April 2 constructing changes discussion

[Monoo]

The latest update has done the following:

Increased wall/girder construction time to 30 seconds

Increased amount of steps to deconstruct regular walls

Removal of false walls entirely with no immediate replacement item (some solutions were proposed, but apparently nothing has been decided on at the moment)

Now, I play squad engineer pretty regularly, and I'm a tidge upset over this. In my opinion this update will pretty much neuter the squad engie and the FOB wholesale; it leaves the engineer with far fewer viable building options, makes them far more likely to die, and essentially prevents the maintenance of an FOB.

I'll leave my thoughts below here, but since we're all civiliz ed people here and not cromagnons from 20000 years ago, I'd like this to be a discussion thread and not just an essay. So, DISCUSS.

The 7 step deconstruction: this honestly makes no sense to me. It's a straight nerf passed off with relatively vague reasoning - "marines will break down a wall next to an airlock instead of hacking in, so we're improving hacking capabilities."

No engie worth his welder will avoid hacking a door open, firstly, and more importantly breaking down walls is necessary for different reasons. Engineers only get 50-100 metal and 30 plasteel to use initially. 6 barriers and your plasteel is gone. Your metal will follow shortly after if you're dedicated to reinforcing the FOB. Breaking down walls that are in the way and moving then to where they're needed is essential in preserving your metal stores. Deconstructing tables and chairs gives you a piss-poor amount of metal. The ability to move walls is part of what makes an FOB happen before the 1 hour mark. If this part of the update stays, we'll be seeing more of the "3 wooden tables and call it a day" approach.

Longer construction time: Why. This kills the engineer.

No, seriously. That's meant to be taken literally. During a xenomorph assault, they tend to melt through ALL of the walls they can. On weeds, it costs next to nothing. The common response by the engineers is to build more walls so that the FOB isn't breached. With this update, however, they'll be standing there in the middle of building one and will provide a perfect target for ganking. Again, why? I'll refer back to the limited amount of supplies available: we can't construct barricades or tables in place of walls because our resources are limited. 30 plasteel. To get this part of the update working, I'd say give us more metal/plasteel at round start or HEAVILY nerf acid's effects on walls.

Removing false walls: I can understand the idea here, and I would be behind it if you were ready to roll out the proposed gate or some other solution along with the update. But just removing fwalls with no replacement even decided on comes across as sloppy. We need a way to make entrances and exits work smoothly and defensibly and this takes away the only way to do so. Besides, the logic that sliding walls ruins immersion doesn't hold up alongside fighting aliens with machetes or bullets tearing down chunks of metal. Edit: the only viable alternative to fwalls that's left is airlocks, but they're a hassle to build, an even bigger hassle to get right, and they can get pried open by any xenomorph no matter the situation unless they're bolted. So why bother?

Devs, staff, I humbly ask you as a longtime player on this server and big supporter of yours to revert or change this update. It does way more harm than good.

Edit: Considering the engineer nerfs of the past, such as the reduced access, don't you think they've had enough? The role is slowly being nerfed into the ground.

[Swagile]

Might as well just remove Squad Engineer while your at it, because the most experienced Engineers now no longer play Engineer due to updates like this.

Going for realism without adding any good alternative to said realism is how you make the game much more linear and boring tbh. Sooner or later, Engineering will just be relegated to making a few barricades with plastisteel and there you go; you are literally done. There won't be anymore creativity in making a FOB to the point that even an idiot can do it, and thats what I am afraid Engineering is heading towards.

No one will cut down walls anymore due to updates like this, as its too lengthy without a proper reward. Its essentially a stealth nerf, just like the stealth nerf on Queens being able to bypass fog on LV makes games even more stale as its just the usual River vs Hydro meta.

[NoahKirchner]

An issue that comes up that concerns me is having both an increase in metal required to build walls, and an increase in time required to deconstruct them. I play combat engineer a lot, and I am almost always out of metal. To fix this I start cannibalizing worthless parts of the colony in the form of the dorms or IA dome. This is fixing an issue that wasn't really an issue, breaking into the walls next to doors as opposed to hacking them, by removing one of the only ways to get enough metal to build a reasonably protected FOB, by deconstructing walls. It already took a fair amount of time to get a stack of metal, enough that it required an engineer to be working full time on gathering metal and distributing it to the other combat engineers to use. It was nice cooperation between the engineers, and encouraged teamwork and not pestering the RO for metal every other minute.

Two issues come from this.

1. Nowhere near enough metal. Like I said, engineers burn through metal /fast/, with only 50 stacks of metal, and with any forms of walls requiring 12 metal to build, this essentially reduces the amount of walls you can build in any reasonable amount of time down to four. Walls being incredibly important for FOBs, as they work both as 100% spit counters until broken, something that plasteel barricades do not, and as boiler spit blockers, while also preventing marine movement. They're not terribly difficult to melt through either.

2. Toxicity. Metal is now going to be in a far, far higher demand because one of the staples of FOBs, walls, have been effectively removed for any engineer trying to make use of his metal. I foresee this leading to a lot more fights with the RO and with each other because of bad use of materials and an incredible metal deficit that cannot be reasonably remedied.

One good thing.

Assuming walls still drop the same amount of metal, it is still potentially possible, with a few more engineers on metal duty, to still cannibalize rooms. Still though, engineers are going to burn through metal far faster.

On the topic of false walls.

False walls, a previously heavily used fortification against xenos, have been entirely removed from the game, leaving only airlocks built by marines to quickly leave and enter FOBs. There are a few issues with this.

To build an airlock, you require airlock circuitry, which requires 1 slot of backpack space. Assuming that each engineer takes down a light replacer, a battery, metal and plasteel, this leaves only 3 of those circuits left. Not a huge deal, until you realize that the marine ability to build doors can be entirely wiped out by a single glob of acid on a vendor, or that vendor being RKO'd by a crusher.

Xenos can walk through constructed airlocks because, to my understanding, ID scan is broken on airlocks. If it isn't I've never been able to get it to work, but it means that xenos can now just as easily pry open an airlock directly into the marine base, instead of needing to use plasma in the form of acid to gradually ware down the marine defense. That is generally, gameplay wise, a pretty good trade in my opinion. Supplies are essentially engineer plasma, they use plasma to build, sentinel castes use their plasma to destroy. A nice back and forth between the engineers and the sentinel caste. That is now removed, because to be able to walk into an FOB, an alien can just pry open a door. (Assuming that they can't just open it because it doesn't require an ID)

Survivors can no longer build doorways into things or defenses, but that is not as big of a deal as its effect on the xeno and marine dynamic of spending supplies/spending plasma to ruin the other team's day.


I think the update could use some tweaking, and rather quickly. Perhaps with the gate that was mentioned in the changelog. For the time being, however, I feel as if this is going to make playing engineer, a role that I and many other particularly enjoy, far more difficult and a fair bit less enjoyable. I do hope, however, that instead of both the staff and players arguing and blaming the devs (who obviously have the best interest of the game in mind) or calling people salty over the issue, that we can see some reasonable discussion on the matter. That's all that I can think to really address. I hope to see this update work out in the future, maybe it will spur some interesting engineer updates, like gates or better defensive measures to counteract these changes.

[Katsukai]

To make these changes work, I think there should be an way to remove acid on walls, repairing walls is an great change but acid still spell the demise of any good FOB, specially when it takes now much more time and effort to make an good FOB now

[OatzAndHoes]

As someone who went from mainly playing engineer to almost never playing the role a couple weeks after the egrill nerf, this is just another nail in the coffin for combat engineers. Yet another nerf without any implemented features to mitigate the damage done, and without any community input or polls. I'm going to go and debunk the usual defenses and justifications that are going to be posted in the thread.

1."This change makes the game more realistic"
Colonial marines has always been developed with gameplay>realism. You can't use that as justification when I can pull up a ton of dev, admin, and host posts stating that gameplay is always more important than realism/lore.

2."More features are coming for engineers in the future"
This exact defense was made during the egrill nerf. Guess what? No features ever came. Sandbags still remain a WO only feature. If you truly are working on replacements/features for engineers why not wait until they are ready instead of implementing a nerf with the vague promise of balancing it in the future.

3."Colonial marines is made to be balanced in favour of the aliens"
Yes, but it seems that engineers are the ones who always take the brunt of the nerfs. Instead of buffing aliens or nerfing standards, we get yet another nerf that brings engineers closer and closer to irrelevancy. SS13s building code is one of the top appeals of the game. It rewards creativity, investment, and keeps veteran players from getting bored of the same old rounds over and over. The more engineering is sidelined, the more I would expect to lose some experienced players.

[Katsukai]

Can someone tell me how egrill was nerfed?

[Swagile]

As someone who went from mainly playing engineer to almost never playing the role a couple weeks after the egrill nerf, this is just another nail in the coffin for combat engineers. Yet another nerf without any implemented features to mitigate the damage done, and without any community input or polls. I'm going to go and debunk the usual defenses and justifications that are going to be posted in the thread.

1."This change makes the game more realistic"
Colonial marines has always been developed with gameplay>realism. You can't use that as justification when I can pull up a ton of dev, admin, and host posts stating that gameplay is always more important than realism/lore.

2."More features are coming for engineers in the future"
This exact defense was made during the egrill nerf. Guess what? No features ever came. Sandbags still remain a WO only feature. If you truly are working on replacements/features for engineers why not wait until they are ready instead of implementing a nerf with the vague promise of balancing it in the future.

3."Colonial marines is made to be balanced in favour of the aliens"
Yes, but it seems that engineers are the ones who always take the brunt of the nerfs. Instead of buffing aliens or nerfing standards, we get yet another nerf that brings engineers closer and closer to irrelevancy. SS13s building code is one of the top appeals of the game. It rewards creativity, investment, and keeps veteran players from getting bored of the same old rounds over and over. The more engineering is sidelined, the more I would expect to lose some experienced players.

I was going to post something, but this about sums up my feelings on Engineering.

ESPECIALLY the creativity part; I remember the old /tg/ CM I played and the super FOB's we created were amazing. We still lost even with said FOB's, but it made games so much fun when you see xenos go through layers and layers of defences to get to you while fighting tooth and nail to get there.

That tooth and nail action is slowly getting side lined more and more until we're getting to a point that its starting to look like a degraded version of Call of Duty except in 2D and with Aliens.

[OatzAndHoes]

Can someone tell me how egrill was nerfed?

Back in the day you used to be able to shoot through grills. Egrills were the number 1 defense of choice by engineers because they were cheap, easy to build, and made defending engineering actually something you needed to do.

[Rahlzel]

Thanks for the constructive criticism.

Put simply, I agree with most of what you say, Monoo. I myself enjoy the Engineer class the most, but I haven't been able to play as often as I'd like, so I may have pushed a change based on secondhand knowledge.

By reports and my own expereince, players would commonly just deconstruct a wall beside an airlock because the wall was easier to get through. The intent to this change was to buff Engineers by making them more important and needed for getting into areas. For some reason crowbarring an airlock when the power is out wasn't brought up and no one thought of it. So it sounds like we made Engineers more viable but only situationally when power comes on. Is that about right?

The wall deconstruction changes I'm open to tweaking but pretty confident they will stay. However, I think for the time being I'd like to restore false walls until we have an alternative to replace them.

What are your thoughts on fair, balanced, and at least somewhat realistic ways to make Engineers more useful?

[NoahKirchner]

Thanks for the constructive criticism.

Put simply, I agree with most of what you say, Monoo. I myself enjoy the Engineer class the most, but I haven't been able to play as often as I'd like, so I may have pushed a change based on secondhand knowledge.

By reports and my own expereince, players would commonly just deconstruct a wall beside an airlock because the wall was easier to get through. The intent to this change was to buff Engineers by making them more important and needed for getting into areas. For some reason crowbarring an airlock when the power is out wasn't brought up and no one thought of it. So it sounds like we made Engineers more viable but only situationally when power comes on. Is that about right?

The wall deconstruction changes I'm open to tweaking but pretty confident they will stay. However, I think for the time being I'd like to restore false walls until we have an alternative to replace them.

What are your thoughts on fair, balanced, and at least somewhat realistic ways to make Engineers more useful?

I'm really glad to see the false walls thing, it's a rather impotant part of a marine FOB and was my largest issue with the update by far.

I think something that could help engineers be more viable, is more baricades in the same way as plasteel or tables are barricades. Sandbags or something similar, to really give it a more "Marine temporary base" as opposed to building a fort in the nexus. False walls will sort of break that feel, but once they go, hopefully it'll be replaced with a gate or something that serves a similar purpose but isn't a moving wall.

As far as the barricades go, maybe not as strong as plasteel but less resource intensive than building walls, having them spawn 2 boxes similar to the inflatables crate in the engineer spawn and containing four sandbags to put up which act like walls that you can see through? Up to you to be honest, but more temporary emplacements as opposed to wallspam would be great imo. Help with feel and with engineer usefulness.

[Swagile]

And Emplacement guns being a thing again; if its too OP, just do like another suggestion on the forums said and allow Engineers to pick between an Emplacement gun and a sentry gun; sort of like how Spec's have to choose their items.

[Katsukai]

What are your thoughts on fair, balanced, and at least somewhat realistic ways to make Engineers more useful?

Make that you cannot destroy egrills by shooting at it, cause it is rather unrealistic. This would make egrills still viable as an first line defense.

[Monoo]

Thanks for the constructive criticism.

Put simply, I agree with most of what you say, Monoo. I myself enjoy the Engineer class the most, but I haven't been able to play as often as I'd like, so I may have pushed a change based on secondhand knowledge.

By reports and my own expereince, players would commonly just deconstruct a wall beside an airlock because the wall was easier to get through. The intent to this change was to buff Engineers by making them more important and needed for getting into areas. For some reason crowbarring an airlock when the power is out wasn't brought up and no one thought of it. So it sounds like we made Engineers more viable but only situationally when power comes on. Is that about right?

The wall deconstruction changes I'm open to tweaking but pretty confident they will stay. However, I think for the time being I'd like to restore false walls until we have an alternative to replace them.

What are your thoughts on fair, balanced, and at least somewhat realistic ways to make Engineers more useful?

I appreciate the quick response, Rahl.

I'm really happy that you're keeping false walls until the replacement is ready to roll out, it'll likely make a lot of people happier with the transition.

As for how to improve engineer gameplay, I'll be fine with most of the wall changes as long as there's a way to combat xenos using acid to break down an FOB. Perhaps being able to repair acid damage to walls as someone suggested above?

Xenos have a fairly endless supply of acid to break down the walls, so I think it would be fair to let you weld acid damage or something. Fuel tanks are uncommon enough on Lazarus that it wouldn't make the welder too powerful.

[YungCuz]

Emplacement guns would be very viable for defences given that they are pretty effective. and they make for a cool laststand/defence. c:

[NoahKirchner]

I appreciate the quick response, Rahl.

I'm really happy that you're keeping false walls until the replacement is ready to roll out, it'll likely make a lot of people happier with the transition.

As for how to improve engineer gameplay, I'll be fine with most of the wall changes as long as there's a way to combat xenos using acid to break down an FOB. Perhaps being able to repair acid damage to walls as someone suggested above?

Xenos have a fairly endless supply of acid to break down the walls, so I think it would be fair to let you weld acid damage or something. Fuel tanks are uncommon enough on Lazarus that it wouldn't make the welder too powerful.

Keeping onboard with this, the aliens are normally floating around the area with acid on it, meaning that once you lose a position you've lost all of your equipment, but youngdrone6969 who sneaks into your FOB can't remove key walls unless nobody notices.

[Rahlzel]

As for how to improve engineer gameplay, I'll be fine with most of the wall changes as long as there's a way to combat xenos using acid to break down an FOB. Perhaps being able to repair acid damage to walls as someone suggested above?

Xenos have a fairly endless supply of acid to break down the walls, so I think it would be fair to let you weld acid damage or something. Fuel tanks are uncommon enough on Lazarus that it wouldn't make the welder too powerful.

Interesting idea. Another that was similar and brought up amongst staff was to completely disable the smaller, weaker, Tier 1 Xenos from being able to affect walls with their acid. Any thoughts on that?

[Katsukai]

Xenos have a fairly endless supply of acid to break down the walls, so I think it would be fair to let you weld acid damage or something. Fuel tanks are uncommon enough on Lazarus that it wouldn't make the welder too powerful.

Not like welding tanks are infinite either, lot of marines including xenos love to shoot at it too.

[OatzAndHoes]

Thanks for the quick response.

The intent to this change was to buff Engineers by making them more important and needed for getting into areas.

The reason engineers would deconstruct walls instead of hacking doors was because it allowed them to turn it into a false wall or harvest materials from it, not because it was faster than hacking open an airlock. I get why you wanted to make airlocks more used, but at the same time this change is in no way an engineering buff. Standards are already not allowed or equipped to deconstruct walls/build false walls/hack airlocks, so it has no real change on the importance of an engineer besides making it more difficult for them to build defenses due to it being harder to get materials.

Also I appreciate you being open for discussion on this. As for changes to engineers, outside of making a replacement for false walls, I'd recommend either giving engineers more materials to work with, making razor wire a thing, or inputting buildable sandbags.

[TopHatPenguin]

Just going to pump out a list of some possibly interesting things that could be added.

Possibly interesting things to make engineers more required/intersting:

- (Dev intensive) Require door hacking to be done via a Comtech hacking device which could be some kind of mini game or what have you. Only engineers could use it and it would be needed for powered and unpowered doors. (However if this does go in survivors may need to spawn with them or having it so crowbarring a de-powered airlock is still in just it takes a longer time then using the hacking tool, in-theory.)

- Previously mentioned but Sandbags would be pretty interesting to see as we've already got the sprites for them in WO, just need a construction/deconstruction method.

- Being able to construct a HQ Tent, which would have a wall mounted bounced radio to the ship inside of it to allow for communication with command in case Comms has failed planetside and perhaps other things but that's all I can think of besides it also acting as a base HQ for the SL's to plan their moves or the Xo/Co to sit in etc.

- Tank Traps could be something of interest for an engineer to build. (More info about how tank traps may work in CM in the hyperlink.)

There are a few other things as well which I'm not sure of so I haven't added them to the list.

[Xurphorus]

By reports and my own expereince, players would commonly just deconstruct a wall beside an airlock because the wall was easier to get through. The intent to this change was to buff Engineers by making them more important and needed for getting into areas. For some reason crowbarring an airlock when the power is out wasn't brought up and no one thought of it. So it sounds like we made Engineers more viable but only situational when power comes on. Is that about right?

What are your thoughts on fair, balanced, and at least somewhat realistic ways to make Engineers more useful?

I don't even think that is the case Rah, Engineers love the chance to hack something, and if power is off they will simply crowbar it, everything about how an engineer works is situational. Most of the time they don't take the easy route and deconstruct walls to get into a restricted place. I would assume the only time a wall would be taken down to get access to somewhere is if there is an emergency situation that requires haste, the quickest option will be used. You guys upped the amount of metal before when girders were being spammed, and even upped the timer to 10 seconds for building time. Engineering was fine before this recent update, and I would have liked for you to have more basis to change something about by using first hand knowledge rather than secondhand. If you're taking away false walls due to realism then give us a viable replacement. Sliding gates, sandbags, deploy-able fences(that can be modded to be shocked), or even move-able flood lights from the ship, to light up dark areas, instead of burning through flares everytime.

Now about the deconstruction steps, I honestly don't like the idea of it. I know the whole two step deconstruction method was two quick for you guys to process but its basically the bread and butter to getting defenses up at a decent time to counter the pace Xenos will come and attack the FoB directly. I would ask to revert these changes until there is a better way to the problem you guys see, because we never saw a problem. Don't let the pursuit to realism affect the pursuit to proper gameplay, there have been a lot of changes to the game where you guys(Devs) would push on these updates to be Lore-friendly, or up the Realism, but it just causes for salt to rise and tensions to become stressed. It all comes down to your decisions at the end of the day and not the playerbase, I just ask heed our opinions about this one.

[Katsukai]

Interesting idea. Another that was similar and brought up amongst staff was to completely disable the smaller, weaker, Tier 1 Xenos from being able to affect walls with their acid. Any thoughts on that?

That would make survivors able to survive every round until marines arrive, I think weak acid should able to be removed by using an welding tool but boiler's strong acid cannot be removed and it's balanced cause it would be marines own fault letting boilers come close enough to melt their defenses.

[Rahlzel]

That would make survivors able to survive every round until marines arrive, I think weak acid should able to be removed by using an welding tool but boiler's strong acid cannot be removed and it's balanced cause it would be marines own fault letting boilers come close enough to melt their defenses.

Good point about survivors. Allowing welders to remove acid... possibly not to specifically remove the acid as that seems unrealistic (even within the Alien universe), but maybe a way to repair the wall to prevent it from being melted as was mentioned earlier a few times.

[Monoo]

I've never liked the idea of grilles being used in the marine arsenal. I'm much more a fan of the razor wire/cattle wire ideas, they make more sense for hindering the xenos anyway.

As for younger castes not being able to melt walls, that certainly has potential but I'd make it so that sentinels gain stronger acid when they hit elite (upgraded sentinels already get no love compared to spitters).

[Rahlzel]

Also, I've just pushed the update just now, and it will go live next round.

Changelog:
"False walls have been restored, along with everything associated with girders - metal needed returned to 2, time to build a wall returned to 8. Thanks for the constructive criticism (viewtopic.php?f=64&t=12048). We'll look into some good alternatives and in the future disable false walls at the same time as having a good replacement."

[Katsukai]

Good point about survivors. Allowing welders to remove acid... possibly not to specifically remove the acid as that seems unrealistic (even within the Alien universe), but maybe a way to repair the wall to prevent it from being melted as was mentioned earlier a few times.

How about depending how long the weak acid been on the wall you can fix it with just welding it, but if weak acid already managed to stay long enough on the wall, the engineer must add metal and use an welding tool to reinforce the wall from the acid damage? This would be realistic and would also make survivors impossible to turtle when multiple walls are melting at the same time on different locations. The repair duration could also be around 30seconds to 1 minute depending severity of the acid damage.