Walls for marines

McBerns

I've seen marine comms use the robotics factory as a barrier in the doorways. Why not just add some barriers for the marines to use? Players or the comm can set up walls.

Frozen

Because... i don't know

You're pretty much right! Just sounds weird

PsiWarp

Maybe Commander can click Power Node to activate Force Fields to seal off the room temporarily ?

d0ped0g

I was always against armory/robo walling because it was heavily frowned upon in ns1 and the lack of it did only good things for gameplay. It meant the game could revolve more around pvp, as whilst an armory wall is certainly a strategic choice that can have drawbacks (especially in pubs where there's more often a gorge around to bile bomb), there's just something tedious about blocking a melee unit from reaching you and then shooting it from a distance. It blocks the pvp from even taking place. And it's not as if concentrated LMG fire doesn't already cut an onos to pieces already. Also, there's already a turtleing problem and giving people more strategies in which to turtle seems daft in this regard.

Most of the time in a pub turtle, if a single onos sticks his head in the doorway bullets will already rain upon him with the force of a thousand suns and will barely have the opportunity to play peekaboo for even a second before it's magically down to 300 hp. Yea yea, i know you're not supposed to attack with just one onos against a marine turtle army. But I still think structure blocking onoses from reaching the marines it's probably not going to reach anyway (considering it's basically a giant bullseye/bullet-magnet) was never a prudent thing to allow. They are supposed to be the big bad alien, and until boneshield or something is implemented, they just don't have the presence they need. Disallowing walling would mean onoses can be a LITTLE more feared as you cant just shove up a giant refridgerator in its path.

Having said that, walling is here to stay and have been endorsed by Flayra himself, so pretty much as much as an official stamp of legitimacy you can get. Although personally I'd groan at the notion of further legitimizing the strategy by implementing it as an actual feature, it may actually have a positive effect. If other structure walling is disallowed, and only walls were used for blocking entrances then the devs could balance it properly by adjusting the hp/armour/resistence to bile/ability to nano or whatever so that it fits in the game properly. Right now, is the armory or robotics factory hp/armour really balanced with walling in mind? It would be smarter not to dual purpose the structures and just have a wall as a feature and so that a single structure can be balanced for with walling in mind (as then you can hit the structure walling balance sweet spot without throwing out the balance for other things cause there's only one structure you need to balance for and all it does is act as a wall).

Having said that, if a wall is implemented as a feature, it might cause people to use it more (which I personally wouldn't like, but I'm sure others might). A "If you build it they will come" scenario. The other side of the argument (the first being balance) is that maybe it's best to leave it as it is - a novelty strategy that only happens every so often. Because it's not immediately clear you can (or you're allowed to) repurpose a structure to have a walling effect (whereas if you have a "wall" structure, the jig is up), that means it only happens every so often. Some people like the strategy, some people hate it, but because it is so rare it'll happen (or even drastically effect a game when it does) that it's practically inconsequential, it doesn't really matter if you're a fan or a hater.

This way also, it allows tourney/league organizers to decide what they want to do with structure walling, whereas if UWE implemented it a wall as a feature there wouldn't be the choice. However, the competitive community has already adopted walling as legit pretty much across the board, so maybe that point is redundant.

stibaer

Walls would be nice as part of different marineclasses.
For example an engineer/supporter/medic that can build an automatic door, a single sentrygun, has grenades and can heal mates slowly.