I’ve been running some shipside HvH events recently and I wanted to make this thread as a place to gather feedback, opinions and ideas for future events.
Spawn UPP ship in, and spawn in UPP roles. I have to spawn these on the Almayer z-level so they have comms.
Crash the upper deck into the Almayer, due to the big size of the deck the areas I can crash are limited, such as astronav, lifeboats, engineering, etc, etc.
Force a minimum 20 to 25 minute ‘cease fire’ where both sides are given time to prepare/gear up
Once combat starts, I monitor the fighting to try and avoid a stalemate.
I’ll generally make a offer that if a faction can capture 5 POWs, they will be granted a reinforcement wave.
During the round I will sometimes intervene to move things along. These can involve.
Giving the UPP CO a railgun strike to fire at their command, this will involve me spamming explosives at an area. I will take GREAT care to avoid gibing/killing anyone unless they blatantly refuse to run from the explosion.
Giving both sides a secondary objective which, if accomplished, will grant a reinforcement wave.
The round ends if the UPP capture CIC, or if the USCM push the UPP back to their ship.
I generally spawn a wide combination of combat and support UPP, including.
Soldiers, Medics, Sappers, Machinegunner Specialists and Squad leaders. These roles are self-explanatory.
Doctors, UPP Synthetics. These act as the core support arm and are important for maintaining momentum.
Military Police. These help guard the ship and process POWs.
Lieutenants, a Captain and a Major. Help coordinate the operation.
My philosophy is as follows
Giving both factions a core home base to work from and a logistical/medical chain is important. This is critical for the OpFor as they don’t get one by default.
Both sides need time to prepare and gear up.
The value of your life must be maintained, meaning reinforcement waves should be used sparingly and not spammed.
OpFor should have equal or slightly greater Frontline Combatant roles compared to the USCM, at least if the USCM are the defenders.
My wishlist of things to be done
Fix up the ERT vendors to have fair item costs, its not up to date
Find a way to make it easier to set up ladders between the upper and lower deck, right now they break when I spawn them so I need to fix them manually.
Make the UPP brig larger with lockers. (Done)
Get the UPP CIC code fixed, right now most of it is broken.
Giving the UPP CO a custom UPP command tablet with secure comms. (In Progress)
More feedback.
Set the lighting to a minimum level where you can see in the dark but not clearly. I can do this already but I have to manually edit every area 1 at a time, which is slow. (Big Wishlist Item)
Make humans more resistant to bone breaks and internal bleeding (Halfway in Progress)
T37 Medium Machinegun for the UPP. A stationary/immobile version of the M2C, trades rate of fire for being able to fire for a sustained period of time. Can only be placed by admins/mappers though.
I genuinely think HvH events can be really well done, just takes time, effort and a half decent admin running the event. Your overall game play ideas and philosophy is something you’ve clearly thought about for more than a few more minutes and looks very interesting, more or less an entirely new game mode. Lots of potential for fun and unique role play depending on the rules and overall objectives dictated by staff.
Hive vs Hive, Whiskey Outpost game modes, all that’s missing is Human vs Human. I’m sure a great game mode/event for HvH can be made but it would require some work.
HvH can be fun as a once in a while thing as it’s different but when people start spamming them every other day (and this was the case with previous admins) it becomes repititive and very boring, It can even go as far as people not wanting to play the game
I would like to do groundside maps. I believe Solaris Ridge is fairly well mapped for that. My principles would apply in that I’d give the UPP a lot of time to prepare for battle, same as the Marines.
I personally would aim to not spam out these events every 24 hours. I can’t speak for other staff however.
I appreciate that HvH is not everyone’s cup of tea and that some people really dislike it, I also appreciate that people can be frustrated with HvH since it feels like death comes quickly and life is short. But I still think, with careful management, the event can be fun. In moderation.
There needs to be more indestructible hull walls inside Almayer, otherwise battlefield deevolves into open field HvH combat which means shooting at offscreen hoping to hit something, or WW1 suicide charges. Sure, some sort of an open field can exist as a risky route one can take, or just waste ammo for “suppresion”, but it can’t be just stretching from one side of Almayer to the other.
Or like when field is sufficiently empty (like after railgun strike) then a piece of Almayer’s “ceiling” falls down to give cover.
I doubt anyone enjoys thunderdome-esque HvH combat in such an open field.
Enough said there should be no darkness, dim low-light like with half NVG xenos can choose to have is best.
Reduce cloakers to minimum. Marines got scout, so give other guys one kommando too, maybe two if they are less numerous.
Sentries should have a “lock on” mode, or something that they don’t immeidately fire, but you can’t just run on screen and offscreen to game it.
AP ammo should be scarce. What is the point of even the heaviest armor when half of both forces have AP?
You should be able to drag and strip opposing team corpses when they are perma.
One of the more wild ideas is having some sort of an item that any marine (and hostile human) can get and this item would change the armor’s appearance to that of your faction, so you can scavenge that sweet heavy UPP armor, stick some USCM colours on it and wear it.
Valid points. AP ammo is a issue I can’t easily resolve since Marines get a lot of it, so I feel compelled to give UPP a decent supply.
The falling debris is a real good idea, I can sorta do this with build-mode but it’d look ugly. We’ll see.
I really, really, want to make the map set to a low-level of light at all times. I can do this, somewhat, but manually editing an area of the ship to a low-light level, but this is very time consuming. I’d love a code solution.
Giving the UPP their own Scout seems like a fair compromise if the Marines get a Scout, I’ll remember that for the next time. Frankly, I’d just gut the Scout from the game mode though.
after cades started blocking bullets and wouldnt break after 3 seconds, cades got more use
now what we need is the ability to shoot from behind walls and not how it is currently
the biggest issue i ever had with HvH were the death exchanges, where allmost every time 2 humans meet and fight they both kill each other
it would be also sick as hell by breaching rooms with granades through a door while taking cover
alao would be cool if the riot shotgun guy had granades he can buy/gets
i have a lot more ideas but thats mostly stuff we have to code
also WHY IS CRAWLING SO FUCKING SLOW its trained military personel for gods sake! they know how to crawl fast! (its cos resting makes you not take bullets without sprite click)
You can already do that. If you stay next to a corner and throw something in front of you it won’t be thrown at a wall, instead it will go straight around the corner.
True. However, being fair, its quite hard to capture someone in HvH, at least it seems to be since you can not move dead bodies nor strip them, so you have to revive someone where they fall, which may not be safe, generally you’d only get a chance to revive a enemy if they rushed too far from their allies or you are able to secure the area they fell in.
Considering the last round where both sides barely managed to capture five of the other faction by the end of the round.
To be fair, this could just be cause there’s yet to be a meta of how to capture people. I felt compelled to add this as a objective for three reasons, firstly to give MPs, medical and CIC more stuff to do in processing prisoners, to add a reason to accept an enemies surrender, and to have a way to bring ghosts back into the game as respawns.
Yeah but it’s done in a way where it works, the sandbags are on the same tile as the metal cades, and I’ve forced the M2C to spawn on the cade line, so it makes for a very powerful defensive position, which is the idea.
Allow upp and uscm to drag key figures and revive them so they can act as POWs. Such as 1st LTs and above or just every commissioned officer.
Also remove the ability to choose specialist in general and only allow them to choose either Sadar or GL( probably GL is better option as they are more balanced in my opinion).
Remove M2C and replace them with m56d because M2C is way too powerful.
Its hardcoded that you can’t drag the corpses of dead enemy factions, maybe a exception can be coded in but I don’t wanna encourage too nasty behaviour. I did, however, reward the factions if they captured a enemy high ranking officer (CO, XO or SO, or UPP versions), which did happen once when a SO was captured alive.
This PR here will remove Spec kits and force all Specs to pick a single new kit of heavy armour, essentially the B18 armour that has been buffed to be similar to the UPP heavy armour. This should help equalize things but still keep USCM specs unique and powerful.
We’ll see how things go. I am planning to add a T37 MMG as the UPP’s variant of the M2C, albiet this one is a stationary weapon that can not be picked up and moved, so its only useful for the defensive, plus it has a slower ROF but longer fire time.
I’m also hoping to add this cute thing for the UPP.
