hey guys look at my ass hahahahahaha
Okay Serious Time. While I don’t really care, I kept seeing a recurring discussion about the place specialty squads have, followed by arguments that resulted from the dangerous precedent I set with Echo (sorry). The genie can’t be put back in the bottle, however if you guys want a /potential/ solution, this was something I pitched over a year ago.
For your amusement.
Can we please do this.
replacing a joke of a system with another joke of a system is hardly the solution to the afforementioned problem
which is people hardly give a shit about what they are ordered by literallywho cic and just want to fuck around with their metaclique
i can hardly blame them
Oh wow, that takes me back. I remember reading this back when.
Would definitly be worth a shot to try.
Its not like its any diffrent how squads are used already.
Are you sure that now, when the Echo’s toxicity is in the spotlight, is really the best time to go “hey, how about we have 3 Echo’s and now command won’t be able to refuse em”?
What exactly does this accomplish, besides splitting charlie?
What exactly does this accomplish, besides splitting charlie?
Honestly this, charlie to me already feels like your freehand squad that you use for various tasks that aren’t frontlining. Why cut charlie into thirds when you don’t need that many specialized squads.
Sadly this won’t work. I like this more of tactical squad / RTS approach that it presents, but currently nobody in command ever picks a specified group to do something.
It is always vague (for example) “we need second comms fixed” and then SL, or Engineer look around themselfs and ask marines close by if they are willing to go with them to fix second comms.
At best it is “Charlie SL, there is a dead spec south of your location”.
I don’t think in a current gameplay loop small marine squads can accomplish anything meaningfull, I know many imagine some kind of flanks that break chokepoint stalemate, but such things don’t happen. As soon as small group actually pushes anywhere, it gets surrounded, cut from going the way they came and then permanently killed.
Bravo already does what it is written in that chart, from half to 3/4 of bravo just fucks off and fights alongside main force, the rest stay behind.
But… What if we made it much, much simplier? HUD icons simillarly to what MPs have, but everyone with marine HUD sees them and marines can set them for themselfs.
Icon for “FoB security”, icon for “medic defenders” (all working titles), you plaster that to yourself to let everyone (command included) know what kind of a role you want to perform.
Ideally one could just step out of their squad to perform such duties.
Maybe even making so marines no longer set their squad in the lobby, but they can choose after gearing up. Simply merge Charlie/Delta and Alpha/Bravo preps and reinforce squad stereotypes, where bravo is guarding, Delta does the main fighting and the rest in between.
Glad to see you back @thwomper. How is NASA treating you? Or was it DARPA? Man is a legit rocket scientist.
YEAHHH THWOMPA THIS IS WHY YOU THE GOAT
In all seriousness i think this would be a good change, sure, players don’t exactly listen to command, but that lets alpha and delta continue to do that, while the 3 other squads are actively opting in to listen to command and make interesting plays
anyways i know i’m gonna get smoked for supporting this but yeah, big ups thwomp
I can’t zoom without losing the image quality, so is there a spec for each squad alpha delta, oscar kilo and charlie and bravo, how would the SOs exactly overwatch these 6 squads with only 4 PCs and max of 5 SOs per game, being also a unpopular role, and how would the structure of the almayer be counting there are 6 squads now and not just 4
You can formalize and institutionalize roles all you want on paper, but players aren’t going to actually do what their nametag says without mechanical enforcement of it.
Imagine if any marine could use a specialist’s gun and the only enforcement was “you just shouldn’t/you should play as a pfc” and there’s not even bans if you break that rule. That is basically what you’re asking people to do with these squad roles.
If you want squads to do a particular role, the game needs to mechanically change and specialize those squads - they must be bad at or can’t even do other things, but good at their own thing.
We do already see this specialization in practice with the intel team to a small degree - albeit their specialization is extremely limited and they’re still essentially just a PFC+ with an intel detector.
This system won’t work, simply because if you want the marines to be performing orders more complicated than “deathball” or “megaFOB”, then CIC needs more mechanical tools to better coordinate the marines (on-screen movement directions, individualised orders, basically using xeno waypoints for marines, and more) plus you’d need some level of OOC enforcement, or mechanical enforcement to compel marines to actually follow orders, which right now is enforced for only a select few Marines via OOC rules.
However, insofar as I am aware the maintainers do not want better CIC tools in the game. I am also sure banning people for going off alone is not going to be desirable.
Marines are forever doomed to fail at the most simple of orders, and will be forever consigned to deathballs as anyone showing initative to split off will just die when only 2 other people follow them, and after all three of them die they will decide to never split off the death ball again since they will just die.
If you want more complicated orders, go play PvE.
Someone have said it. But it won’t stop people from claiming “mariens bad can’t follow orders”.
There’s a grain of truth in what you’re saying, but it’s not exactly true.
Marines can do pretty complicated orders, it’s just that you need the whole command chain to be there for it most of the time, the CO\XO-overwatch-(a)SL. And it’s more of an issue of them executing the complicated orders like flanks correctly, rather than trying.
As for the deathball, one key thing the marine leadership needs to always keep in mind, particularly on the SL level is that marines naturally want to play relatively wide, while the xenos want to play tall(narrow). Marines often need to stretch the conflict line up a bit, to gain a tactical advantage, but also they don’t wanna go too wide.
In my opinion, the real problem with the CM squad system are the people complaining about the CM squad system. It’s natural for people to seek excuses for their own bad behavior, and you know, it’s more enjoyable to think that the system does not work, rather than to consider that maybe your are at fault for not interacting with it. One marine who can follow orders is worth 3 who can’t, hail Alpha!
That is facts, marines can do complicated orders but if the CIC is lacking the SL is lacking and the rifleman don’t want to follow orders, there is nothing we can do, but with a SL that brings people attention , interacts with his squad, an attentive SO , XO and CO helping overall on pointing to the direction of victory, pretty complicated orders are possible, sadly the only issue is that most of the time we don’t got that set up of people doing their job.
