Ruminating on a New Wall Type

[Outcast Seer]

Ruminate: Intransitive verb- To engage in contemplation.

After playing another disastrous match on Ice Colony where the CO decided we should make the underground LZ our FOB, I took the time to reflect upon why we had been massacred. While there are many design issues with the underground section, one issue that comes to mind is that areas such as medical are extremely resource-intensive to fortify due to the large amount of windows.
Simply put, as an engineer you do not and will not have access to sufficient metal to fortify all of the rooms, halls, maintenance corridors, and meltable flanks. While I believe that Ice Colony needs a fundamental redesign, paarticularly the underground section, another idea came to mind: slit window walls.

The mechanics of this new wall type would be as follows:
1. Marines and large xenos cannot walk or climb through this tile even when the glass is broken.
2. Smaller xenos such as the lurker and drone can climb through this wall, the runner is lithe enough to instantly walk through it.
3. Weapons can be fired through the slit.
4. This wall type has significantly less health than normal walls. i.e. It melts fast and does not hold up well to chargers.

In summary: Replacing window tiles with slit window tiles would decrease the number of barricades needed to fortify such areas, but are inferior to a barricade line. The role of runners is emphasized as they can harass and run without the marines being able to chase them easily. The smaller xenos can attempt to flank marines through these wall tiles, but they risk getting caught if they over-commit. Dedicated T3 xeno pushes will not be bottle-necked by these walls.

The benefits of creating this new wall tile:
1. It gives mappers a new tool to help balance the flanks of maps.
2. Runners are given an indirect buff.
3. Engineers suffer less metal-shortage stress.

The issues of creating this new wall tile:
1. Coders and spriters would have to spend time working on this instead of fixing other aspects of the game.
2. ??? (Discuss)

Why am I posting this here instead of gitlab:
1. I would like to see the thoughts and opinions of others to refine the proposal.
2. The idea came to me while half-asleep at 5 AM.
3. Gotta get rid of my new member status.
3. HONK?

[Tharinoma]

Wouldn't this just be a slightly nerfed windows frame?

[Grubstank]

Honestly I find that a welder and your roundtstart materials are more than enough to support your squad on an LZ2 push in ice, so long as you haven't dumped them all into the FOB ( and the fob is pretty cheap compared to most, so that shouldn't be a concern there.) Weld all the maintenance doors as you go and you're gucci.

[Outcast Seer]

Looking back at this I think that I should institute a policy of not making posts before my morning coffee. Maybe if only runners could climb through these tiles then it might be worth considering. But regardless, thank you two for the input.

[Jac]

Adding on to that, cell windows on Prison already exist, and they�re unbreakable, at least by Xenos.

[BeardedWall]

Maybe we could make it so grates or something can be put unto the window frame. Make it behave like a barricade.

I am thinking visually like a prison window bars.

Though I would love to see more options using glass.

Id like to see a bullet proof glass tile that acts similar to the aliens clear wall. So you can see through it and still block projectiles and gas.