Fireteam Leaders

[Shadow Reaper]

For a long time I've mused over how to man a Polaris. It's the smallest ship to really demand my attention. The bigger ships seem too much for now. Putting a Polaris in the field seems needs close to 30 characters. First you need 5 bridge crew. You need 1 or 2 players to man the hangar and engineering. You need pilots for as many ships as you are carrying. You need 5 turret gunners. The gunners seem to me the real problem since most of the time they wouldn't have much to do.

One solution I think may work is to supply 3 NPC marines to each of the gunners and make them Fireteam Leaders. Each leader would have the task of keeping his team members patrolling their portion of the ship and on boarding missions, they would act as a single assault unit. So those players have really three different jobs and can help out in engineering and hangar duties (refueling and rearming) when they have time.

That means if future NPC marines are worth anything, you have five Fireteams that can board at four different points and have one as support to whomever runs into trouble. Seems reasonable to me, and almost what CIG intended, though I think they only planned to supply bunks for 12 marines and this needs 15. Didn't CIG say the Polaris needs 27 but 11 min? So my numbers are off and I don't know where.

Question to start with is, just how much are NPC marines going to be worth in a fight? On terrestrial hops can they ride grav bikes, wear titan suits, scout on command, etc? Just how much milage can we get out of future NPC marines and their leaders?

 

[GPcustoms]

Hope they are better than the NPCs @ PVE. Its a bit amusing how you can creep up,...I mean right on them before you need to go bang....

 

[Deroth]

Hope they are better than the NPCs @ PVE. Its a bit amusing how you can creep up,...I mean right on them before you need to go bang....

That depends on which build you're referring to.
There have been a few builds where the NPCs in the bunkers were brutal without a group of people that are really good at FPS (they would detect players easily from sight and sound, would communicate with each other to swarm, and would effectively use flanking maneuvers...it didn't help players at all that frequently in those builds the NPCs could also see and shoot through walls.)

 

[Bambooza]

Hope they are better than the NPCs @ PVE. Its a bit amusing how you can creep up,...I mean right on them before you need to go bang....

I wouldn't take the current NCPs in the game as anything. CIG has stated several times this year that the NPC's are suffering from the servers being overly taxed with content that can only be resolved when server meshing is implemented. Until then we have NPC's that act like they do from standing on tables/chairs and slowly reacting to us or slowly dying when shot.

 

[Shadow Reaper]

One of the issues I think has been resolved is how NPCs respond to sound. They aggro against shots they can hear and they can't hear shots that are silenced, so having your NPCs shoot weapons wearing suppressors allows them to aggro against an opponent but makes them immune from aggro. I think this will make a huge tactical difference. It also makes a place for bad-ass PCs running point for their Fireteam and killing with a Vanduul Glaive silently--one hit kills. Not much is required of the NPCs if they're silent fire support and the player is running point.

I'd also note the improvements from 3.13 are they move to weapons and ammo dropped by other NPCs and rearm themselves when out of ammo, etc. CIG is actually putting a lot into combat NPC AI.