The Abysmal State of POs

[dauntasa]

To add to this, that is exactly what happened on most maps when the tank was introduced - almost all fighting took place in the caves where the tank couldn't reach.

Yeah but currently, CAS sucks and the Tank doesn't exist, and almost all the fighting STILL takes place in the damn caves. The caves will always give the xenos an advantage and for whatever reason every map(except maybe trijent, from the one time I played it(all of prison counts as caves, fuck prison)) includes massive cave networks. They're so big that the xenos have no real reason to come out of them until the marines have been totally smashed and are retreating. The caves are deep enough that you can coat the whole place in sticky resin and then just let the marines push in. They bleed themselves dry because fighting in that environment absolutely sucks for them, but they're so weak defensively that they need to push in anyway because they can't get the momentum back if they lose it. You turn the caves into a nightmare maze of thick walls and sticky resin, dark and full of blind corners, and with their CAS and arty unable to reach, and then you just wait for them to push in and get murdered. If the place is setup properly and you have boilers the marines have no hope of actually reaching the hive before they take enough losses to break, and the marine tools that are designed to help that situation, and are only useful when it comes to fixing that situation, don't work because of the cave.

If the cave networks were smaller, they would serve to protect the most vulnerable and valuable xenos, like the queen, drones and larvae as well as wounded xenos, from marine strategic weaponry(mortars, OBs, CAS) while letting it still be useful against combat oriented xenos, who would have to leave the caves to be useful. As it stands, the xenos have no reason to leave until they plan to take the Alamo, and at that point the marines have been torn apart and are just trying to leave.

[Heraclitus]

I'm not trying to say CAS shouldn't be reworked/buffed because it will make xenos go to the caves more, I'm just saying that's how the meta will evolve if you make open areas more dangerous for xenos to be in.

[FGRSentinel]

I mean, right now the second most dangerous place for Marines to be in is the FOB after their push fails since cades are absolutely worthless now. So long as this is true, a counterplay powerful enough to break the siege would be needed (as breaking an FOB siege is, at the moment, practically impossible for the Marines compared to the number of times Marines were knocking on the Hive's front door and got pushed all the way back to the LZ).

[Griffith78]

I'd like to post about my most recent experience as PO, it was a positive one.

Myself and a PO named Monday manned the Alamo and shared the duties of piloting, moving dead/wounded marines on and off the Alamo, ordering the Marines to fetch crates and securing them for req and so on. This provided fun playtime inbetween drops. In addition to this I worked together with marines to gather Intel and get it back to the lab. As a PO you are in the unique position to make that happen.

From the RP with my fellow PO to all of the things we were doing made for a good round.

In the end I died at the LZ after rushing to save a marine from a lurker before takeoff , we killed the lurker only to be swarmed by Xenos when we missed the launch.

Godspeed Monday you did well getting the men out.

[Fritigern]

I've played pilot quite a lot over the years, and just recently had some hands on experience with the latest CAS updates. It's still bad.

The latest CAS updates are convoluted to say the least. Even with someone talking me through the procedure I'm still not 100% certain on the process, which isn't a good sign. Pilots aren't whitelisted, if the system isn't designed for someone to plug in and play without a teacher or having to consult a wiki or forum guide then it's a failure of basic gameplay design.

A lot of the steps need to be standardized into defaults, and let the pilots worry about direction and width/length of their runs without having to navigate unintuitive menus.

Forcing pilots to choose between running effective CAS or effective medevacs is pretty annoying as well. Why not add a dedicated ship for the evacs, something equivalent to the drop pod used in previous versions? Make it so it can only fly round trips and never touch down, and you'll improve the quality of life for pilots and marines alike without drastically changing gameplay balance.

You know what'd really be nice too? Being able to use ANY landing zone, no matter the ship. It opens up greater tactical options to the pilots and marines alike without unbalancing gameplay.

[FGRSentinel]

Last I checked you don't have to pick between them. You launch a fire mission from a flyby, the same way that you do medevac. The thing is, the fire mission system is complex to figure out, but once you do it's fairly easy to set one up without too much difficulty. You can make long, narrow fire missions for hallways on Prison; wide, narrow ones to hit inside the courtyard at ETA; long, wide ones for bombarding Xeno structures on LV; and short, narrow ones to hit a single stationary target. If the PO knows what they're doing (and I'll admit the system is hard for me to explain, sorry about that) a CAS strike can be more powerful than an OB with a good setup on the ground.

[dauntasa]

I think at this point it's just a matter of doctrine. It now makes more sense to have 3 POs on the Normandy, with one guy taking some medical stuff and running the medevac winch full time, but I imagine we're still getting 2 and 2.

[FGRSentinel]

You only really need two on Normandy since Fire Missions don't really involve the copilot unless they're a more experienced pilot teaching a less experienced one how to set up and fly a Fire Mission. Two POs on Alamo is good to make sure at least one of them has the brains to check for boarders.

[TheDonkified]

The latest CAS updates are convoluted to say the least. Even with someone talking me through the procedure I'm still not 100% certain on the process, which isn't a good sign. Pilots aren't whitelisted, if the system isn't designed for someone to plug in and play without a teacher or having to consult a wiki or forum guide then it's a failure of basic gameplay design.

Your last statement is stupid. Part of this game's niche is its mechanical complexity compared to other games that requires you to actively read the wiki or ask for a mentor before delving in. Nothing is straightforward at all, and playing any role effectively, even PFC when you first join, requires that you read the wiki.

Making the game unneccessarily intuitive instead of satisfyingly complex are two different things though. Not thoroughly explaining a new feature is a much bigger problem. When new CAS is implemented, wiki should have clear an accurate info so anyone can at least get the gist of the role or even simply follow the wiki. If Neth doesn't explain it well to TopHat that's a failure on him to teach people how a mechanic works, similar to how devs failed to teach mentors how CAS worked when it was first implemented.

[NethIafins]

Your last statement is stupid. Part of this game's niche is its mechanical complexity compared to other games that requires you to actively read the wiki or ask for a mentor before delving in. Nothing is straightforward at all, and playing any role effectively, even PFC when you first join, requires that you read the wiki.

Making the game unneccessarily intuitive instead of satisfyingly complex are two different things though. Not thoroughly explaining a new feature is a much bigger problem. When new CAS is implemented, wiki should have clear an accurate info so anyone can at least get the gist of the role or even simply follow the wiki. If Neth doesn't explain it well to TopHat that's a failure on him to teach people how a mechanic works, similar to how devs failed to teach mentors how CAS worked when it was first implemented.

Basically that's why we have test rounds