ASRS Discussion

[Madventurer]

The changelog says you don't get as much points from crates, and the points you get from stamped manifests is miniscule. Are you saying that we get 100+ points alone from sending down crates and manifests, cause I honestly find that hard to believe, even if you get 10 crates to send down.

I just did a round as an RO, and yes, you do get massive amounts of crates, out of which you get at the very least 2 points each if you stamp properly, going by 1 point for crate and 1 for stamped paper.

Case in point, this was either one or two 5-minute cycles:
1. Empty sandbags
2. AP SMG mags (x6)
3. Plasteel
4. SG set
5. Metal
6. M15 frags
7. Sentry
8. Shotgun shells (x5 buck x5 slug)
9. Metal
10. Pistol extended mags (x8)
11. Regular magazines set
12. Motion Detector (x2)
13. Flare packs (x20)
14. Flare packs (x20)
15. Surplus explosives (4x claymore, 2x each nade)
16. Extended magazines set
17. M56D
18. HEFA crate (x5)
19. Claymores (x8)
20. Plasteel
21. Pulse rifle ammo box (x400)

One or two 5-minute cycles, ladies and gentlemen.

[TheDonkified]

snip

I underestimated the output of crates. First 5 waves are guaranteed to give you exactly 25 crates, so that's about 75 (2 for crate and 1 for stamp) points. I wonder how variable crate output is, but if you get each wave about every 2.5 minutes, builds up to over 200 pts an hour assuming you get 3 crates on average each wave.

I have to play and see how the ASRS system works, but if this is the case, then this probably does completely replace old point generation system.

[Grentex]

I may have overestimated how strong ASRS is, as I said before it loads in a shitton of nades.

The most recent marine losses have been because... people don't understand nades and destroy the ENTIRE marine force with the ones from ASRS that they steal while cargo team is busy trying to sort out the last ASRS crates before DS Crash (or even worse, req team brings the nades WITH THEM) lol.

SO TECHNICALLY THIS IS A MARINE NERF.

[Fritigern]

Maybe instead of just having 5 m56 and sentries at fob marines could set up like checkpoints with m56 and stuff to slow xeno push and cause more attrition in a slightly more offensive manner so when they get to fob they have had time to recover wounded and stuff like that for a better defense.

Basically this can be described as defence-in-depth, but it's not something commanders and players are really familiar with. Marines will give up massive swaths of highly defensible chokepoints and intersections and just amass at the very last point of contention, usually the primary LZ or FOB. I've seen marines pull this off but you really need some robust dudes who are on top of their game to make it happen.

[Taketheshot56]

Yea like earlier today we had, and i counted

249 loose grenades.......

If one misclick had happened in req, it wouldve fucked the entire department up.

[Boersgard]

Maybe instead of just having 5 m56 and sentries at fob marines could set up like checkpoints with m56 and stuff to slow xeno push and cause more attrition in a slightly more offensive manner so when they get to fob they have had time to recover wounded and stuff like that for a better defense.

From what I've seen of ASRS so far, that is exactly what's been happening, and it has contributed massively to sustaining marines through the round (and the length of the round as well), while not seeming to impact the win/loss rate much. Mostly the ASRS change is helping extend how long rounds last.

Basically this can be described as defence-in-depth, but it's not something commanders and players are really familiar with. Marines will give up massive swaths of highly defensible chokepoints and intersections and just amass at the very last point of contention, usually the primary LZ or FOB. I've seen marines pull this off but you really need some robust dudes who are on top of their game to make it happen.

You also need players willing to babysit areas that won't see much action - like hydro road or central nexus on LV.

--------

Overall my impression of ASRS is that it's seriously improved requisitions for the better and in some rounds (once marines establish themselves past the first 20-30 minutes) helps cushion the marines from xeno steamrolls. There's also a lot of nice stuff appearing now that was virtually NEVER bought by requisitions during the average round - motion detectors and claymores for example.

With that said, it does feel like req is getting too many of some things (grenades and M56B smartguns) and too little of others (10x24mm ammo crates, and I'm not talking about the ones with mags in them). Also, sandbags while nice, take way too goddamn long to fill with sand - but that's not really an ASRS issue.

[FGRSentinel]

I was an MT during one of the test rounds and, while I have to say this is a nice addition, I'm afraid it's just brought back concerns raised by the Trijent Dam tests.

The round I was an MT, Req got so much crap they needed more racks built to hold it all. At first, I thought the RO was exaggerating, but it turns out there was a serious issue: Req was getting so much stuff of various types that they didn't have enough racks to sort everything into individual stacks, but grouping everything into stacks on the few racks they had would cause someone's game to crash if they right clicked the tile. By the time I was done I filled something like 30% of the usable space in Req with racks and it still didn't look like it'd be enough. If I kept going, there wouldn't be much space to move around.

The issue is, the Trijent Dam test showed that the mappers' ambitions outstripped the logistical bottlenecks surrounding Marine gameplay (medevac, medbay, Req, etc). Now that the dev team's ambitions are spreading to making the bottlenecks less problematic, their ambition is once again outstripping another bottleneck: usable space on the Almayer. As I said regarding Trijent Dam, many logistical issues that end up dooming the Marines can be tied to the fact that, for maps that size, the number of players required to fill some maps is larger then the number of Marines the Almayer's setup can handle. The two Req lines are a serious bottleneck when the number of Marines goes over 60-80, while Medbay often gets overwhelmed when there's more than 8-10 wounded waiting for treatment, but you can't do anything about either of these with the current size limits on the Almayer.

If the Devs continue to focus on making the logistical issues easier, I think they may need to make a choice between enlarging the Almayer or designing an entirely new ship altogether.

[Gut_TC]

6 Mounted Smartguns were given along with 3 sentries one round. And all were retrieved during Evac and used to defend Almayer on xeno hijack boarding. They had hard time.

[Swagile]

It wouldn't be a logistical nightmare if we'd stop getting useless shit.

Like at this point, the meta for RO's is to completely ignore all individual grenades unless its Incendiary or M15 grenades (because you get HEFA and HEDP grenade boxes later in the round), ignore normal ammo (because you get extended mags and AP mags later on in the round), and ignore normal slugs / buckshot ammo crates (because you get full deployable boxes of slugs and buckshot later into the game).

Basically send that shit back. Same with SG crates; take the manifest and power pack out of the crate and send the rest down the shaft cause no one but SG's can use it and no SG worth its salt is gunna lose his harness and eye glasses. Pistol ammo always gets ignored as almost no one uses pistols on the ground and those people get enough ammo to last them the round during round start anyway.

Basically at least 30% of the shit ASRS gives us gets immediatly stamped and sent back, which reduces clutter and workload, while giving us time to send down the actual useful shit (like claymores, M56D nests, sentry guns, etc).

[dauntasa]

Maybe it would make sense for the RO to have a bit of influence on what gets sent up? Like the RO would choose a type from a list for the next supply retrieval. If he set, say, "Defences" as the type, then the next batch of supplies would be weighted to contain M56Ds, sentry guns, claymores, etc. If he set "Ammunition", you'd get more AP rounds, grenades, etc. You'd still get some random bullshit, but at least you'd be able to influence it a little and not have the marines get fucked over by 20 crates of spearhead autoloaders or something.