So, one of the really annoying problems with pipe bursts right now, is that they partially invalidate holding areas on the ship by destroying cades and setting off ammo explosions with no way for players to influence or mitigate this in any way.
So I thought, maybe if the APC of an area is still functional - we don’t spawn pipe bursts there?
This would let marines make areas safe by replacing and repairing the broken APC, and it gives xenos some of their own counterplay to cause chaos by attacking those APC’s similarly. I think this would introduce some better interaction between all sides and just overall be more fun and less “that’s bullshit” while keeping the aesthetics and atmosphere of the ship falling apart
The ship will still be atmospherically exploding but the areas that are still powered and working will be fine. If anything that’s even more atmospheric and provides additional juxtaposition and context.
Also, this idea could maybe even tie into the current proposals and goals of the development team for additional holdout areas on the almayer:
What if there was something in lower engineering that marines could repair and keep working which would prevent pipe bursts across the entire ship? That would also provide an interesting dynamic and counterplay with more holdouts and reasons to keep them.
It could be:
- Engineering thing AND APC repaired prevents pipe bursts in the APC area
- Engineering thing OR APC repaired prevents pipe bursts
Would also explain why the ship doesn’t start exploding when an APC is broken normally - because the engineering thing isn’t broken.
With some more complexity something like this might even evolve into interesting stuff for maintenance techs to work with in shipside gameplay.