I’m all for preventing hell fob sieges, but I don’t know why people are pushing so hard to make rounds shorter. Sure a new round means you get to respawn after you balded out, but every time a round ends it’s
5 minutes for server to reset
5 minutes in lobby till roundstart
25-35 minutes for marines to deploy
35-40 minutes for marines to get enough momentum/traction for an actual push to form a front only then does combat actually start
Every time you start a new round you reset this shitty cycle and spend another 45 minutes waiting to play the game for what ends up being literally less than 5 minutes of open combat in some worst cases. So having a 1 hour round means more than 75% of your round is just waiting to play
I like long rounds, it gives more leeway for cool things to happen - a bar built in the FOB, marine/xeno megaclutches that make winning actually feel rewarding, research making a greeno hive, etc. Long rounds are soulful
I think to make them attainable though:
You need to make survivability more viable. Make permadeath less punishing. Bring back 2 larva per cap, make med systems easier. Make larva and foxtrot more commonplace, to allow respawns for both sides enough to sustain an open front for a bit.
(I made a discussion for that a while back and people didn’t seem to like the idea though, in which case I’d say the only alternative is to live without being able to play for hours at a time instead of expecting the entire game to be railroaded to balance for ghosts in dchat)
Change the whole meta. I think endgames are a big part of it, I gave my thoughts on that in this shitpost: Endgame Reworks
but short tldr, both marine and xeno endgames presently force xenos to siege the FOB cause for some reason that was deemed a good idea I guess
I don’t think side objectives would necessarily be a good idea; as much as we like to be high and mighty and pretend CM isn’t a TDM, that’s what most people play it for. Certainly most of the xenos; and I’m sure many marines wouldn’t wanna spend 40 minutes kitting up, deploying, immediately achieving some arbitrary objective like getting power up (standing around for 5 minutes staring into darkness while engis do the work) then hearing the end round victory music. People wanna shoot shit. This isn’t a MILSIM, I think if people wanna do that kind of stuff there’s way more opportunity on the PvE server.
I agree with Steelpoint, I think open frontline combat and hivesieges are what people live for, and I think we should be incentivizing that more
The problem is if you’re in deadchat you’re always going to vote for an instant round end even if one side actually has some momentum which is very frustrating if you’re alive and emotionally invested. I fear a lot of the suggestions on this thread would dilute a lot of what makes cm soulful to try and fix a problem which only effects a minority of rounds.
This being said there’s an obvious problem with endgame disparity. You don’t get a 3 hour FOB siege if marines hold both comms because nuke literally directly ends the round. For xenos King has all the kit to carry the hive to victory but you’re dependent on the player being good and having a good understanding of the King’s role and toolset. Perhaps as King becomes a more established feature this will be less of an issue (although I also think it’d be sad for King votes to always be won by the same xenos because it is a really fun role) but maybe there needs to be a greater shift in weight to make xenoendgame a consistent round ender even if the King player is less familiar (lest new King’s be opened up to all sorts of salt from dead chat too).
Examples might be stimms becoming ineffective after King spawns or an even more upgraded selection of hive boons like 15 larva or every xeno gets pheros, increased t3 slots, weeds now spread onto cades and start decaying them etc etc. Something which makes xeno endgame mechanically different to instant round end like a nuke but also gives a more definitive endgame weighting once king is in play and takes dependency off of 1 player. I don’t think King itself needs a buff but there’s obviously a problem with xenos actually sealing the deal and ending the round even once they’re officially in the endgame.
Personally, I don’t believe that hive/cave sieging is as bad as it is. At the very least it isn’t a stalemate, because xenos are dying and marines are being capped, but my proposed easy fix for fob sieging should help cave sieging as well.
Step 1. Remove mortar. Literally has no meaningful purpose other than to perma deny areas with insane amounts of green fire
Step 2. Either reduce the build speed of building castes by about 20-25% to compensate or reduce building hp by a decent amount but reduce multiplier damage from breaching weapons so they take the same amount of shots/hits to break.
Step 3. Standardize cade damage for xenos. The difference between trapper’s ability to destroy cades and ravagers ability to destroy cades is way too large. Melee xenos should have an easier time breaking cades and ranged xenos should have a harder time breaking cades
having one guy afk click on coords every 30 seconds is not variety.
and no i dont mean making trapper and runners do the same amount to cades. just make it so trappers dont auto delete cades and melee castes can destroy more than one cade every 3-5 business days
But, back to the main topic. I don’t think shipside deconstruction matters that much, the problem is not the cades, but 80 marines manning them. Also the problem is not just that the rounds are long, but they’re are long in an inorganic and unfun way.
The big problem of CM is that it has a circular toxic feedback look. Marines get outright broken crutches, xenos have to be strong enough to fight marines who have those crutches, hence xenos are too strong for marines without the crutches. So, there’s no other way to fix everything without nerfing both sides. Marines should lose the nuke and stims and xenos should lose some initial numbers, but get a little bit more sustain.
Finally, regarding the Objective Based Gameplay™. I think people who keep suggesting this, just fail to look at the situation realistically. CM just does not have the dev power to implement this well, particularly because it’s really hard to implement correctly. The end result is just going to be people metagaming all the objectives and speedrunning through them, resulting in a whole lot of boredom. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t try stopping anyone trying to code this in, but I would want to see the working end result first, instead of just breaking CM that already works well on a mere promise. TDM is there for a reason - it works and provides endless variety. Particularly if the map design is decent.
Do we hate 3 hour rounds or do we hate FOB hell sieges? The answer to that question is important because the solutions are drastically different in scale.
If we hate 3 hour rounds, the solution is to provide attacker advantages such as better/improved tools to breach defenses: better explosives/breaching shotguns/ stronger acids/ more structure damage on claws. Alternatively, one could weaken defensive elements such as green fire, thick resin, sentries, etc. Comparatively easy fixes.
————
If we hate ‘hell sieges,’ then the solution actually has nothing to do with what tools sieges are engaged. So long as the primary objective is to exterminate the other side, the losing side will always be propelled to a defense of their stronghold; it is an effective, and in fact the ultimate, means of securing survival. The primary objective would need to change to make sieges less prominent.
There is a reason why the queens most slaved to the meta hide away in their stronghold, and there is a reason why commanders look for any opportunity to call for an evacuation. The game begs you to hide away, to take advantage of the enemy’s advance, and yet we (the staff and players) beg everyone to ignore it: for roleplay’s sake, and for gameplay’s sake. If we don’t want sieges, we need to change the primary objective of one or both teams. I don’t actually know how challenging the mechanical changes would be to make, but the community pushback would be high. It would take someone both passionate about the change as well as mentally strong enough to brave our polite and well-mannered communities’ responses.
——
Writing this at disneyland while my girlfriend is in the bathroom, will edit it later if any of it turns out to not be coherent.
No, this is a wrong assumption. CM used to work fine when the care was put to de-emphasize FOB sieges.
Also, FOB siege != caves assault. Caves assaults are good, they’re exactly what the game was always about.
So, to rephrase yet again, xenos should be nerfed, mostly in numbers, until attacking the FOB just after drop is too risky. This would result in a massive spike in marine power\winrate, so both xeno sustain should be buffed to compensate and the crutches marines are stalling the rounds for like the nuke and stims removed\reworked.
I agree that cave assaults are more fun for both sides, but designing the game around ensuring xeno’s lose is going to alienate too many people. If I was remarking that my suggested change would get the developer backlash, any suggestion which all but guarantees xeno losses would get them crucified. If your suggested change does not guarantee xeno losses, then the FOB hell siege problem has not been solved.
I’d personally say cave assault is the least fun part of the game, more akin to a fob siege for the aliens where it’s too tight to really shoot your gun, and you’re constantly getting slammed by xeno CC abilities.
for me the peak fighting is in destructible terrain, where both sides are able to actually change the battlefield to suit their own ends rather than having to just murderball into caves and hope the xenos run out of HP before you run out of living marines.
see; beaches on LV, for example(although LV beach suffers from just getting OB’d CAS’d to death if xenos actually bother to try and defend it… which is part of why they dont bother and just hide in the far more defensible caves)
-Remove shipside decon
Time for me to preach the gospel of the LZ autolate. The holy autolathe can eat garbage and give us useful tools, flash lights, and steel sheets.
Examples of things that it can eat
-Empty magazines
-floor tiles
-metal rods
-broken glass
-just about anything it can print
-empty shotgun shell boxes
-Low quality attachments like telescoping stocks, flashlight grips, and underbarrel grenade launchers
On Fiorina, there’s practically infinite metal for an enterprising marine with a crowbar and wrench to farm.
Pro-tip. You don’t need to be able to build machines to get an autolathe to the LZ.
-Find auto lathe
-partially decon
-take all the shit
-find a PACMAN
-decon it where you want the autolathe
-rebuild the autolathe using the now free machine frame
-be disappointed when this gets nerfed because marines being smart is not allowed
-profit
If marines want to deconstruct all of chances claim to make their FOB, go ahead, because that would mean that marines aren’t inside their FOB and are at risk of dying to backliners while trying to decon tables.
Almost as if Hivelords can generate enough plasma to fortify entire quarters of the map in 20 minutes, just by sitting there
I really dont see the issue with setting Piranha MTs on the briefing hall
Hell rounds are the fault of every single player in the game, collectively, on both sides, and need to be addressed systematically, rather than with bandaid nerfs
