
I think the issue is creating new units in a way that makes sense with the lore and the Flood in general, mainly when you get to vehicle and air equivalents. I imagine a Flood Leader would probably be mostly unique Infantry, with vehicles and aircraft being mainly an “infected” mish-mash of UNSC and Banished vehicles. Leader Powers would probably focus on recycling and reclaiming units.
Core Infantry: Combat Form Group. Could be upgraded with Infection Forms to steal killed enemy units?
Core Scout: Stalker Form.
Specialist Infantry: Carrier Form Group. Similar to Suicide Grunts, deploys Infection Form swarm on death.
Anti-Vehicle/Building Infantry: Tank Form.
Anti-Infantry Infantry: Thrasher Form
Core vehicle: Corrupted Warthog
Anti-Air Vehicle: Corrupted Ravager
Heavy Vehicle: Corrupted Scorpion
Core aircraft: Swarm Form
Support Aircraft: Corrupted Engineer
Heavy Aircraft: Bomber Form
Hero Unit: Corrupted Spartan
Super Unit: Juggernaut
Leader Powers would probably be based around generating Infection forms to capture and recycle killed units.