Mechanically disable the ability to hijack the dropship while there are greater than X marines still on the ground.

[Challenger]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary):
One of the major "accepted metas" of the Marines are that, on all three maps, they have to plan their planetside assault around LZ1 being the final fallback point due to the presence of a dropship console that the alien Queen is able to use at any time for any reason. This greatly hinders marine strategy, creativity, and immersion. To fix this problem, there should be some mechanical way to disallow the Queen from being able to use the dropship console so long as there are still at least a few Marines on the ground to kill or capture.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole):
IMMERSIVENESS: It makes little sense for the Queen, who should be defensive of her hive and brood, to undertake the extremely offensive action of assaulting the enemy hive while there remain many uninfected hosts on the planet. The concept of "let's just ignore the FOB and take the bird up instead" shouldn't exist for the aliens, they should be meeting the immediate threat of a FOB that they see instead. And in the case of the FOBs falling and tallhosts being scattered around the colony, well, why would the Queen choose to ignore potential hosts like that for a hive assault? Xenos are pretty fast and have night vision, it's easy for them to find survivors around especially once there's many of them being ordered to find the last hosts.

On the marine side, it would be much more immersive for their FOBs to actually be, you know, assaulted instead of completely bypassed by aliens who decide to launch themselves at the Almayer to force the round into a quick battle. And when the Marines get scattered and flee, they will actually be hunted down by the aliens instead of ignored for the impending assault. It is somewhat immersion breaking to see all these marines remain on the planet that should be "overrun" because the entire xeno population went up to the Almayer.

GAMEPLAY: The LZs are now only important because they're LZs, not a magical endgame objective for the xenos that the Marines have to defend against at all costs. Which means that Marines now have a much, much greater variety of places they can set up a FOB, for various benefits and detriments, for example if they expect reinforcements to break them out they might want to FOB themselves into a cave, at the risk of being completely wiped with no retreat if they don't get those. No longer, for example, can the entirely IC-reasonable action of holing up in telecomms on Ice Colony be punished with being stranded on the planet entirely if LZ2's generators never got set up and the Alamo is hijacked, for example. But at the same time if Telecomms gets attacked, there's no retreat for those marines. Finally, this makes it more likely that Marines will have more squads on scouting duty and less on FOB duty roundstart (this is a search and rescue after all, there shouldn't be much of an investment into a FOB) with less of a risk of the DS being hijacked out of nowhere.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc):
The exact way to prevent premature xenojaculation would likely rest on one of two methods, a direct inhibition on the Queen's part, or more general marine technology. On the queen's part, we could simply have it so that above a certain %age of uninfected Marines on the colony, the queen hears a voice in her head when trying to use the consoles that says "you want to secure the planet for our brood before leaving it". Simple stuff although the equation for when a Queen should be allowed would have to be fairly complex to prevent situations where one guy hiding at the corner of the map is holding it up for everyone and obviously shouldn't stop the queen, while six guys holding a pretty great FOB and RPing with each other should obviously demand the queen's attention.

The other way to implement this would be more general, and also make it make sense for WHY the Queen is even able to call down the dropship: below a certain amount of conscious, unrestrained Marines on the surface, the dropship console would unlock for everyone, so that PFCs can call it up and down to evac, as well as the queen. Think of it as an "emergency unlock" automatically activated for the dropship by the loss of planetside forces, that the Queen takes advantage of to hijack the dropship.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):
Code, and a flavor message.

[slc97]

So if one marine is on the ground somewhere alive somehow the entire round can be delayed? I'm gonna have to hard pass on that. -1.

[Challenger]

Forgot to update the title, my bad on misleading the lads. This is what I wrote in the middle though:

>Simple stuff although the equation for when a Queen should be allowed would have to be fairly complex to prevent situations where one guy hiding at the corner of the map is holding it up for everyone and obviously shouldn't stop the queen, while six guys holding a pretty great FOB and RPing with each other should obviously demand the queen's attention.

The point is less to force the round to delay because of some random rambos running around, and more to not make the Queen bypass perfectly valid FOBs.

[Terminutter]

So if one marine is on the ground somewhere alive somehow the entire round can be delayed? I'm gonna have to hard pass on that. -1.

Sounds more like a formula calculates how many marines can be left before it can be called, affected by playercount and xeno quantity. So if you have 30 marines planetside, you can't, but with 6 stragglers or so, it can be called.

If so, I think a solid +1 to encourage more unconventional FoB options.

[Symbiosis]

I'm all for this. +1.

If the number of Marines planetside is greater than the Xenos, then no call ability would work, too.

[Swagile]

I have a similiar suggestion up. Its basically if around only 25% of the marines are still on the planet, the xenos can invade. Otherwise, the marines have to be taken down in numbers, either through capture or kill.

[Recounted]

yeah queens usually book it to LZ 1 if marines are building a FOB at LZ 2 usually and ends up letting the marines win

[Trench007]

I like this idea, nothing is more annoying than those pesky meta-rushers: +1.

[misto]

it sounds like an inversion of the marine's distress beacon function. marines cant call for help until the enemy threat is high enough, aliens cant counterattack until enemy threat on the planet is low enough. reasonable, i suppose, and its not like most hives dont already scour the enemy from the planet before moving on anyways

[Stripetail]

Take all my upvotes, ALL OF THEM! +1

[Snypehunter007]

Denied.

This would cause a large delay to the round by having marines hide in unusual spots and its very difficult to calculate who is on the planet.