We can all agree. Getting capped sucks. Yet it is essential for the xeno gameplay loop. It is essential for xenos that some marines sacrifice their rounds so they can continue theirs. And there’s 0 counterplay when you get capped. Your only chance to survive after getting capped is if the xeno carrying you is bald. Maybe you can make it a bit more annoying for them by knifing them but that’s really all you can do. Being a nuance. In short there’s much fun in the whole mechanic to begin with.
Question: How do you remove capping ?
Answer: To remove capping you need to make it either really hard to cap or make it not worth the effort and risk. The first would require either a marine combat buff or a xeno combat nerf which is really not fun for the second. I say it should be doable just not really worth it. One way would be to make the burst timer really long. So much so that the marines would have the time to end the round before the caps burst. So that the cap itself can have an impact on the round but not an immediate one. Something like half an hour or more should do the trick.
Question: How would we keep maintain the xeno gameloop without capping.
Answer: The colony was full of people prior to the infestation. Most of those were captured by the hive and infected. Those people should be found in the hive itself. As they are all infected they will burst over time providing the hive passively with numbers. Due to the stress of getting capped, stuck in a moisty, dark place filled with nothing but xenomorphs, rotting corpses and the screaming of the dying those colonists have gone insane. They are either catatonic or straight out insane, paralyzed, sobbing and screaming. In a few words NPCs that do nothing but either serve as a source of xenomorphs that the marines can deny by putting them out of their misery. For that reason defending the hive will become of outmost importance, for the sake of objective based gameplay that the devs are pursuing. In the hive there’s only two types of talls. Prey and danger. Prey is captured and danger eliminated. The fighting marines are dangers so primary objective would be them killed rather than captured. Along with the burst timer being really long it would be more effective for the hive to kill than capture. Capping is a tedious task either way so it’s probably gonna be more fun too. There’s still a problem though. Capped people take up space. It would be really tedious for the hive to relocate everyone in order to fortify properly. So what now?
Question: Where do we safely store captured colonists regardless of hive location? How do we make it so they cause no issue with the space they take?
Answer: Like the FOB rework, a fixed chamber within the caves with impenetrable walls and plenty of room for the captured colonists. No attack will be able to break into that chamber, be it physically attacking the resin, explosives like C4 breachers and BRUTE or any sort of orbital fire support. It essentially has the protection of the hive core. In addition, the hive core now serves to keep the cap chamber impenetrable. If the core dies the chamber becomes vulnerable after a few minutes allowing the marines to wipe out the xeno supply. This means xenos will need to adjust their defense and protect the cap chamber with the hive core. Since defense gameplay will be nerfed this will force xenos to play aggressively and reward them for doing so. I believe that’s the direction the game is headed anyway.
One issue remains with ways to change the location of the chamber to fit the queen’s play style that I cannot quite figure out rn. Id think it should be done prior to match start since it’s not as simple as selecting an LZ since it manifests physically into the map. Maybe it could be the same and just spawn it at will before the larvae burst. What if there’s no queen though. That’d cause problems. Maybe if there isn’t one just do it automatically.
Edit: Also pylons could serve to make caps burst faster increasing the passive larvae gain. That would require a lot of mobs to be in those cap chambers though
Will preface this heavily. While the main point of capping is to get the extra xeno, another very important part is to perma marines. If xenoes lose their best way to perma people, then marines as a whole will be stronger, and harder to kill. So if you just make permaing as a marine harder, then its going to be much harder to actually punish them
So then instead of being capped, you will now be camped until perma. Where there is nothing you can do, but now xenoes have to actually count until you perma so they can take your corpse for intel (which will also be a minor boon to this).
So all in all, just removing marine capping, while still giving xenoes larva over time needs more thought behind it. Unless xenoes can just headbite perma people who have been revived x times or something similar, then the problem will not only be the same (albeit altered), but now just a buff to marine longevity.
I kinda want to see a test or instead of captures and stuff like that, we bring back the spawning pool and let xenos drag perma and orange/yellow line marines to the pool for larva.
The way I see it, this way xenos need to defend corpses or try to drag them back as far as they can; which means marines have to push to save their allies or they’ll lose them to the hive. It encourages xenos to be aggressive with their defenses and marines to be aggressive while pushing caves.
Yes I get facehuggers and capturing is a big part of the lore but it’s so fucking unfun being stunned and dragged just to see a popup saying “lmao ur round is over now” when you’re nested. At least with this idea xenos don’t even have to stun you, you can go down with a fight before your get maimed.
What if instead of hive core larvae there was colonist caps within the hive that replaced the passive ones with actual bursts. That’d be a nice thing if you take care of some details
Edit: Brainstorming can sometimes give ideas to contributors who then may go on to improve the game. With every idea you put out you are contributing in a way.
The only “engagement” we had with captures was resisting out of nests, which got removed.
I can’t see any idea on what other mechanics could be added. Xenos stun you to hell, you get hugged, you get dragged and nested until you burst. There’s really nothing else you can add to it.
I have seen rounds where OWL gets his 50-70 kills, and yet marines still manage to win. As Rainbow pointed out, if you cannot perma the bodies, the kills don’t attribute to much.
Many marines that perma to filter out the marine wave were just failed caps. A warrior lunged em, slashed and flung em into allies, and the marine died from injuries in unrecoverable land. Your hatred for getting taken out of a match won’t have changed.
If I was a xeno in this change, I would haul, or if that’s gone then permastun, all the way out to the middle of nowhere or to the hive and then kill. Essentially capping without the huggie. If I cannot permastun I would get 2 allies to tackle to manage it. If tackling is disabled I would try to fling chain and bodyblock marines into isolation before killing. If I cannot fling I can get warriors to lunge chain, or runners to leap chain on bodies while dragging. If anything else gets removed at that point I think I would just quit the game.
I think it was better when burst timers were higher. So you had a chance to be freed from the nest. Maybe if xenos were encouraged somehow to build nests closer to frontline, then being a cap everyone is trying to rescue would feel more interesting.
everyone is about making “xenos nest on front” concptualy cool, but in practice it does not happen unless xenos know they won and do not give a fuck anymore. no matter how “hard” you make moving caps to hive, unless it is fully prevented, they will just do it. as for example no matter how long the timer to burst is, the only chance to get recovered is if marines pushed the hive and xenos will die before allowing that with any meaningful amount of captures. And forcing frontline nesting is no easy task.
response to below
not worth the chance of loosing 10+ xenos, firesupport hardly gets half the kills on avrage round (it hardly gets any kills on most of the rounds)
this is position where you kinda have to force them not just encorage them as even one xeno is not worth some advantage let alone two, you could somehow make the extra larva linked to the next being “frontline” one but I do not know how would you evaluate “frontline” nest
Capping’s one of the best mechanics in the game. It’s thematic, lore accurate, and allows marines to suffer attrition while rewarding xenos for taking risks. Also, it really doesn’t suck. You wait 7 minutes then you get to play as a xeno. That’s a pretty awesome replacement for just being perma’d, which is what the alternative is.
Camping while looking at the clock and going off camping 5 minutes after they died isn’t allowed (metagaming), but camping corpses just generally got ratified like a year ago.
What if putting enough caps near a pylon (like 5+) would make the pylon CAS & mortar proof? Then frontline nesting would give xenos some direct combat advantage.
Xeno counterpart to marine shipside crew activities.
Something like Research that is dependant on xeno bodies, xeno research would be dependant on caps.
Xesearcher caste maybe? Those StarCraft 2 vibes with Abathur.
Having a live human cap closer to the frontlines providing more xesearch points, injecting caps with stuff, or performing sort of a “surgery” on them that could result in many outcomes, both positive and negative:
Doubling larvaes gained from a cap.
Letting larvae exit without killing it.
Letting that cap free while also pumping it full of godstims for a while etc.
Just straight up killing a cap.
Getting a predalien larvae out of a marine.
Creating black goo that can be applied to perma corpses to create zombies (either allied with xenos, or not, infecting humans, or not etc).
Making a human/xeno hybrid a’la Alien:Ressurection.
Could be cool and outcomes could be almost limitless.
While it wouldn’t make capping any better experience.
For that you would have to bring back some form of nest maintenance that if unattended would result in losing caps, either by them escaping, or dying to some kind of disease/xeno mites.
Not a mind numbing guard duty like it was in the old days, a xeno version of running stuff shipside.
frontline caps will not happen with any amount of pylon protection unless xenos are forced to frontline cap making it IMPOSSIBLE not to. Else xenos recive protection and give 0 fuck about idea of frontline nesting, why would they do it
