A more interesting Railjack Defense mission

[motorfirebox]

Railjack defense missions kinda suck. The railjack part is fun, but then you get out and just do a boring defense mission until you fall asleep on your keyboard. So here's a better concept.

Basically, your objective in railjack defense isn't simply guarding some random cryopod until you decide to leave. Your objective in railjack defense is actually rescuing those cryopods. The rescue comes in three parts: first, you fight your way onto the ship that's holding the cryopod. Cy has to lock onto the cryopod's signature, so you have to defend it until he does so. While you're defending it, the Corpus send jamming drones in order to halt his progress, which you have to destroy, and eventually a jamming specialist. (I added this part because regular defense is boring.)

Once Cy locks onto the crypod, he yoinks it onto the railjack, and you get back to the railjack as well. Now, you have the cryopod on board (maybe in the main room with the turrets?), and your job is to defend the pod and yourself while the Lotus locks onto the cryopod through the Void in order to grab it the same way she grabs capture targets, with hopefully a bit less screaming. In order to do that, the Lotus has to work through a satellite—which the Corpus will attempt to destroy.

So you have to defend the satellite with your railjack, and if you get boarded, you have to defend the crypopod in your railjack. After X amount of time, Lotus successfully Void-yoinks the pod, and it starts all over again. Cy locates another crypod on the ship, you board and defend it while he locks onto it, go back to the railjack while Lotus does her thing, repeat as long as you feel like staying.

[(PSN)Hikuro-93]

All that, and more.

The defense tile itself sucks a lot. On RJ or starchart. As if Defense wasn't already a boring mode by default.

Then, no Grineer defense. Or Corpus Skirmish. Or nodes with just "kill x ships". Or actual RJ game modes that you play in space instead of having RJ be just a prelude to a regular old mission, but way worse.

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As for the suggestion itself, it'd certainly be better than the current RJ defense. But a couple of thoughts:

• It'd still have to be endless somehow. Whether that means finding several pods on the ship across waves or infiltrating one capital ship after the other, I don't know.
• Even if we implemented this, the tile itself would make it all the same as before. The drones can come, the enemies can come. But at the end of the day they will still have a full-on peregrination ahead of the before they can even see the pod in the horizon.

[motorfirebox]

31 minutes ago, (PSN)Hikuro-93 said:

• It'd still have to be endless somehow. Whether that means finding several pods on the ship across waves or infiltrating one capital ship after the other, I don't know.
• Even if we implemented this, the tile itself would make it all the same as before. The drones can come, the enemies can come. But at the end of the day they will still have a full-on peregrination ahead of the before they can even see the pod in the horizon.

It would be endless, you'd just find another cryopod and start it all over again—enter the Corpus ship, defend the pod, extract to railjack, defend the satellite, rinse repeat. And yes, the map tile is not great, definitely needs some work.

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

DE simply needs to tweak the Archiwing space missions for Railjack. AW mobile defence in RJ is basically skirmish / defence.

[BR31]

So the defense tileset is really horrible with enemy pathing there.

But i'm pretty sure there is something more to it.

After the ophelia fix- enemies' ai broke in a lot of ways:
my time for opening defense relics in normal missions increased considerably.
Sometimes enemies in survival missions just also break and stand in one spot
and that's without camping and actually moving a lot.

But for defense it's the most annoying and on bad tilesets ,
it seems that the chance of breaking is higher?
They can chill on the back of the map,
stairs quite often do it , sometimes after void corruption-
they change their behaviour: from rushing to the objective to
the exterminate unalerted state?

And on that rj defense tileset i noticed numerous times that enemies stop running at all,
or they continue to jump for a long time on the stairs /hide behind a cover in like > 100 m away from the def target.
Overall just feels awful .