Recently forced to lead an operation after CO and XO died, it was kinda a lot and that was with me keeping up with what was going on as the round was unfolding.
You just have so much stuff to micro manage and so many plates to spin that you dont get anytime to actually think and plan, it’s just go go go answer phones remember decryption bark at the troublemaker of the week ask qm if they got the thing check map check overwatch make a dozen announcements don’t forget about encryption!
I just find it to be so overwhelming and not at all fun. I used to play SO and XO more regularly in the 2020 era and I do not recall it being such an exhausting experience
Yeah just as I mustered the courage to start hitting the XO grindset I decided that I’d do it on lowpop hours. Then it gets kneecapped like this, and to make it worse a ton of planned changes are going to cripple lowpop even harder, idk what’s the meta for coping with this ngl
The Commanding experience is typically the players that just get it calling those that have to work for it incompetent, which is one of the worst aspects I think- best practice is to not let them get to you unless its actual feedback with guidance on how to implement. Everyone has parts of video games they are good and bad at. But it can be enjoyable. The big way to minimise how many plates you are spinning is very similar to how you handle having alot on your plate irl.
Deligate what you can, and have a routine and stick to it.
Have a few plans for maps already in mind so you don’t need to properly plan.
Have a waking up script and checklist and stick to it.
Mine is:
Good morning , is req working, is the chemline manned, AA, OBs, check squad comps to aee if plans need changing, pull out one of the standard plans unless im trying something new.
when one of these thing goes wrong you deal with that specific plate and the routine will handle the rest. Just communicate the issue and how you need it solved.
No req? “SO, need you to man req, ill update your ID“
No response to requests to check OB and AA? Ask a mt.
Bravo has no CTs? Pull rank and kidnap that delta CT, send the CE down.
The best part about this is when you have Someone Who Just Gets It compared to Someone Who Doesn’t Just Get It but the person who Doesn’t Just Get It goes through these motions; every single time they hands down perform better than even innate Knowers.
I just find it to be so overwhelming and not at all fun.
Sadly there are many who view CIC having bad/no tools to lead marines as the point. Until we see some movement in the other direction from the maintainers CIC is likely to remain under played and frustrating.
I think the decryption mechanic is great, but agree on the garbled comms being a bad addition. Would love to see decryption repurposed into intel decoding as a replacement for just spamming do after’s. Specifically, letting you do it to complete a ‘batch’ of items so that it also is less time consuming to sort through each individual paper, folder, manual, disk, and scanner.
For God’s sake it’s unbelievably frustrating just the way gearing up is set up. I spend the first 20 minutes scrounging my basic gear as an SO because 2-3 minutes to sort and grab the majority of your loadout at hijack is unreasonable and ridiculous to expect from people. You should only have to worry about your gun and armor, NOTHING ELSE. I want to be leading marines, not spending those minutes desperately sorting pills, defib, engineering tools, building supplies, ammo, and where the hell all of this fits in what.
SO and CIC in general is so ridiculously castrated for no good reason. You can’t even access marine uniform vendors for pouches without having to hack them.
it is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener at war. Every marine, from the most grizzeled veteran, to the greenest admnistrative worker, should be prepared for combat or confrontation when in an active combat zone. Within reason.
Expecting a flexible junior officer to only get life/operation saving equipment when the ship is being boarded or they are actively deploying is a little silly.
You don’t need a giga-optimal build for Hijack - everything you could possibly need to lead (and that’s the keyword here ‘lead’, not frag) is available for SOs in the armory. It takes like maybe a minute or two to juggle the few things to hold a defense and get moving to the rally point.
I will agree that CIC feels a little miserable at the moment. I’ve come to kinda enjoy the decryption minigame and once you get it down it can manually be done in about 20-30 seconds without even using punchcards. Part of it is the stupid ass chat-not-auto scrolling bug that I can’t for the life of me fix but a majority of it is how empty CIC feels even with decent pop.
I’m hoping there’s a CIC refresh that comes with ASS that actually integrates the two together, but given the comments made by a lot of people when issues are brought up regarding CIC along the lines of “CIC is meant to suck” has me holding very little hope.
At least I can just yap as the CO and make the XO actually deal with the hard stuff
I only have this issue on /TG/ and Monke and it seems to be solved by using fix-chat. No idea why it happens, but fix-chat always fixes it.
I think ASS will put the nail-in-the-coffin of CIC given there will be no consideration given to CIC players of “how do I overwatch 7 squads”. I believe already that in a super-theoretical, super-optimal scenario you leave the ASO to run Supply Drops & OB as needed with 4 SOs, XO and CO deploying planetside.
Most SLs rarely talk anymore or even coordinate with their squad cause no ones gonna listen to them. SLs used to he the original ,abcd and passed orders and info etc. Now the games turning into a linear TDM
idk what the thought process was making losing a tower just as bad or worse than losing a queen, it’s been hell on low pop
Nearly every Command role getting a loud shout makes the people who need attention background noise.
SL’s are often now more focused on ‘winning’ rather than developing banter
All the decent SL’s become CO’s
SL’s do not have aura anymore, there is no beating the bush here, Command as a whole are ignored the second queen appears - then it becomes a matter of CIC becoming the Queen callout bot 600.
This is a fault of community, rather than a fault of the actual game itself. It’s became a matter of TDM, rather than a matter of being in a squad. ASS might rectify this, but we wont know till its fully implemented and we feel the cultural shifts
I strongly believe it’s a structural problem - The entire marine gameplay revolves around acting/reacting to the queen, and individual marine squads are so incapable of holding their own there’s no reason to bother listening to or following your SL.
Really there’s just 1 squad (the ungaball), and 1 squad leader (whoever is doing announcements), and that’s not a community problem, that’s the playerbase naturally approaching the limit of “most effective strategy within the game mechanics”.
If you want to see this change, then queen needs to get weaker and individual squads need to be able to hold their own. The same thing that’s been said a million times but we never try to actually do it.
Doubtful, at this stage I genuinely believe newer players have gone down in RP quality. For all intents and purposes the FTL changes should’ve incentivised well, actual fireteams moving around with FTLs taking a bigger leadership role- This hasn’t happened whatsoever, it’s still the same ungaball with mute SL.
I have no hope that ASS will magically cause people to step up and do better at generating aura, and I think it’s kind of counter-productive to pin hopes on gameplay mechanics fixing it. It’s squarely a community issue, and the only way to make it better is by having people play like genuine leaders to set an example for others to follow.
