The amount of tools to give marines more lives and recover them from absolutely lost situations are excessive.
Witnessing a mortar allign explosive shells on top of dead marine bodies, to pull them from DEEP within xeno lines, all the way to the marine frontline is incredibly stupid, frustrating for Xenomorphs who have zero counterplay, and completely unrealistic.
If an explosive shell from Mortar lands within the range of a body, it should gib it.
_
Responding to some of the points brought up:
It should be more than “exactly on top” given that wouldn’t stop the problem, as they throw the shell 1 tile off to toss it in a direction.
This is nothing like using grenades for the very simple reason that grenades have a very small range in comparison, and they expose the marine throwing them, who can be grabbed by a skilled Xenomorph, which I am okay enough with, as it has at least a risk component. Mortar has zero risks.
Mortar shells are not very expensive, no. Requisitions can definitely supply Mortars with more than sufficient shells. You can see Mortars constantly firing shells nonstop many games.
Not that hard, especially given the range of Laser Designators.
It’s nice that you own up to that. It would be quite nice if more players played both sides so they could see the entire picture. Seeing mortar used in this manner has been one of the most frustrating experiences ever. It takes immense amount of effort and risk quite often to drag a marine deep without killing it, and mortar just doing that was really shameful.
This is no more a problem then using grenades to recover bodies honestly. Mortar shells are very expensive iirc and it’s a waste of fire support to recover bodies with it. I can see how it’s frustrating it would be for it to happen, but every HE shell used for body recovery is a shell that didn’t clear buildings and probably didn’t kill anything. Also, I could be wrong but the explosions will destroy most standard-issuie Marine guns and their attachments iirc, which is a significant loss.
There’s also the fact you’d need to coordinate the recovery a ridiciolous amount - even if it only takes one shell, you’d need one shell to learn the necessary offset and then one shell to recover the body, but first you need a JTAC to spot to recover the body, which if it’s deep in xenomoprh lines isn’t going to be an easy task to lase or get coordinates for.
Mind you, I am saying this as a Marine main, so I don’t actually know how it is on the alien side - I just know it looks to be a waste of resources from everything I’ve seen. Maybe I should use the mortar one round to actually learn how it plays, but I’ve just never gotten the chance [except one round where I used it to no effect as SL during a FOB siege on coordinates I spotted myself]
Mortar shells are not very expensive, no. Requisitions can definitely supply Mortars with more than sufficient shells. You can see Mortars constantly firing shells nonstop many games.
I haven’t, actually. Not saying that it doesn’t happen, but I’ve seen mortars maybe… three rounds recently, and I don’t remember them firing non-stop. I will retract this point if someone who has used a mortar recently steps forward, though.
The problem with explosives being used to recover marines is that dead marines tend to be laying down, and laying down marines have reduced explosion damage. Which means that gibs are harder, and the damage actually dealt is minimized making revival easier.
You could do alternative things, like making explosions deal heavy organ damage on dead people, possibly causing heartbreak, or making it reduce death timer.