how do we deal with "early retreat"

General Discussion
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I like Doubleburst. Doubleburst has upped Xeno win rates. But – and this is obvious – doubleburst very quickly snowballs.

Marines adapt to this by not even waiting for caps to burst. When Major Zion Barnes (he does this the most effectively I think) sees xenos got too many caps, it’s straight back to FOB.

I loathe calling it an “early retreat” because it’s not intentionally/maliciously early, it’s objectively a good play and the only viable move for Marines. But in terms of gamefeel, it’s early.

Why is it early? Because now we’re in FOB siege 15-20 min after drop. Now xenos are doing a siege. They will eventually win, meaning the Alamo evacs. Now we’re doing hijack gaming with the entire fucking Marine Force and we WILL get a Xeno Minor – which is a “Xeno win” but lets not shit ourselves, it doesn’t feel like one, it feels like a Marine stomp.

It isn’t fun for Marines either after it happens 3 rounds in a row.

The only play for xenos is to refuse to engage the FOB, which slows gameplay momentum to a halt. I know refusing to engage the FOB can work, I’ve seen it, but for a # of reasons it turns rounds into near-3 hour slogs, Xenos avoid this for a reason, they ALMOST ALWAYS just siege because it’s more fun.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to fix the “early retreat” thing as-is with doubleburst, and I like doubleburst. Three alleviating things I can think of –

1.) TGMC option but modified.

If Marines shipside = 120%(?) more than Xenos ground side, Queen gets an option to skip hijack entirely and cop a Xeno Minor.

My idea here is imperfect and could definitely use some rethinking/retuning but I think the concept is there.

2.) Buff Xenos during Hijack dependent on Marine/Xeno ratio.

We’ll do some math — we can scale extra Hijack larva based off Marine/Xeno ratio.

I dug thru GitHub and apparently during Hijack, Xenos used to get infinite/exponentially more larva. Worth a shot just to cut this slogfest down – but I still want Xeno Minors to be viable for marines! If Marines have 40 guys and Xenos have 23 bug, that’s a pretty fair ratio; I see no reason for Xenos to get a huge buff there.

Potential 3rd option now that I’m thinking of it —

3.) Make redeployments part of the gameplay loop.

By doing this we sort of, continue the gameplay loop instead of speed running it via Xeno Minor on Almayer/pausing it via Xenos refusing to hijack

I have zero clue how you’d accomplish this tho

Sorry for the wall of text but TL;Dr – as a Marine main I don’t like spending 21 minutes prepping, to deploy for <25 minutes, to then go back to the Almayer and completely slaughter every Xeno in a deathball. It is getting fucking boring bro

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The reason siege doesn’t work in this case is because marine defense is a heavily flawed system that rewards marines much more then marine offense (especially since the time to get to hive is far too slow to get to caps, without coordinated marines)

its not cool when a round becomes a 3 hr slog with 15 minutes of gameplay, and it should never be viable. Cades are meant to be a stopgap which depletes quickly, not infinitely sustainable because you have 20 people defending the cadeline which blocks almost every xeno ability and thus mostly makes marines invincible.

Fighting invincible marines = Not fun

i’m kinda convinced a literal deployable invincibility shield would be much more fun then cades, because then you could at least grab marines and use abilities on them to get them out of the shield

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Shit happens.

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its not cool when a round becomes a 3 hr slog with 15 minutes of gameplay, and it should never be viable. Cades are meant to be a stopgap which depletes quickly, not infinitely sustainable because you have 20 people defending the cadeline.

My thoughts exactly

I wasn’t around for the FOB rework. Does that fix this???

But also Birb you have to recognize what I said earlier too – doubleburst FORCES this kind of defensive play. So here’s a 4th idea:

Keep doubleburst (ofc), but make moving already-nested caps significantly harder.

This makes it viable for COs to take the gamble of continuing to push hive despite significant caps.

It would STILL BE A DANGEROUS GAMBLE. But COs might actually do it. Right now you will NEVER see a CO continue to push hive with 5 caps because the entire Xeno hive will ALWAYS just re-nest and re-locate and now we’ve got the Marines in the hive (probably getting trapper hugged), in caves, with 8-10 larva recently spawned and ready to flank them.

Discouraging (not preventing) re-nesting will encourage continued Marine aggression.

I admit this one might be too big of a Marine buff – my other ideas were all Xeno buffs.

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This only comes from “poor” but intentionally “poor” map design - where Marines get both of the end-game objectives (Pylons) handed to them for free, and tasked with not losing them until 02:00. Holding just one of them prevents the Xenos from doing their nuke. As a result, the best play for Marines is realising that “I don’t need to feed caps into a position where we can’t use Mortar, CAS and maybe OB” means they withdraw to play defense on the end-game objectives. You can even draw the idea that Marines attacking IS them ultimately defending the two end-game objectives.

Mortar & CAS are very strong tools that define where Xenos can and cannot hold, and as a result Xenos can only hold under caves unless Marines are asleep.

As above, there is no reason to take the risk pushing when you realise that your win conditions are behind you outside the LZ. Often, despite the CO’s will to push Marines simply can’t. Without Mortar, CAS and OB to clear out heavy fortifications, Marines are simply feeding themselves into the Hive and attritioning heavily under the hope that they will break into the core. If Xenos themselves haven’t taken heavy losses to Mortar, CAS or OB then it’s a huge risk, and once you feed some caps you’re on a five minute timer to storm the Hive and save the caps, and that’s a risk! You risk feeding MORE caps in and having the five minute timer run out, and you end up in a worse position.

No, it doesn’t. Imagine FOB as it is now but you have to build your FOB 20 tiles outside the LZ (which is immune to any attacks now) instead of on the LZ. I had a very good time drawing rounds out to 2-3 hours by just making my Marines build the FOB at the Power Transformer instead of the LZ.

2 Likes
6

Oh, my favorite topic to REE about!

I’ve been saying this for years, but I really believe that CM can be tightened just by periodic numerical tweaking to counterbalance whatever mapping changes or whatever new broken stuff gets added. Unfortunately the maintainer team still does not have anybody doing it, or at least doing it that well.

Then we’d need only a few auxiliary systems like:

  • Round start time(population) based balancing. Currently xenos do worst at mid pop. But at high pop it’s just very hard for marines to survive that 9 T3 dreadpush.
  • Some kind of a xeno sustain control system. We had the free larvae before, but it was a bit too much and not fine-tuned well enough. Ideally we need to keep xenos weak enough to not bruteforce the FOB, but strong enough that they won’t get ungarolled or easily attritioned by marines. CM always works best when xenos are a tiny bit overwhelmed and have to bleed the ungaball dry to win.
  • All of that should be map-aware. Some maps are just naturally harder for either of the factions, and I believe just a tiny bit of balancing to either side would improve the enjoyment by a lot for everyone.
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Its basically a skill issue. As a Queen you either establish a hold point at a far away part of map and let marines push to it, to later flank and wipe out marines or you dont push fob. It is not hard to pull, but requires a lot of expierience, thus called skill issue

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8

I don’t have much to add since everyone else touched on the mechanical aspects of it. What I will say is it’s just tough cuz the marines effectively have to decide “do we want to win or do we want to have a more exciting fight that will probably end with all of us round removed?”.

Marines are massively benefitted by turtling, and it works towards their scaling power over time with tech options. If they want to win that’s the play almost every time. Now that doesn’t always make for exciting rounds, so the XO/CO basically has to decide if they want to win or if they want to throw down with the Xenos and flip the coin.

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The “early retreat” is not the main issue. It’s a consequence. The issue is that marines have no incentives whatsoever to ever leave FOB. You can just afk in FOB for nuke and stims. That’s it. There is a ludo-narrative dissonance, when despite you are being supposed to clear the colony from xenomorph threat, you have literally no gameplay reasons to do so. You can win the game (and that’s your goal given the game being TDM) without ever entering caves. The reason marines still trying to rush caves occasionally is inertia. Meta has been shifting to FOB afking for quite a while. It’s just a matter of time when people will start hating on COs/XOs who order offensives, just like they hate people who do splitdrops/paradrops/other off-meta stuff. I hate doubleburst with all my heart, but it’s not the problem here. Yeah, doubleburst made this strategy even more rewarding, but FOB afking has been way too rewarding for a long time already.

Marines need a clear incentive to attack caves. Currently there is none.

13 Likes
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You could prevent that with an adaptive variable that depends on current marine-to-xeno pop ratio.

e.g. 20 marines vs 20 xenos = 1 larva per cap, 200 marines vs 20 xenos = 3 or 4 larva per cap.

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I had actually suggested trying a dynamic burst based on ratios, basically to not add the insult to injury of winning xenos also getting double burst and totally snowballing ad infinium. If someone wants to code it, I’m sure Drathek would be open to a little experimenting.

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12

Yeah as XO. I want to be able to push.

But like I know caves are a death trap. I have to play super safe. Cause when fighting xenos they activly get stronger the more you fight them. So long as you dont kill a t3 and they keep getting caps. So it encourages me to do thing like hold sensors and bait them out of caves.

I know when to fall back as FOB is safe and i am more likely to be able to kill a queen or rav and turn the game around.

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13

From my experience FOB rework just moved FOB off LZ and added extra time for xenos to afk once they actually take over this FOB that’s not on LZ waiting for defenses to run out of power.

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i can almost guarantee with how long CM’s been around this isnt a novel idea

might be worth doing a little is:pr is:closed searching to have something to reference

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Dynamic burst ratio may be a bit suboptimal, because it punishes marines for being good. Which is a different thing from punishing them for being passive.

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it does punish xenos for “being good” too, it would be balancing factor to give the loosing side a chance to come back, with the number of larva being determined for each burst individualy as bursting happens it would keep xenos in some ratio bounds, lets say the inteanded ratio roundstart should be 1 xeno per 3 marines then the single burst threshold would be 1 xeno per 2.2 marines, 2 larva around the 1 per 3 marines and reaching 3 larva at 1 xeno per 6 marines or something

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17

That would be a MASSIVE improvement to the game, but unfortunately the current CM staff position is that you must suffer through hijack every single marine loss.

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18

I’ve said it a hundred times before and I’ll say it again: Make hijack vote based. The entire server should get a say since the entire server has to play it, one player should not decide whether or not every other person has to wait through hijack.

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19

That might sound fine in concept, but when you think about it:

More than 90% of ghosts will vote to skip hijack to play again faster. Xenos who don’t feel strong enough to wipe out marines will vote to skip. Marins who don’t feel strong enough to wipe out xenos will vote skip. Anyone who simply doesn’t like hijack gameplay will vote skip no matter what.

Hijack would be skipped 9 times out of 10 if we are luckey, even more than that more likely.

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If it gets skipped “too often” then dchat’s vote can be removed, but if without dchat’s influence it continues to be skipped every round that makes a vote more desirable, not less. If people don’t want to play hijack, that is a problem with hijack, not the idea of skipping it.

3 Likes