OB beacon change

[KingKire]

New suggestion:
Summary:
Allow marines to disarm and pick back up armed Orbital Beacons.

Benefits:
-Simple to code
-No balance changes needed.
-Aliens still have a chance to avoid the Orbital bombardment like normal
-Marines can pick up failed tosses and try again.

Details:
This change will allow marines a chance to regrab tossed OB's. This means aliens can still run away from the beacons without a problem, but now marines can keep moving the Orbital beacon to new locations until they finally have a decent shot for launch.


Old suggestion

► Show Spoiler

Summary:
Orbital bombardment beacons have increased range, less accuracy, and instead of beeping, all players receive a warning text of incoming artillery.

Benefits:
One of the key weapons that the marines rely on to fight in combat is bombardment support from their orbiting warship. Big question though:
-WHY does it loudly beep when its triggered? Theres no reason, at all, for beeping. Lorewise or gameplay wise, i cant think of a reason.
-If its to warn allies: why does it need to beep, you called in the fire support, you get the fire support.
-If its to warn enemies: If i wanted my enemies to know when they were gonna die, i would have mailed them funeral notices ahead of time.
*rant over*

Benefits are as such:
-removes metagaming the OB beacon.

Details:
-Beacon when triggered causes all players/aliens to receive the text "you see 4 streaking lights in the sky coming towards your area, very quickly". This allows all players to still get early warning of incoming artillery strike, but they dont know where its coming from.
-Beacons range is increased to 10 spaces from 5. This moves the beacon into a more offensive weapon used for removing alien clusters.
-Accuracy from more than 5 tiles away is distorted by +/-3 tiles. This mean bombardments now have a greater risk of missing their hitbox when they are out of sight.

To possibly balance these changes if they prove excessive:
-Increase in price cost, to represent the possible increase power
-More range deviation, causing shells aimed at the farthest coordinates to deviate possibly up to 4 spaces

[Crab_Spider]

I mean, xenos don't necessarily meta the OBs they're using what they have gathered from past experiences of the Marines' equipment and applying it to what they're seeing in front of them. These are the same guys that are out for blood on the Brood, why would they hesitate to kill you with everything that have let alone throw something in front of them and do absolutely nothing with it?

In fact, I'll bring up the formula for these occurrences:

Mines = Boom
Boom = Red blinking light
Red blinking light = Bad
Bad = x_x

Mines = beeping
Beeping = boom
Boom = x_x

The beeping is to warn the allies it's launching and they have to pull back, lowering casualties. If the enemies hears it to they'd HAVE to pull back giving the Marines an oppurtunity to open fire.

[KingKire]

Well i get that it blinks, thats fine. what i dont get is why it makes a sound. mines make a sound when you deploy them since they manually trigger(and then go silent if i recall), but OB's are triggered by command only. We would go under the assumption that marines would be fighting against other human forces, which begs the question why such a short range weapon would need a warning.

But thats beside the point, the bigger point is that aliens are being sneaky little suckers and running away from the short range bombardment. They can do this because they both know the range of the weapon is very limited and that they have a 2-3 second warning before it hits. I understand no one wants to stand and get hit by the OB, so i figure this is good tradeoff to being both alerted while not knowing exactly where that bombardment is going to hit.

[Casgair]

If the enemies hears it to they'd HAVE to pull back giving the Marines an oppurtunity to open fire.

To back up KingKire, your logic breaks down when you consider that the marines aren't likely to be hitting anything when they open fire as the aliens pull back -- assuming they did hit anything it's going to be from afar, which usually just means slowing down a xeno for 10-20 seconds. Not only that, more often than not the marines pull away from the kill zone themselves, so it's not uncommon to make little ground after a strike.

[Sneakyr]

The OB as it stands is only something you can use on xenos that are surrounded or stuck in a certain place, and they'll usually be dead soon anyway. Trying to throw one across the river to end a stalemate, on the other hand, will have the xenos pull back for the duration of the bombardment then be right back where they started. OBs are rare in the field, one for each squad leader and rarely ordered by req. Basically, +1 because OBs are (relatively) rare and need to be more useful than they are now.

[KingKire]

Alright, i've decided to change out my suggestion for a more simple change, Allowing a trooper to disarm and regrab the Oribital beacon.

[Crab_Spider]

Alright, i've decided to change out my suggestion for a more simple change, Allowing a trooper to disarm and regrab the Oribital beacon.

Sure, that works too.

[Kerek]

Personally I would rather it didn't beep.

but +1