The only utilisation of the squads will be Comms / Sensors work, or minor flanks that could be assigned to other squads (without ASS) but those Squads’ SLs aren’t paying attention. Because…
Support Squads are weirdly castrated of all the firepower that Marines have been given over time to stop a single Ravager from wiping them out.
That seems like a solution, but requires a bold move. Such move is to even further set a squad’s role in stone by giving them unique equipment.
Nah, that would just create PFC+, every fragger would want to join the squad just to get this clearly superior gear and skill that is good to have in every situation.
I’m thinking about making one of the supports squads “long range”. Give them unique access (and ability to use) to altIFF 4x NVG scopes, maybe new bolt-action rifles, or just M4RAs. With a rule that most of the squad should take that gun to groundside, while few are alowed to be pure guards if they want to. Command knows from roundstart that they have a “reliable” squad that will bring a long range gun, which lets them create a strategy to use them as long range support. Maybe give the leader NVG Rangefinder too. Maybe if that leader orders “focus fire” altIFF scopes change for the duration of that order to regular IFF. Some other new gear could also be included. Like short range sensor tower pack. Nothing from those ideas here I think would benefit much your regular frontline PFC, so there is no incentive to take it and then join ungaball.
Then second from three support squads could get pretty much mandatory “heavy gear”. Even heavier armor, that slows down even more (we talking here very slow, with maybe an ability to move faster for few seconds), but protects from front pounces/grabs/prae kidnapping/etc and autosplints. Dedicated breachers pretty much. Helmet that can only be used with said armor that protects from one, or two facehugging attempts if the “visor” is down, but reduces vision, this on top of a bad weather, could push it even harder. Stronger lights on armor too, gauntlets that help a lot with hand fractures, special boots that make weeds not slow you down at all (but can only be used with that armor, so you are already slow, you are just not crawling on weeds). Weakness of those guys is acid.
Or maybe a CBRN support squad, maybe balanced legitemate weedkiller, maybe madatory flamethrowers, armor that protects against acid a lot, but is weak to melee brute.
But will devs go with that?
BTW, command can already do something like that, they could make echo squad and tell every volunteer to take mandatory flamer, or something. Nah, not off-meta enough, order another split drop.
Charlies whole thing was it was the flex squad that could be used for whatever.
Bravo did FOB, Alpha and Delta frontlined, Charlie did whatever.
Severe case of “old thing bad” with no good reason for it.
Honestly, I think a better twist would be to reduce the number of support squads down to 2 - OSCAR and KILO. Each support squad will get priority 2 SGs and 2 Specs and 2+ HMs. The vast majority of the riflemen/FTL’s will go to Alpha and Delta whose main job is to hold the frontline. That way the “support” squads will get an actual force multiplier from the SG’s/Specs and can get away with smaller squad numbers. This would also allow them to do more things other than boring ass coms/sensor duty such as flanking xenos.
I think this change could promote different tactics other than the boring murderball tactics. You really don’t need SG’s/Specs to hold the front and instead to be used for more flexible actions. It might even make a tactic such as hammer and anvil feasible where Alpha and Delta holds down the xenos and the support squads can come from behind and cut the xenos off.
Cause right now as mentioned by others, the support squads exist as glorified fireteams that have very little impact on the game meta.
Xeno faction is still purple and they also used to eat together before it was determined weird (rightfully so.) Lots of team bonding and bitterness for marinedevs to be had there.
So people aren’t using charlie as a support squad in the way you intend so your solution is to force what is effectively a personal preference selection down their throats? That’s literally how that comes across.
I’ll say this much. I think the squadman players have done a really good job at adapting to the new squad structure if anything. Appart from people being forced into bravo (IMO we should have communicated better that squad preferences got wiped/changed), I’ve largely seen people in support squads working as intended, and everyone in the support squads listening to orders and staying with their SLs.
If anything I only see command not effectively assigning them as it’s still commonplace to see command throw their hands in the air and just slap everyone on the front to unga, moreso on lowpop or when its an hour in and the frontlines are thinning. This personal fluff change wont do anything as if command isn’t effectively utilising support squads they’ll do the same to kilo and oscar.
It makes no logical sense either. Why are we moving the C squad to the last unlocked just to spite the players of charlie
Hell, why did we call them Oscar and Kilo when we could have just used Echo and Foxtrot, and then Golf, Hotel. As I heard someone else say, admittedly oscar and kilo are names that roll off the tongue easier, but IMO bravo sounds equally as weird as a name as Golf and Hotel.
EDIT: I have no idea why the text for this subheading is weird. Theres no extra characters for it to do that.
On the topic of A.S.S.
I might suggest a form of “return to lobby” in the squad preference menu if you don’t get slotted into one of your earlier squad preferences.
Maybe you want to play as a Squad Leader, but only for Oscar, Kilo or Charlie. So you set those three squads as your top three preferences, and for your fourth preference you slot a ‘return to lobby’ or something.
I feel something like this would instantly resolve any issues people have with wanting to roll for a specific squad but not wanting to risk getting thrown into a squad they absolutely do not want to play
(inb4 this is impossible code wise)
Generally agree with what a few others have said and what’s proposed here. It’s nice to think that these newer squad will be flexible and adaptive, but they serve really little purpose without having something to distinguish them. You have to give people a practical reason to see them as a distinct, specialized element and not just another squad of grunts to throw into the grinder. Giving them outright better equipment seems ill-advised because it’ll just make them meta-squads that anyone with any sense will go for since then they’re just better than going any other squad. Giving them access to gear that’s a step in between standard issue and what specs get sounds solid to me.
If I were to look at the idea Cabal’s got here, I’d say maybe something like that and the squad can vote on what their unit is specialized in (either mechanically or just the SL selects it and it’s strongly advised they ask their squad about it)? Having them have a fixed predefined role does seem to be counterintuitive to the aim of having them being an unknown element, but having a consistent style and general capability would make things easier for command to understand and easier possibly for a new player to make sense of. CRBN squad especially would go pretty hard aesthetically, and would have a fairly clear niche of being the ones to clear weeds and deny area to the xenos but being relatively ill-equipped to engage in direct combat defensively or offensively. Other things that come to mind are just sort of formalisations of things you do see done with fireteams or Echo into full dedicated roles like a mortar team or recon unit.
At the end of the day, the overall game does not reward splitting off groups of marines. This is not and has not been an issue with squads, leadership, culture, or anything else. It is a GAMEPLAY issue, and it has been present for AGES. Many many XOs, COs, and SLs have tried to split off groups for sidemissions, flanks, ect., and more often than not it leads to an automatic xeno major. If the queen catches a group of marines alone, they get wiped, and xenos get 8 larva for it. There’s also often very little that a small squad can accomplish. Roundstart you can get comms and power online which is important, and on certain maps you can grab sensors, but we already had intel for those tasks, and the limiting factor has never been organizational issues, the limiting factor is that if those marines get found by xenos, they are GONE and xenos are rewarded immensely.
I will say that I think the new squads are soul, but I really hope that we aren’t planning to force CIC and SLs to try to use them in the way intended by the devs, and that instead we look at gameplay overhauls to reward splitting up marines instead of “deathball go north to hive”.
Part of the issue is how overpowered the ungaball is, especially if marines decide to burn AP ammo upfront. Xenos have frankly been castrated of any answers to the deathball push with backlining being killed after the tunnel/burrower nerf and frontliners (aside from the ever overpowered Ravager of course) being little more than frail bullet sponges that have to run after just a few shots and have all the damage output of a damp noodle.
But because the Ungaball is so overpowered, not doing the Ungaball may as well amount to throwing the round because the one thing the xenos have left is being able to pick marines apart when they’re in detached groups. So, the ungaball remains the primary, secondary, and tertiary best strats compared to doing literally anything else and deviating from it may as well amount to tossing marines to the xenos like lambs to the wolves.
A.S.S might work if the game’s balance were reverse with low quality hordes of xenos against a small force of powerful marines that can hold out against the incoming tide a la Dark Descent, but instead we have a small number of frankly mediocre xenos against a horde of powerful marines with the one caveat being that marines can’t really do anything if they’re in smaller numbers and some xenos closes the distance, so it’s best not to give the xenos that opportunity and just keep reusing the nigh invincible deathblob which makes the squad rework pointless.
Like others have said, it’s reinventing the wheel without addressing any of the issues for WHY the game is like this right now. This isn’t yet another xeno vs marines balance thread, but the game rarely deviates from ‘ungaball to victory versus desperate screecapping until the marines run out of steam’ until whichever side can do their strategy better wins. So really, without addressing how each round is more or less the exact same strategy every single time because of the fundamental balance of the game as it is now, this rework is frankly pointless. The new fancy squads with their specialized roles just don’t matter when all that the marines should be doing is blobbing up and diving into the caves under the effects of a frankly absurd amount of drugs.
In short; they have to basically rebalance the whole game so that more strategies are viable for A.S.S to ever be a worthwhile inclusion, and rebalances take so long that it would frankly be years before it could be so.
if you give xenos the tools to counter the ungaball that just means the marines can’t do anything, since the reason why ungaball exists is that smaller groups of marines fold like wet paper to xeno attacks
The counter to the ungaball is flanking it instead of taking it head on, which is working very effectively recently now that it’s actually being done.
Marines also have narrow combat width - you can have 80 marines and only 4 of them can shoot anything at a time; hence fights always stalling out at chokepoints - and marines also get friendly fire in close quarters with each other.
The only actual advantage the ungaball provides is the ability to get back up and fight after being taken down by a xeno instead of being overrun and permad/capped; which is where smaller squads falter. An 8 man squad is often little different in effective firepower from the ungaball (sans specs), but once 2 die, there are no replacements, it’s a challenge to revive, and the squad quickly collapses thereafter, whereas the ungaball can push to get bodies back and has enough security to keep medics safe.
If we had permadeath for marines for example, I think the win rate would immediately go 95% xeno favoured as there would no longer be any benefit from the mass/security an ungaball provides.
Might sound strange coming from a Charlie Main, but… I actually like the new support squads. Yeah, it’s a little jarring waking up in Red — or more recently Yellow, since the constant switching keeps wiping my preferences — but overall, the smaller, more manageable squads just feel good. I’d honestly love to see them stick around.
That said, I know we already have fireteams that are supposed to fill a similar niche, but let’s be real — most SLs barely touch them beyond setting the medic as FTL so we know where the heals are.
That’s why I really liked what ComradeKiwi said about making support squads more specialized. Right now they’re just three extra rifle squads with no real personality, and they don’t have the firepower or tools to hold comms/sensors, secure a mini-FOB, or protect their sacred mid-round Epic Dance Battle.
Here’s my pitch: give each support squad a “Squad Kit.”
Think of it like a squad-wide specialty that shapes what they do that round. It could be chosen a few ways:
Command assigns it at round start.
SL picks it, kind of like how players choose specs.
Randomly assigned at server start for chaos (the fun kind).
Some rough examples off the top of my head:
MASH Team – Opens up multiple medic slots for the squad, spawns extra shovels, sandbags, and razorwire so they can set up a forward triage post. Maybe even give the riflemen some light medic abilities so they feel like part of the team instead of just tagging along with the medics.
Defense Squad – More engineers, maybe a special kit that lets them deploy a guard tower or an M2C with a unique graphic. Everyone in the squad could be trained on M2Cs, and the towers would be stationary so they can’t be dragged to the front but give the squad a fighting chance when holding an objective.
Drone Squad – Inspired by Aliens: Dark Descent. The squad gets 2–3 remote drones that anyone can control, but the operator has to stand still while piloting. Drones can be shot down by xenos, and if they are, they stay offline until someone retrieves and repairs them. Perfect for scouting and spooking Lurkers.
Mine-Laying Team – AKA “The Boys with the Toys.” Their kit gives them claymores, fire mines, star-shell trip mines that light up the area, maybe even Tesla-style mines that stun/slow xenos. Give them a special backpack so they can carry more mines and really make the AO a nightmare for xeno.
Artillery Support Team – A squad of FTLs with extra Laser Designators, JTAC comms, and radio backpacks. Basically the “please make the sky explode over there” squad.
Mortar Team – Spawns with a mortar and limited shells, and all members get mortar training. This would probably need balance tweaks since mortars can either make or break a round, but seeing a small dedicated mortar team work together would be pretty cool.
None of these ideas are perfect, but that’s the point — this is just to get the ideas flowing.
TL;DR:
Support squads are good. Keep them. Make them special or unique so they have a real purpose beyond “miscellaneous tasking.”
oof didn’t realize how long this post was gonna be, sorry bout that.
That’s why A.S.S is frankly doomed to fail in my eyes. The ungaball needs to not be so blatantly overpowered so that there’s an actual advantage to the marines splitting up and giving the xenos smaller chunks to work at, but neither should marines be unable to do anything else because the one place the xenos still have any strength left is the good ol ‘divide and conquer’ if such tactics were tried with the game as it is now.
Such changes to fundamental parts of the game would again, likely take years to redesign, test, implement, and get what will likely be negative feedback from the community on since it would be sweeping buffs and nerfs to both teams that shake the game possibly to its very core.
But in the meantime, should such things ever actually happen, the system is just pointless for the game’s current iteration since it’s just gonna be everyone except for FOB squad dive the hive again and again and again.
Then anyone got any idea how to give xenos ways to deal with ungaball that won’t be good against smaller groups of marines?
It is easy to point fingers at ungaball, like it is a strategy/exploit marines found and refuse to let go. They are forced into ungaball.
The “natural” state of marines isn’t ungaball. Marines are nudged into forming an ungaball due their experience and monkey brain mentality. The “natural” state marines shows up when perceived danger disappears, which is usually at the end of the round, when there is three xenos left. Then everyone splits up into small groups, or even going on solo, this is pure ungabrain at work, optimised for the most ammount of fun in the shortest possible time.
I don’t see any real way to nerf ungaball (or buff xenos against it) and buff small marine groups (or nerf xenos against them). Scaled up rav enrage for every xeno? Introducing Xeno CAS forcing marines to split, but nerfing xenos otherwise?
Every isolated small marine group will be discovered, reported and then destroyed/capped.
That is why support squads should be designed for indirect support to the ungaball, but not sitting in the ungaball themselfs, such as long-range special forces squad I proposed.
Ungaball’s roots run too deep for any indirect change to fix it. ASS isn’t making it worse, so it shouldn’t be impacted by it. I’m afraid it is as deep as core SS13 mechanics that are impossible to change.
If you don’t do anything to it and simply force marines to split because something, or otherwise they lose even with ungaball, then you will quickly realise you have to nerf xenos anyway.
The ungaball was never something marines chose to do - we’ve tried for years to split squads and have just alpha hold one spot or charlie on another, we’ve tried flanks and maneuvers - it did work to some degree years ago but xenos have gotten stronger since.
Trying to look at it from the perspective of systems (or systemic incentive) and not individual balance cases:
Small squads need to be more efficient than large blobs.
An already existing design implementation of this is friendly fire - it’s the reason only 5 people in the ungaball can fight at once as the rest can’t shoot through their team mates. So a small squad of 5 marines is maximally combat effective and utilizes their combat width efficiently.
The problem is that a small squad scales worse when it comes to logistics, pushing, and especially, casualties. The medic can’t get people up any faster or safer than in an ungaball, the squad can’t resupply any faster or safer than in an ungaball, and a small squad of marines is not meaningfully harder to detect than the ungaball is.
This is the core problem - Asymmetric scaling - to resolve to make small squads useful
Map Objectives
I think this is an element that could help - 5-8 objectives on the map that marines want to secure; we sort of have this in some ways, but it’s not really formalized. Comms and Sensors are good examples, and in some maps we have medical/surgery tables, or access locks with turrets. Small things like this give marines a reason to spread out, but the current inability of small groups to hold ground has made small objectives untenable to hold/bother with.
When it comes to specific cases of asymmetric scaling, I’m really struggling with ideas that are going to help a small squad more than an ungaball.
What I can think of:
Universal defibs - Anyone can use defibs, but the effective drugs, surgeries, etc. still relies on the medic. This would enable a small squad to keep themselves going even if their medic is killed, but without making the whole squad into medics.
Replenishable sentries - Something an engineer can put down to buy time/safety and which can be abandoned without severe cost. It helps improve squad strength/resilience without adding people. Just let the engineer replace lost sentries or recover and repair them instead of permanently losing them.
Resupply drops - I think this is planned anyway? Something like a small limited drop pod for certain supplies that can be called down like the ASAB (or w/e) beacon on whiskey outpost.
Squad Leader passive Aura - As long as the squad leader is close by, everyone in the squad has a passive buff to endurance or accuracy or something.
Throwable IFF mines - Something like an incendiary mine that you can just toss and it’ll auto-trigger when a xeno comes close. Add IFF so if a marine is next to it, then it wont trigger. This would make it more effective/dangerous when fighting a small group that might hide a bunch of them around the room, whereas ungaball it’ll never trigger because there’s too many marines.
Basically just trying to think of things that will help a small squad more than it’ll help an ungaball.
The problem with everything you just posted is…
If marines get all of that, why wouldn’t they ungaball harder? Like actually just bunch up with all their improved things and ta-da!
I don’t really have a clue on how such a change towards the meta (which have been that way since forever) would be.
The simplest way, would be to make marines stronger, akin PVE marines and low in numbers…
But at that point, it isn’t CM PVP.
Why would you skin me that’s fucked up………
Marines would need additional off-screen trackers like a scream getting an arrow pointed to it, or every oorah/whistle making a directional indicator on the edge of the screen.
Everything is very near-sighted, imagine needing binoculars to see from your garage to your house. Xenos have a lot of tools to deal with the nature of the display, like observing other xenos.
Plus I like disability options for deaf people.
This is a perennial topic, but force concentration was always a core tenet of military tactics. In CM the ungaball by itself is not all-powerful because of the chokes. Xenos want to go narrow, marines want to go wide(er). Flanks are just a way of going wider.
Now as for the A.S.S. itself, well, everybody already knows my opinion - this is probably not the worst change in CM, but one of the most toxic ones. People in this thread keep struggling to find a way how those Support squads would differ from the normal ones, so let me spell it out:
Don’t @ at me with “but if people coordinate, it’s fun”. See, how I said “intended”? Yes, you can use those squads as additional units in much the same manner the normal squads are, but it’s not their intended use and those smaller squads don’t have any advantage over the normal ones.
So, if this getting forced upon us, one thing that I at least wish is the checkbox to opt in or out from rolling those “special” squads and only roll for normal squads.
And, finally, for fairness sake, there’s probably a way to make those squads work in a non-toxic manner. Just not only make them an opt-in roll, but also enforce a higher RP\cohesion standard for every single marine rolling for the special squad(including the SL). But this of course would go against the “fuck off CIC, we’re solo flanking the hive” intent for the existence of those squads. Plus it would add up on the admin work.
P.S. Charlie would rise again. Grapes, remember to eat you breakfast and stay weird!