Unvanquished Forum

What is the current stance on ladders? I've noticed that they seem, as well as elevators, to not be used as much as stairs and ramps. Is this intentional, and should they be avoided for gameplay purposes, or is it simply because they haven't needed to be used in maps much.

Elevators get used far less than ladders, mainly because they are currently really hard and annoying to set up by mappers to work correctly (although we are working on changing that).

Ladders, on the other hand can be seen more often compared to that. Parpax uses quite a few of them. Yocto has them in a few spots, Tremor always had them too, just to name a few. You can find them very often at vent-entries. But many mappers will simply avoid them for main-paths.

Ladders do have currently the disadvantage for players to rather easy fall off them though. Especially if trying to mount them, going downwards, you will find yourself rather falling and trying to grep the ladder with a forwad motion again.

Besides that, any bot ai will have a rather hard time getting along with them.

Ladders should not be part of one of the main pathes since humans are much too vulnerable when they use them. On the other hand, they can serve as a shortcut/alternative route or give humans access to locations that cannot be connected with ramps or stairs (e.g. above ground ventilation shafts). They are also tyrant proof: Tank room on parpax allows aliens to backstab humans spamming fire down the alien base's main entrance but the ladder makes sure camprants are excluded from this. The room should also make a good human base location since tyrants can only attack from one side while humans have two short pathes to the enemy base.