ok I get what you mean now. I think that's the trick to everything is balancing things where marines cant overwhelm to easily at the start but marines still have a chance (but a fleeting one) the longer the game goes. Right now its too easy to meta rush AND marines win the longer the game goes. So both are out of wack.
The other main problem is when the meta rush is stopped and punished if marines just fob and hide for 30 minutes tehn they get reinforcements/better tank guns/more crap from asrs/ect that makes up for their failed meta rush. So its like why not meta rush if you can recover from a failure. Just makes it more optimal to meta rush.
With all of this said the reason why all of this happened is A: People bitching about being out of the round and the round taking too long and xenos bitching about evolve and age taking too long (I just wanted young to not be useless) and B: the round being sped up to alleviate that.
Those are the two things that threw everything out of wack. It made marines have a smaller window to win before xenos got stronger (faster evo/maturation) thus making meta rush more optimal. It made the devs add a lot of shit that makes the game less lethal which made xenos attritioning marines way harder. So now marines win long games and meta rush is still more viable because killing xenos before they get going is still the optimal strategy. (also factor in things like allowing earlier drops/fog holes/fog just dropping faster period/whatever else im forgetting that made meta rushing even easier)
Then we need mechanic that makes marines stronger over time that is not DEFCON.
In my opinion the best solution would be abilities boosts with time spent planetside, time spent with benos on screen and shoots that hit benos.
Like if marine spends 1.5 hour planetside in fob, then he gets +1 to Endurance, but he can gain this faster if he had living beno on his screen for combined time of 5 minutes for example.
Marine gets +1 to whatever gun he is primarly using and have used it effectively (time spent planetside +Hit on benos, or something like that).
The list can go on: Screech resistance (not immunity) after being affected several times to prevent mindless beno spamming it, neuro/shell shock resistance (Endurance does that).
Also I still don't think so that marines can recover from failed "Meta-Rush" as it requires "va banque" approach. Lose one squad and marines have to lose, they can't win, no way (without outside help, like benos feeling too lucky by trying to beat up several preds, or mercifull admeme spawning UPP that has objective to kill both). Up to this day I never saw a round where marines were forced to retreat everyone to FOB, survive siege, leave FOB and destroy benos. Such rounds never happened naturally.
Last edited by CABAL; 07-25-2019 at 09:42 AM.
We could also in addition buff benos roundstart, but make them lose power with time.
It would be best to have both sides at their prime condition at roundstart, this discourages metarush, however encourages turtling.
Give marines like one, or two crucial places planetside, so that they should be focused on defence more, but that they can't simply wait in FOB. Oxygen factory for prison, heating reactors for ICE etc.
like others have said when xenos lose anyone besides at the very start they already get weaker over time cause it takes a lot of time to replace t3 and old t2 they lose. Xenos are also specialists unlike marines so if you lose all your ravagers you have no one that can fight through fire. If you lose all your boilers have fun seiging fob. Stuff like that. Marines are just all plug and play cause none of them specialize in anything except specs and you can just trade out weapons whenever you want. (plus every weapon is a jack of all trades now for some dumbass reason, you just switch ammo types)
I haven't been on in a good while, didn't they remove the north flank from LZ1 on Big red? I think that has a lot to do with the map itself rather than the state of the game, it's not nearly a problem as it is on big red on other maps, LV FOB is flankable on all sides, ice is ice, Prison has an invulnerable backside but there's still alternative routes and it's definitely not the best defensible FOBs because of its limited shooting line.