April CM time machine event discussion

[CABAL]

I wonder if gasmasks will ever make a comeback - immunity to gas in return for lower visibility. Marines put on masks, 2-3 PFCs run in and dump a few HEDPs to sow disarray into the xeno force, then while xenos are scrambling to get the three pointmen (who actually have a good chance to retreat to safety), rest of the marines unga in and murderball.

Anyway, in terms of Boiler chokepoints, they can be broken, even without a tank. I've seen it happen, most recent was last night, on Solaris I think. Xenos were holding SE caves, Boiler spam galore, eventually marines just waited for an opportune moment and swarmed in and it was all over 20 minutes from there.

... you know, now that I think about it, when did xenos start to use marine tactics, and marines adopted the xeno murderball approach? Although I suppose it's not that surprising, given the difference in how many players are on each side, and the fact, which I've seen time and time again, that xenos kind of shit their pants the moment marines realize that fear is xeno's greatest, and probably only, weapon.

Reduced visibility is the most cancerous thing you can have in a game where you can already see only 7 tiles in each direction. Especially since every pouncer can pounce from 5th tile. No matter how good you would make gasmaks, just the visibility alone is a nail in the coffin for that.
Also you think about too big cooperation for random SS13 players. No player (both marine and beno) will connect in hivemind to do such a stunt. Maybe in ARMA, or game like that you could have stuff of this caliber.
If gasmask has ever to return, it should slow you down only. Not only it would bring a bit of realism, since you can't really run far and fast with gasmask as you can't get enough oxygen with each breathing cycle (unless its some fancy gasmask with airpump). Even then running into gas is a death sentence for marines, since gas already reduces their vision too and benos can see them trough. Especially now when 3 beno castes have acid spray and one can neurospam.

Yes, C-acronym can be broken, but its not fun to do that, its tedious, its based on luck and it will always bring a lot of casualities. All of that to push benos to next chokepoint. And looking at every map... Every map has caves and every cave has multiple chokepoints.

Marine tactics to turtle and beno tactics to murderball are things that players naturally fall into. If you are afraid of you character death, you run when you see multiple enemies. If you are not afraid of your character death, you rush the enemy, no matter what. As simple as that.
In the past of boomer politics, it was easy to be afraid of your IC life as marine, since odds were always against you, so standard player usually turtled in that moment. Benos then were always at adventage, so they didn't had to worry about their IC life since they could always quickly retreat to reheal fast and easy in less than a minute. Now its more, or less balanced, so tactics are flexible. This is where robustos take their part. They lead by example. If you sit behind a cade, waiting for your death, but then you see few confident mariens who despite all odds go past the cades and rush, you start to feel that this might be it and you go with them, causing domino murderball.

[xenofood]

Also you think about too big cooperation for random SS13 players.

And that is ultimately the number one problem with CM13 that's also impossible to solve.

[CABAL]

And that is ultimately the number one problem with CM13 that's also impossible to solve.

That is the problem of any game with random playerbase and lack of voice chat ingame. Corporate Mercenary have a cool feature of text-to-speach for comms. This doesn't solve too much, but helps you communicate with squad where you don't have to scroll up to read longer messages, or even look at chat at all. It would be nice for SL/CO/XO/SO to have.

[xenofood]

That is the problem of any game with random playerbase and lack of voice chat ingame.

Random playerbase is the absolute number one problem. While we do have plenty of reasonable players, there will always be those who rolled a PFC and are walking around shouting orders or demanding specific medicine because they've played SL/Medic/Engineer/CO before, disarming/tackling you if you dare to be in front of them on the way to the dropship, going off to unga with their metabuddies to hunt xenos regardless of orders, shit like that. Now, it's not a problem that makes the game not be fun, personally I hardly ever notice it, but it is something that does impact gameplay and strategy, and is very much present. And let's be honest here, 9/10 times most people only listen to orders when the orders are to push or move to the front, and disregard the chain of command entirely if the orders are not something they want to do, or if they think they have a better idea.

The problem with voice chat specifically in CM13 is that there's just too many people. I actually thought about this a while ago.

It would have to be separated into specific channels so for example marines could only hear/talk to their own squad + SL, SLs would hear/talk to their squad and their overwatch, overwatch would only be able to talk to their assigned SL and command, and so on, and similar with other ship-side departments. The key here being having an established funnel of information, while keeping separate comm channels to a reasonable minimum of members. Right now, if Command tunes into squad comms, they hear literally everyone in the squad and that can get overwhelming really quick.

In THEORY, it would work. In practice, you'd never put together enough people who have enough mic etiquette and humility to keep their mouth shut and relay/carry out orders given to them without hesitation.

I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of people that would do it, but that "lot" is unlikely to be enough for the whole thing to work consistently.

And that's not even mentioning xeno voice comms. They're a hivemind, you can't just separate them into squads. So you'd have 40+ xenos at times in a single voice chat. That's just impossible.

And all of this, of course, assuming that doing something like that would even be technologically possible.



On a different note, maybe a comms revamp would be interesting. Separate comm channels to force funneling of information through chain of command, and make the comms chat appear in a separate window so you don't miss an important message because the chat scrolls by so fast on the frontlines. But once again, the problem we'd run into in this case would be the random playerbase largely hating it, not to mention the squad would be fucked if their SL dies and can't relay orders from overwatch. Or maybe I'm just a pessimist.

[Pigeon]

We dont have voice chat becuase the engine CM is on is older then most of us. It may or may not been made on an Amiga and made for 'ibm computers' or something. That or it a pet project out of MIT. That or am making stuff up and we don't have voice chat becuase a ROLEPLAYING GAME with voice chat means you cant roleplay reliably as a lizard, a fu.. a cat person, or hell even different genders or races.

[xenofood]

We dont have voice chat becuase the engine CM is on is older then most of us. It may or may not been made on an Amiga and made for 'ibm computers' or something. That or it a pet project out of MIT. That or am making stuff up and we don't have voice chat becuase a ROLEPLAYING GAME with voice chat means you cant roleplay reliably as a lizard, a fu.. a cat person, or hell even different genders or races.

Rest assured, I was not the least bit serious in wanting to implement voice chat. That was just my two cents on how it'd work if it could work.