thwomper has yet to comment on the hive siege trivialization because he knows im right
The shotgun I can’t even remember the name of (xm51?) was good, it was also needlessly and relentlessly nerfed until it wasn’t good anymore, but then just as it stopped being worth using, we got the brute that was better in most ways that mattered.
Marines need some ranged wall clearing tools, xenos players obviously do not want marines to have effective wall clearing tools and it feels like this battle comes out not in the game but in the development and balance - Even when we had something completely balanced, and the shotgun absolutely WAS, it wasn’t good enough.
The brute is a more overall interesting piece of equipment than the shotgun because its cooler and it’s an opportunity cost - brute or sentry, not both. Except sentries are so nerfed into the ground with half of them borderline useless or locked behind extra costs that it’s not even an opportunity cost anymore. Brute rockets help a push through heavy fortifications; sentries just die in five slashes and mostly do nothing at all, which shifts a lot of people towards using a brute, which saturates it in the fights.
If I were to balance this out, I’d be buffing sentries and reducing brute ammo supply (pretty sure the latter has in fact already happened), but I can’t help but feel like nothing ever being good enough for xeno players resulted in this state of affairs to begin with.
And the shotgun? Well it doesn’t need to come back unless the Brute goes, but it sure would be nice to have some kind of accessible wall-breaking explosive for busting down large swathes of reinforced walls around the FOB or held locations; the shotgun was ok (but not good) at this. Something less like C4/breaching charges and more like thermite and detcord - more time consuming, but also more economical and available.
I miss when you could truly have a comeback from nothing. The new additions to speedup rounds have had the knockon effect of preventing the losing side from having a comeback story.
Xenos used to be able to comeback from 3 xenos to a round win. Marines used to be able to break extended sieges through the pure attrition late game and go on to wipe the hive from what was seen as a losing situation.
Nowadays if a hive gets down to 3 players, they will be quickly put down by sensors exposing them and brutes mangling whatever defences they have left. Xenos will just be given a king for holding two comms towers which shatters any chance for marines holding cadelines. Nuke is possibly the worst example of all this, it truly is disheartening to be on the receiving end of even if it is useful in ending the round.
While some might like shorter rounds, I feel like something has been lost achieving it.
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I would rather the BRUTE than the absurd bullshit that was the XM51, BRUTE feels much more fun and engaging.
IMO scarcity should be increased so it’s closer to BCs, very limited resource that’s also powerful to compensate for it’s much faster rate of wall-demolishing relative to the XM51 (which would clear literally everything with infinite ammo but at a significantly slower rate )
In addition the wind-up time should be longer so xenos have more time to respond with oppressors or something (the counterplay is to murder or cap the immobile CT)
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People really oversell XM51. In fact XM51 was only good against actual walls, it was rather (intentionally) weak against resin structures. XM51 never felt like an issue to me as a xeno, and as a CT I felt XM51 was only really good to clear actual buildings. Like you could have a decent impact by breaking walls in a-block, but that was pretty much it. In most other cases you would just get out-built. Because unlike BRUTE, you would be able to break one wall at a time. Probably XM51 wasn’t perfect and maybe deserved nerfs, but saying “at least BRUTE is better for gameplay than XM51” is just insane to me.
Please teach me the way of capping/killing a CT on the edge of the screen? XM51 had the MAXIMUM range of 3 (if you took the stock everyone was ditching, so really it was 2). That made you vulnerable to basically every ability in xeno kit. This is simply incomparable to BRUTE. Scarcity doesn’t fix anything really, even if it was 1 rocket per CT, it still would be a mini-OB you can use in caves (and also next to the core) to clear structures.
Also, despite what some people say, BRUTE doesn’t require coordination. At all. You don’t even need people to clear the line of sight, since BRUTE is IFF. It’s too easy to use and too safe, for the insane results it provides.
I get that BRUTE is cool. In fact, I agree, it’s entertaining to use. But it still impacts the game in a negative way that is being simply dismissed. It’s really “style over substance”: let’s not think what it does, just see how cool it looks! You can see this principle applied to many features added recently. Yeah, I refer to multiz. Who cares that it plays like trash? You can shoot xenos from above!!! Ugh.
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@SolidFury
If you want to portray BRUTE to be trapper-equivalent then make it deal large amounts of damage to xenos on hit (right now it does almost 0 damage to mobs), add a scope to it, and make it have infinite rockets.
@ihatethisengine
blud, multi-z has been something pushed by staff, not demanded by marines to “shoot xenos from above wooo”
multi-z barely works/doesn’t work with CM’s gameplay and negatively impacted performance and so far theres very little to show for it
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What is a proper channel?
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This isn’t true, a range of 3 is absolutely wild- I’m fairly certain it was closer to 4 or 5 from memory of using it. You didn’t need to hug anything, you could literally just fire from range.
As for the XM51 being vulnerable to xenos, it’s only very slightly so. The primary target of the XM51 is doors- one shot, one kill. Resin walls? Waste of ammo honestly, but that isn’t much of an issue considering doors are everywhere (so you can bypass defences with one shot anyway). As such, you’d just run within 5 tiles, shoot, and run away 0.5 milliseconds later, was there much counterplay against that? I don’t believe the XM51 was oversold, it was absolutely a broken piece of kit that made resin doors effectively be thin air, good for chasing and also slow breaching. I’d hardly call erasing entire buildings off the map using a single PFC ‘decent’ impact, it was absurdly good against anything that wasn’t resin walls.
I agree on this point, BRUTE ought to lack IFF and be able to hit marines (but of course, not do much damage to xenos as usual). There’s significant wind up and an obvious laser, it does not require IFF whatsoever and forcing a clear line of fire would make it easier for the BRUTE user to be targeted by xenos.
I suppose the range could also be nerfed to 5 tiles or less, as opposed to the current 7.
Hard disagree, scarcity is absolutely a valid balancing tool. I get you’re using hyperbole here, but 1 rocket per CT is like… nothing, at that point people wouldn’t really bother using it at all. I don’t think disregarding scarcity is useful, as commonly it’s the only mechanic holding marines back from just using the american doctrine of ‘flatten everything before we even set foot near the place’. I mean… scarcity has always been the first go-to balancing slider used by game devs when they have powerful tools.
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I urge you to download an older build and actually test it. Without the stock you literally needed to hug the wall for maximum damage. With two tiles between you and a wall the damage would fall off significantly, and you would need more shots. With three tiles between you and a wall the damage would become non-existent. Stock gave basically +1 effective range and burst fire mode (which was pretty broken), but people didn’t use stock much because the gun wouldn’t fit in the belt with the stock.
And you don’t see a difference? XM51 was mainly effective against resin doors (the role that masterkey still fits perfectly), while BRUTE is effective against everything: walls, clusters, cores, caps. And again, at least you need to approach the door, even if for 0.5 second. In combat, on (hive)weeds, in a choke that’s a huge risk.
It is a tool, not a silver bullet. Vulture, for example, wouldn’t be exactly balanced even if it had its scarcity slider set to max. Even with a single bullet it still would be brokenly op, lack counterplay, unfair, etc etc. Why OB is balanced? Not just because you have only two shells, but because it’s fairly trivial to dodge, there is a huge unavoidable CD, it’s really risky to use, it requires (ideally if you don’t cheese it with math) coordination, etc etc.
I mean, yeah, this is how I imagine a more balanced version of BRUTE. Make it so breaking line of sight (laser) cancels or delays the windup, that feels like something, right?
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All valid points, yeah. I’m honestly too lazy to test out the XM51 to see if falloff is real (I legitimately didn’t know it had falloff, I always assumed it had effective range = 5+), but yeah the arguments I made missed nuance which you addressed pretty well with say, the example of OBs. My point was more that scarcity was valid as a balancing tool, but I realise now that your perspective was more along the lines that powerful things require a multitude of limiting factors which include but are not limited to scarcity, which kind of just makes my argument pointless.
I dunno how this would go but I assume a xeno running out to cuck the laser every so often would probably be funny and feel better for xenos (considering if you run out to cuck the laser, you put yourself at at risk and people can use it to bait you out to kill with HEDP/rocket).
I wonder if the alt-IFF code might be able to be adapted for this???
EDIT: wtf hate why aren’t you in the CM discord anymore how am I supposed to bitch at you about coding now
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You’re focusing on differences no one is arguing about and completely missing the point.
I’m not saying the BRUTE and Trapper are or should be identical.
The example comparison is only about this:
Both allow long-range fortification removal with very little risk or counterplay.
That’s what creates the snowballing and makes defensive play feel pointless.
And yeah, there are other tools on both sides that do similar things in different ways, each with their own trade-offs. But the mindset of…
“Well, the other side has Y, so we can never look at Z!”
…is just a race to the bottom. That kind of tribalism which we see constantly in deadchat and discord doesn’t actually solve anything. It just keeps unhealthy mechanics around longer than they should be.
See the forest, not just the trees, my friend.
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Brute is already merged?
on topic of xm51, don’t need to get old versions since it is still in the game and you can just spawn it. Some ERT still got it too
You can shoot with stock/no stock at a distance of 3 tiles between you and a structure. There is no difference between shooting from 3 tiles or right in front thick resin walls, it goes down in 3 shots.
The ironic thing about brute is that it does not help that much in the real chokes, because xenos don’t need to build them up much. They just use T3s there to pin the marine push.
Instead it’s making any kind of open ground defense even harder for xenos and it was already super hard. So this leads to xenos playing even more around chokes.
It’s kind of an eternal choose your poison problem - if you trivialize all the xeno defense tools, then try to somehow trivialize\remove chokes, you just inevitably end up with xenos that are overpowered at a baseline.
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can confirm what sg says, xenos these days are either flank pushing or holding chokes with indestructable walls, open ground is for skirmishers and backliners only
I think with “hardchokes” (such as caves with indestructible walls) it does have a lesser impact, although once the structures are down, building up the “lost” position is extremely risky, due to having to be one tile off the location to build, and due to the vulnerable nature of builders, one stun, grenade or high DPS hits usually can result in a death, for something that can be cleared again just as quick.
With “soft chokes” (such as Lambda labs internal corridors,) it can actually widen the structure, turning a 2-tile width corridor in to a 4-6 tile width corridor (iirc),
Open ground is usually lost pretty quickly in this “iteration” of CM, and it just compounds on the issue it already has.
Since I came back to CM recently and have been playing xeno again. I think current Brute and sensors are the most egregious and frustrating things to play against as xeno.
The reasons why brute is such has already been stated more than once on this thread but sensors in my opinion have almost the same negative impact if not worse than brute
While they were first added (to my knowledge) to make delays less of a thing, it has ended up being an incredible advantage for marines and simply shuts down certain xeno hive playstyles and comeback ability. For me, xeno queen used to be one of the most fun command roles due to the different tactics you could try to employ: fake hives, drawing out marines in caves (map dependent) to then hit their overextended supply line, mobile hives following the queen hitting marines from different directions and more. All of these playstyles are now a thing of the past. What have sensors done is force xenos to now play on a single predictable objective every single time if they do not wish their every movements called out by CIC (I know some people will say “it’s only useful if CIC actually is competent!!!” but I don’t think this has any merit, yea no shit something is useless when not used).
Concerning comeback ability. What often happens now, even if xenos successfully evacuate the hive with minimal losses (which they may be forced to now thanks to tools like brute), they are almost always unable to take a breather, regroup or even flank because the marine force will always only be a short distance away. I had several rounds where I was playing a queen myself, when the hive was still strong where we just weren’t able to accomplish any flanks because any movement would be immediately called out by a CIC announcement.
There are certainly other factors and tools that have made playing xenomorph quite an uphill battle, but brute and sensors have for me certainly reduced my enjoyment of both playing xenos and research roles, the latter being unfun and pointless on short round. I do not have statistics but from the games I have recently played but it appears that the amount of marine stomps are now a common occurrence.
Concerning sensors, if the reason of their inclusion is truly to help end the round by spotting the remaining few xeno players, I believe sensors should be outright removed and replaced by the same system xenos have to detect the last remaining marines.
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I had hoped to get a screenshot of an engineer 7 tiles away from resin walls in the middle of the ungablob, behind one or two marines, to ask how to kill or cap them. Alas, the allure of gameplay pulled me out of my observer roleslot.
Sensors being strong is a fair take IMO, one of xenos greatest powers used to be winning the information game. If marines wanted to extended FOB siege, it was 70% of the time cause xenos overpressured and made them feel weak.
NVGs were also super rare, you couldn’t just binoc and see that the choke is being held by a single drone and T3. You had to commit time to test the defenses and see how many xenos fought back, or risk the blind push.
It blows my mind how many marines just, walk in the dark with no suit light, people used to be scared of that stuff. Not packing flares meant 3 less tiles before that warrior was ontop of you!
I do kinda like LV sensors though. A diveable objective behind the hive, with the lakehouse being a natural bunker if the engi wants to hide out, that gives marines a major advantage feels like what MOBA wanted to be.
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