QOL Changes To HvH

Development Ideaguys
1

TL;DR

  • Fractures and Organ Damage should be rare or impossible to acquire
  • The map should be at low level light levels, no 100% darkness. Flashlights and flares are still useful, but you can see in the dark without them.

Edit

  • Barricades should have significantly higher chances to block bullets.

HvH as a game mode is unlikely to ever reach a stage of being an independent game mode that does not require staff to run it, but I think there are a few mechanics that could be changed to help enhance the base game mode to be less frustrating for the players.

Fractures and organ damage need to either be made very hard to acquire, or outright impossible outside of minor heart damage from revives. The issue is that it is incredibly easy to suffer fractures and organ damage from sustained gunfire, as gun damage is balanced around you are fighting xenos and not being shot at intentionally.

Being revived in HvH is rare as it stands, but the amount of damage you sustain makes it almost impractical to do so, this leads to players sitting out or waiting for a ERT reinforcement, which then encourages staff to send reinforcements. Thus players lose agency or attachment to their character since characters become less personal and more cannon fodder. If players only had to deal with their damage and internal bleeding, there’s more incentive for people to be revived.

My second point is to remove complete darkness. At minimum the map should be set to a low-light level, enough that you can still see targets but that flashlights, flares and NVGs are still desirable to use as they make target identification quicker.

The issue here is that the HvH meta becomes everyone running around in complete darkness, people who use their lights get killed and everyone else is playing pin the tail on the donkey with a blindfold. These kinds of fights are boring and destroy any attempt at allowing a static frontline to form, as now everyone is just roaming around like a hive-less xeno deathball. This also makes NVG users the king of HvH (Mainly Specs, SGs and the rare NVG CLF spawns), and dying to someone who can see while you can’t see a thing is boring.

HvH is the only game mode where people want to play FTL, since they get access to NVGs.

EDIT
Based on discussions I also believe that increasing barricades to have a much higher chance to block bullets would be a great change.

As it stands, barricades are a noob trap in HvH, they offer no actual cover to the user, and make defensive fortifications very hard or impossible to hold.

If barricades worked more effectivly, it would further help allow actual frontlines to form, alongside the light change.

These three changes I feel would go a long way into making the game mode less frustrating and more enjoyable to the average player.

6 Likes
2

I like this, very good change! +1

Also I want to debate if we should add scopes back into the game.
I feel like it is stupid to limit vision when we have guns that are accurate till the ends of our screens[almost all guns do this]. Like, we see someone just got into our screen vision, we both just start shooting and both die.

There is no dynamic to like try and pick off a section of the enemy forces to create a weak point then rush into said weak point to flank the enemy. With the current HvH mode, the marines just have to mostly hope that a flank just presents itself and be there at the right moment.

There should be testing to see how people like scopes vs no scopes[unless there already has] at least.

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The only way i could see scopes not being OP as shit, would be making a dedicated urban map or something similar. Because if you can always use the scope to its max range, then you will always have a deffinate advantage over everyone else.

This was very much apparent in earlier HvH games, and the first Warfan HvH landing (People would just snipe you from the pillboxes as you went 4 tiles south).

1 Like
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As an out of commission HvH mapper, I always felt that, the cover system that currently exists is just optimized to the classical XvH role, and its completely innefective against gunfire or anything of the sort. Most part of the damage comes from how precise shooting is, with cades rarely holding bullets back and being very fragile to explosions and others, and I think that all objects in the way of the fire-fighting should give bigger chances of not hitting targets, like how you see in Xenonauts 1. In the Oily Amphibian map we did try to make trenches to protect from enemy-fire, but the combination of platforms with sandbags (extremely overpowered sandbags) was quite useless, and people were more inclined to simply just roam around the open field, as it would not block their movement as much. In the end, actual HvH looks much more CS:GO like, and not Combat Mission like, which would be better for the intention of the game, I suppose.

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I would be interested in supporting buffing the bullet block value of barricades significantly. If barricades had a higher block chance, plus removing fractures, it would make defensive fortifications actually viable to use, and any damage you take through the cades would not result in you being knocked out of the round after 3 bullets.

@XCatCreeperX Scopes are a difficult issue, no one really likes being killed from offscreen, and I can predict the scope meta would be everyone taking a 2x scope and slow marching towards the enemy and getting sneaky off-screen kills when someone walks into their sight.

6

Another “Only HvH” buff would be smoke grenades for me. It could make for more tactics if smokes lasted longer then 6 seconds.

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Not only cades you see, all kinds of big objects should give some type of indirect protection to the bullets, with the cades being the most reliable ones. I still think that Oily Amphibian would be less chaotic to the marines if, even if the UPP-men were safe inside the bunkers, the beach traps could give some additional protection to the advancing marines. But regarding the smoke grenades, they should really be much slower to spread to the other tiles and actually last longer for actual manuevers, and not this excuse of grenade that works more for trolling (the thing is actually very good at it)

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AFAIK it is possible to do the thing with low light levels, I’ve seen it done before during a CLF HvH round on Big Bread.

Getting rid of darkness pretty much removes CLF as a viable HvH faction, their only advantage over the marines is that they can run faster as fast as no armor while having less armor than light armor. Compared to this, the UPP have heavier armor and thanks to the UPP gun """resprite""" PR, they also have straight up better guns than the marines.
As for the organ damage, fractures, I agree, on top of this there should be a limit to how much brute damage a person can take after they die, because right now you can just shoot a corpse to make it essentially unrevivable with hundreds of brute damage.

Maybe also add the thing where if you take enough damage you instantly die/crit instead of having to wait 2 seconds for the life tick.

For barricades, right now it's apparently 85% to block a projectile but that seems incorrect, probably ancient code.

You can combine walls and barricades to achieve a pretty good coverage from bullets.
Most maps aren’t made for HvH and need quite a lot of construction work to be made viable, maybe some kind of tool to help build quick fortifications?

Or maybe we could expand on the trenches and copy them from Civ13/Reforger.
Or get some more urban maps, I think there was one in the making? Not sure.
Could probably take some escal maps (there’s dozens) for urban combat.

9

I really want a dense urban map now, imagine room clearing, CLF mixed among colonists ready or not style.

2 Likes
10

I see your point about CLF with no darkness. Though I still think removing 100% darkness would be a positive for the game mode.

(unless you wanted to do something insane like force Marines to have their armour light on at all times, and if a Marine is not wearing armour they lose immunity to fractures and organ damage, so only CLF can use the dark and Marines need to throw flares)

Barricades just need a huge buff. Not 100% block cause then we’d end up in eternal trench warfare, but enough that you can stand by a cade and reliably block most incoming fire.

11

CM13: Fallujah Edition

1 Like
12

While that would be cool, I don’t think marines would behave half as tacticool as your AI teammates do in those sort of games. Already seeing one marine deploying a M2C in front of a door and two marines trying to breach pushing themselves around, either getting killed by the tunnel vision M2C or the CLF. Haven’t played ready or not and the swat 4 multiplayer not lately, but from what I remember the latter usually ends in “spawn → rush “frontline”/lurk around (depending on the map) → shoot people ded → repeat” as well instead of the funny room clearing you get in singleplayer.

13

I generally believe that EMP should be added against cloakers. Just imagine a cloaker coming inbetween CLF’s who have no SG’s, and CLF just begin FFing.

1 Like
14

hmmm
kek thought: Scopes have limited FOV? increase weakness at close range like old timey FPS games did? all of the rest of the screen is blacked? dunno.

15

One thing you could do is make it so full auto has a high miss chance unless its really close. Just BRRRTing someone on the edge of your screen, and being BRRRTed don’t feel right.

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Question will the sniper spec still be able to scope in? If not whats the use of the sniper spec then?