Title. Explosive balance feels pretty bad right now.
Powerful explosives should be rare and costly which is why most explosives in the uplink come at a decent TC cost or have downsides to their usability (like C4’s long timer).
However this balance is turned on its head when we look at the crew’s explosives.
Chem explosives are comically easy to make with a huge amount of power relative to the low cost, low storage size, and high damage. The space cleaner grenade meta is becoming inescapable, they are very powerful for how cheap and mass producable they are.
Second, although this one is more rarely seen due to it being limited to Emag interactions and warops, is the explosive payload.
1 steel
1 plastic
0.5 glass
0.5 plasma
0.5 silver
And you can print an explosive grenade.
This is extremely mass producable and with explosive stacking you can make some absurdly stupid bombs.
Lastly: Firebombs and Pipebombs
Both of these items are dogshit. Random trigger timer means the few times I’ve seen them used they have never hit their intended target, with an incredibly weak explosion.
Firebomb at least is easy to make and sets whatever it hits on fire, but the Pipebomb I have only ever seen used once because it’s absolutely garbage. It’s payload ingredient, gunpowder takes more steps to make compared to clf3 or water potassium, for the benefit of a weak and exceptionally unreliable explosive.
I kind of agree but kind of don’t. Even in real life causing an explosion is incredibly easy to do. There’s lots of shit blowing up in this game, but from my experience the vast majority of explosions are from relatively weak sources like welderbombings. I’ve only ever really seen a lot of damage caused to station through explosives when it’s in the right people’s hands (i.e.: nukies). And they should have access to these things, they’re here to destroy the station - not make friends.
But with stacking explosions, I do agree that sometimes it can be excessive. Maybe making safe explosives can be harder to achieve, like grenades and such. Whereas things like pipe bombs can be made for cheap, they can be unreliable and potentially cause damage to the user from a premature detonation or something like that. But otherwise safe explosives would be both difficult to obtain the components, and difficult to build.
“Safe explosive” sounds odd to say. I guess reliable would be a better word
i think we should make pressure / heat explosions more rare / costly and make them more “sharapnel” focused, to my knowledge hitting a actual grenade with bullet or sharapnel doesn t make them explode (unless you hit the pin system) they however cook off when you burn them or hit with pressure / heat (also we should make it so ammo itself can also cook off and turns into randomly flying bullets)
Remember that, while realism is cool and all, we do make sacrifices for either:
Mechanical intuitiveness. Sometimes something is easier to understand if it does simple behavior than the actual, real life, unexpected behavior.
Mechanical enforcement. Sometimes we deviate from realism to make something fun, or to enforce a goal mechanically.
So it’s important to not get too caught up in chasing extremely realistic gameplay, we’re more so looking for what’s fun for both parties while also not causing a lot of trouble.
I do agree that either the cost of the explosive payloads should be increased or their ability to chain explode should be re-evaluated, some sort of logarithm or diminishing return.
I think that the random timer component cements the bombs well as an improvised explosive. The crafting “barrier” so to speak prevents it being made every round by John Shitter, but still viable if someone devious wants to commit to it. However, if we want to promote their usage a bit more, then yeah I agree with making them not extremely painful to craft.
I’ll offer some input on explosives as a concept.
We know how they work roughly. Boom. As things are right now radius is the main difference between most of them. Reality, it’s much more complicated. Brisance (the shattering force), shrapnel, sensitivity… just to name a few.
Thought. Separate explosive blast, shrapnel, structural damage, into separate fields. A grenade casing obviously has shrapnel in mind. Explosives go in, it’s a grenade. Give it a little structural damage and focus on shrapnel. Modular payload or something, no grenade casing. Less shrapnel, more structural damage.
Bottle bombs/satchels? Effects mix.
Sorry if it drifted off topic a bit. Main point I’m trying to illustrate is that explosions having more than just size would make balance much easier to achieve.
I think that the random timer component cements the bombs well as an improvised explosive. The crafting “barrier” so to speak prevents it being made every round by John Shitter, but still viable if someone devious wants to commit to it. However, if we want to promote their usage a bit more, then yeah I agree with making them not extremely painful to craft.
I don’t think they should be reliable (Although they are arguably a bit too unreliable now with their linear random timer between 0-10 seconds) I think the issue I was trying to convey in my sleep deprived state was that other explosive options are just as easy to make if not easier than the “cheap unreliable options” while also being stronger and more reliable.
Ideally pipe bomb and firebomb are the unreliable floor that other explosive options are weighed against.
Gheto explosives should not be reliable. Manufactured explosives should cost more in my opinion with adjustment to Nukie outpost resources so they dont get nerfed inderectly
I feel this is kinda blown out of proportion.
I rarely see anything but uplink explosives being used. Reason is that crafting an actual explosive requires collaboration from various departments, the minerals required means either a LOT of money spent by cargo or mining being done. The payload is science-only iirc. And the actual chemicals for the payload must be produced by chem, or i guess you can use welding fuel for whatever that is worth?
People cannot just mass produce this, it requires people to be actively ignoring antag behaviour. And that should be punished accordingly.
If someone makes the moves and takes the risks, they should be rewarded accordingly.
Not like explosives are any worse than what an actual antag can do. Like, you know, just a blitz-ops, a dragon eating you, zombies infecting you, wizard gibbing you, etc.
A couple explosions can be easily patched up.
I mean, any scientist with half a brain can stack a toolbox bomb filled with explosives payloads really easily:
Free plasma, silver, steel, glass, and plastic. Each payload costs 0.5 of the rare materials too and this gets even cheaper if you want to setup a hyperlathe.
Scientists can just EMAG their own lathe or set one up in maints.
All of this can be done under the facade of doing real science work.
Any other job like Engineering or Cargo is just as easy, the only caveat being having to rely on science to make the tech.
Any other job will have some difficulty.
Remember we’re discussing crew-available explosives. Also important to note that you’re comparing these explosives to major midround or roundstart antagonists. Explosive payloads stacked pile-high will combine and do a lot of damage. I’m not against the whole doing damage part, but I agree with Cheeseballs if they need to be raised in price.
It depends. I’ve noticed engineering getting better at patching up holes, though note that there are still often times where engineering gets in over their head very early into the round.
keep in mind btw, there is a “better minibomb” recipe that was nerfed earlier with smoke changes, it used to be 3x3 explosion and was twice as potent than regular minibomb and still it does 210 - 280 damage (total) (almost one shots DS and its used to one shot gib the DS before the nerfs) and spaces 3x3 area, it uses easy to acess basic chems and isn t costly, so you can mass produce those. (recipe found by me, how it works is you make several chemical explosions in single beaker and amplify them with smoke or foam reaction)
It doesn’t seem like an easy thing to balance either, lots of the fun comes from the danger of the work that you do. Like with atmos tech or sci, these jobs should have the potential to get you blown up. But at the same time, it makes it easy for anyone in those departments to also cause massive damage to the station. Making these jobs less dangerous can also take away from the medical department, a department where it’s not uncommon to stand around not doing anything for the majority of shift as-is when everyone’s already playing safely.
But I also agree with Nanock in the sentiment that the concern’s a bit exaggerated. Like I mentioned earlier, most of the explosions that I’ve seen during gameplay have been from low-damage sources like welderbombs, uplinks, etc. The vast majority of the time I’ve personally seen explosives causing serious damage, it was in the appropriate hands.
I’m not against the whole doing damage part, but I agree with Cheeseballs if they need to be raised in price.
I will clarify I don’t mind crew having explosive options that are reliable and instantly kill or even possibly instantly gib, I think that those options should actually be difficult to make which they currently aren’t.
This is definitely a difficult issue to tackle since it interfaces with chemistry and therefore medical, but it’s an issue I wanted to at least note and get opinions on.
I agree with most of what you said. To me the antagonist explosives feel pretty well balanced but the crew’s ability to make explosives can just be insanity sometimes.
This pocket bomb meta has gotten so bad I just assume every Chem is a validhunter who has prepared a backpack full of explosives now. The real kicker with Chem bombs is you can essentially customize it to be the perfect tool for the scenario. I think this is just a byproduct of Chem itself being really broken and too easy to abuse with no real investment. Having one role be much better than others at making these big AOE weapons is weird too. When Atmos did this same thing with MaxCaps (which arguably took more time and effort to make) they got nerfed into the ground.
I also agree that the explosive payload should probably not be allowed to just chain explode.
Seeing a WarOps round come to an abrupt and unceremonious halt because there’s a Tider willing to run into the center of the Nukie squad and suicide bomb is lame. It not only takes away from the preperation that goes into it on the crew’s side, it also just straight robs the Nukies of their antag round on their side. There is little you can do to react to a Tider jumping out of maints and instantly killing the entire team. You have around 1-3 seconds tops to escape the massive AOE it creates, which typically is not happening. Add to this the fact that most of the explosives that the Nukies are carrying just explode too…
Maybe lorewise it needs to be housed in a grenade to be primed? And also the materials cost should definitely be increased. It is a joke how cheap it is to mass produce grenades. What is normally a 4 TC purchase for antags can be made for the materials the author listed essentially.
Regarding Firebombs and Pipebombs, I actually think these are in a good spot. Like Roomba said, if they’re too easy to make you will have tons of shitters self-antagging with them. This both negatively affects rounds, and also increases admin workload.
I’m good with changing them to be something more akin to a binomial distribution with silly chances to blow up instantly on activation or have duds occur.
