One of the issues with Hijack is that, technically speaking, the Almayer is a fairly fair and fun map to fight in, but the current Hijack mechanics encourage the most boring style of combat imaginable. Cadehugging the lifeboat.
Hijack is fun when you are holding a non-required spot, such as a fuel pump, requisitions, medical, briefing, CIC, etc, etc. However, hijack makes this very non-viable resulting in the vast majority of hijacks occuring with another FOB defence at lifeboats.
My proposal is simple. Rework the Marine objective to support unique last holds. I would suggest this occur in this manner.
CIC now requests for a Nuclear Warhead which is sent immediately to req.
The nuke must be anchoered somewhere on the ship, once anchored it can not be unanchored.
The nuke starts a XX minute timer (to be decided), once the timer is finished, the nuke is armed. The nuke can be destroyed by the Queen by interacting with it.
Once the nuke is armed, the nuke can not be disarmed. It will then detonate after X minutes (likely 1 to 3). Once the nuke is armed, the lifeboats will unlock and can be launched by anyone (the queen can not lock down a lifeboat anymore)
The idea with this system is that it will now encourage Marines to pick any part of the map to hold out in, instead of mandating the Marines hold out at the lifeboats.
The only drawback to this, aside from coding it, is that Marines could just hold out at the lifeboats. I’d discourage it somewhat by forcing the lifeboat doors to be opened, so that the marines have three flank attack routes that can’t be sealed off.
It’s not that unique last holds aren’t supported - I personally almost never hold lifeboats, because I consider them utterly boring.
People autopilot to lifeboats.
What is a problem is that if you hold one pump, you can get enough fuel to escape.
Personally I’d rather see pumps reworked into being able to provide 25% fuel - and Marines being able to have only one, two pumps at the time. That would force them to go from pump to pump, enabling more unorthodox tactics and some kind of mobile gameplay.
This would honestly just encourage lifeboats holds more, because now when you hold lifeboats, you don’t have flanks via lifeboats, and you also get a free SD.
Honestly I kinda like the old system with the fixed countdown to boat launch. When both sides can plan for when the timer hits zero, it can lead to rising tension as the timer gets closer to zero, with the last 30 seconds or so potentially being quite epic. Even as someone who put effort into PRs that are only applicable to the new system, I would be happy to go back.
I think preventing anchoring the nuke in the lifeboats lobby during decrypt under normal circumstances would be in our best interests, to be honest. Otherwise this would just be the current meta without pumps, since there’s no real reason to hold anywhere other than the lobby. Feels like we need more of a nudge.
To do that, here’s an idea:
Have the generators break once the dropship collides with the Almayer. Then either clear the SMESes or destroy one to two and disconnect them from the network to require repair.
Since ASRS is working on reserve power (or maybe it’s damaged, etc), it doesn’t have enough to “charge” the nuke before vending it. Meaning the nuke has to rely on external power to decrypt. Give it a significant power draw.
Have the nuke or ARES throw an error when anchoring within the lifeboats area (at least during decrypt), citing safety protocols forbidding rerouting power from the area.
The idea being we offer the Marines a few possibilities for maintaining decryption: you could restore partial power by repairing a few generators and getting the SMESes back up, set up PACMANs (PACMEN?), or hot-swap batteries at the APC. (Unless there’s something about shipside power I’m missing that would prevent this.)
This preserves the need to repair at least one APC and it maintains side objectives. But ultimately, your hold location can be anywhere with an APC other than the lifeboats lobby, not just “pick a pump.” Since there are other APCs nearby you can still do adjacent holds that let you stick near lifeboats if you want, but at least now there’s more of an argument against the exact same lobby hold every time.
I think the problem is it’s way too easy to get 25% fuel even if you don’t defend pumps at all. I think fuel gain either should be slowed down, or having just 25% fuel should not give a chance of successful launch.
Anyone outside of a significant cluster of marines, or a caded area will tend to die quickly on ship due to how chaotic it is, you cannot make the end game too obnoxious or esoteric or everyone’s just gonna get lurker or warrior’d to death sitting in a hallway trying to dive through the wiki to figure out what to do
keep it simple stupid, especially since any given MT/Comtech could be dead dead dead or a complete coward or afk when hijack happens
But its already pretty obnoxious, where xenoes have to rush every single pump to make it so marines don’t get that guaranteed evac. Trying to make it less obnoxious by having it so you don’t get 25% fuel in the span of 1 minute would be fair.
Its not like marines are running out of people to fix said APCs, and the resources are plenty. And you don’t even need all of the pumps to reach 25%, as you just need one or two hold outs, which happen anyway.