Did the new patch usher in a new era of xeno play, where the xenos can metarush the Marines?
Since implementing the DS hijack instakill system, where you instantly kill all xenos and marines planetside the moment the DS liftsoff from hijack, it is becoming quite clear that this strategy is now going to be very viable and rewarding.
Let's consider the points:
- As said, if you hijack the Dropship you will wipe all known things, xenos or humans planetside instantly.
- Xenos has recently been given large maturity buff of 3 evo points generated per tick
- Drone castes have some plasma regen buff so it makes defences less annoying to build.
- Currently FOB team sucks and normally if you late join you will notice that Engineer is hardly pick and sometimes you are stick with 4 engineers ish
- FOB team is weak as most of the original vet team are gone(Only one returned)
- Even though the FOB team is comprised of original vet teams, command can sometimes order the FT team of Bravo off to the front, which is usually 50-70% of the force.
So obviously what I am hinting here is a complete bypass of the entire marine force into the FOB and insta-nuke them like its an exterminatus from 40K. And I think with the current patch it is very VERY possible to achieve.
What you need:
- A good melting team, meaning any xeno types that can melt cades.
- A burrower
- Good drone castes to build defences
- Survival, just avoid dying for long
Realistically No 3 is hard to achieve cause you will be killing some ungas at some point, but let's say you try to do it and lose only 10-20% of your forces. What you do here is bring as much as the marine forces to the caves/hive surrounding areas and hunt you down. But do this slowly at the cost of their lives for now, to slow down their momentum a bit.
While all of this is happening, a skirmisher team is sent to harass supply lines to bring out the FOB team, while the melting team melts any constructed cade as long as possible. It is not possible to melt all of the cades, but the objective is really to keep one or two areas only defended with 1 layer of cades or have 1 tile breach, and one breach is all you need.
By 13:00, or if you want to be safe and avoid being punished by staff then 13:25, the xenos can start a mass exodus into the FOB itself. Attacking the weaker side of the FOB or the breach, the xenos can rush to the DS and have 40 seconds to take control of the DS and another 30 seconds to get everyone on board. They have 2 minutes to kill off any FOB threat surrounding the DS before the boarding.
Once everyone is on board, hijack, CHOO CHOO.
Is this possible?
Well let's consider another few points here:
- Bypassing to the FOB is not a new strat and it has almost always been allowed when the Fobbits are bald. It's only the time allowed to do it. So if by 12:55 or 13:00 we see Tcomms wide open with no cades, then you are asking for it. This was done several times. The difference now is the hive dont have to hunt down all remaining marines.
- Marine metarush on all 4 squads is a very dangerous gamble but opens a wider opportunity for this. If CIC invests too much into frontline and not enough on FOB, then it is very viable to execute this gamer move.
Your only problem here is staff approval of it that's all. Unless staff intervenes you are going to see this as a very viable 3rd option for xenos if things go south.
Your thoughts guys?