Currently sabotaging the station is way too little works for the antags to achieve and has no counters. It would be much more balance if the amount of havoc you can wreck is directly proportional for the amount of works and preparation you do. I suggest to make several changes:
1.Engineering department should have NO traitor.
Reasons: It is too easy for traitor engineers to produce big problems for other engineers to solve and it is almost no way of preventing that before they actually cut the station power down or spacing part of it. It is too hard to fix compares to how easy it is to break.
2.Cutting any wires cable without a insulated gloves should put anyone in to critical
Reasons: cutting wires is a very strong way of disable the crew to react, thus it should require the antags put more works to achieve that, when they cannot spawn as engineers they need to get a insulated gloves before sabotaging the powers, and that requires some works proportional fixing the power.
3.Only interns of Science and Medical department can be traitors and they should not have full access over the whole department
Reasons: it is impossible for RD and CMO to keep their department colleague in check even when they are not traitors. Both scientist and medical stuff have legit reasons to roaming around the station with dangerous tools, and they can both make bombs and emag things to get powerful stuffs. So it would be nice that put more risks on them doing the high reward things by giving them more attentions from more trusted eyes. Having non-interns impossible be traitors and interns can be traitors still allow antags to do the fun stuff but also give RD and CMO some trusted hand to handle things would be disastrous if in traitors hand. And it should also make traitors have to disguise themself better for more eyes are watching them.
I 100% agree with all that. Even from roleplay stand point, the newly hired guy with shady and no background is hired to the company and only to find out later that they are hired spy or an agent in order to do what ever with the company.
If you correlate it with the real world, it makes sense that the HR wanted to hire someone so they hired a person off some weird and shady job listing without doing proper background check on this employee. Only to find out later that they were assigned to this company as a secret agent or something.
I think this just fucks up antags too much. Like, I’m with you on the life support stuff, but making antags locked to intern roles means antags can’t play in med or science basically at all. Plus then it’d be people who are new at the game only, since interns have a time-cap before the roles are locked out.
Remember, antags need to be able to get away with stuff to make it fun for them and engaging for the rest of the crew. It’s the reason you have to eat and why maints exist; it gives openings for them to actually do stuff. If everything was as secure as you suggest, people would be really frustrated.
for the later part, it is also fun to have sci and med to have more interns and less “actual” stuff, so it is also impossible for the RD and CMO to run their department by just the trust worthy staff. it will creat a more balanced situation for RD and CMO to deal with, if you want the department to run, you need use interns, maybe just giving sci 2 actual scientist and 6 intern, giving med 1 chemist 1doctor and 6 interns
I fundamentally disagree on most of the points being made.
Engineers can usually fix any issue caused by an engineer in roughly 6 seconds once the issue is found and identified.
I’m mostly fine with, but that’s not going to stop antagonists or shitters from snipping wires anyways with insuls.
Absolutely not. Interns are specifically prohibited from being antagonists because rolling antag and trying to learn the department sucks, and detracts from them actually doing their job. Often times the damage done by science is reversible or preventable with a competent crewmember. Medical staff are a little more dangerous in that regard, but again, they can be stopped with competent crew observations.
the thing is, almost 70% of last night’s rounds they were distro sabotage. At some point I was like “i’m not gonna play if im just gonna be out of oxygen in the next 15 minutes due to power or atmo sabotage”
Like why do you need to sabotage the whole station if you just need to steal an item or kill a single person.
This literally falls under unnecessary mass destruction. Let’s say you play on a 100 players pop server. Why do you need to ruin it for all 99 just so you can kill a single person and eventually fail at it.
it’s not about making antags not having fun. It’s about having extra layers of difficulty so sabotaging the whole distro doesn’t only require a single screwdriver and a wirecutter.
To be honest, it’s not fun where im gonna be spending every shift gasping for air and spend it seeking eva suit and oxygen round in the next several hours because, “hey since im antag, ill just ruin distro for everyone”.
I might just ghost or not properly invest into roleplaying my characters.
everything can become redundant which is why even as an antag, you should at least make it fun for you and your target - I learned that the hard way whenever I greentext and not feel good about it.
yeah unless an antag has die a glorious death they’re not supposed to do that at all actually, like, ahelp if they did
but also given gas miners are not destructible anymore, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to repair any given sabotage as long as the removed pipe is in atmos and not say in a random corridor? an engineer or the captain could fix it, eva could be opened in the meantime…
If find a random wire being cut or distro pipe is not hard for a skilled player, why do you think not having access to engi and full access to sci and med is to hard for antag? My point is, the cargo antag are the point of balance, they can in theory get all the powerful tools the want. But the QM are not too busy to keep them in check. So they need to either roleplay to get the trust or having smart plans to get there. The same things should applied to SCI and med because the RD and CMO are too occupied to deal with other stuff, that’s why there should be one or two more trusted employees to help them keep an eye on the antag. That does not prevent the antags from emag the lathe or the robot, it just make it harder, they need to do it with more discreet
That’s the point, though? Command is supposed to keep an eye on their staff, and only having so much time to do so is what makes antags work…
Like people CURRENTLY aren’t prevented from emagging the lathe or robot, and they don’t get a free pass to do it unless there’s additional syndies in their department.
Maybe it will be too hard for antags if every one do their jobs right, but that never happened and will never happens, from my point of view, the antags in med and sci can get things to easy and the cargo antags are perfectly balanced, so maybe give the RD and CMO a few staff they can trust will tip the balance back. So as a antag, to get things you should not have in Med and in Sci is in the same difficulty level as to their cargo counter part.
Your proposal already exists.
The security department’s entire job is to ensure that the station remains safe, and to ensure that people in more important areas remain safe and loyal to nanotrasen.
Part of the game, as it is, is trying to deduce what everyone else is up to. Is that chemist mixing life saving chems, or is he trying to poison you? Is the mime waving at you to do a joke, or is he going to gun you down?
By artificially introducing roles with the sole purpose of being deduced as safe, what you’re doing is reducing the odds of anything interesting happening involving traitors, which leads to things like more shuttlebombs as that is the only way to guarantee a greentext.
Lastly, this proposal would make security unfun as well. Security’s entire purpose is to be the trustworthy ones. They are the unwaivering soldier in the seas of doubt on the station. By giving every head their own personal bodyguard, you’re making it so that sec does not have anything to worry about beyond arresting tiders.
I mean, cutting wires isn’t even the best way to do it, if you want to really inconvenience the station, remove APCS completely. That doesn’t cause shocking at all. And it’s actually quite hard to space the station itself. Anyone can fix a wiring or apc issue with a tiny bit of engineering knowledge, it’s harder to keep the station unpowered than I think you’re appreciating.
And cleaning up after traitors is miles more fun for engineering than meteors. I wish traitors would fuck with electricity in better ways that actually make me have to figure out where tf they messed with it.
Intern roles are locked out from most people as far as I know, so you’d basically be dooming any regular player too? CE or QM have the most travelling departments, so I dunno how you think RD and CMO have it hard. Meds and scientists usually stay inside their department all round, it’s pretty easy to notice a missing med (and they get metagamed for it pretty constantly). I won’t lie, this post is very confusing lol.
For the record: i remember hearing a long time ago at atmos USED to be a “safe” role like sec and command at couldn’t roll syndie and i heard at every single command/sec team would metagame this knowledge for give benefits to the atmosians and prioritize them over the other engis (making them semi heads or sucessors, more access, giving them better gear, etc.) which was super unfun for any actual antag engi.
Losing ii sec and command and logs being under sec instead of ai for some fucking reason were already a big blow for the antag team. Putting more limits like the ones you are proposing will only make antags more miserable to play and will reward ““robust”” command/sec mains who play to win.
Yeah, atmosians deserve no real protections because they actually frankly are not THAT important to the station. There is basically nothing an atmo can do that CE can’t or any regular engi can’t figure out after breaking in. Air alarms are the only annoying thing and even that is fairly easy to resolve with hacking or simply getting atmo access from HoP. Yeah, they do carry a little more risk because they have access to plasma, trit and frezon but also unless you have DAGD most of the atmo sabotage of that tier is gonna be pretty unacceptable mass murder that should rightfully get you bwoinked. Even DAGD might be not enough to justify flooding distro with trit, I’d probably shy away from it.
II sec is something that should probably be added back. Every zombie round ends up working out to just be sec and what heads immediately fled to them (Looking at my CEs who stole the atmos axe at round start and immediately bailed on the department at the first sign of trouble) fighting everyone else as sec tends to be unwilling to arm the crew and is known “safe” so they have no reason to do anything but give up on the crew if things get out of hand. Super common complaint from my friends that makes zombie antag rounds just a drag for anyone but sec and maybe engi if there’s not a II in the department. Having sec be initial infected at least makes that proposition not guaranteed and denies them being the only ones who get to have the zombie apocalypse power fantasy.
Being II is hard, because I basically have a guarantee that if I can’t find a good opportunity in med or quickly take down people in my department, I’m just going to end up RR’d and sec plus heads will escape unharmed.