POIs

[Anticept]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary):

One of the biggest difficulties that I see for marines, is that they must defend several locations on maps, often leading to xenos mobbing the hell out of them due to them being split up, and generally faster moving than marines. This is leading to a lot of 'turtling' mindset on the marines. Xenos, however, only need to guard the nest they are using while they have any captured. During lowpop rounds, they also have to keep an eye on larvae but generally this isn't a problem. The queen is basically a mobile base and xenos can carry everything they need with them as inherent abilities. When I play xenos, I feel much more free to move about without a lot of worry.

I believe that xenos should start having some new types of "points of interest" as well on the maps for BOTH SIDES. POIs would be life limited once they start getting tapped. They would not last terribly long, but they would act like a steroid injection for both sides. Such an implementation would act as follows, and could provide one or more bonuses as below:

-- Marines:
- Research unlocks
- Bonus cargo points
- Source of rare medicines that are extremely effective, including limited use cryotube medicines that can restore the dead to life.
- Rare ammo and supplies.

Xenos would be weaker than they are now.
- Capturing the POIs provide benefits such as increased regeneration, more higher tier support, and faster growth. A little bit better than they are now.
- Losing a POI will incur a penalty for a period of time, before returning to standard rates.
- Should the marines start targeting POIs, it can lead to some back and forth gameplay, and hopefully encourage a little bit less turtling on just marines.
* These are, on purpose, upgrades that last only as long as the POIs are held. Aliens are far faster and maneuverable and shouldn't be too difficult for them to acquire new POIs.


Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole):

Changes the dynamics a bit. Hopefully draws out the marines some early game. But it would likely cause them to turtle hard late game if they don't get an upper hand. And, that could be just fine. With the aliens getting POI buffs, it might make late game go a lot faster.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc):

See above summary.

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):

Admittedly, this would probably take some effort. On the upside though, it could be deployed in stages and tests. Small amounts at a time, to study the effects.

[KingKire]

Well, the problem is, this works well for a game stand point, but lore wise, there would be no real reason why aliens would be effected by changes in terrain. POI's dont matter to aliens, as they are indeed, alien to the location and it would not effect them.

As for marine buffs, im gonna say no to having permanent upgrades. The game of colonial marines is supposed to evoke more of a tactical horror game then a RTS stratagy game, and although these are some good suggestions, i feel like they would need to be toned down, or given to be very rare. Marines are supposed to feel the slow realization that in a war of attrition, the aliens will win in the end.

-1, suggestion is good, but it needs to be worked on a more temporary and unique 1-time things then a constant stream of enhancement.

[Anticept]

The issue that I have is that gameplay should trump all else. CM is loosely based on aliens. We can still be alienesque and use a lot of that inspiration, but no matter what, it still needs to focus on what makes it enjoyable for players, even if things have to be stretched a little bit. The lore should be written around the game, not the other way around, and allow for some leeway. Besides, official aliens lore already has it that xenos can change depending on what they infected, often taking on various forms and alterations depending on what creatures they burst from. It's not really a stretch here either.

These POIs could be things that WOULD interest aliens. For example, a genetic structure in native creatures hives that help provide the extra strength. They just need to place a weed nodule and it will grow to harvest the information.

Marine POIs could be databases and research that they need to download to bump their R&D levels. Or finding ammo caches.

They don't have to be the same POIs that both sides would be interested in. Just 'seeds' that reward a more dynamic gameplay than "hunker down and make the round last as long as possible!"

As for permanent upgrades: they aren't significant game breaking things. Just small buffs. What i meant by permanent, is they aren't the same kind of system as aliens would have. So I removed that to avoid further confusion. If the marines lost the POI, it wouldn't harm them other than the fact, that in the research example, they lose the data and don't get the benefit.

Caches could require time to open as they use locks that need brute forced, for example.

[Joe4444]

I believe N denied a suggestion like this once before, It was about capturing "points" for some sorta buff and N said right now it wouldn't fit the game or something.

[forwardslashN]

There was a similar topic posted; this would work better as a FPS mode rather than a CM thing. A lot of what happens in the game is unscripted, and adding things like this would just mean making CM more Natural Selection. Fun, but totally different. It's also pretty silly to add objectives for xenomorphs who do nothing but hatch more xenomorphs and kill. We do have some ideas on how to change up the style of gameplay to give incentive for marines to get things done, but they won't work as described. To also note, the game only has xenomorphs as the major enemy right now, but that may change, so this wouldn't be very product in the long run. Denied.