Map discussion.

[Ketrai]

Big red : Definitely seems to favour marines. There's not many good hive locations, and a few hive locations are outright bad due to easy entrapment, especially on high pop. (lambda, viro) The caves are rather straightforward for the largest chunk. It's just two big vertical tunnels with a few connectors, and they're rather wide and open in many areas, allowing for shooting xenos in a barrel. This also makes it harder and more time intensive to sticky up. With only a few entrances to the caves, of which two are close together. (eta, filtration) You can easily barricade in the xenos.

ice : Definite xeno favor. The fact there's two z-levels only accessible by a small lot of marines at times, with long winding tunnels that are easily stickies, and flankable. With the flanks being mostly 2x2 tunnels even easier to sticky. The size of the map also gives xenos extra time, and there's a million hive locations. On top of all that, snow takes longer for marines to clear, affects marines more harshly, and if you loose your helmet in some god forsaken corner of the map, you might as well freeze to death. There's many caves systems above ground too, that are nearly impossible to flank. Such as the one at excavations.

lv : Probably the most balanced map in my opinion. It has its flaws yes, but the river is unweedable, and marines aren't as disadvantaged pushing into it as xenos are, seeing as they can abuse range to cross it. The open areas allow for extensive use of cas, OB. The only strength for xenos here being the extensive, humongous and complex cave system. They can hide anywhere, and run the marines around in circles for eternity whilst picking them off. Many intermediate tunnels are a lot smaller and tighter too, allowing for easy sticky for drones and hivelords alike. The fog prevents rush, and most of the time the fog holes can provide as much of a death trap to marines, as a benefit. They're also easily held with a boiler and a crusher.

prison : This one can go either side. The distance between dropship and hive is tiny, yes. And they can easily flank up to three sides as once in a big pincer. But xenos have the easiest time ever stickying everything up. You can just plant a whole load of sticky, and hold marines at the countless tight chokes, namely being 2X2 hallways. Especially with crushers this one can become a cakewalk for benos. Marines do have the issue of getting lost or scattering, especially once they reach the open area of civ. Which benefits them by nature.

[Rodger]

Boilers are a must for big red, simply to stop marines from unga rushing to the hive. I wouldn't say it's marine favored. Personally it's a pretty balanced map. Usually xenos lose so quick because they lead marines straight to the hive. Or they put their hives right next to cave entrances. Now for ice, xenos are pretty much forced to go underground due to the fact that there's no good areas for hives anywhere above ground. I feel like the biggest issue marines face with underground are the ladders. They just get outright camped by xenos. And there's just not enough breathing room in the underground area. As most hallways underground are 2x2. LV, balanced map but if marines win it usually becomes a 15 minute bug hunt. Not really much to say about LV other than that. Prison, it's literally just a fucking maze. There's barely any good hive areas that it's pretty much quaranteed that xenos will hive at civ. When marines win it usually becomes like a 10 minute bug hunt too. Personally the layout of prison station is awful. Some areas are incredibly hard to navigate to from certain areas.

[Madventurer]

I wholeheartedly agree that Prison is a horrible map, perhaps even worse than Ice.

Major problems with Prison are that it's highly similar with the cell layout, which wouldn't be bad if the cell areas were fun to fight in, but they're not at all. End result is a bland map that's not fun to fight in, with chokepoints for xenos to hold easily, marine forces attempting to go around them are inevitably flanked due to the amount of small passages....
And, as a xeno, the catwalk tiles are annoying as fuck with the inability to weed, large hallways that lead directly into the best hive locations being near undefendable from unga rush that manages to put down a T3 or two with sheer momentum....

To sum it up, Prison is the least fun map because it's not fun to fight as either side. The map is just a copypaste of the most boring possible layout, cells, with some other kind of rooms placed in some locations.

Just replace Prison with an asteroid mining station that includes a small cave system for the xenos to hive in, plenty of station-like spaces to fight in, perhaps with need to activate a docking system to reach the mining section, similar to the filtration system at Dam except toggle, or simply one-way turn on.

[Rodger]

Just replace Prison with an asteroid mining station that includes a small cave system for the xenos to hive in, plenty of station-like spaces to fight in, perhaps with need to activate a docking system to reach the mining section, similar to the filtration system at Dam except toggle, or simply one-way turn on.

Interesting map idea. I would actually love to see something like this.

[SolubleWhenWet]

prison would be great if the cells were more beat up and had more pathing between them; also making CASEVAC almost completely irrelevant really works against its favor. its my favorite map, if only for the aesthetic

[RobBrown4PM]

Xeno's need a couple of competent boilers on LV and Big Red in order to win.

On Ice, it's a game of repelling the Marines first assault in to the underground and then besieging the Marines on the surface.

Rav's and Crushers are king on Prison. Xeno's shouldn't be losing if their Rav and Crusher gangs are at least semi competent.

[FGRSentinel]

As a PO, I heavily dislike both Ice and Prison since they're both made in a way that guarantees zero fun for POs.

On Ice there's exactly two general strategies: 1. everyone lands at LZ1 and you sit on the surface until the CO orders you down, then you lose a squad and sit around till evac's called or 2. one squad deployed to fix Tcomms while the other three drop to LZ2 and assault the underground. Both of these guarantee that either CAS is never used with an LZ1 strategy (because the only paths between the surface and caves are magic ladders that defy space time and you can't CAS down them) or that the benos can simply go up the Aerodrome ladder at any time, stealth hijack the Alamo, and get to Almayer without fighting most of the Marines (which has actually been attempted before with an LZ2 strategy)

What's wrong with Prison for a PO? Two things, actually.

First, there's exactly three locations on the station with glass ceilings: the LZ, the Yard, and Civilian Residences. This makes Prison the only map in the game where the benos' preferred nesting site can be hit by OBs, Mortars, and CAS, but it also means CAS is only going to be used if the SLs survive long enough to get into the hive and remember to use their tacticals. Forget about medevac too since the only places you can medevac from are an area that doesn't even open until later in the round, the enemy's base, and next to a dropship you can use to send them up anyways.

Second, LZ1's design is abysmal due to the exceedingly close proximity to Tcomms and the fact that you enter the hangar from Tcomms almost right in the blind spot of the dropship's turrets, but almost no CIC staff understand that if the FOB's being attacked and Tcomms goes down on Prison you're almost guaranteed to have to evac within the next 4-5 minutes if you're lucky. (I'm not even sure most CIC staff know that Tcomms goes down half the time, which makes it worse) This means you have to leave the dropship and try to get 20+ people that are used to ignoring everything the PO says to understand that it's TIME TO LEAVE while hoping the CIC staff doesn't take your silence and absence from the dropship as a sign that you died and launch it (or just launch it because you're not making trips up anymore and they're assholes like that).

[Omicega]

Big Red remains our best map, although xenos have to know what they're doing to make it an actual contest. When Big Red works, though, it gives the best gameplay of any map in rotation -- protracted battles around engineering/Eta entrance, Lambda choke, north medbay, or cave sweeping are all fantastic.

LV is the most consistent map -- it's a consistently good-but-not-great experience. It used to be my favourite map before the fog hole/project Nightmare thing, because honestly I really appreciated the mandatory 45-50 minutes of 'roleplay time' to banter with the rest of the squad or just other marines in general. Now, command seems to like having us push the fog choke as soon as they find it, which is markedly less cool. If I wanted a chokepoint meatgrinder of a map I'd vote Prison.

Ice is actually not as bad as it used to be, in my opinion. It's still too big and has the ever present Z-level issue, but it doesn't seem to be a guaranteed xeno win anymore. I still rarely play groundside on Ice (because it has the best fashion for synths so I lock up that synth slot), but at least the past few haven't been the old story of a 3-4 hour round where marines sweep surface then slowly die underground. I still think it could be improved, but I actually don't think it's our worst map anymore since telecomms was moved close to LZ1.

Prison is a bit of a dumpster fire, honestly. Big Red used to be the premier speedrun map but Prison blows it out of the water, and has done for months now. There's exactly one hive location that ever gets used -- west Civ -- so marine gameplay pretty much boils down to deploying in a big ball at LZ1 and trying to move west through a series of 2-tile wide corridors as quickly as possible without it being a metarush, which is something loosely defined and entirely open to interpretation from one staff member to another. If there was any actual need to scout a hive location, like Big Red, maybe it would be better, but as it stands Prison basically forces Command players to pretend they don't know where the xenos are almost down to the exact few tiles, which is ridiculous. It's one thing to ask marines to have no IC knowledge of benomorphs as a roleplay flavour thing, but it's another entirely to expect every command player to have to finely balance their OOC knowledge of where the hive is (because it's never anywhere else) with their desire to actually give effective orders that'll win the round.

Don't even get me started on Prison's quest for elusive glass ceilings for CASEVAC.