An Awkward and Possibly Rather Lame Look At A Single Grineer Shipyard Tile Set

The Grineer Shipyard Defense/Interception tile is a funny one. It’s a very small map and it’s the one that’s always used when you visit Seimeni for those sweet 20k credits for 5 rounds of defense. But it’s a small map that has changed a few times, not always for the better.

The gimmick on the Shipyard Defense tile is that the Cryopod you need to protect is on a platform, and this platform has a chance to move from one place to another. It’s a bit like the Cryopod on Helene or Hydron except this moves on a rail. This gimmick has always been there, and the path has been mostly unchanged. It’s the map all around it that has changed.

Well, I say that, the elevator from a weirdly low down area is still there. Despite this map being out in the open, you still get a cut scene where you drop in from a vent, rather than being dropped off by your landing craft. Once you’re in the mission, you then take a large elevator to what is clearly some sort of loading area. If you’re lazy or someone has already taken the elevator (which only works one way), you can just jump down the pit and be magically teleported up to the surface.

What you’re greeted with at the surface is standard for the Ceres Grineer Shipyard tileset. Shades of brown and green. If you’re lucky, it’ll also be raining and stormy. Getting struck by lightning is a pretty common occurrence here. A cryopod or four Interception consoles await, sitting there vaguely ominously while players faff around before the mission starts.

But this particular map used to be more flat and more open. No, not open. More… ramp-y. There were ramps to walk around on. Or at the very least it didn’t funnel enemies into weird paths. Also the rails weren’t always electrified.

The rails being electrified, I get why they changed that. The enemy AI simply can’t deal with the weird, thin rails. You can easily camp up there and be untouched by Infested and pecked at by Grineer (or rarely Corpus) bullets. And because these rails stretch off the map almost, even if the area was properly pathed for AI, then you’d just have an easy way to kill enemies by knocking them into the bottomless pits below. That being said, the end of the rail, where it reaches the upper area and connects to the ground, is a major pain in the ass because pets get constantly stuck and killed by the electricity.

With or without the electric rail, there’s something that bothers me about the current map. Enemies just… get stuck. In the default position, which you see when you enter the mission, the problem isn’t so bad, but enemies will struggle to climb up the boxes from the lower area to the upper area. Actually, the second bit of elevation in general seems to be a massive hindrance, particularly to Infested. Any area where enemies have to climb around or up things is always a pain because it bottlenecks enemies, and not in a good way. You often have to go right up to the edge to shoot down at them, and the AI tends to go single-file, which makes slaughter tedious.

But on top of that, enemies seem to get stuck in general when it comes to traversing upwards or downwards. This lack of flow often means you end up with stragglers that you have to go and chase down. And that’s on top of enemies who just get stuck hiding between boxes.

On the plus side, there is one positive change. After I brought the issue up on r/warframe, the developers swooped i and fixed the gap between the two pillars that always looked like it was large enough to pass through but wasn’t. Now you can shoot enemies and jump between the gap! Which is nice because that gap always looked like it could be passed through.

Still, the map is one of my favourites, because there aren’t many maps with actual weather effects, outside of the open world areas…