Pushing the enemies main base as fast as possible while they are still weaker => metarush.
Lower numbers of xenos and a boon later would do it.
There are only three words with “meta” used on forums. Metaevac, metagaming and metaevac, the last one fallen out of fashion, but could come back.
You act like I use it in every post.
Don’t be so madussy, angrussy when marine is holding a gussy and shooting xenussy.
The fact marines can literally recover dead bodies from outside the FOB by moving the body using grenades has always seemd ridiculous to me considering xenos have no way of influencing the movement of a body (and nor should they). Means that even bodies that seem like they’d need a concerted push to recover sometimes are able to get revived. Personally I think synths are a bit too free to rush out and tank a whole hive slashing them whilst they recover bodies too, theyre just so damn tanky.
warrior is a whole caste built around permaing people by moving where they die
Sure but they can’t move them post death which is what i’m referring to here…
I honestly don’t think that sieges are inherently “not fun”. You feel a rush as a xeno when you finally open a breach. Or lunge a clueless engineer. Or acid bomb the entire line. Etc. Etc. Sieges can be cool, even if losing a siege is very frustrating for xenos. Still, I don’t think this part of the game should be streamlined to “if you get pushed to FOB, you can only evac”, that would be lame. I think we just need to address the most annoying issues such as incend mortar spam (at least make it last shorter), stims (I dunno what to say here, we all know stims fucking suck, marines should not get them ever, especially by cade hugging, but this is how you currently get stims with ease), some LZs should be remapped to make them more siegeable (see examples above).
Sieges are not “fun” because they render 90% of castes useless or a mild inconvenience.
The most drastic example is runner; your useless unless your acid runner and tailstab cades from a distance, otherwise your throwing.
Drones can heal and build but thats about it.
Sentinel is 100% useless.
Spitter… you spit at a cade from the dark and hope you do not get focused.
Warrior… useless, none of your abilities do shit. Just tailstab from dark and pray.
Lurker… tailstab from dark, maybe vamp lurker sweep on marines that hug a cade literally, but thats about it.
So on and so on; only siege busters like crusher, boiler, certain prae variants, etc. have any fun unless Queen screeches and lets other castes slash for free.
Lies.
I mean runner and lurker are backliners and there is no surprise they are not that useful without a backline. Still, even as a runner you can scout for flanks or cap on screeches even during a siege.
That’s a lot. Building and setting up nodes/clusters is a key to a successful siege. Gardener and healer are peak during sieges.
No. You can stun people behind cades, for example preventing engineers from repairing.
Spitter is the best T2 against cades. Just keep spitting and spraying.
Fling works over cades, abducting people and flinging them behind your lines is the best way to perma people during sieges.
Again, the same issue as with a runner, but you can utilize lurker when there is an opening or counter-push.
And this is a rarity during a siege?
most of these require marines to stand next to cades or the cade being already broken though. Good luck even walking into 2 tile distance to tailstab against bipod and scopes, let alone up to the cade.
If you’re not a t3, defender or spitter you’re better off alt tabbing so as not to bodyblock since you’re not gonna be doing anything relevant till cade’s broken or marines decide to push out.
Yeah, it kinda hurts my soul as a lurker/runner main when its an instant fob siege or an equivalent. Because it either forces me to essentially AFK until marines push out, or risk it all by going invis and going after unmanned cades (if there are any).
Kind of funny of who the participants here are: @ihatethisengine defending FOB sieges and @Swagile of all people with the point about the xenos not being very suited for those.
Anyway, I feel like both can be true. FOB sieges can add tactical variety to the round, but that does not change that the xenos for the most part don’t have that many tools for them and FOB sieges definitely shouldn’t take the majority of the round time. When I play warrior and it’s the FOB siege I keep getting the urge to just devo to a defender.
And, to return this to what should be done, I feel like fixing the strategic shift is the key. Back in 2020, when the nuke was available too, marines usually had to ahelp for it at like 3 hours and those were back and forth rounds, so nobody played for it. Now the stims + nuke is the perpetual sword of Damocles that’s hanging over the xenos and pushing them to keep sieging. And the latest changes seem to be aimed on railroading the xenos more: “ok, you still have to permasiege the FOB, but you have to let marines to fully build their megaFOB first and now you only have 1 hour instead of 1:30 to take it”.
Like, as much as people love to hate that carlarc’s infamous “FOB is not meant to hold”, that was the mentality that got us out of the previous permasiege meta. In terms of the more tactical changes, I feel like DEFCON reintroduction now gave marines too much req fund potential, so probably the cost of materials should be made higher, just so that marines cades would be more limited in number, also the Bravo colony scavenging mains would be back.
So basically, my thing in 2024 is “nerf marine force multipliers, but buff marine baseline(slightly nerf xeno tankiness) to compensate REE-REE-REE”.
I throw to prevent 3 hour FOB sieges
Again, when you say “FOB is not supposed to hold” you basically fuck over an entire squad — Bravo, whos sole purpose in the game is to prepare FOB to siege. I have 600 hours as CT, I built countless of FOBs, a lot of them were never touched because marines won too easily or lost too hard. It’s just weird to care about several castes (I have 500 hours as lurker), but ignore bravo and its engineers.
Speaking of stims: yeah they suck and should be removed. The fact you now get everything you need for stims from xeno corpses really made FOB siege even more rewarding for marines. Thank current maintainers who main research and wanted to make research independent from IOs (what the fuck, really?). Now you never need map control for stims which is dumb as hell.
As for nuke, thank morrow who reduced the price of nuke from 30 points to 5 so again you can get nuke just from holding FOB (because research and xeno corpses give a lot of techpoints), you don’t need intel or map control (except for the towers of course, but on some maps it’s not a problem).
P.S. saying “remove sieges” is akin to saying “remove backline”. Some people really hate the fact they need to interact with other players to get from FOB to front, so it’s not a strawman. Also see many recent lurker nerfs. Of course frontline combat is very engaging but should we really remove other forms of the game (sieges, backline) to preserve it?
Look, I’m not saying that FOB is not supposed to hold, but I think just about everyone here would agree that there’s actually a fine balance in how strong the FOB should be and since the xeno tools against it are weak, it just shouldn’t be that strong. And every time it gets too strong it has to be nerfed, because marines are rational agents too and if they have an easy safe way to win the round, why won’t they use it?
P. S. Morrow didn’t just reduce the nuke price, he actually readded the whole nuke mechanic and he actually understood that you shouldn’t give it to marines for free, it’s just that the implementation of it is not great and he actually counteracted it with that xeno endgame, which is now getting replaced by a version that’s inferior at stoping the nuke camping, because it’s now just making both factions to stall for 2 hours, then do that timing push.
It really depends on what you are going to do. If your key to solve sieges is to introduce a strain that just hardcounters FOB and have barely any counterplays itself — that would be a bad solution.
Nerfing research, nuke and metal amount is fine for me. But sadly I feel like we are going to see nerfs of the symptoms, not the reasons.
I also throw except it’s my computer out of the window
req costs increasing based on purchase amount rather than order amount would somewhat address this since the system is rather pointless if you can purchase 10 metal stacks and the cost increase kicks in only once after the fact.
What are you talking about that’s not how it works whatsoever.
If I request 10 orders of metal sheets I still need to approve them all individually, every single time you approve an order the price of the time in question will go up - even if you already have a bunch of orders in queue.
I read all the messages and close to the end i was going to post what you wrote. But you beat me to it.
It’s like reversed maturity have happend, the thing they wanted desperately to remove. Now the end game mechanics like nuke, forces xeno to push early to protect intel and hold comms. And if you do not end the round quick enough, marines will have stims 100% guaranteed. So instead of removing mauturity, they somehow managed to shoot themself in the foot and made it reversed instead. It is what it is.
My favourite rounds are when the queen and T3s throw on first contact with the FOB so that the rest of the round can be skirmishes away from cades.
Also it is my opinion as well that endgames are the cause behind most rounds devolving into a rapid FOB siege. Adding in the turrets/weed restrictions/gas is just putting a bandaid on the issue that is current endgames.
Weird. Maybe I stumbled on some rare bug then.