Big on this and it probably explains what Samson Jack is saying below. Fireteams divide your squad into a group small enough for 2 Prime Lurkers to take apart. No reason to split up, like ever.
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Okay, but what is stopping the ungaball after the xeno nerf? It is still going to be the most effective way to win, but now the xenoes are weaker.
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Ironically, Multi-Z resolves this a small part because you need to contest the upper floors otherwise you get spitted from long distances and boilered. Both you and @Wintermote are right in saying that Xenos need to somehow be strong enough to dissuasde grouping up but weak enough that splitting up works. To some extent, impromptu splitting up works where Xenos are too slow to rally their advantage and wipe a small group but itâs very impromptu and unorganised.
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Completely agree. Doubly so since I have returned.
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Regarding SL, I think the problem with the mute or non-responsive is that playing SL is really reliant on marines giving enough of a shit to listen to you. Itâs not like Queen where you have to follow orders, Pfc Robusto may just ignore you do their own thing. Plus working with command to form a plan/flank is usually risky because if you split up your squad to go flank, Xenos will just rotate and wipe out your squad; because of this marines form the unga ball because itâs the best chance they have to not get rolled by the hive. This is amplified if you only get like 3-5 marines who care to listen to you; and at that point why even risk it?
Furthermore, and this is just my opinion, SL is just a very weak CO/XO or even SO on the field. You really donât have any big command/big boss vibes like you are from the CIC here to lead, you are just a rifleman with a giant L next to you. Compare that with the XO/SO who has CIC armory gear and weapons or the CO with a plethora of gear and you just look like the great value version.
I donât think that giving SL a cool new gun would make SLs more active/more talkative, rather I think they need something only THEY can do that others canât. My idea would be they can call a drop pod like what RTOs could do during techwebs but be for ammo/light supplies (so req isnât invalidated). That way SL is more followed as theyâre the ones with a unique ability which marines want to stick close to and utilize.
If not that idea, the point Iâm trying to make is that if you want more responsive SLs, they need to have an ability which lets them be more unique than someone whoâs just part of the unga ball with an order pheromone.
If a SL has an ability unique to them, marines will stay near them. If marines stay near them, then they have a better shot of doing plans like flanks/etc. If that happens, SLs will be more responsive to CIC for new strategies.
(Again just my opinion)
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Buff T3s other than ravs, but also make them all more dependant on support castes. That is one idea.
This issue was brought up multiple times in other threads while not being focused on, so someone might as well make one now. How to make smaller squads of marines stronger, while not only not making ungaball stronger, but actually weaker?
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if staying near SLs makes marines more effective, wonât that just make an unga ball (stacking SLs) even more effective in turn?
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CIC slowly turned in to five nights at Freddyâs tbh. Often after doing all my tasks and getting in to a position where I can relax a bit I find that my screen is littered with multiple pop ups: opened tacmaps, tablet screen, announcement screen, XO Console, the crew manifest and the camera feed. With how much informationâs you have to process and how fast you have make decisions and respond to people I can agree that CIC COULD BE less enjoyable for most people. Though personally I do enjoy getting problems throwed at me in fast pace because when I do resolve them I feel a sense of accomplishment.
Arguably most of the micromanaging aspects of CIC vanish on high pop where every department has its dedicated head and bravo is capable of building the FOB. Sadly for lowpop CIC it tends to be a nightmare. I always hate to find CTs or MTs to build the FOB, or banishing a poor marine or SO to slave away in the pits of req. I seen many people get mad at me for trying to finding sufficient replacements and sending MTs groundside when there were no bravo CTs.
If we push all those other things aside the biggest problem would probably be the men that are working under you. Even the greatest CIC can be only as good as the sum of men working underneath them. If your SLs are bald and cannot execute good flanks, fallback, cades and pushes or properly read the map and know how to avoid obstacles then you will have a real hard time commanding. Now even if you have good SLs, your marines could just never look at the right part of their screen and ignore every callout and order there is. Now that we also have the scramble in place compensating for bad marines is even harder than it was before.
But all those elements are pretty much based on LUCK. Not always will you have bad players, not always will you have to find replacements and if you avoid low pop than PROBABLY most of its issues wonât haunt you. At the end of the day do not judge yourself too hard for losses because sometimes even if you did everything right on your part marines will still fumble and die to some bad CAS, FF, nades, mortar or stupidity. Try to enjoy yourself if you do not want to have a bad time.
There is some hope on the horizon called A.S.S but without adding more SO slots and a CIC redesign it can make the experience even harder.
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Thatâs true; I donât think thereâll ever be a solution unless Xenos get nerfed to the point where one squad can at least hold 1/3 of the hive back long enough to retreat. I donât know of a way you could encourage marines to listen to CIC plans and actively follow them out without making it so that Xenos are just pushovers.
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Good take. A lot of it is luck and the time of day you play. We all need to remember at the end of the day this is the game and the goal is to have fun.
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After reading through this thread Iâve become convinced that the best course of action is to simply remove the queens ability to scree.
Having all this power concentrated into one xeno leads to basically all the problems mentioned in this thread.
Removing the screech without compendation would just lead to ungaballing becoming even stronger and incentivising it more since marines would become invincible. Making individual xenos straight up stronger would also lead to the same thing. Imo if ungaball power is going down, then all non-sniper spec IFF needs to undergo complete destruction into alt IFF.
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The main problem with e.g. a 5 or 10-man squad is mostly a lack of staying power. You canât recover from losses and donât have a way to hold a position against even sustained T2 attacks (nevermind T3) if the squad is isolated from other squads.
I made a post about this before in an ASS thread.
What we need are:
- easier recovery from losses for small isolated squads
- something that make it more difficult to run over a limited manpower squad
- doing this without making that squad better able to kill, and without buffing the ungaball
The main things that I can see improving survivability:
- A way to get people up after losing the medic (universal defib idea - just strip it from the medic or maybe medics can be revived by anyone)
- Stronger/replaceable sentries so you can backstop your position and buy time to retreat
- Strong quickly deployed cades that canât be shot through/over, which block movement and are time consuming to get through by aliens
These things would let smaller squads hold onto ground a little better - and the focus on deployable cades/sentries means itâs not something you can easily push offensively with, and it encourages more actual squad-leading and planning ahead rather than simply unga-ball charge.
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Necropost but I just wanted to say I think this is an objectively wrong way to be thinking about CIC and it completely misses the point of what ASS is trying to accomplish. CIC canât overwatch 7 squads at once because youâre not supposed to be micromanaging them.
This also ties into the issue of SL being a extremely diminished role in terms of responsibility, because right now the current CIC interaction with squads is that theyâre told specifically what theyâre needed to do and whoever is on overwatch handholds them throughout the entire process, with the SL being reduced to a glorified rifleman calling out xenos.
Whatâs supposed to happen is that CIC gives a general order to the squad and then the SL determines the best way to accomplish it, which not only gives the SL agency but also lightens the load on CIC because they donât need to constantly watch over the squadâs shoulder. Yes, there are going to be times where the SL fucks up and gets everyone killed, but thatâs part of the learning process and youâre never going to get better at leading if you keep having your SO eye on the sky tell you exactly what to do.
ASS is designed to facilitate this kind of interaction because the support squads are small enough that they can reasonably operate autonomously, which frees up Staff Officers to switch between tasks and support squads as needed instead of constantly flipping through one squadâs helmet cameras. Instead of CIC directly managing the support squads, itâs much more reasonable to give them an objective like âCover this flankâ and then the SL decides how to approach it from there, which is more enjoyable for both parties involved instead of CIC completely superseding the SL.
I unironically think Bravo is the squad with the best culture right now and the best squad to be a SL for simply because CIC never pays attention to them, meaning theyâre able to approach tasks at their own pace and decide amongst themselves how to achieve their objective. Iâd go even further and say CICâs power to constantly observe and direct marines should be reigned in so SLs have the chance to have some autonomy. Comms garbling is a step in the right direction, despite the messy implementation.
tldr: if the support squads are going to always die every round because CIC canât constantly watch them, then how come Bravo doesnât consistently wipe to a single lurker in the backline every round?
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Come play Uno with us! We can hunt burrowers together when weâre on break from our round in the Uno tournament
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thereâs the âAutomated External Reanimatorâ or just the Reanimator kit from Dark Descent that can be used by anyone to wake Marines from âcomasâ, @somerandomguy3124 probably has some screenshot on hand but itâs:
Yâknow itâd be nice if tables and doors and other objects could be used for this, instead of being generally poor and too time consuming.
This is very true, quoting the entire post because of how true it is.
As @Tired describes above to some extent, and as Iâll add on: in an ideal world you can give SLs a destination and keep them informed of flanks and supply & CAS and they will win you the game through their own initiative. Not every game has 4(or 6) plat medal SLs or even 6 SLs to begin with. Ideally, yes, you point in a vague direction and the SL marches until his feet give out however thatâs not how things really work. Some SLs need micromanaging, some SLs need simpler plans or they will get lost and wipe their squad. Itâs the reality of playing CIC, most hours of the day you donât even get four SLs. Now, youâve got 6 SLs (hypothetically).
TLDR: Yes, in an ideal world you point in a direction and they figure out how to get there, but in reality not every SL is locked in..
Bravo doesnât consistently wipe to a single Lurker because half of Bravo leaves to Front and half of Bravo stays on LZ protected by deathturrets. Bravo and Intel both regularly get wiped out by Lurkers when they try to venture out of FOB.
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We could buff benos to have damage/defense bonuses based on the amount of marines nearby (like base ravâs Empower, but screen-wide and weaker), or choke marines with crowd control abilities (like ballerâs balls)
And turn the Queen into a morbidly obese Sentinel. Nobody wants to play Queen as is, imagine what happens if you remove her screech
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You know marines ungaball for that exact reason? Since they canât kill t3s with small number, i.e. a squad, they need âMORE" marines, i.e. the ungaball. Now you say we buff xeno against the most efficient way to counter 2+ t3s (ungaball) to discourage it? Good answer.
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Sl is and always was rifleman+++.
Why are most SLs unresponsive? Because they donât have the time to read the radio noise/chatter.
You get spammed with 8000 messages and sometimes one of them is a order.
And its not only SLs who are irresponsive, if you donât call a overwatch with a phone or CIC with a phone youâre going to 90% of the time get no response because the SO/XO/CO is busy looking at the map and getting intel.
If you want to get a hold of a SL either call them on the RTO or use the overwatch console.
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CIC is not supposed to micromanage marines, or order them around every second of the way, that is the SLâs job. But if the SL is ignoring CIC or the other squads⌠Then it gets micromanagy.
CIC for me is about THE BIGGER PICTURE⢠they have intel on what squads and people are doing, access to the tacmap, access to what would be sensible to do, but they have to earn the rest of the battlefield information.
Sensors makes CIC the ultimate information machine.
Why do people ignore orders, why do people ignore SLâs, why do people disregard information?
Because people simply donât get the information. If you stop to type in the frontline you will get snatched by a Warrior/lurker pounced/facehugged/prae abducted/ravager pushed/queen screeched. The moment you stop to roleplay in the frontline or that you lower your guard you get immediately targeted as easy.
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CIC and command expects a plan to stay intact after the first immediate contact but have little to no information on the battleground, supplies, combat capabilities of marines. That is where the SL is supposed to shine, but since people follow the SL tracker for the frontline and push the SL is almost always supposed to be the frontline.
And if you arenât on the frontline CIC/overwatch will have to demote you to get someone to guide the poor lost souls somewhere.
Plus a SL canât and shouldnât be expected to manage 20 people alone, and FTLs are otherwise busy raining hellfire on enemy positions and co-ordinating Jtac.
Not only there is no chain of command but there is also no support to the chain of command.
I donât think we need more punishment because that would just get people away from playing SL, but we need a cleaner way to get messages across between Fire teams/squads.
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TL;DR - CIC which should do tactical oversight always wants to do practical oversight. SL which should do practical oversight is usually too busy leading charges because of the tracker mechanic. FTLs who should co-ordinate fireteams are otherwise too busy with fire support.
Proposed solution: Get easier and cleaner channels to comunicate between CIC-LEADER, LEADER-FTL, FTL-FIRETEAM. Some people will never listen to orders for whatever reason, and thats a fact of life, but some people who donât listen to orders it is because they didnât hear them.
Edit: Actually rather than âWhatever reasonâ, it would be more specific to say that people donât obey orders for a multitude of reasons that are individual and time-sensitive. Except when they want to frag, but usually its a âOh xenos are pushing here.â
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