From a balance standpoint I really dislike the map. Pre-30 marines get pretty much the entire colony for free to grab intel on, and most of the intel is indeed on the beach. There’s not much room to cover before the hive is driven into caves, one OB is pretty much enough to secure the entirety of the beach and flatten everything xenos built on their side of the river.
Comms always spawn in the colony, where Marines are naturally advantaged as most of the colony cannot even be weeded, and this is THEIR side of the map after all. It’s very easy for marines to nuke on LV.
I think it would be for the best if the map itself was to be heavily reworked, or at least comms tower locations changed up to sometimes be north of the river, or at least more intel moved inside the caves proper.
this map was never a problem til the marine defense buff slop and the nuke and king slop, but seeing the development teams attitude this map might as well go off rotation
The “meta” is determined by lazy maintainers who didn’t change comms positions on maps or where intel spawns after making endgames of both factions dependent on the afforementioned spawns.
On Fiorina, as I’ve said before, the fucking comms towers can spawn literally next door to the Warden Office LZ, to the point that taking the tower means breaking the FOB. It’s so close that you can see comms while looking out the window from the dropship. On Kutjevo, you can have comms be in that annoying spot south of where the free 250 metal crate spawns, directly south of LZ. This area is only accessible through a narrow, mortar-able tunnel that can be easily fucked with incend shells if xenos even dare to push.
LV is simply the worst offender because on most maps, marines have to push out of their holds to get intel. On LV this is not really required. Unless marines are instantly besieged, the Intel WILL be recovered very fast and there’s little xenos can do about it.
Maintainers are unpaid volunteers and, unlike you and me, some of them in fact do have actual lives.
Also from what I know(and I may be wrong here), the people behind the CM design so heavily centered around the comms are no longer on the maint team, so you can’t even fault the current team for it.
So, I know, it’s weird hearing that from me, of all people, but the best you can do is either just chill and wait for it to get better when the current maintainers have the resources and the understanding of the issues, or just join the maintainer team and try to fix it all yourself.
quite possibly the worst map we have. xenos cant hold beach and cant push past river(assisted by hard to weed colony) without wiping marines
marines cant hold literally anything other than cave entrances, but also cant push past cave entrances without wiping xenos
the map itself has legacy fog mechanics(literally serve zero purpose btw, they were added when meta-rushing was a problem during maturity, please just remove it)
comms spawn literally ontop of lz1 half the time.
jungles + its 2 lane system(only one being used by marines depending on lz) makes it way too easy to xeno backline.
How many lurkers can you kill solo? You’ve just proposed to remove the most popular map and the Lurker Team Six is already deploying to your IRL location. Good luck.
I HATE LV! ITS THE SAME MAP EVERY TIME! THE FUCKING ROAD FROM FOB TO THE FRONT IS ALL CADED! MARINES ARE EITHER INSIDE A CADEFORT ON BEACH OR INSIDE CAVES WITH 10 MORE! I HATE LV I HATE LV I HATE LV!
I think the more time you spend on CM the more stale LV gets. It really got worse in my eyes since nuke and king got added, there is an incredible incentive to just cadehug the colony for marines and cavehug for xenos, you are in a huge disadvantage if you try and push the enemy, much more here than in any other map. So you just wait for the enemy to push when they have no intention on doing so and you just hold the towers as much as you can.
Not really sure how to fix this, remove nuke and king only on LV? Place one tower in engineering and one on the beach? I tend to skip LV rounds nowadays, or I got in the habit of making sticky hell in caves (if you saw the resin node-sticky flood it was probably me), something should be done but I really cannot see what in particular.
LV was built for a time without defined objectives, with static comms being lazily put in along with a few other maps, it is actually abysmal for gameplay, its the only map with a confirmed comms location and so the meta has revolved entirely around it, with the sides of the map being clearly determined by a river, the defined marine side is way too compact and favoured for marines, i think its the only map where marines can literally do nothing and still win, especially if comms are on lz2 considering you can basically superglue yourself to the tower and face 0 risk with a slowdown river with natural light sources scattered in it protecting the tower
to fix this map id say 1, the colony needs to be spread out a little bit more, 2, no more guaranteed comms locations and more locations, you have hydro and fitness that are dead center and would be good for comms locations, finally 3, no more unweedable areas around comms, placing a round objective on a riverbed that slows the melee side and stops their greatest asset is sadistic, considering its guaranteed for atleast 1 comms tower to be on a riverbed.
Yeah but xeno players are the minority so they can’t win a popular vote, so NV is only picked because of the vote accumulation system, while LV is picked every second or third round.
My problem with LV is that it’s just so small. Every map has fairly large areas with not a long of reason to go to them, but with LV it’s even worse. The lake/cabin area to the north is never relevant. Huge chunks of the western cave system are barely used. Almost the entire south western corner of the map is likewise. The barrens also eats up a lot of space without providing really much in the way of interesting fights beyond the first mega resin fort.
It would be cool if it could be more jungle and less cave system. Maybe shrink the barrens a bit, add more jungle, replace the river with a river delta so we can have multiple water ways that could be bridged at strategic points. Then you can maybe see about adding some structures across the water to spread out the intel. To help xenos out in areas they can’t weed, maybe add some whiskey outpost level of vegetation in some areas for marines to have to clear. Really just anything to break up the predictable tedium of LV.
I mean, this is clearly an acid goop post, but I will put my 2 cents in.
LV gets stale fast if it doesnt change up with other maps. The comms locations are the same exact, every round, with slight variation to force marines pick one LZ over the other. Most intel does indeed spawn on the colony, why I honestly suggest alot of the intel be moved to lakehouse cabin and more added to Sand Temple, while removing most intel from caves themselves. Why? Because that intel is unimportant and impossible to get, unless xenos are utterly blind or marines have won the round. I absolutely agree there should be some variation, maybe creating two more comms spots on the colony(nothing north of the fog, that’s just giving xenos free stuff), like one near hydro and one between engineering, fitness and corpo? Or just one extra, so there’s no guaranteed comms tower in engineering.
Caves on LV is such a hellish place, because of all the chokes xenos have an easy grip on them, if marines dont commit to pushing before the first mature boiler evolves from spitters and completely destroys any chance of victory. Even Lambda Labs in Solaris is not as bad as Western Caves on LV. Honestly, if colony was made any more weedable to allow backliner hivelords and backliner vanguards - marines would never win LV, because the skill ceiling to win for marines would become so high(M1+W) that xenos could just outplay marines every single round and win everything, unless queen kills herself on a jungle lizard or something.
LV colony being held down by marines happens only on highpop, if robust player numbers are greater or equal to ten and they want to destroy the backline. Otherwise lurkers, runners and drones have free reign out there to 1v1 PVTs to death.