Command markers for marines. Or more stuff for CIC to use in general.

Development Ideaguys
1

Currently Xenos have a tool at their disposal that marines dont.
Something thats provides major gameplay benifits and allows xenos to operate on an entirly diffrent level.
It is so strong, xenocord has been silently paying the mod team to shut any mention of this for years.

The Resin Marker.
Dont leave… im totally cerial.

Jokes aside, that tiny thing allows xenos to co-ordinate on an entirly diffrent level compared to marines.
And yes i know Marines have SL markers, but thats just queen marker. It servers 1:1 the same purpose. Go to the one person that hopefully knows what you need to do.

Resin markers are diffrent, waaay diffrent. They allow players to recive more information about the current battlefield.

Thanks to the varriety of markers you can place.

  • Where can i go when im hurt?
  • Where do i need to set up defences?
  • Where was the flank?
  • Where is the main push?
  • Where did we supposed to bait?
  • Where am i supposed to rp a wall and defend?

All these and more xenos can find out very easily, and people actually use them a lot of times.

Xenos already have every tool marines have for tactical gameplay.

  • They can see every other member of their team.
  • They have radio
  • They have a tacmap
  • They have a tacmap they can draw on (xenos, queen can doddle on tacmap as well.)
  • They can give orders
  • They have a marker that points them to their ground base, their leader.

Thing is, xenos got all the tools marines have in the tactical side. But 1. They often are just objectivly better. 2. They also got more.

  • Queen has queen eye and can free watch all of weeded terrain. Better overwatch.
  • They got a tacmap that updates live for every xeno. And not every 5 minutes if the Xo remembers to push the button for it.
  • And the Resin markers.

Like, i dont understand how thats even remotly fair.
And dont come with “but revive, and sensor tower, and tank and etc etc etc” This is about purley the tactical tools.

Because know what? Its a lot more fun to play tactical on the xeno side. Like, way more. Because they got tools that are actually fun. And making one side more fun isnt good balance.
Imagine how much more fun SO would be if you could queen eye wherever cams where installed/marines are.

CIC really needs more tactical tools to communicate and oversea the situation.
CIC should take insperation from RTS in its design. Not from some niche indi game from rushia thats about transcribing 30 phone calls at the same time.

Also, yeah. Hard to code. But the queen eye only working where cams are, is literally base ss13 AI eye. I think we could make that work.

6 Likes
2

nah. I don’t think marines need 1:1 stuff. Announcements go hard as SHIT

10 Likes
3

This will just promote more of the poor actions of, not listening to command and just follow some little marker.

5 Likes
4

I don’t see why Marines should get a better way to organize to compensate for the Xenos ability for better coordination. They are a hivemind and should have that advantage.

This is coming from a Marine main with like 3 hours on Xeno

1 Like
5

Thats an oxymoron.
Like, you do know the markers are placed by command/leaders xenos. Rigth?
The markers they would follow instead of commands orders, are the orders from command.

Your argument against them is: they wouldn’t follow orders, because they would follow orders.

They do, thats why xenos got em too.

This is not for compensation. This is not for buffing marines. And certainly not for lore reasons.
This is for making a role more enjoyable to play.
This is not to give marines an unfair advantage,
This is to give marines a tool, that xenos had for a long while, that makes their side objectivly more fun to play tactical.

Yes, it would make marines more stronger.
But if your argument for balance is to make one side more frustrating and less fun, you migth not have the best opion.

Btw, the fact that you got only 3 xeno hours aint good for this conversation. This is about giving marine fun tools xenos have. Wich is hard to judge, if you dont know the fun tools well.
Go play more xeno, experince why its more fun to be tactical as xeno. Migth change your mind a bit, or at least you understand my point better. Whatever.

3 Likes
6

No, announcements suck, marines need more tools.

1 Like
7

I could see SO’s being able to designate a point-of-interest on the tacmap like Natural Selection 2(or just like resin marks for Xeno Leaders/Queen).

2 Likes
8

CIC is supposed to be a little blind so they’re forced to communicate, and can’t just place a marker then go mute besides for OBs.

It’s called the fog of war. Xenos have 33 players on an average and need to be able to respond quicker so they have more access to intel than the 100-200 humans. Marines don’t need it cause the SO is supposed to give the orders instead of a place and forget marker.

Plus what’s cooler. Clicking a lil marker to go to so marines deathball or screaming “GET THE FUCK TO WEYMART DELTA”, “DELTA GET ON THE WEYMART ROOF AND DEFEND IT”

Your SLs are meant to be your markers, communicate with them where you want them to go. You can set objectives. You can talk as SO if you need marines to go somewhere. You have 20 cameras to look at. Please stop porting TGMC stuff into CM.

Adding this would unironically kill and dumb down the command gameplay even more just like when ,abcd was added. There’s a reason SLs are more mute now.

6 Likes
9

As someone who played both marine and xeno extensively, I have to disagree.

Marines have EVERY TOOL at their disposal that they need to use to win, and then some. Like, people really think the game is xeno-sided, when in reality the balance is very much in marine favor. Most of the time marines dont even use half of the shit they are given because they choose to ignore it, or just turn off their brains and rush into unfavorable terrain which benefits xenos(while xenos have actual tools ready to deploy and hold down those sweet sweet cave chokes).

Biggest nerf marines have is their lack of thinking sometimes, because if all marines were even remotely good at the game most of the time - xeno winrate would be absolutely destroyed, like some people say “If all xenos and all marines were good at the game - marines would always win”. I dont blame noobs for being bad at the game, its only natural for them to be bad at it, but I will blame people that KNOW how to play the game but choose to lose and then blame xenos\devs\admins\etc.

Please, use CAS, use Mortar, use OB, use OT grenades\rockets, kill xenos that rush out in the open(ESPECIALLY WITH NO WEEDS), use communication, use your damn guns at least to protect medics and engineers, plus people that know what they are doing. If more people actually did at least the last one - marine winrate would already increase by 25%.

5 Likes
10

I like the idea of a more sophisticated toolset for command, they only thing I am concerned about is the fact that marines tend to be ungas more often than not.

2 Likes
11

To bad, TGMC is overall more fun. So shit is gonna get ported or synchronicity stuff happens. Because ya know, good idea are that for a reason.
Btw, camera for command aint a TGMC thing but a SS13 thing. Called AI EYE.

But no, the argument “but its more balance and its soul” when you could have something a lot more fun, aint really valid. Yes, they would need to be properly balanced if included. But the incusion of less frustrating command tools, aint a bad thing.

On an unrelated note, i was actually working on porting some stuff from TGMC over.

Yeah, the game is very much marine sides it a lot of regards.
But the thing is these tools Queen has are mostly for directing xenos easier. She can already do it, its mostly so its less stressfull to do so.
It also takes some work away from the tac map.
Being able to mark the zone where you go heal. You can do that on the tacmap. But its kinda shitty.
You can already do everything you could do with the markers, with the tacmap.
Just worse.
All that markers would do, is a more easily digestibale, and more fun tool to play RTS in CIC.

Fun should never come after balance and much less lore. You balance the fun stuff so it works. You dont make something unfun so its balanced.

True. But like, thats just a fact of live for SOs. No matter what fancy tools we would give em, most marines will ignore them and unga charge to cause mass casulties in less then a minute.
Have to keep those SO tears running after all.

…man i still remember when charlie squad got completly wipped one time. I keept telling them “Go back north and hug the northern wall as you return to FOB”. “Your running into the entire hive” “for the love of god, please turn around” “SL, please. Those men trust you. Dont make them pay for that trust with their lives.” They didnt listen, at all. They died so fast. It was like they wanted to kill themself.

1 Like
14

He doesnt know.

Really do, we port stuff from TGMC regularly.
Like autofire. Thats from TGMC.
Would like to go back to only semi, and burst fire?
So you can play “Pure CM” and devlop Carpal tunnel.

Also, fun fact. We dont have energy weapons because of people saying “no dont make us TGMC.”
Even though its kinda strange in lore for us to have non at all. Like, anywhere. And one of our main diffrences is that we actually try to be lore acurate and have a correhend art style.
Like we dont even have plasma guns. Wich is sci-fi talk for “gun that shoots somthing way to hot”.

1 Like
16

We do have one laser weapon in the game, though I think it runtimes when you fire it unless someone fixed that. It’s the same laser pistol that appeared in the concept art/background of the first Alien film.

Again in regard to the OP, I’d see no reason you couldn’t have a bunch of pre-made symbols added to the tacmap that CIC can use to plop down for ease of use, might help a bit.

1 Like
18

I actually like this idea, TGMC does have something similar that lets command make announcements to attack somewhere that directs you to the location, its useful for new players or people who struggle with map geography.

Also if you guys don’t have something meaningful to contribute to the thread or the idea then don’t post, and no tgmc bad we dont like go play tgmc is not meaningful or constructive.

1 Like
19

The dream is to have trail painters, so that Marines can mark the path to the front by hand …

2 Likes
20

Your argument against them is: they wouldn’t follow orders, because they would follow orders.

My argument is that it’ll promote for marines to ignore command announcements/ radio. Which for the most part has important information for marines to know and understand.

Markers would just dumb down command gameplay and hold the hands of marines. Instead of taking the time to listen to what’s said over announcements and radio, I’m going to ignore them completely and follow a little marker.

Like Sandvich said, a lot of SLs are mutes and don’t communicate, markers will just make it worse by allowing for lazy people in CIC to plop a marker and never talk over radio or announce anything.

And more fun is subjective rather than objective, I’d rather communicate over radio to learn about the AO if I’m late to join or get lost. SO or SL so and so can be like “oh yeah we’re over at X, head in Y direction of FOB, lot of bugs here” instead of “follow the marker”

TLDR, markers, although making easier for marines to find where they need to go, will just dumb down CIC, SL, and marine gameplay and will be holding marines hands

4 Likes
21

False. Marines already ignore command announcements/radio. Those who don’t do it, wouldn’t if they got a marker.
Did xenos started to ignore Queen’s announcements/hivemind when they got their markers? No. Most of them even ignore those markers anyway.

It is already as dumb as it can. Without markers you need prior map knowledge, you have to know on the fly all of those names of places command and marines shout over the radio.

Doesn’t happen to xenos, won’t happen to marines.

So SO, or dear god SL has to write a paragraph every time someone wakes up from surgery, or is a late joiner? Perfection.

Why do people act like a simple marker will somehow ruin something that is already down in the gutter? We have a SL marker, does it hold your hand, does it “dumb” your gameplay down? No, it just keeps SL and SO from constantly stating where SL is and if he moved while marines don’t have to alt+tab, or pull out a map to check where they need to go.

I would even argue that RTS style micro wouldn’t dumb anything down, but even made it more engaging. Right now something happens and SO/CO/SL has to write shit nobody cares about much, spare their free time they could be doing a milion things and then every single marine has to read that shit and then process where they need to go.
This is that “deep” mechanic that would be supposedly “lost”? No, marker won’t tell you how many xenos are spotted there, it won’t tell you that Queen comes from west, or that she screeched. Marine comms and announcements would still be in place. Just as it is with xeno markers. They don’t tell you that scout is around, they don’t tell you that SADAR watches etc.

While RTS-style commanding would be more engaging, me a lowly marine, selected and ordered to move somewhere personally by SO.
This is also faster than typing something and then reading it. Xenos should get it too. That would be cool and unique experience to be essentialy an RTS unit that can disobey orders.

4 Likes
22

Someone (Not me)
needs to update the Bubble computer to have all the powers that SO computers have.

And marines don’t need arrows to command staff.
Command staff need arrows to squad leaders.

3 Likes
23

I don’t know how long I can continue to disagree with you, it seems like everything you comment is an attempt to change what we’ve already got (and enjoy) into some kind of TGMC equivalent which you deem as more fun.

4 Likes
24

If it’s not hot pink armor with an anime sword and a big round cape that makes me look like an oversized cockroach, then it’s not for me!!!

Serious talk, i like certain TGMC QOL, i actually think the primary thing there that promotes unga bunga outside of command isn’t waypoints as they are but rather the ability for the instantly-updating tacmap so when you see someone die off wherever, you know you can go there for a good fight. Not that here is any different really lol. If it was just waypoints as a compass/HUD component like the SL tracker or the xeno waypoints, i dont really see how that does anything different from anything already implemented.

hottest take but not all communication has to be text-based. we point at people to indicate things, we disarm shove others to let them know theyre in our way or annoying, people do little directional-spin dances to gloat. a waypoint set by command is still in fact communication, it’s just not textual. a red traffic light at an intersection doesn’t have to say anything for everyone to be able to ascertain the meaning of it.

i’d be against like free-float camera and instantaneous tacmap just because i feel like a core part of ss13 on the whole and what even makes it a game in the first place is information asymmetry versus Military Job Simulator, but another arrow for geographically challenged or new players or new maps doesn’t seem like the banality of rp.

5 Likes