Nerf to give nocturine a bit more counterplay.
I still think 6 seconds is a bit short for providing a meaningful opportunity to respond, but it’s certainly better than the instant sleep that it is right now. Maybe bumping it up to 10 would be better.
Looking to get more thoughts on this.
The major current problem with noct is that due to lack of memory loss (to prevent your target from ratting you out once the effect wears off), once you inject someone with nocturine you effectively HAVE to kill/RR them (depending on LRP/MRP).
With the consideration that nocturine necessarily implies killing/RRing, I think 6 seconds (or slightly more) is reasonable.
An alternative could furthermore introduce a soft-knockout that inflicts blindness and stun but you can still speak through, with the intent of replacing the 6 seconds of nothing with 6-12 seconds of soft knockout.
The changes are fine in my opinion. I also wouldn’t mind bumping it up to 10 seconds if more discussion follows that supports it.
As slam(?) brought up on the PR, it makes certain aspects of the actions that follow mutually exclusive (ex. your target being able to scream to alert somebody is mutually exclusive with them being quickly round removed, as you can’t buy both a radio jammer and a minibomb).
Might have some interesting ramifications when it comes to upcoming Xenoborgs? We’ll have to see what happens.
I think that was me in the discussion on the minibombs versus jammer.
It may give time to radio for help which would lower the value of noc for agents. Should the price also be changed to account for the more counterplay as well ?
I dont have a strong opinon on doing it one way or the other as its not a system ive interacted with much other than being knocked out.
(as a note, I have antags other that wizard and II off and play a pacifist so my knowellege on antags mechanics are limited)
Conceptually I think my only complaint is this is already kind of what the Drowsiness status effect tries to do. Its just that Drowsiness doesn’t have enough sensible configurability, so now we have two status effects that both do the same thing kinda badly but bad in different ways.
Yeah, I would rather make drowsiness better and use that.
The way I implemented it was pretty basic and mostly a placeholder because I did not want to make the PR even bigger in size.
Drowsiness should also show you an alert icon so you get more feedback what is going on.
There’s also Ed’s status effect rework into entities with components, which I don’t think actually changes any of the functionality of the status effects, but it does use ForcedSleeping and Drowsy as its test cases.
I am willing to give drowsiness a go again, but I tried it and it seems like the current component system does not support it. The StatusEffectSystem does not support property editing of assigned components (you provide the component as a string, which then gets factory’d and added) so you’re restricted by the default values.
When I tried to supply a component anyways there were issues with the drowsiness being perpetual/continuously applying the forced sleep effect. So that would need to be worked out, and I couldn’t really figure it out. Also fairly certain drowsiness does not allow stacking the forced sleep duration.
In the end a ForcedSleep with a delay and a Drowsiness with a non-variable time to sleep is the same, sans a hazy visual effect shader (that takes time to kick in regardless). Delays were always meant to be supported for StatusEffectSystem so the code part of this PR is good regardless.
If we merge Ed’s status effect refactor the old one will be obsoleted though. So it would make more sense to base it on the new one.
Related video from @liltenhead:
I think Nocturine being unavoidable is a very powerful tool that is justifieed by the cost. You are forced to spend 12 TC on the hypopen and bottle, I think 6 seconds is a bit too long personally. If you are unarmored, the captain with decent reflexes can easily cut you down in 6 seconds with his saber. Also it is enough time to send a short call for help on coms. If they delay IS implemented, I think it should be balanced with a lower TC cost and/or making the metabolization amount per second lower, to make it last longer and/or lowering the threshold for Nocturine to activate to below 8u (what it currently is now)
Alternatively, Replace the Nocturine bottle in the uplink with a cheaper NEW chemical that has a delay and make Nocturine locked behind chemistry access with vestine.
On that note, I really think syndie chems shouldn’t come from botanicals anymore.
They are rare in my experiance… accept leotox that is oddly common
Of course this is the same department that can have plants that contain liquid gold and silver and can resolidfy them into normal resources or have a plant that can make plasma, trit and frezon at the same time.
I have to agree with Naomi, you don’t get them that often and the only time I’ve seen (lethal chems) them used is by antagonist botanists. usually they just sit in the chem master for the entire shift. There was one time I saw hyperzine but the botanists just used it all to be fast and silly in botany
(also how do you convert liquid gold into solids? asking for a friend)
( mutate Chilli into Chilly and mix with frost oil)
I feel this isn’t a great way to think about it: “It is expensive, therefore it is allowed to not be engaging for the other side” puts the cart before the horse. The price should not be a justification for poor gameplay.
As for the Captain killing you in 6 seconds; if you walk up to them with pen and nocturine bottle in hand? Probably. Consider being more discrete to make the reaction time slower. And if they do start swinging, congratulations, assumedly you will survive and they just wasted their time neither running nor screaming for help. Sure, maybe those other two wouldn’t have been much better, but maybe they would’ve. Choices!
I had a chat with Ed about the refactor and it seems best to just wait until that’s implemented before I make any attempts to get Drowsiness working.
So until then, we can discuss the PR conceptually. How do we feel about these mechanics:
The 6 seconds is just a starting value - I don’t care if it should be 2, 4 or 10; we’ll adjust based on playtesting.
I like the idea of slurred speech in addition to these.