Metarushing the Alamo Lockdown

[FGRSentinel]

Technically it's both the console in the cockpit and the lockdown button by the door; the Queen doesn't need to pry open the cockpit. I've seen a round where they queen rushes Alamo and both she and every beno that swarmed the dropship got killed after locking it down, something she only did because the xenos were losing and Normandy was transport on Ice. No pilots were even killed during this and the Queen never went into the cockpit. On the other side, there's been rounds where, as people said, the Queen suicide rushes the button to prevent Marines from having a numeric advantage in the Almayer defense.

The ability of a losing hive to deny the Marines one of their only two dropships for ten minutes without any intent of actually hijacking said bird is beyond BS, just like the ability of a winning hive to have their Queen suicide-rush the shuttle during evac to prevent 20-30 Marines from leaving is. If the Queen had to actually go into the cockpit itself to kill the ability to fly away, it wouldn't be so bad, but as it stands, the queen can just step on, shriek, and then blitz a single button. The only risk the Queen has is that she doesn't get to the button in time and gets trapped on a shuttle filled with Marines in transit to Almayer while the hive prepares and waits for a new Queen. In the end, almost nothing is lost because if the Queen succeeds she dooms all groundside Marines to death, but if she fails the benos just move all the captures and SSD benos to the LZ to prepare for the new Queen to call it down, which they'd do after the Alamo is taken anyways.

[kastion]

In the end, almost nothing is lost because if the Queen succeeds she dooms all groundside Marines to death, but if she fails the benos just move all the captures and SSD benos to the LZ to prepare for the new Queen to call it down, which they'd do after the Alamo is taken anyways.

Either you are being disingenuous or you have no idea how xenos work. When the queen dies a shit ton of burrowed larva die with her. The hive also loses all their mutations. The worst part of all they lose their best xeno bar none especially if she was elder+.

[FGRSentinel]

I was being serious. When the shuttle launches the hive loses all burrowed larva anyways, while losing 20+ Marines during evac is basically a killing blow for the Marines. There's been more than a few times where the Queen dies during/after evac and the hive still wins though, so it's not a complete loss like you make it out to be.

[DefinitelyAlone0309]

But the queen can try to get her burrowed up if she doesn't die before actually launching the Alamo. And losing all the hive mutations is the big succ since it shores up a lot of missing stats.

Also if an Elder Empress dies, not only will the next queen be young and completely vulnerable to any kind of damage, the marines will also get a huge boost in terms of momentum and morale that they can actually break the DS siege and maybe even push the xeno back or at least take out a lot of xeno with them too.

Also, it's pretty much considered that planetside is the real battle and what's considered for balancing anyway, so talking about shipside battles isn't really useful since it's already got shorten to 20 minutes to prevent it being too drawn-out before moving to the next round.

[FGRSentinel]

True, but at the same time the FOB siege is meant to be the final moments of the planetside fighting, but nothing's stopping the Queen from sneaking onto the dropship to lock it down much earlier in the round to deny the Marines reinforcements or CAS, something that's actually fairly common for the benos to attempt when the PO's bald. If this sort of tactic is allowed, you might as well tell xeno mains to stop calling moments where an aggressive beno leads the Marines back to the hive by 12:30-12:40 a metarush as well.

[KingKire]

My opinion:
Locking down the ship from a single button is silly and i think everyone here can at least say thats true. The button controls lock down for the doors. Why it has control over the ships engines, is just bad code that needs to be junked.

If the queen gets into the cockpit, she can lock down that ship. If the pilots alive, he can unfuck the cockpit by spending 1-5 (random) consecutive minute standing still at the control console to unfuck the controls. You can then do normal launch procedures.

What this boils down to:
If the queens in the cockpit, your gonna have a long, bad time. If the pilots alive in the cockpit, your gonna have less of a bad time, and more of an ass clenching time. A door button also should not control the flight plan of a plane. It is a dumb switch, not a computer.

[spookydonut]

Removing the button lockdown will just bring back the stupid pilots sealed/hiding in the cockpit metagame where they try to trap the queen, lol

[BobatNight]

Maybe ya'll shouldn't have made DS doors invulnerable to begin with.

[spookydonut]

Removing the meltable shutters was a good move and i stand by it

[BobatNight]

Removing the meltable shutters was a good move and i stand by it

If the shutters weren't invulnerable you could hypothetically remove the lock-down button since the Xenos would have a chance to escape the cheese.

The shutter change was completely stupid, kind of like acting a lower deck for the tanks.

[GoliathTheDespoiler]

It's a dumb but necessary system.

If someone can think of literally ANY alternative, please make it known.

[KingKire]

Removing the button lockdown will just bring back the stupid pilots sealed/hiding in the cockpit metagame where they try to trap the queen, lol

You know, thats a good point that i didnt think about. Im curious how we could get around that situation in possibly a better way.

Aliens like the idea of having possibly backdoors reminiscent of the aliens movie( where the alien gets inside and kills the pilot/crashes the ship), and also the idea of a good ol' slaughterhouse reward for a long fight. Both of which are great feeling moments for alien players. It takes work to get inside the dropship and survive the fight

Marines i also think get a good boon out of the panic of trying to not get slaughtered on the ground floor of a planet.

I know that its a difficult problem to find a solution of, because its sometimes hard to feel good to be slaughtered in the barrel if your a marine. Possibly this extra distaste is brought about by shorter rounds that cause endings like an alamo slaughter fest seem tired and annoying if it happens too often too quickly.

Hmm.

My thoughts are that having melt-able shutters does add drama and tension to a game. I understand not having the dropship in transit shutters stay unmeltable to stop open cockpit sheaningans, but i was playing ERT, and me and 3 other ERT members welded ourselves in our shuttle trying to decide whether or not to depart the ship. When acid started to appear on the doors, we knew, that all hope was lost and launched out. Had we not had the fight-or-flight response of a quickly melting wall, the moment would have most likely been less of a dramatic impact.

Having acid on the dropship shutters is a way to signal to the marines that the situation has gone horribly, horribly wrong. and after thinking about it, and what impacts it has, i think having the shutters be meltable might be the way to go.

The Reasoning:
- Dropship alien lockdown was created to prevent the pilots from being cheeky and sealing aliens to a flying death coffin : solution = queen hits button to prevent ship from leaving
- Flying death coffin problem exists because shutters to the dropship are unbreakable in any fashion.
- If we remove the invulnerable shutters, aliens can move freely inside and outside of the dropship once breached. Which means we can remove lockdown button on the pillar, and just keep the console lock in the pilots cockpit.

Spooky, im curious as to why you made the dropship shutters invulnerable, what was the reason for that change?

[Dauntasa]

It's a dumb but necessary system.

If someone can think of literally ANY alternative, please make it known.

have a civilian shuttle lying around somewhere on any given map that the queen can hijack instead of the Alamo so that we don't have the incredibly dumb thing of the queen being able to use a computer to remote override a military shuttle and being able to hack it from the ground

ice and prison literally already have civilian shuttles in perfect places for this and it would only take a couple of minutes to add them to big red/LV. This way you have the strategic choice of attempting to overrun the Alamo and reach the cockpit to prevent the marines from evacuating or letting it go and taking the easier option of hijacking the civilian shuttle.

[kastion]

have a civilian shuttle lying around somewhere on any given map that the queen can hijack instead of the Alamo so that we don't have the incredibly dumb thing of the queen being able to use a computer to remote override a military shuttle and being able to hack it from the ground

ice and prison literally already have civilian shuttles in perfect places for this and it would only take a couple of minutes to add them to big red/LV. This way you have the strategic choice of attempting to overrun the Alamo and reach the cockpit to prevent the marines from evacuating or letting it go and taking the easier option of hijacking the civilian shuttle.

Its not incredibly stupid though. The queen mother tells the queen how to hack the computer with their mindsharing powers. In the lore the queen mother literally can not only read the minds of humans but she can manipulate them too. They say the queen mother convinces the humans with her psychic powers to go to the planets with aliens so that the aliens can capture them.

[spookydonut]

Spooky, im curious as to why you made the dropship shutters invulnerable, what was the reason for that change?

The transit shutters have always been invulnerable because they previously stopped atmos leaking, then it was to keep people falling/being pushed out of the shuttle in-flight.

I removed the lockdown shutters because they were buggy and also lead to silly things where marines or xenos would end up trapped/hiding inside dropships and made the actual airlock doors unmeltable, unhackable, unweldable to avoid any of the issues that cropped up with the old lockdown shutters.

This was happening independent of the changes to how the shuttle is called down, hijacked etc, of which there were about 3 different solutions trialed for about a week each resulting in the current mechanics which overall were the least worst solution. Ravingmaniac came up with current mechanics.

[CABAL]

Its not incredibly stupid though. The queen mother tells the queen how to hack the computer with their mindsharing powers. In the lore the queen mother literally can not only read the minds of humans but she can manipulate them too. They say the queen mother convinces the humans with her psychic powers to go to the planets with aliens so that the aliens can capture them.

How does "mindsharing" powers allow to hack brainless machine? You have to have human fingers to type anything on the console, while Queen is huge and her "finger" (clawed) is like fist of a human if not bigger.
It would be better for Queen to just slash the console which would damage some of its components and saying "lorewise" that some psychotic/possesed by Queen mother/predator/UPP/CLF hacker is doing the rest. There would be timer for this "hack" and if marines are able to remove Queen from cockpit, then they can take control back.

Still sounds fairly stupid, but it's not "magical" by stating that psychic and technic powers are the same.

Maybe something like that: Xenos have to capture a marine and bring him to the Ovied Queen. Then she can call Queen Mother to focus her powers to possess that single marine (something like cortical borer). Mind of one xeno would be placed in control of said marine. That marine have to go to interact with console so he can hack it. Knowledge how to do it would be transferred by Queen Mother. Marine/Survivor can resist it after some time.
Here we go. Nothing "magical", pure Science Fiction.

Yet I think that idea with civilian vessels is the best.

[kastion]

How does "mindsharing" powers allow to hack brainless machine? You have to have human fingers to type anything on the console, while Queen is huge and her "finger" (clawed) is like fist of a human if not bigger.
It would be better for Queen to just slash the console which would damage some of its components and saying "lorewise" that some psychotic/possesed by Queen mother/predator/UPP/CLF hacker is doing the rest.

because the queen mother can read the minds of the marines to know how the console works. Then she tells the queen how it works. pretty simple.

[FGRSentinel]

There's a difference between knowing how something works and being able to use it. Any Marine with the correct access can fly the Alamo even if they have no idea how any of the equipment works, for instance. The PO, who presumably we're led to believe is trained in every aspect of the dropships, and the synths, who most likely are programmed with knowledge of every system and function of the dropships, can't lock out remote launch of the dropships under any circumstances.

So how is it the Queen, an Alien that realistically should be too damn big for the cockpit and has clawed fingers larger than your hand, can lock out remote and MANUAL flight of Alamo by pushing a button that serves no purpose beyond locking the exterior doors? More importantly, how is she able to manually fly the dropship when she'd probably accidentally destroy half the controls?

If the Queen wants to charge onto a bird filled with 20 Marines to lock down the Alamo during evac, there needs to be a MEASURABLE risk of failure involved where the PO takes off with her on it. Seriously, if you want the Queen to be able to lock down the Alamo from outside the cockpit, put an access panel inside the dropship's cargo bay that contains the ship-to-ship communications system or something to allow remote launch and give POs the ability to maintain/fix it. The queen can rip open the panel and slash it to bits, which doesn't prevent a manual launch from Alamo, but does prevent remote launch from Almayer. Maybe you could claim that destroying this only prevents remote control via secure frequencies or something, I don't know.

The point is, the lockdown rush is, as it is now, a low risk high reward tactic: so long as the Queen has a screech ready when she steps onto the Alamo, she just needs to walk over to the lockdown button, hit it, screech, and walk off. As a PO I've noticed there's occasionally a delay for a few of us between us hitting the launch button and the ship actually receiving the command. How long? Well, long enough that if we're launching because the Queen stepped on she might hit the button before the engines start their spinup and prevent us from launching even though we hit our button first.

[kastion]

There's a difference between knowing how something works and being able to use it. Any Marine with the correct access can fly the Alamo even if they have no idea how any of the equipment works, for instance. The PO, who presumably we're led to believe is trained in every aspect of the dropships, and the synths, who most likely are programmed with knowledge of every system and function of the dropships, can't lock out remote launch of the dropships under any circumstances.

I mean if you want to keep challenging how powerful the queen mother is i can keep making stuff more and more ridiculous. The queen mother saw that the humans were making dropships and knew in the future she would need to beable to counter it so she used her mind control powers to trick the engineers into make a queen sized claw button that locks down the alamo, and she tricks everyone who flies one into not noticing the button. Yall acting like people cant have the dexterity to do things that are smaller than their hands. Humans do neurosurgery on the brain with insane precision. Im pretty sure a queen (who is the ultimate warrior) probably has more dexterity than a human and can be careful while pushing some buttons/

[CABAL]

I mean if you want to keep challenging how powerful the queen mother is i can keep making stuff more and more ridiculous. The queen mother saw that the humans were making dropships and knew in the future she would need to beable to counter it so she used her mind control powers to trick the engineers into make a queen sized claw button that locks down the alamo, and she tricks everyone who flies one into not noticing the button. Yall acting like people cant have the dexterity to do things that are smaller than their hands. Humans do neurosurgery on the brain with insane precision. Im pretty sure a queen (who is the ultimate warrior) probably has more dexterity than a human and can be careful while pushing some buttons/

This is just straight up retarded (if not sarcasm/joke, I'm not sure).
From terrifying space monsters lurking in shadows to fucking magic illuminati cult in just two hours.

Neurosurgery is not comparable to computer interface. Doesn't matter how much dexterity you have, if you have fingers the size of a fist, then you are unable to use keyboard. Is this really that hard to imagine? Close eyes and imagine that you woke up tomorrow with hands and fingers 10x bigger and 10x more dexterity. Will you be able to play SS13 as before? Will you be able to even launch BYOND? This is exactly how Queen could operate any console (and she isn't ultimate warrior, squad of deaf marines will fuck her up).

Without tools, humans can't operate things that are way smaller than their own fingers.
It's like saying that with infinite amount of dexterity and tweezers you can just buy mercury, use tweezers to take one proton out and sell it as gold.

[kastion]

Neurosurgery is not comparable to computer interface. Doesn't matter how much dexterity you have, if you have fingers the size of a fist, then you are unable to use keyboard. Is this really that hard to imagine? Close eyes and imagine that you woke up tomorrow with hands and fingers 10x bigger and 10x more dexterity. Will you be able to play SS13 as before? Will you be able to even launch BYOND? This is exactly how Queen could operate any console (and she isn't ultimate warrior, squad of deaf marines will fuck her up).

Um bruh ive seen a kid playing league of legends who has no limbs. He used the side of his face and shoulder and a spoon in his mouth. Its funny yall think that buttons on a console cant be pressed because someone has claws lol.

[CABAL]

Um bruh ive seen a kid playing league of legends who has no limbs. He used the side of his face and shoulder and a spoon in his mouth. Its funny yall think that buttons on a console cant be pressed because someone has claws lol.

Sure, but that kid did it poorly, or had customized tools like here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMvikz2cA-8
If imagination isn't your best "thing" then try practical things: Wrap your fingers with duct tape (several layers to the point of barerly being able to move them) and then attach kitchen knifes to each one of them (ask for help, you won't be able to do it yourself). Try to play SS13. I bet you won't feel difference.

[blingx3]

who cares fam, this concept was conceived by salty dishounorublu mariens that are running from the battlefield, would metarush again 10/10