The Brutal-ity of Alien Swarm

alien-swarm

Playing Alien Swarm on Brutal is nothing short of hilarious, because it is so excessively difficult.
Is there somewhere (steam forums or elsewhere) that has a list of the stats of the aliens when played on Brutal?

Best Answer

A fully manned brutal mission under default settings features a swarm that has 2.6 times as much health as it has under a fully manned normal game. The damage dealt is also scaled by 2.6 times.

Additonally both the swarm and the players are faster, although I don't think they're any faster than they are in Insane (that's 20% faster for aliens and 4.8% faster for marines).


From sdk_src\game\shared\swarm\asw_gamerules.cpp:

ConVar asw_difficulty_alien_health_step( /* can be edited from the console */
  "asw_difficulty_alien_health_step",
  "0.2",
   0,
  "How much alien health is changed per mission difficulty level");

// ...

// alters alien health by 20% per notch away from 8 /* that's actually 5 */
float CAlienSwarm::ModifyAlienHealthBySkillLevel(float health)
{
    float fDiff = GetMissionDifficulty() - 5;
    float f = 1.0 + fDiff * asw_difficulty_alien_health_step.GetFloat();

    return f * health;
}

/* ... */

// alters alien health by 20% per notch away from 8 /* that's actually 5 */
float CAlienSwarm::ModifyAlienHealthBySkillLevel(float health)
{
    float fDiff = GetMissionDifficulty() - 5;
    float f = 1.0 + fDiff * asw_difficulty_alien_health_step.GetFloat();

    return f * health;
}

...where GetMissionDifficulty() returns 13 (for brutal, 10 for insane, 7 for hard, 5 for normal, 3 for easy), with one point deducted per missing marine (and a hard lower limit of 2).

(Comments within /* */ are mine.)