Static comms in 2024

Development Ideaguys
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Hi, just a yearly salt post about the static comms being the worst thing still present in CM. In addition I also have a somewhat comprehensive proposal as to how to finally get rid of them. Here’s what I think should be done:

  • Marines always have comms and don’t need to set em up.
  • Comms towers, when held now give marines a passive intel income. Though maybe that income needs to be separated into a separate type of points. Thus marines would have to make a decision whether they’re holding the comms for bonuses and\or the nuke. So, more variety for command in terms of strategy. This also gives more flexibility to the mapping team, because now you no longer have to have 1 comms tower by each LZ and can make each map a bit more unique in terms of objectives.
  • Xenos, now that they have the endgame backend, get a comms disruption ability that disrupts the marine comms for X minutes. Thus instead of punishing the marines when they are already on the back foot, we can punish them when they are winning, like during the hive pushes.
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ok so youre proposing making fob cadehugging even stronger? Not only do marines get extra intel from comms (for free, i might add), but also always enabled comms as a baseline?
And the generous xeno buff to compensate is literally just disabling these comms temporarily?
mods, ban this man

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I like comms being an objective.
It equalizes the playing field in a way that encourages backliners.

I don’t think there is need for deployable comms anymore.

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4

Comm towers already do this

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Even the porta comms required set up.

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What I want is to actually end the FOB cadehugging meta, by making it easier for marine leadership to organize the defense and thus make marines the attacking faction again, just as it was always intended and that way it is more enjoyable for everyone involved. Yes, xenos would again have to bleed out marines before attacking the FOB. Comms disruption is just something that would help them with that. Obviously as it stands it’s still a marine buff and some other tweaks may be required to balance it out.

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I feel like this idea has some merit and is good food for thought.

I’d like to see the removal of one comms tower with the remaining tower made more centralized/contested.

This idea would see the return of deployable comms with some changes. I’d like to see it that the deployable comms couldn’t be set up in either LZ and had to have a set number of clear tiles kind of like tents do. Additionally, the comms couldn’t be set up on water. If nothing else I think this would provide that marines with a bit more flexibility and make backlineing a bit more interesting as you had to not only locate but figure out how to attack varied comms locations.

I however do disagree with always on comms. I think that the xeno’s ability to kill marines comms is one of their strongest abilities and having no comms is crippling thus making holding comms paramount.

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By giving marines Comms always on you are encouraging them to sit inside the FOB.

Comms right now is the only incentive making the marines to leave FOB cades. They need comms to organize. Thus they will leave the security of cades to get it.

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This is an absolutely correct thing to worry about. I just think that gimping communication in a game that’s all about communication is a terrible way to mitigate this. Instead, more refinement should be given to the xeno objectives\endgame, so that there’s always some pressure on marines to do something proactive and not just sit in the FOB.

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Sure…how about OBs located in some remote place of a map?
Or a blackbox that gives ASRS a permanent discount?
Or one that resets the cost of some of the techtrees?
Or one that increases the ammount of marines that Foxtrot awakens?

So many options.

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grafik
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Comms intel objective: “Am i a joke to you?”

Also, most of what you said is just doing the exact same thats already ingame. Just in an elaborate way. Road is diffrent, but goal is the same.

Using what recource? Royal Jelly? The thing thats harvested from xenos capping comms.
Making it have cooldown would just mean you have someone set a timer to press a button every x minutes, and comms is regularly off in waves. Wich sucks ever harder.

And using royal jelly would mean you need to cap comms, to be able to buy disabled comms for a limited time. Over stuff like king; Evo buff; larva; a lot of buffs in general.

Rule of thumb. Making something elaborate for the sake of it, always makes stuff suck balls.
You want to simplify game mechanics.
If you can simplyfy a game mecanic, you usually should as long as it doesnt take away from it.

But this is just jumping through hoops to gain a nerfed thing that already exist. I really dont see this working.

I agree it would be fun if we had more variation in objectives. But this aint it chief.
I would recomend you look into the repo instead. There are a LOT of scrapped or removed ideas for round objectives.

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Way to miss the forest for the trees. What I’m suggesting is a fundamental change that’s gonna untangle the comms towers from the comms itself and would just leave them as an optional objective for marines that gives marines something for holding them. The fact that it already gives some intel is absolutely irrelevant. Current intel alone is not worth holding the comms towers, so what I’m suggesting is giving an even bigger bonus, or maybe introducing a different resource that would be required for some things, like nuke. The ideal would be making comms tower holding only a situational thing, instead of an everyday chore.

The comms disruption thing, yes it’s going to take royal jelly and maybe we can give some free uses roundstart. This is a very secondary idea to the whole proposal, but the advantage is that it’s going to be a tactical mechanic that’s going to be actually useful exactly when the xenos need it, just as explained previously.

P.S. Regarding reintroducing portacomms, that’s absolutely fine by me too.

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No, i absolutly got what you meant.
I just focused on why its bad for xeno side. Something you didnt focus on, wich you said so yourself.

I just mainly adressed a problem, you didnt adress as much as it needs for this to work.

Your change would be a fundemantal change, yes… for marines.
Xenos would basicly interact 1:1 the same with communications just that their ability to disrubt enemy communication gets a major nerf.
Other then that, nothing changes. Still “cap comms, to stop marine communication”
The argument of “it’s a tactical mechanic” doesnt work, because the hinge of it being tactical is that xenos can disrubt xenos in important situations at will. Wich is a nice idea. But they could only do that realiably, even with a small ammount of starter jelly, while controlling comms.
Wich is the same requirment to disrubt comms rigth now, just with a better reward.

“Limited time ability that takes recources and objective controll” vs “quasi-permanent ability that takes objective controll”. Thats a nerf, not a more tactical version of it.

Same end state, just jumping through a lot of hoops.

For the changes to the marine side, you cant just dump more points into the intel economy and expect it to work out.
If comms where to only be there for intelpoints, they would 100% need to give more points.
but current point gain and tech tree pricing is set by overall avalibel points in the round.

So if you where to give comms more intel points, and thats it, you would mainly give marines a flat buff.
Its already not hard to hold comms for over 1/2 of the round for marines.
So its not a situational tecpoint increase, but a general one.
Giving marines

  1. Communication that cant be fully deactivated.
  2. A larger ammount of foxtrot/cas/OBs to be bougth. Aka, more power.

If you where to adjust other tecpoint sources and purchases acordingly to the newly introduced tecpoints, you will definitly cause 1 or more tec point sources to fall flat. After all, you will need to take the points the tower gives, from some other source.
And the best sources you can take points from without disrupting too much gameplay, would be xeno bodys and power gens. Wich both dont have the ammount of points you need to make comms tower worth while.
Wich means you will def have to take points from IOs.

Of course you can just say “Fuck it” and just give marines flat more points if they controll comms and xeno royal jelly gain ALSO a buff.
Honestly, that migth be the best way to make this work. But it can also have unvorseen consequences. So who knows.

Tl;dr:
Cool idea.
But if you want this to work, you need to not give xenos a big nerf, and deal with the large ammount of new marine tecpoints.

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Now you are being completely disingenous. How the fuck is making them stronger during defence breaking cadehug meta? What?

Temporary comms disruption is giving xenos an opportunity to silence comms while marines have comms secure. Thus making xenos stronger on defence.

You’re essentially curbing marine ability to end the fucking round by giving xenos an ez flank opportunity, and curbing xeno ability to finish off the FOB by making CAS & Mortar stronger (#1 Xeno killer during siege), owning to comms being always enabled outside of short intervals.

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This man clearly never plays marine.

Static comms are better than the only viable alternative, the portable comm unit.

Might I remind you that the portable only ever lived in the FOB and could be R-walled off, so it would literally never, ever, ever go down and when it did it’s to a borrower and very temporary.

If you want to complain about the passive intel gain do whatever you want I don’t care that’s not my concern. The only thing you have any right to cry about is perhaps the spawns of the comms unit.

This also dies on arrival because 1 comms unit should be relatively close to FOB to make it viable for marines to actually hold it. The 2nd comms unit is usually in bumfuck nowhere and gets a pittance for defences if any so like, genuinely what is your issue here, I don’t understand comms are fine where they are for the most part.

Take away the intel gain, sure.
If you make the spawns less generous for marines you’re just making the round more ass for those involved so like what’s your solution for something better?

Vagueries like: “So, more variety for command in terms of strategy. This also gives more flexibility to the mapping team, because now you no longer have to have 1 comms tower by each LZ and can make each map a bit more unique in terms of objectives.” don’t count.

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I never said it was not a nerf. But it’s also a tactical ability that can be pretty useful. Think of it this way: we don’t want any faction to be too strong. If xenos are sieging the FOB they’re already relatively stronger than the marines. And then we’re punishing the marines further by weakening their ability to coordinate.
With comms disruption being an ability, xenos could use it when marines are storming the hive. And if the marines are storming the hive, it means that they’re relatively stronger than the xenos. So instead of making already strong hives even stronger, we’re giving the weaker ones some more potential to survive longer. Hope that’s clear enough now.

You’re correct on this part. Basically we have 3 priorities here:

  1. No longer leaving marines without comms for like half of the round, that being during the FOB sieges.
  2. Not upsetting the balance of the game so much as to result in a marine speedrun meta.
  3. Keeping the objective-based gameplay for marines.

Now if it was up to me alone, I’d say screw 3 completely and lets remove the comms towers outright. But since the maintainer team believes(or used to believe) that objective-based gameplay is the future, we’d have satisfy that requirement too, somehow. So basically this proposal is a compromise and here we’re stuck between having to make the comms towers so useful for marines that they would want to hold onto them sometimes(not always), but not as useful as to let them do stuff like print Foxtrot every 10 minutes. One thing we can do is nerf the total intel gain on marines, as to make them rely on the comms towers more.

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I’m not being disingenuous, but yes, this is a somewhat counterintuitive approach. Just try to follow me here: We want to lower the number of FOB sieges by a significant amount. What are our options? The first option would be buffing xenos. But that’s night impossible, because the amount of content they get per year can be counted on a couple of fingers. And that content is usually nerfs. The second option would be nerfing CAS & Mortar. Again, almost a nonstarter because JTAC mafia is really strong. So the only remaining option is actually buffing marines during the FOB siege a little bit, as to make attacking the FOB somewhat harder. If it gets harder, xenos would start letting marines out of the FOB more and we’ll have dchat crying about cavehugging instead.

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If you want to genuinelly remove FOB sieges, you need to encourage Marines to actually want to leave the FOB. Meaning you need to add a very strong incentive for Marines to leave the FOB.

Securing communications does not really accomplish this, if evidenced by how many FOB sieges we have. Furthermore, the CIC can just continue to send communications via announcements during a siege to coordinate the Marines.

The King somewhat encourages this, but in reality, it just sets a 1 hour 40 minute to 2 hour time limit until the xenos get to stomp the cades, and still have a fair chance of the King dying to the FOB.

Perhaps if the victory conditions of the planet were not only just removing the Marines from the planet but the xenos accomplishing an objective that, if met, will force the Marines to retreat from the planet. So the xenomorphs can either break the FOB to force a retreat, or complete a objective that will force the Marines to retreat. In this case, you’d be forcing the Marines to fight outside the FOB instead of using the FOB to attrition Xenos to death, which is a optimal strategy.

2 Likes
19

Easy. Remove FOB and Bravo.
Also, xeno buffs stillc suck.
Evo most useful. Next one 5 larbas. Damage.
And defences. 1 armor point for rouny. Wow so big. If it not solid zero.
And all of it temporary.
Damage-Evo-Armor can go away. Larbas can die

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FOB sieges happen more often because xenos are not letting marines out of the FOB, even though realistically they probably should. Marines deciding to camp in the FOB for the entire round is still a possible problem, but it does not seem to happen as much.

I think this is a key thing to emphasize here. Taking out marine comms does not make taking the FOB much easier for xenos. It just makes it harder for marines to relieve that siege and way less enjoyable.

With regard to the xeno endgame… Well, I was the person who originally suggested the previous permanent larva drop thing. The problem with it was that it was a bit too strong and resulted in xenos locking marines in the FOB and then having the permanent number replenishment to sustain the seige. The current endagame stuff on the other hand is a bit too weak and xenos are getting attritioned just a tad too much now. But the pendulum swings are smaller and smaller and I think we’re getting much closer to nailing this stuff right.

If xeno endgame was up to me, I’d readd the larva drop, at 1:30 or 2:00, make it absolutely passive, not requiring any towers, only a queen, but make it around 2 times smaller than it was. I think this would be enough of an encouragement for marines to not FOB camp and either nuke it efficiently or chase down the xenos already.

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