I got a note:
The note is : Noted for Rule 5, Mechanical Exploits | Told not to make giant piles of glass as defenses
I’m a CE main. I probably have the most CE hours. I can make glass work decently well as a defensive measure. There are very specific circumstances to make it work well though. Both glass panes & reinforced glass panes take one xeno hit to break(afaik, this is just from observation not testing). That means to make a glass ‘barricade’ that blocks ten hits, you need to place ten panes, layers, of glass.
My argument is, glass is really shitty. It’s tedious to destroy for the xenos when so much glass is placed, sure- but you only have so much glass. In said round, I had 50 glass- I used 30 glass to block a single tile. See picture for the set up: four regular walls diagonally, with a folding barricade blocking the open tile, then with 30 glass blocking it. It takes very specific set ups to make glass work defensively- first off, anything that can destroy regular walls and even rwalls can just bypass it. But, consider if I needed to make it wider- I had 50 glass, so I could have made it 50 thick. If I wanted to do the same across two tiles, they’d have to be only 25 thick, and so on. So I HAVE to block all the other tiles with walls- so this set up costs 28 metal, plus 30 glass to set up, minimally. Then, if the wrong xeno shows up, the whole set up is nullified anyway. Finally, the only reason I did this set up at all was that I completely ran out of metal & plasteel- so I disassembled some nearby walls for girders, and deconned to build the walls, then used the glass as a desperation set up to finish it.
Then there’s the biggest weakness of glass which makes it almost unusable during most rounds- this set up totally worked for quite awhile, but as more xenos came, more marines came. And they saw the glass. And when marines see glass, and realize that it’s potentially in their way, what do they do? It doesn’t matter if 0 xenos are around, they sit there and shoot every last pane and go ‘wtf was that’ and walk off. And trust me- I get it! I’m using a very niche set up, I totally expect this.
Finally, like- layering panes of glass like this has been intended since Baystation times. IRL, if you want to make stronger glass, like say bullet proof glass- they put extra materials in between the layers, but essentially it’s just many, many layers of glass.
Note: There is one actual exploit-y aspect to this- the red line going diagonal past the glass line in the picture. You can’t shoot past the glass without breaking it, however the game lets you flame past it. I’m not 100% sure if this is intentional behavior- for example, boiler gas & smoke both ignore secured glass and pass right through, and I am pretty sure that’s intentional, but not sure if that behavior is supposed to extend to an incinerator.
Other than that, imo this is not an exploit- tedious & annoying to deal with, but an intended mechanic.
