Rounds are too short now

[dauntasa]

With the cade nerf nobody bothers building more than one or 2 cade lines, and a queen screech + boiler gas will break through 1 cade line guaranteed. So there is no LZ1 siege, people hold the cades long enough to get all the wounded on board and then they leave, which is reasonable to do. Then they get to the almayer, and because of the Almayer timeout, there is no Almayer siege: people either evac or charge the xenos hoping to catch them unprepared at the crash site.

This makes the round much shorter, which really impacts the flow of the game as it stands. With rounds averaging around 1:30, you can break it into phases.
Early Game: Nothing interesting happens. People get their gear and then AFK in briefing. Xenos slapfight about mutator choices in the hivemind and gather monkeys for larvae. This also includes a brief and very silly period after touchdown where the xenos and marines pretend to not know that the other exists so as to avoid metagaming. All told this is about half an hour, if the marines are quick about things. There is no time for RP because everyone is busy preparing for the round, marines are lining up for attachments, doctors are prepping the ORs and mixing drugs, Command is writing up a strategy and conducting briefing, etc.

Mid Game: Contact is made and combat begins. The game is generally decisively won by one side or the other within half an hour of battle being joined. Either the marines have caught the xenos unprepared, broken into the hive, and scattered them, or the xenos have halted the marine push and they are now retreating to an FOB which they cannot hold. Either way, victory is assured except in the event of a monumental display of incompetence by the winning side. This lasts generally half an hour at most which means that if you are medevaced as a marine or killed as a xeno by the time you get back into the fight it's pretty much all over.

End Game: Either a small scattering of xenos hide in the caves until the marines have tediously picked them all off, or the xenos break through the FOB in less than five minutes and then invade the Almayer which has a 20 minute hard timer. This is not particularly interesting to anyone. Hunting down 2 runners in the caves for 20 minutes is tremendously boring for everyone involved and takes forever. Swarming through the Almayer is marginally more entertaining but given the 20 minute timer the marines rarely actually try to hold, and typically just rush or evac. When they do try to hold they run into the same problem with cades(and the fact that SD and Tank Hanger don't exist anymore when they were the only solid hold spots on the ship) and it's typically over within a few minutes. So, then the xenos end up with the same problem: hunting down one solitary PFC as he hides somewhere on the ship or rooting some MT out of the latest incarnation of Fort Tismo. All of the potential entertainment of this is dampened by the 20 minute timer, which forces big rushes and causes the whole thing to feel essentially meaningless. Oh, we took the ship and slaughtered the crew, but it's been 20 minutes and there's still an MP hanging out in a corner of the brig so I guess round's over and it's a tie, or whatever. Oh, we pushed back the xenos and there's only a scattered few hiding in the maintenance tunnels, but it's been 20 minutes so I guess we lose.

Nobody is particularly enthralled by the early or late games, and midgame is short enough that getting injured or dying as a xeno will put you out of commission until endgame. This is why you're seeing an uptick of people just fighting through IB in full body casts: the other option might as well be missing the entire round. I think we need some major extensions to the midgame, more ways to hold out, regroup and recover for both sides, and we need a total rework of the endgame to make it good again. People had gotten kind of tired of the SD defence thing but it was still better than a hard timer, and it still had the potential for some great moments and last stands which the current endgame does not allow for.

[popjin]

I agree. I think that giving more options as to how the game ends would make it much more "satisfying" for each round end. For example, SD used to create lots of great last stand moments to hit the button at the last second, or to die trying. Even if it does get stale when done every round, I think this could be offset by having alternative endings such as holding CIC or another location, and the occasional marine major on Almayer.

I think one thing that should be added back is Sulaco style escape pods. I remember that in the past, the rare escape pod ending would be amazing for everyone involved, as people rushed and pushed to the one escape pod location and had to defend it as it refueled, even to the point of fighting on the actual shuttle. Now, not everyone can evac so you just end up with half the marines evacing early and leaving the other half to slog it out for the siege. Loss of communications is also a major downer, as you can either hold CIC, a pretty boring location with way too many breach points to maintain command announcements, or some other location and not have any command functions (distress, evac, announcements etc.) Way too often, CIC is chosen and those options not utilised well.

What I think should happen is to re add manual SD and Sulaco style escape shuttles, perhaps in EVA, which is currently unused. Imagine activating an escape and fighting/sneaking through to the escape shuttles in hanger while being chased by xenos? Encourages much more aggressive play and makes things more interesting for marines. To stop it from being used every round, perhaps add it as a CO only option for now until a better solution can be worked out.

[JJG]

snip

This is a perfect encapsulation of 95% of rounds.

And this is also why IMO the best events are those that are just like a regular round but with respawns for both sides to keep the game in the midgame phase for longer. End game and early game are both tedious and boring. Early game more so than End game.

Autismo forts are fun (if you don't get admin bombed)

[RuAlastor]

Nobody is particularly enthralled by the early or late games, and midgame is short enough that getting injured or dying as a xeno will put you out of commission until endgame. This is why you're seeing an uptick of people just fighting through IB in full body casts: the other option might as well be missing the entire round. I think we need some major extensions to the midgame, more ways to hold out, regroup and recover for both sides, and we need a total rework of the endgame to make it good again. People had gotten kind of tired of the SD defence thing but it was still better than a hard timer, and it still had the potential for some great moments and last stands which the current endgame does not allow for.

True. Early game is a big mess rn. Most of the time I don't even get my medflask because of req being slow and bald or briefing is 12:15 or I'm just preping Charlie breakfast... Sometimes you don't have time for preping. Unlike Dauntasa, I believe, early game is also important and interesting as it sets the mood for the round and lets you know your squadmates. How to fix: IMO, marines should be able to deploy after 12:30 and still be able to win, not steamrolled by elder t3s and t2s

Midgame lasts till one major battle. After that the leftovers come to the FOB, which is assaulted by the Elder Empress and killed within 2 screeches if marines lose. No way to hold FOB at LZ. And if you try to hold at comms on Ice or at hydro on LV you will be surrounded and killed as there's no time for reinforcements to arrive. How to fix: IMO, marines should be able to hold FOB for longer so they have time to regroup and attack. This would create more situation both for muhreens and benos. Make cades stronger OR make resourses cheaper, nerf boiler mutators OR buff gas masks, allow marines to stay 1 tile away from cade and hit consistently.

Late game. Personally, I don't like it. If it's muhreen major - delayylien memes, if it's beno major - I like my character and I want him to evac as now there's no chance to survive Almayer defences. How to fix: ???

[dauntasa]

True. Early game is a big mess rn. Most of the time I don't even get my medflask because of req being slow and bald or briefing is 12:15 or I'm just preping Charlie breakfast... Sometimes you don't have time for preping. Unlike Dauntasa, I believe, early game is also important and interesting as it sets the mood for the round and lets you know your squadmates. How to fix: IMO, marines should be able to deploy after 12:30 and still be able to win, not steamrolled by elder t3s and t2s

Don't get me wrong: I don't think the early game being a slow prep phase is bad, as long as the thing you are preparing for is very entertaining. The slow burn at the start is part of the game and I'm not advocating for the removal of req lines or briefing or that sort of thing. But I think the time crunch on it needs to be eased up. The best chance for the marines currently is to rush deploy by 12:20 which makes the early game a frantic scramble to get as much stuff ready as possible before the drop. I think the reason that the mods have felt the need to crack down on roundstart shenanigans is because anything other than prepping with maximum efficiency really hurts the marines, and so everyone will hate you for doing anything which delays the drop. This is why we have 15 second briefings now, where the aCO just walks up and quickly rattles off one sentence long orders for each squad and then tells them to get on the boats. If we can ease this time pressure to deploy fast up we can get back to having a nice, leisurely early game where there's time to goof off and RP a little, and I think that would be beneficial. If I had to come up with ideas, I would say that in order to do this the speed bonuses to early xeno maturation need to go, and that survivors need to be both buffed and nerfed: They must be given more tools and abilities to actually occupy the hive before the marines deploy, but they must also be made much harder to actually survive with in order to reduce the marine incentive to rush deploy to rescue them quickly. For example, that random LV survivor start where you spawn deep in the xeno caves but are also given a good stockpile of equipment and prebuilt cade lines is a good standard for this: the survivors have the equipment to hold off the xenos and occupy the hive, but are also so deep within the caves that a quick rescue is an impossibility. Having survivor in general starts be more like that would be a good thing for easing the early game pressure, especially if the xenos were given more reason to go after them.

All that said, I feel like the early game, while not super engaging right now, is also the least pressing issue when it comes to gameflow. There's room for improvement but fixing up the mid and late games would do a lot more for the overall enjoyment of the game than focusing on the early game.

[spookydonut]

I was meaning to do this for a bit, but this post encouraged me to look into the actual stats.

Yes, in comparison to last year, our rounds are on average shorter by a not insignificant margin. The biggest drop, however, occurred around when SD turned from manual to automatic (xenos hit Almayer, Almayer SD begins arming) and then to timeout (xenos hit Almayer, you have 20 minutes left in the game). AFAIR this general time is also when the game went from "75% xeno favoured" to "50-50". Both of these things had a large impact:

- Marines winning the round is usually a bit shorter, because Almayer fight is usually a somewhat lengthy siege, same with assaulting LZ1
- More Marine victories means shorter rounds on average
- Automatic timeout means we don't have 1+ hour Almayer sieges
- Since we have no Almayer siege, Marines tend to evac a bit earlier than they usually would (they know that once they evac, the game will be over in less than 30 minutes, vs trying to hold off for an indefinite amount of time like before)

All of that contributed to the major drop in round times.

That's actually interesting, previously rounds seemed longer because of long almayer seiges. That being the case the best approach is likely to try to prolong the midgame as that's what players enjoy the most.

[Swagile]

devs have a decision to make, i feel

either:

A) balance around a longer game, aka giving both sides more delays (xenos have wider gas, marines currently only have one decent delay, and thats the threat of SADAR) so that both sides can reposition and use proper strategy to break each other (marines and xenos both using flanks, proper blocking off of flank routes, etc)

B) balance around a shorter game, aka giving both sides faster ways to deal with damage (give medics old QC / Peri back, multisplint, stronger splints, faster surgery, no surgery to replace limbs just print it out and slap it on, etc)

notice why i mention a lot of marine related things? because xenos have already been balanced to have delays and also be able to control the flow of the game faster through short and long game mechanics.

xenos have fast healing (strong and very strong pheremones), delays (queen screech, wider boiler gas, traps, resin structures), and huge damage (one two slashes with proper mutators fucks you up as a marine)

marines do not have fast healing, they require evacs, they require slow surgery, and they have very little methods to delay xenos. if xenos are ballsy and even slightly organized, they can route marines pretty hard due to all of these; the only advantage marines have right now is their numbers and EVEN THAT is questionable as some rounds, xenos have 30-40 xenos round start due to burrowed larvae + monkey bursts.

tl;dr devs really have to take a hard look at what direction they want the game to go and STICK to it

[RuAlastor]

Yes, I partly agree with you because I often see some bullshittery starting at briefing if aCO is late for briefing even for 2 minutes, but at the same time I believe marines should have more things to do at the beginning, like chapel, bbcourt, signing for ensurance from liason and so on. Probably, aCO can announce briefing only to SLs so muhreens can actually RP during that time or something in that direction...
Ye, and noone actually speaks for survivors. With this fast maturation I had several instances when t3s came to fuck me (once at central nexus). Fortunatelly, sometime they don't have enough time to do that... Survs are no match to current benos (I'm not talking about that cheeky YoUnG rUnNeR (420) that tries to fight 3 survs alone) and moving them closer to the hive will just give benos more larvas rn.

[ThesoldierLLJK]

I am still having nightmares of the Five hour Ice round

[Madventurer]

Not sure how many share the opinion, but the Almayer sieges were quite fun for me, of course not counting the massive delay it was capable of at worst (not that xenos can't do that on the planet...).

That being said, the main problem currently is that the preparation is all for nothing, since the round just ends so fast it doesn't have time to matter all that much.