A syndicate base has been found in Scorvio on the desolate planet Tartarus. The crew must assault and destroy the base with its onboard nuclear device.
Note: The original post may be edited based on the desires of @kmc2000
The syndicate need better medical facilities, and a cloning machine, as the PVP ships have.
The problem with PvP as a game mode from what I’ve experienced is as following:
The lack of ghost roles is really hampering with this game mode. You head down, kill some people, and eventually die due to the fact that our raptors are not an equilavent to CM’s drop ships. You only got a few closets full of supplies, nevermind most machines. This usualy leads to people dying because medical suplies are very limited, and impossible to re-create on site.
Leading to the crew dying for they did not have the time to bring: Surgical tools, blood bags, medibots. And medical suplies enough to overdose an elephant.
Since mostly all crew will head to the planetfall, this leads to the main ship being skeleton crew. New players are absolutely oblitirated, as the captain and some other crewmember, tries to fight ship after ship. Unable to do repairs. Service job personel will just slowly walk around doing their best not to die.
Combat is far too lethal, you get shot by two bursts since you can’t see further than seven tiles, and are suddently in need of medical assistance. Issue is you can pratically not do anything besides this, for unlike CM our combat isn’t about slowly pushing fontlines. We’re on a codebase where stunning the firing is your best option. Secound best option is to just fire gun till either party is dead.
The game mode brings nothing valluable when it comes to roleplay. An admin gets to have a “very cool” speech, where the only highlights is what the clown of the hour does durring the meeting, and the part where it ends. The lack of information leads to no ability to plan the invasion, which leads to people just running in one direction with guns. Only proper way to play the map is by already spectating once, look all over, then use your meta knowledge to where the base is.
Transporting people back to ship is also near impossible, since it requires you to convince some man that they should not be doing the runny shooty stuff. And given the landing area is very clear, the syndicate will of course have a planned ambush, damaging the ship. We really need a safe landing area where you can organize for some time, then go on the attack.
Thank you for comming to my TED talk
3 Likes
Some suggestions:
- Give the NT ship a basic planetary scanner to provide a basic image of the planet’s surface (like DRADIS but for a planet), also maybe orbital strike targeting?
- Allow Raptors to land at different areas on the planet (Possibly use something like FTL?)
- some kind of system for medical evacuation, like say stretchers on the top of one of the APC things or some kind of Fulton stretcher to transport people back to the medbay/to a raptor
- Make syndicate surgical tech not sync with NT surgical tech
- better armor for this mode only or less lethal weapons
1 Like
I think the crew need an Alamo for this to work.
It’d work like:
-Guaranteed interior Z level, with ability to move around like a fighter
-Comes pre stocked with medical facilities (albeit basic ones)
-Dropship “hovers”, allowing you to move slowly and not swim like a shark all the time
Nt would get 3 waves. The 1st wave is just the crew, then the subsequent waves spawn in their own dropships in centcom, with an FTL marker leading to tartarus that they can latch onto to get to scorvio quickly. The waves are made up of ghosted players with one of them assigned as “pilot” and one of them as “commander”, with the rest as an ert style setup between medics and marines.
Syndie mind control sleepers should be able to convert crew, to give them a reinforcement stream. Perhaps converting someone could award them with ammo, to incentivise capture?
As for midround joins, perhaps we can add some kind of drop pods that spawn later on in the round?
The base has too many long 1 tile wide corridor chokepoints. Fighting through it isn’t fun at all because dodging is next to impossible.
Here’s some things I noticed during my time as a syndie on the base.
The Syndicate planet should get at least some basic overmap defenses. In the first test it had a no-delay infinite ammo railgun, which was obviously very much overkill, but I think a proper PDC with just the standard loading racks n stuff would make sense so the planet can at least defend against fighters shooting it from point blank and maybe even a boarding ship if they’re real aces. (Maybe even a few torp tubes to defend against larger ships)
The base definitely needs an autolathe or something. They don’t need to be able to print all the magical science stuff the NT ship has but having an autolathe to print ammo (which usually runs out quite quickly) makes it turn into less of a guerrilla war near the end of the round. And it’s always possible to balance the lathe use by reducing or increasing the amount of materials that the Syndicates get (Maybe even make them use their mining gear to get some materials?). You can also add a lathe to the Nanotrasen dropship that kmc was talking about to balance out the ammo situation from both sides.
The Syndicate vault should be more secure. Of course the puce disk won’t be in the vault itself in the future because the crew will get pinpointers for it, but even with the disk not being there the vault is not secure at all. Right now the vault is just surrounded by plastitanium, which is a regular one-weld deconstruct wall, this makes accessing it without going through the door significantly easier (please see: Engineer Pascel digging around the base with a pickaxe and welding open the wall.) and gives the Syndicate less time to actually do anything about it (in part also due to the fact there is only a single toolbelt in the base). My suggestion for fixing this would be adding at least one layer of reinforced walls to the vault wall and possibly a turret outside the actual wall (of course not in a way that covers 100% of the wall area) to avoid the current situation where in mining your way around the base is literally easier than fighting.
Another thing, which Honk was also talking about, is that the combat is fairly LRP. I think that adding actual buildings, military defense posts and natural obstacles to the very flat landscape can help improve this a lot (maybe add a few sign posts that help the invaders find their way to the base too?)
And last but not least, can there be a voice changer in the Syndicate radio room, because right now it’s only good for spying on PDA messages and making fun of Nanotrasen over their own comms.
2 Likes
Heavily agree, one of the biggest issue with the map as it stands is that it’s very open, and VERY FLAT. There’s a reason the sniper basically cleaned house with no recompence.
add trenches for NT to not get mauled instantly
Also adds that D-Day feeling
Also make orbital bombardment actually worth it
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Missed opportunities here
The transport ship getting camped sounds like it should be only an issue if there is only one available landing zone or if the crew is too lazy/dumb/underpopulated to have a dedicated transport pilot, who could also do ammo resupply. For resupply I could also see drop pods spawned through cargo sending a cargo torp being a cool mechanic that doesn’t require the away team to go back to a landing zone.