god damnit, i missed it, also yes having a single day per month be a test day where devs test out their weird wacky tacky shit all day would be lovely so almost everyone gets to experience it no matter their time zone
All for the! Merdonalds 2.0 here we come!
I like some parts/Indifferent. (Feel free to elaborate)
No, give me back my space vietnam!
god damnit, i missed it, also yes having a single day per month be a test day where devs test out their weird wacky tacky shit all day would be lovely so almost everyone gets to experience it no matter their time zone
Dev(s) work on Ukraine time.Originally Posted by Grentex
Solution: Move to Ukraine to be in line for testing, comrade.
I knew a big xeno update was coming but this isn't really what I expected when the test round dropped.
It's honestly hard what to make of it all.
Crystals that age so that you wait for them to 'grow' in order to harvest them and bring them to a spawning pool? Some crystals in the caves and on the river were young and couldn't be harvested but some in the colony could. Like are some crystals growing for balance reasons? It was all very bizarre and not really explained, lots of drones really didn't know what to do. Also the tank blew up the crystals at the river, not sure if the devs want this to be intentional or not. I think there are some interesting aspects with the crystals but not sure how well people will respond to them.
Some neat ideas though.. Like that gradual healing fountain/recovery structure.
I could also see some xeno mains really liking the 'instant spawn back in as a larva if you die mechanic' introduced with the spawning pool.
Honestly the round was shit so that might colour some reviews but going by what I saw and had to read over the radio. So some points.
Sandbags taking a dumbass amount of time to build is cancer and serves no function other than a shitty mini game equivalent to the ship side engine repairs. They are supposed to be something quick to erect after taking time to prep the bags, making it take longer just makes me think that some devs need to play as PFC shovel spec.
Generators take so much power it makes them useless, the time mining and the resources spent making them would be better spent making a bigger FOB. To add to that, there's even more clutter to work around now, have fun trying to get around in a tightly packed FOB with more shit in the way, extend the range or something or hook it to APCs instead of a 5x5 area. Heck a power grid with pylons would be better, you can then centralize the generators and crystals to one location meaning you can organize how resources are being spent. It helps everyone and it saves on the problem of having lots of people trying to help out only to get in each other's way.
From what people are saying here, locking some of the things behind engineering 1 (placing wire and HMG usage) is retarded. It's as if feeding marines lead was actually beginning to show up on the battlefield. Can we stop taking things away from how a squad can help each other please? I do believe this is a team game where people can help each other, making certain simple tasks exclusive to a skill is going against this and generally reduces some play styles that people want to play. (Some PFCs will support others, from sandbags to the old rollerbed PFCs which I used to play).
Crystal harvesting is a game of making a bunch of marines slave away with an engineering mini game to gather crystals that honestly have little function or place in the style of CM, sure you can change the style but they only have one use. It's a disjointed mechanic that is piled onto more disjointed mechanics. They function as power and building upgrades that for the most part are not even that good.
The use of materials is something of an improvement, but then taking extra metal down will just be the done thing for engineering teams. All an FOB will resort to is on how much metal and plas one can cobble together to build and wire the cades. As mentioned earlier, power draw is insane, turrets are meh for what they are worth and it's just more efficient to pack the cades with meat over sentries.
The flame sentry as expected is the FF king of automation, sure adaption is going to be needed but with the 7 tile view range and the range of the sentry it's not going to be worth much seeing as SS13 has a few constraints in it.
The play style we're heading for I'm guessing is FOB defence which has been mentioned before as a pointless task where marines can't finish off xenos because you actually need to chase them down to finish it. Needless to say the colonial marines last round led by slave masters just did what we always did, attack. The FOB saw little action and the time invested into it was a complete waste for the most part. Sure one can rule this off to a one off, but it's a known fact that aggressive plays are necessary for marines to gain anything.
All in all my opinion of this on the whole is rather low really. It's adding a limitation on some elements of the game such as placing wire and HMG usage against players who are not willing to invest in a skill point or roundstart roles. It feels completely disjointed to add this into the game for only groundside shit, it's a mechanic that is added for the sake of it rather than anything else. The actual extraction of the crystals has been likened to a engineering mini game or a mobile game, it needs fleshing out for sure. Also the fact that it seemed to bug out part way through is rather bad, expected of a test however. As for the whole idea of a 'mega project' it's not much of a change tbh, just a minor addition of stuff really. If anything the xenos got more content out of this if anything, nice to have but if both sides are to play to this standard it would be nice if the same level of incentive and requirement is there. Right now it seems like the marines either have to focus on the crystals to reap the FOB content or just man the FOB like the old days. You can guess what most people will do in the current state of CM, that plus all this is likely to do is to make rounds longer and honestly more boring for the people who have to wait for the next round.
Last edited by Mann handle; 01-26-2020 at 10:49 PM.
I like the idea of moving towards objective based gameplay, I think it has the potential to make the game more fun.
The only thing to me that seems a bit out of place is the whole crystal ordeal. CM and Aliens are hard sci-fi and this seems to be getting into the goofy territory, I think it would make more sense to have a fuel that can be ordered from req/found on the planet/synthesized by RnD or the MTs instead of mined and transported with minecarts.
Honestly, it could even be an incentive to make the shipside engine run really good, maybe the generator planetside has to use powercells like the fusion reactors to keep running (and you can also find some planetside if the MTs are bad). Natural selection gameplay and hard-scifi space 'nam aesthetics don't have to be different imo, mostly just a matter of changing the fluff.
The objective-based gameplay is a good refresher from the constant deathmatches we always have, but definitely could use some tweaks.
Reading through the posts, at least for crystal stuff, I have some suggestions:
1: call the crystals raw phoron
2: said raw phoron can be put into the generators, but doesn't provide as much power as refined, nor last as long as refined phoron (what we have laying around in the ship/colonies right now)
3: have marines ship the raw phoron up into the ship for refining (perhaps re-task one of the engineering storage rooms into a small refinery?) or to sell to the ASRS god for a boost in points that has a hard cap (I.E. you can get up to 300 points by giving ASRS raw phoron, but once those are gained, you can't gain more by feeding raw phoron to THE PIT)
4: Perhaps let the FOB make a large generator (combine 4 generators in one spot, add some metal, and it's now a big ol' generator) and some new energy pylons that connect with a spool of wire and have a 3x3 energy area (centered on the pylon) to put defenses in. Up to say, six tiles between pylons/generator? (Also, helps us with making YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS jokes)
Just some suggestions, what do ya'll think?
While I agree that the crystal stuff is a silly idea, the Aliens universe is not hard SciFi in anyway. If you want hard SciFi, Expanse, Seveneves, Aurora, Rememberance of Earth's past (aka Three Body Problem trilogy) would be the way to go.
I agree that the crystals should be either A. A different resource (phoron) that gets refined on the ship or B. Sold for points which are used to buy fuel. I appreciate that gameplay ought to come first, but this doesn't seem internally consistent with the universe, and that bothers me even if no one else cares.
You're far from the only person it bothers.
I would call the original two aliens movies pretty close to hard sci-fi. There is some hand waving but it's all very grounded technology, and some of the expanded universe stuff further flushes out the technology. This is maybe an argument of semantics, but the world of the expanse for example and that of aliens aren't overwhelmingly dissimilar
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