did alien multiply for mission 6?

[John]

This mission is pretty weird, after the part when I'm supposed to escape with the med kit alien waits for me literally everywhere. 7/8 vents drop liquid from them and you can't hear the guy moving. He even dropped on the ground while the liquid was still pouring from the other vent hole. I think I should have picked the easy difficulty instead of normal bcs this is just ridiculous.

[Wobb the Great and Terrible!!!!!]

Well the developer said the way the game is meant to be played is on the "hard" difficulty.
I played multiple times (and about to start a new playthrough), on hard difficulty every time.
I get what you mean. Especially that part when you have kind of just encountered the alien properly, and really had to hide and be careful, for the first time.
It's ridiculous. But get past it, and then it gets back to normal for a while after that. Then it's only towards the end, when it really ramps up the challenge, but you will understand when you get there.
For how great the AI of the alien is, many scenes and levels are quite tightly scripted in how far the alien will get to you. It's always designed on like a rubber band that connects you and the alien. So it will only get so far away from you before being pulled back to your area again.
I saw someone say that on easy it's like 100m away, on normal it is 75m away, and on hard and nightmare it's just 50m away. And these are the maximum distance the alien will ever get from your location when it is present in the level.
Bear with it and you'll start to get the hang of it. Once you have done a few rounds with it, you'll start to get the hang of how it behaves. Just try and switch up your own behaviour as much as possible so as not to get caught out when it "learns" your routine for hiding.
On my last playthrough I couldn't get it to run away from the flamethrower any more, no matter how much I blasted it. It just held back out of range until it saw an opportunity, and then it charged me, the smart bastard.

[|iG| Vertigo]

That part late in Mission 6 can often generate some odd behaviour. My first time I thought I was evading two aliens, but I think it was just that it instantly warped between two ceiling vents. That's rare in the rest of the game, I think it may be flittering between two conflicting scripts during that section.

Originally posted by wobbler:

For how great the AI of the alien is, many scenes and levels are quite tightly scripted in how far the alien will get to you. It's always designed on like a rubber band that connects you and the alien. So it will only get so far away from you before being pulled back to your area again.
I saw someone say that on easy it's like 100m away, on normal it is 75m away, and on hard and nightmare it's just 50m away. And these are the maximum distance the alien will ever get from your location when it is present in the level.
Bear with it and you'll start to get the hang of it. Once you have done a few rounds with it, you'll start to get the hang of how it behaves. Just try and switch up your own behaviour as much as possible so as not to get caught out when it "learns" your routine for hiding.
On my last playthrough I couldn't get it to run away from the flamethrower any more, no matter how much I blasted it. It just held back out of range until it saw an opportunity, and then it charged me, the smart bastard.

You can mod the game so that the difficulty setting extends the distance of the alien's sweep box / rubber band, but by default it's the same for all difficulties. The distance does change depending on where you are in the game though.

Difficulty changes enemy eyesight, hearing, health, damage, how long they stay distracted by flares etc, how long the alien aggressively hunts you after it's left the vents, how much time it spends in the vents, and how long you can spend in the human-accessible vents before it comes to find you. Plus some additional tweaks for Novice and Nightmare. There may be some more stuff hard-coded into the engine, but that's what you can find in the difficulty .bat files. Personally I'm not a fan of Hard mode, the alien rarely leaves you alone once it's down on the ground. The easier difficulties make its appearances a bit more random and realistic.

But yeah... regular flamethrower use does bring out some bad behaviour in big Stompy. I've noticed it will also start setting traps for the player when you torch it a few times, such as doubling back around a corner, or jumping into a vent and backstabbing you as soon as you've walked past it. In terms of the way the durability works though, I'm pretty sure the alien's health regenerates, so if it's started resisting your attacks then you could try poring a long uninterrupted gout of fire onto it, rather than short bursts.

[Wobb the Great and Terrible!!!!!]

I had things like that with the alien after prolonged flamer use. It would jump into a vent, so I would scurry along past it, only for it to drop out of the vent more or less onto me (not the surprise attack from a vent mind you, but he just drops out like normal, but whilst I'm there under it), or immediately jumps out of a wall vent around the next corner, again right into me as I pass it.
In these instances there's nothing you can do but die.
But I guess they had to do something to make it counter the flamethrower. It did make me stop using it for a while.
Though I thought a better way to discourage flamer use would be to lower the amount of fuel you find lying around. I never went below 375 in the flamer, and was over 400 for 95% of the time. And that is while using it really often as well. Even on people and working joe's.

[|iG| Vertigo]

Yeah, agreed. That's the nice thing about Nightmare, you actually need all the pickups you find.

Drenching the player in ammo and compensating with an arbitrary carrying limit is one of my biggest FPS pet peeves, actually. In games where modding is easy, it's usually the first thing I change. I like being able to pick up everything I find - and for it all to be *useful*, too. It's particularly important in survival-horror games like this, where you're supposed to scour the environment for anything to give you an edge.

[Wobb the Great and Terrible!!!!!]

Yes. I got so sick of going around trying to pick up crafting supplies, only to have to leave them because I met my limit of three items allowed.
By the end I had 3 of every item, 6 medkits, with every crafting setup full and ready to craft, and every set of items filled to the max. In fact I had all that by the time I gave up my weapons on that conveyor belt when going down to appollo.
Those suited up working joes were a doddle. Just throw the switches in the places where they congregate, to blast/electrocute them. And then just mash them with pipe bombs for the one's who are left.

[|iG| Vertigo]

Right? It's so annoying!

Thankfully you can change the max carry capacities with simple modding, but there are limits to how much you can modify the crafting recipes, and I don't think you can change the number of pickups in the levels at all. I usually just slap my favourite difficulty settings onto Nightmare and play that way.

(Edit: you can change the amount of ammo in pickups, just not whether they're actually spawned in the map. I think.)

[Wobb the Great and Terrible!!!!!]

if I fancy a real challenge, I do nightmare. That severely limits how much stuff you find, if I remember right.
But I don't like how in nightmare the motion tracker is borked. Doesn't make sense.
Just make the alien more unpredictable, remove (or lengthen) the rubber banding with the alien, limit the amount of pickups, and raise awareness of nearby enemy and alien. That was all nightmare needed. Borking the motion tracker seems like something it could have done without. You might as well never pick it up in nightmare. It's more hindrance than help in my experience.

[Sifer2]

Mission 5, and 6 are really hard. Then you get the flamethrower, and it's far easier. So you can suffer through it or cheese it by just rushing the objectives. And yeah near the end of mission 6 the alien seems to be scripted to stay in the vents more but try to grab you from them.

[NinthElement]

He moves between vents very quickly in the mission 6 exit sequence. If you don't have any humans in your way to slow you down, you can just run all the way. But if you are forced to linger too long he will drop and start hunting

[Anejey]

The Alien is made to be constantly near you as others have already mentioned. If this ruins immersion, there are actually multiple aliens on the station, so you can just pretend that several are going after you.