Low pop is best pop.
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You say that and then I remind you that xeno backline is practically dead in the water at the moment.
Bravo would just devolve into another aux squad, practically losing it’s squad identity in the mean time.
Also the FOB rework will not suddenly turn bravo into some flexible squad, bravo is gonna guard the transformer. Why? Because this was the actual live experience during the FOB rework.
You can nerf cades all you want because marines will just use sandbags and when marines can’t use sandbags they’ll use fences and so on. Transformer still needs to be actively guarded to prevent stealth takedowns even with the requirement of a T3.
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Does bravo have a squad identity or is it just the roles that got pushed into them time and time again because no one else was willing to do them?
I mean realistically, there are people who go bravo because of FOB duty but those are like four guys. You don’t log on to a game about PVP and roleplay to do nothing the entire round because nobody will stay at the FOB.
I do thing that a FOB rework will get the backline active again, plus removing the turrets. Maybe removing the OT mines.
The only reason people actually grind OT mines is because of the Lurker/Runner that I mentioned before. There is no other way of killing them, unless you want to do like I did and get outplayed by a drone setting a mini hive just west of FOB on hybrisa. (Which, props to that player, they actually made me come up with a strategy to that.)
But it’s never been a secret that chasing backlines got you hugged and granted a dual-burst to the enemy.
I mean rule number 0 of this community was for the longest time that people were here to have fun. And I don’t think making marines get curbstomped by xenos by getting captured and feeding 1.5x larvas is my definition of fun.
Marines are less likely to actually push and secure a kill if it doesn’t mean they break even. Dual burst was a buff for the xenos, I don’t know if good or bad for them and us. But it significantly killed a lot of the marine’s tactics and initiative in fighting or killing backliners.
If anything dual burst made it so that attempting to push a possible ambush would make you grief your own team.
No matter if you can play xeno after you burst, you still don’t want to be a weight to other people.
I do think that xenos should get some sort of a pop boost, just not something that happens for the entire round.
Maybe caps are worth double in the first hour and a half or so. Maybe hour, I think hour would make the early game a lot more important and get people to be aggressive more often.
Of course the transformer needs to be guarded but I think not having people on the LZ as being a death sentence for the marines.
I would hope that the marines get a warning when the transformer goes down so that they can just run like hell and maybe evac if it’s unguarded.
Plus whatever the area of the transformer is it’s a lot lower than the 30x50 rectangles that most FOB’s are.
That takes a lot of metal, time and most importantly people.
I do think though that this setup would allow for more mobility among bravo, which the players seem to have been doing on their own. As a SO it’s hard to find any bravos guarding the fob, and why is that?
I don’t really think the turrets are the main reason why here, because they have been around for longer than this symptom.
I think just removing the turrets as-is right now would just break the game for worse.
Why?
Because it would bring back issues from 9 and 6 years ago only made stronger by the new xenos.
Low pop is where I get my most general experiences, because no matter how you look at them, they still apply to high pop. It’s just that high pop is way more lenient on marines and they can make more mistakes. And by mistakes, I do also mean things that are unfair and not really their skill issue.
I don’t think the xenos should get nerfed, I just think that both factions should have a chance to do creative shit every round and not play the same round over and over and over again.
Because if I wanted to do that I’d go back to playing chess.
Anyways, thank you very much for your input.
I was not around when they tested the FOB rework and only heard about what people were saying about it.
I do still believe in it, and I don’t think it’s naive to believe that it will change the tactics and the game scape to be more fun.
Both these were built by Echo and Bravo was free off FOB. Salazar was XO and assigned this, Omsk was Echo CT made this and I was Bravo running around in ABLOCK
Only 3 Echos ended up being needed to make this, and Bravo ran backline and reinforcing front
1 Like
It is though. It’s spectacular. I play for bald SO OBing the FOB, permanently removing 15 guys from the round. It’s FUN. Losing is fun. I am not a fan of double burst either though.
More handholding = less fun, at least for me. I used to have FUN by killing a bunch of bravoids in FOB as a lurker right after the drop. I had FUN as a bravo CT, trying to cade the FOB under constant pressure. I used to have FUN returning to FOB from the front to deal with lurkers harassing bravoids. Now all this FUN is gone for me, because there are god sentries making sure NOTHING happens in FOB until the code decides it’s time.
FOB rework is just bad, I don’t think there is anything to discuss. Gigaflank into FOB is risky as fuck, and the risk is the reason xenos don’t do it every round. Also like this is the only reason to pay attention to the game as the DP. What if someone tries to sneak onto the ship? The more you streamline the game, the less there is to do. People were legit writing GUIDES on how to play dropship PO and NOT get owned in your own ship by a lurker sneaking into FOB. I used to wait until comms and cades are up as a dropship PO, because who knows, maybe Queen is right outside the FOB? Maybe marines will have to instantly evac? Maybe they need me? Now I know it’s safe to leave LZ as soon as cooldown is done, because I know god sentries will protect marines from whatever.
The game is simply more dull because of the sentries. I’d take 00:25 wipe EVERY day over this. Because it means that if we haven’t been wiped, my actions mattered. I prevented 00:25 wipe by building the FOB in time; I prevented 00:25 wipe by leaving Alamo on the LZ, with its sentries and MGs up; I prevented 00:25 wipe by ordering more squads to support bravo before leaving the FOB; I prevented 00:25 wipe by shooting my goddamn gun. There was so much and we handed it over, in favor of a more streamlined experience! Fuck that man.
8 Likes
Thank you very much for your input and experiences.
I mean I’ve turned around round before in the past, and I know what you mean, losing absolutely is fun but it gets kind of old when every round you hop on it’s the same strategy and it always works out the same way.
In my personal experience it was not a fun experience and it will just get sloped further.
But it might not happen, I’ve not been around for a hot second.
And to support that a piece of anecdotal evidence: back in the day the server would fall into dead pop because it sucked so hard nobody, not even the europeans would want to play it because it would just be unfun for both sides, the fact that we’re not into deadpop with the turrets is a great stride in my opinion. I think that it is evidence that the game improved since then. And what do I mean by deadpop? The server that had on average 180 people at busy hours had like 60 people playing up until mid-day EST when a wave of 80 people would join and the day would start, most people were available before but just holding up to join after the low pop rounds ended.
That was in late 2019 and early 2020.
I do agree that the sentries make the game dull and the DP should get more action, but there barely are people who roll DP as is. And in the past it wasn’t too different. It got so bad that they had to give SL’s the skill to drive the dropship down and up because no DP would show up and sometimes not even a CIC.
I think that’s a testament on how boring the DP job is and how we could improve it, if nobody is using a feature I think it kinda sucks a bit. Because in my experience that was what happened to the XM88, fleschettes, m2c and other such guns that got nerfed to oblivion, and if it applies to guns… Why wouldn’t it apply to roles and items?
But there have been times that no matter what I did or my teammates did to prevent the wipe, marines simply weren’t enough and got crushed.
And man people would get sad and it was the most depressing thing to see. People would just salt in ooc because they lost a round, they would blame command for something that was an environment issue.
And it was soul crushing every round to know that people that I commanded had such horrible rounds.
I don’t think the FOB rework sucks though. From what I’ve seen they’re working on new mechanics to patch up the holes that were shown by the playtest and developing new stuff, and I want to believe in them.
After I came back from my break I’ve seen some reworks and new systems that are pretty promising on changing up the gameplay loop for better, and I’m really glad people are at least trying.
It’s imperfect? Yes.
But that’s what playtesting is for.
Share your opinions about stuff because your voice matters.
I think your points are valid,
And you opinion is important.
Thank you for reading this far.
As @NyoomVoyager points out, bottom picture was built by Echo on one of my rounds. Echo was 2 CTs + an FTL and FOB was built by an MT in a power loader. All 4 squads inc Bravo was in A-Block and eventually fell back to hold the very built transformer.
As I note here: Lessons from FOB Rework (1): STOP putting Bravo on FOB!
Bravo would lose its identity as the Defense Squad but they definitely have no reason to be on transformer. Death Turrets being removed on FOB Rework wouldn’t change that as the Death-Rockets can easily destroy any attempts to steal the MT off LZ.
During my rounds on FOB Rework, after Carrier was prevented from destroying the transformer, there were 0 takedown attempts as no T3 wanted to walk there.
TLDR: Death Turrets + FOB Rework will push Bravo off of FOB. Maybe that’s a good thing. But no Death Turrets changes nothing to FOB Rework.
I think @Itus is definitely right about lowpop, Bravo is normally 4 guys and there’s no pilot and often some IO or ASO in CIC. Maybe the Death Turrets should be a handhold that scales with pop?
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You have a pretty selective memory. 2 larva per cap has been the norm for the majority of CMs history ever since like 2019. And before that there was multiburst, that was effectively the same thing. There’s no grand conspiracy to suddenly up the cap ratio and make marine mains suffer. It’s just that, the only time it was lowered to one larva per cap, xenos started to get really outattritioned. That’s why it was upped again. The current 1.5 seems like a good compromise and maybe it can be tweaked further.
FOB turrets are something that added only like a year ago.
As for what to do on lowpop without them, well, one thing that still can’t fully wrap my head around is the unlimited will some players have to roleplay creeps from some MOBA game. You don’t have to do the exact same thing every round regardless of the situation. You don’t have to rush beach the second the fog falls. If marines don’t have the manpower for Bravo alone to fully build\man the FOB roundstart, they should just do the logical thing and slow down their tempo.
I guess that’s also the reason why the same people dislike Bravo so much. Because that’s the squad that’s all about adapting. If the FOB is secure, there’s really no need to keep the that many people there and Bravo can basically fill not one, but two frontline fireteams.
So yeah, the big thing that I keep seeing is that there’s quite some will to remake CM into more of an “on the rails” kind of experience, which on one hand requires less flexibility from the players, and on the other makes each round exactly the same as the previous one. I think young people have the word “slop” for that.
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No? I don’t think I remember 2x bursts in 2015 to 2018, they might have been added when I stopped playing.
When dual burst was added I remember how much people bitched and moaned about it in OOC and I don’t think I remember people bitching and moaning about it before like 2022?
And if people don’t complain about it I really don’t remember it.
I don’t remember hivecores spawning burrowed larvas that weren’t just AFK people, that’s why most rounds back then had 20 to 25 xenos at max. That’s why the Farwa/monkey killing rule was in place, and it’s still there even if it’s made legacy because of the dual burst.
I don’t ever remember there being this much of a powercreep in round where the xenos would come up to having 40 to 30 xenos PRE DROP on a 100 people round, Multi-burst was a RNG CHANCE not a guarantee. Different to Dual burst.
But yes, selective memory that is not supported by any facts at all.
As I pointed out above:
Changes to the game environment made some strategies obsolete.
- Boiler trappers, the most soul crushing xeno caste was added due to the megafob strategy and made it somewhat defunct, […]
- Because sometimes ComTechs are not geared for that, or ready for sitting in the FOB.
- And with no CT’s you also get no mats.
CIC is usually having to give information to the marines on low pop and can’t step away to help the ct’s or all the co-ordination in the front is gone, like it happened for me a few times.
And I think the strategy thing you said is blatantly fake.
WHY?
Xenos hold the caves, marines hold the FOB. Those force specific strategies.
Want to play but on colony grounds and get CAS to do anything? Too bad the xenos will hold the caves or get screamed by their queen for not ‘following strategy’.
Front is wiped? Marines FOB siege and get the ‘slop’ experience.
If you don’t rush the caves when the fog falls hive usually sends backliners and gets caps, resulting in a full wipe because the hive has 22 xenos and 11 burrowed, why? Because marines not being on the offensive is a losing strategy for them. There are mechanics that favour the hive.
Having the CT’s of every squad reinforce FOB IS a forced strategy that low pop used to have until it was nerfed.
I remember as we had to fortify the entirety of the lz-1 dome and that was a fucking SOUL experience having to defend it. But again it got stale and people decided to use mechanics to force that strategy to be removed.
There is a reason why people follow patterns, and I don’t think it is because people are dumb or people are smart, but it is because it works. Fucking Bill Carson came up with the most creative and brilliant strategies I’ve ever seen, and are they the standard? No.
I don’t think people ever hated bravo because they are the squad about adapting, I think people hate bravo because if you do anything but sit your ass at the fob for 40 minutes you’d get screamed at. You would do anything other than holding the fob as a bravo SL and you would get screamed at by the entire CIC and sometimes even bwoinked for it. HOW DO I KNOW IT? Because I fucking experienced it, as SL, as a CT and as a Rifleman even.
I don’t think CM should be made on a rail. If all my arguments and anecdotal tales about how hive used to do different ship and creative shit that I really enjoyed to fight against aren’t enough evidence.
Thank you very much for reading so far.
And for the love of God…
Stop insulting people.
I am only fighting this hard because:
- I got called naive for believing in the devs(on the fob rework).
- Cic players and marines got slandered(And I defended them, because marines get nerfed a lot).
- I got accused of being malicious with my data and had to get down to details about it.
- I had the impression that just because low pop rounds are low pop they don’t matter and thus my argument didn’t matter(even if the issues go past low pop, and low pop is just the easier sample to observe it in).
What I said about the larva dual burst is that it removes players’ incentive to assault xeno positions due to the possibility of traps and killed the backliner and other skirmishes. I don’t think It should be removed. And I don’t think marines losing most rounds on low pop is a marine skill issue either. losing four rounds in a row is not a toss up of fate. It’s balancing decisions made clear.
I don’t want to keep posting on this thread.
This is my last post.
I gave my experiences on why removing the sentries right now would be a bad idea.
If you disagree with that, please feel free to call me out on my bullshit if I am wrong.
I can still argue about it, but I don’t mean any harm to anyone. Even if it gets heated, please be mindfull that I’m not here to cause conflict.
I’m here to discuss the game and think about it with you.
Thank you for your time, thank you for your inputs.
You know, I already have this rule written out:
When something broken is added to CM it’s never gonna go away, because people would keep going “hey that’s how it was in my time, lets bring it back”.
It’s just never a valid argument, because “back then” the game was balanced very differently. Case in point - the reason you never saw that many xenos “back then” is because there was a combination of balancing bugs that kept their numbers way lower than the actually expected 3 to 1 ratio. Later on when those bugs got fixed, the formula had to be tweaked to account for the noncombat USCM to compensate. Also the xenos back then, oh the xenos back then! The neuro prae! Sentinel that didn’t suck! Agility mode insta bonebreak punch warrior! Lurkers that would solo squads! Queen before all the 9000 nerfs!
It’s ok to bring something that was fun before, but you have to understand why it got changed and what that side got to compensate for the change.
Also, lately(last year) we had a bit of an issue with marines stalling LV in particular for the nuke. Like that’s the legit best strategy. There’s really no reason for marines to push at all these days on any map. Xenos can’t cap in the backline if the entire marine force is there. The only reason why marines don’t stall more is because of the unga genes and command players not wanting to bore everyone with this shit.
P.S. don’t take it personal, it’s only a game and salt is a way of life.
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Multiburst was in the game but as far as I remember it wasn’t extensively used, you’d occassionally get the marine who had 2 larva in him, sometimes 3 but most were 1 larva caps.
You’re using examples from almost 6 years ago
Lowpop these days is consistently dropping to 60 players. 2 nights ago it was 40, and like 17 of them where ghosts. FOB turrets aint fixin shit
We’re lucky to get 160 on highpop most days. Pop is a different issue due to a bunch of different reasons, and I don’t think the turrets have anything to do with it.
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Like anybody cares that people keep saying it. That is like maybe at best 5 forum enjoyers and 10 discord fans that do that. The reality is: When something broken is added to CM, it’s never going away, because “improve, don’t remove” policy.
FoB turrets just extend rounds that would have been marine wipe and that is pretty much it. I remember seeing few that couldn’t even do this. For me it seems like a fine anti-cheese mechanical restriction, just make it to “mark” a xeno for few seconds if it is range (even if behind a wall) and then shoot so the offscreen damage isn’t unavoidable. It doesn’t do much else. How many rounds you think should be decided to be a marine wipe because of one sweaty lurker went to FoB soon after marines arrived? I think the number should be less that 0.01%.
What else they really do so impactfull to xenos? Stay up after marines evac? Just make them turn off then. You don’t see them serve their intended purpose, because their intended purpose is to prevent singular sweaty xenos from fucking up LZ too early. Just as you don’t see security guard serve their intended purpose of protecting the building they are assigned to, because just him being there already does that to a great excent by discouraging anyone who would require action.
Cabal, that’s sort of the cornerstone of the problematic thinking. You look at a situation and go “no, marines should never fail here, no matter what”. Then you go to another situation and another, and another… In the end, you just end up with a very artificial game and that lacks that depth that CM always had. And there are plenty of games that do that and they have way better engines. CM is great for precisely that lack of artificiality and xenos(and 'rines) being able to do what just logically makes sense for them. Like creating lurker hells in the backline or diving the FOB is just what makes it so endlessly entertaining.
Coming back to that “one lurker killed the FOB on lowpop”. Well, how many marines have to have completely screwed up for that to happen? Five? More? That’s like 30% of the marine force?
So, what me and other people here basically saying is that we should just always let marines fail when they screw up massively instead of coddling them. And if they lose too much when they don’t all screw up, it should be dealt organically: FOB turrets are a band aid. If they’re, in fact what keeps marines say in 30% of the lowpop rounds, how about we rip the band aid off and say lower the number of xenos instead. But here, instead of handholding marines we’re rewarding marine competence - the risk of that FOB dive is still there and they should still manage it.
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Slippery slope argument. Preventing super short rounds is the situation where both marines and xenos shouldn’t fail here, no matter what, especially to singular players on both sides. No, it won’t end up making super artificial game lacking depth. There is that, only this one situation, no falling into the endless spiral of tinkering with everything, only preventing super short rounds via giving marines a little bit time and safety to build a proper FoB.
FoB turrets aren’t taking depth from CM anymore than a lurker killing half of Bravo baldos would. They just prevent cheese that would otherwise lead to unfun rounds for almost everyone (with the exception of said sweaty lurker). Can we agree that super short rounds that you lose due to no fault of your own are bad and should be avoided? We gain nothing from the fact that xenos can freely maul FoB before it gets first few cades.
There will never be a concrete number to point at. And it isn’t even about “lowpop”. Lets not pretend we are robots that need specific data to determine a treshold, follow “spirit of the fair and fun game”. How many marines need to completly fuck up at the start of a round (after first landing) for it to be fair to the rest of the playerbase?
In most situations it is true and I agree (why xenos are excluded from this statement is beyond me, both should fail if they screw up massively). But start of the round is precisely the situation where things need to be nudged a bit to be fun, or to not be too much unfun. Who has any fun when FoB gets fucked in 5 minutes after first landing and marines just die in the next 10 due to being surrounded? One sweaty lurker, nobody else. Not entire shipside who wanted to RP a bit and support groundside indirectly, not marines who got fucked, not those poor bravo baldos getting fucked, even other xenos to extent are not having that much fun, 10 minutes of combat for 25 minutes of waiting, totally worth it, yeah.
Ahhh… How many marines have to fuck up for it to be considered “they all screw up”, hmmm? Are we to assume that every single marine who didn’t stay in FoB before it was completed and air-tight screwed up? Both can play this game. When it is “all” marines fault when FoB gets fucked in first 10 minutes?
Band aid and mechanical way to enforce something that otherwise would need admeme intervention, can’t forget that. While I am not a fan of the first part, second is quite nice.
Both things impact different fields. FoB turrets aren’t helping marines win, they help them not lose their FoB too fast. Less xenos in a round helps marines in every single way, that is way worse than FoB turrets, just nerf xenos as a whole, because sweaty lurker couldn’t stand to not be able to fuck up FoB construction for how long those turrets ae active, ridiculous. And that numbers game is impossible to balance, especially on lowpow where individual skill matters much more, so 5 baldo bravoids fall to a sweaty lurker.
Menaging early FoB dive is just boring guard duty. It is not rewarding competence, it is rewarding mind-numbing chore that if you are not focusing on it, gets you killed in almost an instant.
FoB turrets are a shitty bandaid, but they are there for a reason, so removing them without tackling said reason is just straight up bad.
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Great take. How is losing FOB early not your fault? Even if you didn’t play bravo, maybe you shouldn’t have rushed hydro before cades are set up? So no, I cannot agree.
This is a team-based game. If someone on your team fucks up and you don’t address it in time, you lose. This is literally how it always worked by design. Same for xenos. You can have a great backline carrying the game for you, or you can have 20 runners suiciding and wasting all the larvae so you just get outattritioned.
I mean, the first to blame is always the aCO. It’s literally his job to ensure nothing goes wrong. The second to blame are the guys ordered to build the FOB. And at last, the rest of the marines who didn’t react to the problem in time.
This lowpop argument is just stupid honestly. Yes, a lurker can theoretically wipe the floor with 5 bravo PVTs. Or he can just die, which is more likely, and the hive would lose like 10% of its numbers from that. And both of the scenarios are more interesting than FOB sentries.
A lot of stuff is getting added for the bullshitiest of reasons. Doesn’t make the reasons valid.
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Marines dont need a crutch at the FOB to deal with their incompetence. Not having a FOB does infact ruin the round for marines but that doesnt mean the proposed solution should be prolonging rounds in where marines should obviously have lost early on. I am looking at 5 minute front wipes where 40 marines hold the FOB for an hour because turrets stopped them from getting annihilated quickly before fob was set up.
You can also just tell Bravo as is that they just need to suck it up and stop losing the whole squad to lurkers lol.
Remember those 30 minute evac rounds? They dont happen anymore because the turrets and now you either get a 50 minute evac once the turrets go down or those rounds transform into 2 hour long fob sieges that end with king or godstims. In all these scenarios there are going to be 100+ ghosts (yes you can check yourself) because A. Few caps are taken during fob siege, and B. Few techpoints are gained during a fob siege.
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I agree. Remove the handholding on FOB.
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The FOB turrets were added after a string of instant xeno majors, it was literally a PR born from marine copium.
All it’s really done in my experience is arbitrarily delay rounds which marines would have lost anyways. If marines wipe outside of FOB, now xenos have to wait longer or risk several balds eating dirt, even though the end outcome is still a complete slop hijack with no meaningful marine resistance.
The turrets are so fucking OP you may as well just not build FOB and just fight around them (until the battery dies)
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