Colonial Marines Ammo Management: Less is More

[Sargeantmuffinman]

Wait didn't some one buff the belts to carry 7 things rather than 5 things?

We should just revert back to that and add this.

But still a bit neutral.

[1262]

As nice as it all sounds, right now I don't think Sulaco staff is reliable enough most of the times to always provide you with ammo when needed to impose such limitation -1

(also damn you, now I must go and play JA2 again)

EDIT: Most of the extra slots we're getting from armour and belt is better used for flares in my opinion, carrying an MRE or basic medi kit in your backpack isn't a terrible idea either. 7-8 magazines is enough most of the times, even to give one or two spares to your medic or engineer.

[Steelpoint]

Having less ammo might work well if individual Aliens were easier to kill, but right now Aliens can tank a lot of damage and under the absolute best circumstances (100% accuracy) you'll have to expand half a mag to kill even a single lowly Alien, let alone anything higher tier.

One complaint I can levy against ACM is how I feel the roles between the two factions have been reversed, the Marines are the highly numerous and expendable force while the Aliens are the more individually powerful and less expandable force. Losing a single Marine is not really a big deal but the death of a single Alien can be a bad thing, especially since it can take half an hour, if not longer, and a expenditure of resources to build up and evolve a single Alien and losing all that time investment and resources is a big loss to brunt.

Perhaps that is something for another time.

[Artouris]

I am against this. From a RP/lore standpoint and from a gameplay standpoint. I'll break it down.

The problem is that aliens either take too many shots or are capable of just running about being nearly impossible to hit. If we had less ammo, then not only do we have to basically risk hand to hand combat which is VASTLY unfavorable for marines or just lay down and get hugged. If we're properly pushing and fighting the hive, me and my full belt and backpack of ammo will tend to be depleted. Mainly because no one has time to stab the resin walls without risk of being hugged or the fact that Tier 3s can tank and reflect bullets. This is worsened by the crusher if they've designed their hive properly and the crusher knows what they're doing. If we had more stopping power or more ammo in a mag, then that would be fine to reduce the amount of clips we can carry. But as it stands, we have to bring large amounts of ammo because most of the rounds will either miss or get deflected, less than half usually actually hit the target to do damage. This isn't even mentioning the ammo used as suppressive fire (which does work but you don't hit anything).

Second comes from a lore and RP standpoint. The reason it breaks down in argument is that you can carry this much because troops today carry that much. Troops today carry 5.56 or any other type of ammo in magazines. The bullets themselves are propellent, bullet, and the brass casing. The brass casing usually ends up being most of the weight of the bullet and most of the weight in ammo. Remove that by using caseless ammo you VASTLY increase the amount of ammo you can carry. And we do have a point reference in this, which is the West German G11, which was a project that was cancelled due to the reunification of the Germanys and they needed the money to rebuild. However it was a gun that featured fully caseless ammo.

Just for the comparison, a magazine of 30 rounds for a M16 is about a pound, so if at the basic level we carry 210 rounds, that's about seven pounds. Now that's the basic minimum level from what i hear. Now im going to do a bit of math im not going to show here. But in metric the weight of a 30 round M16 clip is 480 grams. I'm going to use the magazine size of 50 for the G11, because that's what it would have used. The weight for a bullet of caseless 4.7x33mm would be 5.2 grams. So we get one magazine carrying 50 bullets weighing in at 520 grams. Which is more than weight effective than the 30 round M16 clip. So now lets say we're carrying 210 rounds of this stuff, and see how much it weighs... 2132 grams, which comes out to be 4.7 pounds. Now I wont say the math is completely clear cut, because the G11 Magazine isnt accounting any weight of the magazine since i couldn't find it, but its still pretty clear cut the weight saved by caseless ammo. The problem wouldn't stem from a incapability to carry more ammo, it would be a incapability to fit it in slots. Like we would just run out of pouches instead of finding it too heavy.

The real explanation why troops nowadays dont carry as much ammo like they did in say vietnam is because usually you have a IFV or other vehicle with your excess ammo nearby, you didn't have that in the jungle. Not to mention growing concerns of weight issues and back problems from carrying alot of gear (that comes extra with the ammo) on patrol and what not.

[1262]

Another point against giving marines less ammo is how weeds work. You can sure empty your gun at an alien twice and bring them to low health but 10 seconds on weeds and all the ammo you have expended is wasted. That thing considered, less ammo is a hueg nerf, especially during the defensive when marines have no way of chasing aliens down and finishing them off.

[Dalavi]

I'm quite torn on this. On one hand, the whole "survival horror" aspect of the server is loads of fun, and I'd like to see it improved. On the other hand, it's already difficult enough to drop an alien, and from what I see even a relatively lowly runner takes a good ten bullets on average to drop, and decreasing the amount of ammo carryable by marines with only giving a few opportunities for scavenging (not to mention beacons for supply drops being quite clunky and slow) would only make the actual process of combating the xenomorphs more tedious, instead of making the process more fun. And this isn't even mentioning the things discussed above like what seems to be the reversal of roles between the marines and xenomorphs from the films, or the historical evidence of troops carrying large amounts of ammunition and supplies.

What could balance out/improve this suggestion would be, increasing the accuracy and damage of weapons (or make T1 and T2 aliens squishier), making every single shot fired count. It would be far more tense knowing that a single bullet could be the difference between life and death, than thinking you're already going to miss or that the shot will just plink off the xeno's carapace. It would even create a bigger atmosphere of tension for alien players, knowing that a few shots from a rifle could be your doom if you aren't careful, and that swift guerrilla strikes and stealth will be far more effective in the long run than blindly charging.

tl;dr, if you're going to add this, make each bullet count more as-is, rather than enforcing scarcity of (individually) worthless shots. It could make the experience more tense in the long run for both sides knowing that each shot really counts.

[Dyne]

Ammo shortages were even apparent in the film "Aliens". Vasquez and Gorman ended up running out of ammo in the ducts and were forced into using their sidearms.

They ran out because they lost most of their weapons when the dropship hit their APC, if I need to remind you.
And the APC was filled to the brim.

[Mycroft Macarthur]

-1

we can bitch about tension and roleplay all we want but this is still a game, if you want to fight the aliens past t1 you need to send so much metal downrange you make the normandy landings look like kids fighting with super soakers, if you really want marines to carry less ammo then give them useful or interesting alternatives, losing ammo slots for grenades, meds and chems or useful battlefield tools is fine, losing it for a pack of smokes and a lighter is not, its even worse for shotgun users because they ALWAYS run out way faster then m41a users ever do, maybe give us some deployable traps or walls or some shit (spike strips, tank traps, etc), entrenching tools we can use to dig pits to set traps or make trenches, stuff we can USE in a battlefield situation, half the time i cant spend time roleplay because im too busy trying to not get killed by gigantic pissed off alien things and roleplaying would necessitate i stop shooting or patrolling for a few minutes.

[DernSquirrels^3]

.... maybe give us some deployable traps or walls or some shit (spike strips, tank traps, etc), entrenching tools we can use to dig pits to set traps or make trenches, stuff we can USE in a battlefield situation, half the time i cant spend time roleplay because im too busy trying to not get killed by gigantic pissed off alien things and roleplaying would necessitate i stop shooting or patrolling for a few minutes.

Shit, E-tools and more deployables for engies to build sound like a great idea.

For another thread.

*cough*

[Dalavi]

-1

we can bitch about tension and roleplay all we want but this is still a game, if you want to fight the aliens past t1 you need to send so much metal downrange you make the normandy landings look like kids fighting with super soakers, if you really want marines to carry less ammo then give them useful or interesting alternatives, losing ammo slots for grenades, meds and chems or useful battlefield tools is fine, losing it for a pack of smokes and a lighter is not, its even worse for shotgun users because they ALWAYS run out way faster then m41a users ever do, maybe give us some deployable traps or walls or some shit (spike strips, tank traps, etc), entrenching tools we can use to dig pits to set traps or make trenches, stuff we can USE in a battlefield situation, half the time i cant spend time roleplay because im too busy trying to not get killed by gigantic pissed off alien things and roleplaying would necessitate i stop shooting or patrolling for a few minutes.

This. This times a million. Fighting xenos beyond T1 honestly gets utterly ridiculous sometimes, especially when they finally get to T3. Hell, I can think of dozens of potential traps and opportunities with extra gear that could be coded in right now.

[Mitchs98]

-1 for above reasons. No point in limiting ammo to marines, at all. It will only nerf marines heavily and make everything a pain, especially with all the new/inepet BO's, Command, and RO/Cargo workers. I've waited 45 minutes on a simple drop of ammo I wasn't even sure my BO heard 5 times, and never got it. That was AFTER we'd burned through tons of clips.

It also makes no sense that webbing wouldn't be able to carry ammo, pockets are iffy but in reality not everything is about realism in SS13, at all.

[The_Mockingjay_]

-1
In my opinion I only see this swinging the balance even more in favor of the aliens and would just cause too many problems for the marines to be worth.

[Jeser]

Actually, I like those ammo bags. But, resupplying marines is RO's job. And in active rounds RO is pretty busy sending crates with ammo, explosives and so on. With drop system marines don't need ammo bags.

[Evilkyle24]

-1
Why would we voluntarily carry less ammunition, makes no sense from IC or OOC.

[Morrinn]

As much as I'd like to see logistics given a boost to involvement, I don't like getting there by way of player policing.
A compromise might be reached by limiting where magazines fit (I'm looking at you, cardboard boxes.)

[Thrain]

-1 from me. I really dislike arbitrarily low limits set on ammo because someone feels like trying to make a horror survival game. At most, I would say disallow ammo from being added to boxes, but do bring the boxes back mainly so that medics can have their full equipment easily loaded in and a little bit of ammo to spare.

[Jeser]

-1 from me. I really dislike arbitrarily low limits set on ammo because someone feels like trying to make a horror survival game. At most, I would say disallow ammo from being added to boxes, but do bring the boxes back mainly so that medics can have their full equipment easily loaded in and a little bit of ammo to spare.

Engineers need boxes too. If you need boxes, go to RO. He has 50 cardboards from round start.

[Mycroft Macarthur]

if they're just like the old marine boxes then fuck yes, in pre alpha i always loaded my boxes up with bicaridine and shit so i could heal in the field.

[Biolock]

+1
I'm military, and I've never carried more than 8 mags, and that's when my friend is carrying extra water or whatever. I generally only carry around six magazines, and that's more than enough.

[Biolock]

Also, in game, I play as a combat medic almost exclusively and don't believe I've ever run out of ammo.

[SecretStamos (Joshuu)]

-1
Why would we voluntarily carry less ammunition, makes no sense from IC or OOC.

IC: Being able to carry as many magazines as you currently can in CM is pretty unrealistic. First and foremost, it would be very difficult to carry 18 (that's before using the box trick) magazines of ammunition in addition to your standard kit. You've be greatly weighing yourself down. Secondly, the Colonial Marines are not a force that logically is deployed for months on end. They're typically sent on patrols, enforce peace and carry out quick reactionary strikes.

That's pretty much the essence of this mission. You're expecting to patrol a colony and come back. You take all of your standard equipment with you, but you're only expecting to be there for a few hours at most. Thereforce, you'd probably pack 5-7 magazines at most. You're not expecting combat, so why would you bog yourself down with 30 magazines for something that appears to be a search and rescue?

It's currently possible to carry a whopping 60 magazines if you empty shotgun shell boxes and fill them with M41a ammo. People have done that.

OOC: Have you done as I asked and tried out carrying less ammo? Under your current argument, would you rather we give all the weapons infinite ammo? Sure, you'd probably voluntarily go along with it, but would it actually make the game more fun?



Acquiring ammo on the field would not really be an issue. You can already call down supply beacons, I'm proposing the team gets 4 ammo storage boxes, the colony gets covered in fallen weapons after the first assault, and you can always take from the corpses of dead teammates. I almost entirely play marine. You have tons of ways to acquire ammo in-game. I always see marines trotting over supplies on the ground as if its worth less than dirt. Because it is. Everyone is already so self-sufficient that you don't need to take any mind.

[Derpislav]

All these -1's are valid and logical, but even as a full-time marine player, I give my +1. My brains says "no, that's a horrible direct nerf" but my heart screams yes. As a combat medic, I rarely have more than two spare mags and it's wonderful.

Also, what Mycroft said. I've been planning to make a suggestion thread about more stuff for Standards, but decided to hold back due to how equipment management was changing every 5 hours recently (belts - 7 slots, suddenly 5 slots, next day it's 8 slots). For the very bare-bone basics I'd add table parts (some reinforcened ones perhaps too) to marine prep room (the one never used by anyone) and syringe cases spawned with bandages, tramadol syringe and inaprovaline autoinjector. I've suggested making standards carry "weapon platforms" that would need to be carried by two men (or one sacrificing a lot of his backpack room and ability do defend himself) on the chat, but it was rather meh'd. But that's for another thread.

On a sidenote I think that while some items should have their ability to carry ammo taken away, holsters should be given space for one-two autoloaders or M4A3 mags. Totally not ripped off Jagged Alliance.

[Steelpoint]

I'm all for tension and whatnot but removing the ability for Marines to carry a higher number of magazines will be the biggest nerf they will suffer to date, the addition of the Crusher and the explosives nerf have already done a lot to scale down the power of the Marines let alone this suggestion of effectively curtailing a Marine's bullet inventory by around 70% to 80%.

Not to continue to mention the fact that at best it takes half a mag, to more than one mag, to kill but a single Alien. Realistically it usually takes more than one mag or a lot of other Marines to down Aliens considering how many bullets Aliens can absorb, and quickly be able to heal from.

[Evilkyle24]

I've only ever carried five or six magazines for my main weapon. It takes a shit ton of bullets to drop a single alien. I have expended an entire clip and not even made one of them fuck off.

[Lostmixup]

I say limit the ammo around the sulaco in general, making calling in supply crates more necessary, and limiting people's ammo in a sense.