So thinking about things that would add more variety with not a lot of dev time I think a good idea would maybe be a last stand style horde mode.
Story wise you can be holding out for as long as you can do draw attention away from another team working in the area. While you draw the main fight the covert team steals intel/items/whatever.
Fairly simple setup, start out with basic pox walkers and groaners with light gunners, each wave is larger, adds more specials, more unit types, and maybe includes some new challenges (one wave might include a pack of pox hounds, another the power on the lights might go out, maybe a vent purge mid combat etc).
Every 10 waves or so a Valkyrie either gives you the option to leave or drops supplies in the form of ammo kits, med kits, grenades, and med station charges. Maybe every 5 waves after 10 you need to do an extended hacking event to keep the vox caster system in contact with your Valkyrie support. Every 20-30 waves throw a random boss / monstrosity enemy into the mix.
Each wave survived gives you more plasteel, diamantine, and at set points an emperor’s gift.
General ideas for areas they could use for holdout locations:
Enclavum Baross in the square and in the fort at the end.
Chasm Station HL-16-11 near the auto scheduler
Silo Cluster near the statue or at the end
Hour glass in the large outside pit, in the Relay Sation, in one of the large hangers.
Vigil Station Cogitator room
Consignment Yard Train yard at the end
Hab Dreyko Plague Tree
Comms-Plex 154/2f on the roof.
I think it would give people to do that is something different while not requiring a whole ton of retooling which also giving people who want a larger challenge something that scales up over time so people who are bore with the current difficulty have a grater challenge to overcome.
I like this idea. Another good location might be the big room that you jump down into in Magistrati Oubliette – the one where there’s a medicae on the top level that you can’t get back to. Have had lots of epic brawls with monsters etc in that room and imo it’s be perfect for this.
First I thought: “well in a way we have those moments allready”
But having read your suggestions I love them!
Would be great and ever increasing wave difficulty will be a challange for a very long time.
And the story background you gave is as simple as it is fitting (great!) .
We already had a firefight-mode in V2 called “Fortunes of War”.
You had to play 3 “Back to Ubersreik” missions and collect runes there, which have been on hidden spots. Was a pretty cool way to unlock it. And instead of having pretty much scripted waves, you´ve been able to adjust the difficuly from 1-5 in general.
Would be great to have something like that here, especially some hidden stuff in the missions aswell like the runes or jumping puzzles we had in V2.
Please, not here…
I would love that they make “arenas” for this…
I would love to see that with a place where we can take cover, one with corridors… several places really different.
As a variation, add a number of control points in the classic “1 2 3 2 1” diamond layout. Players just need to hold the “1” point to win but the extra points held act like Grimories/ scriptures by increasing xp, dockets, Emporer’s Gift, etc.
Some places to put this would be the long stretches of map, especially where two or more paths run roughly parallel.