My opinion that no one asked for on all antags (the gamemode ones)

General
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Hey.

I’ve played my fare share of multiple servers but wizden has to be my highest in playtime and I thought why not yap about the antags. So thats what I’m here to do.

Okay so first off we have the iconic syndicate. I honestly think Traitors is a pretty flawless mode, sure kill objectives might need some tweaking but overall I think its balanced. Both crew and the Traitor have fair chances.

HOWEVER, everything goes out the window balance wise if you want to go loud. You only have very very limited choices when it comes to going loud. You either:
A. buy a surplus crate and hope you get some good gear.
ORRR B. Somehow, in someway, kill another syndicate agent and steal TC from their OPEN uplink. This is highly unlikely to happen.

I think syndicate agents need that little extra TC to be able to budget a loud operation. Even a +5 TC to the default uplink would make going loud much more enticing. HOWEVER, +5 TC to a silent syndicate is just even better news as then their balance goes out the window. There isn’t many ways to balance this and its a shame cause loud syndicate agents tend to be more enjoyable then the silent one that somehow greentexted even though you didnt see them all shift.

Anyway, on the topic of traitors:
THIEF
now I think thief is brilliant. The concept is that obviously you steal shit and the objectives are great (FOR THE MOST PART)
The one issue is thieving gloves. If they get meta’d somehow, you loose thats it. Your entire playstile needs the gloves or you will just loose. This makes it ESSENTIAL to buy the anatomy kit for any chance of a lasting run, so that you can shove the gloves in the storage implant.
As much distaste as I have for the anatomy kit its a requirement if you want to play thief without loosing because someone found your gloves.

So whats my suggestion? I have none, I’m not a game balancer. However there was an idea that after a few seconds you would get a pop up of “somethings missing.” after someone steals something from you using the gloves. In return for this nerf, there would not be fibers on the gloves, meaning that they act the same as forensic gloves. This still means that detectives once your gloves are checked can know your a thief, because those gloves have no residues.

ANYWAY

The hard to tackle one: REVOLUTIONARIES.
As of writing theres a brilliant rev rework doc in the mist so that might fix everything I talk about but HOLY MOLY is the rev gamemode just never fun.
As a rev: you have to gib or convert command. on LRP it tends to be gib.
As command: you have to hope whoever your shooting at is a rev and isnt someone innocent.
You see, as a command main durring rev rounds where they have been confirmed, I still have no clue who im supposed to avoid. For example: I was dragging a person (who happened to be a rev) to med so they could get healed, just for me to be randomly instakilled by two revs weilding shotguns. It isnt fun.
As I said in the discord, zeds is better then revs because at least in that gamemode I know who I’m supposed to shoot at, in revs its a guessing game and if you get it wrong then you get ahelped.

Anyway, now time for NUKIES!!!
For the most part, nukies are farely balanced. I love that the crew has to come together to beat a small but powerful ground and can make some really intresting RP and new tatics. It forces the crew to adapt or die!

This is the case, if the nukies dont use LUBE
I FUCKING HATE LUBEOPS.
Your pretty much shut out if they use lube, because unless there was a warop announcement, you wont know that they are coming until the lubes already there, with the nukies. Essentially, you wont be able to grab magboots before they come, as even if it is warops you may get done for metagaming for gearing up with magboots in anticipation for lubeops.
Lubes just not fun to play against.

Right, obligitary lube rant aside, warops is pretty fun aswell.

Zeds(Initial Infected)
Zombies tend to be a somewhat weird round. Like I dont dislike it but it just tends to be weird?
Of course, you have the rare exception, such as when a salvage fultoned xeno corpses back to the station and the infected them, causing a chaotic outbreak.
But in general, zeds tend to slow down a round and while yes there can be rare moments just like in nukies where the crew creates new strats or some precious RP moments are there, it just tends to be a slogfest.

okay uhh whats left? oh right
WIZARD!!!
Wizards tend to be fun, as they aren’t forced to attack the station, but can just be a silly guy who fucks with people sometimes. When wizards go loud, they go LOUD!
I think wizards a brilliant addition and cant wait to see more additions to him.

okay I forgot one antag but I cant recall what they are so thats the rant done

uhh

bye

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Regarding syndicate TC budget,you might be happy to hear that there is a pending PR for stealing tc from someone’s uplink even if its locked

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Turning off gravity counters lube ops pretty well. also cleanades.

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clean-nades are a decent counter but the magboot issue still arrises because its still unfun to fight with no grav against people with grav

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I think nukies mostly just buy the noslips, not the magboots for noslips. I think I’ve yet to see a crew turn off the grav gen on lube ops. There’s only a few regular robust players that think to take magboots out of EVA as well usually. Out of all things, cleanades are the most common counter to lube ops, but I’ve seen it take a while to arrive and even then it

  • rarely cleans all the lube
  • still leaves water for a pretty long time, forcing walking

My main gripes with lube ops are that it’s incredibly stale (most nukie strats are), incredibly easy, comes at little to no cost to nukies, and is very unfun to fight against. But I think largely nukies require more options to create fresh strategies, though I don’t know what all those options should be.

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Most nukie strats are stale because nukies themselves are sort of stale. They’re so common that their strategies are so refined down and optimized to little more than a formula.
“Nukies only win L% of the time.” Some people say. They don’t detonate the nuke no, but it’s still a total round end.
Personal thought. Nukies should be uncommon enough that their sudden appearance is a surprise. A moment met with something other than groans and cries of “not again.”

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There is a bug with puddles where they retain their slippiness even after being cleaned, cleannades have never been a valid counter to lubeops because of this.
Turning off gravgen griefs the entire station and makes operating even harder than it is already.
The only solution to lubeops is to aqcuire magboots or pray nukies are trash enough to take so long the bugged lube water evaporates before theyre done emptying armory.

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the nukies shall continue untill robustness improves

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Bug? Isn’t that just how puddles work?
Water puddles are still slippery while they are evaporating, and if the puddle isn’t completely drained (in a situation where cleanade is not used), the lube will not evaporate so it will remain slippery

However, 2 things to note: nukies can only, normally, get 2 lubenades (if I remember correctly, they start with 2 chem payloads) if they want more payloads, they need the right lathe or to raid VGRoid, and make the chems in advance for the extra nades, all of which requires more planning and gives more time for the crew to just, be productive (and during a nukie round, until they show up, there are very few antags, if at all)
So, for the most part, they need to be pretty tactical with the nade use. I’ve seen armories get cleaned by nukies easily even without lube, and having an armory wipe isn’t a guarantee loss; most guns end up coming from cargo (not to mention cargo can get the actual good crew weapons - enforcer and 550s, which most armories dont have)
I’ve seen rounds were the armory is raided exclusively by crew, and have them lose; and I’ve seen rounds where the armory was wiped, and nukies still lost.

The main problem with the lube is with the nuke; if an area is lubed and the crew has no counter, its bad, but at the end of the day the nukies have to move, either to get the disk or get the nuke, and once they move, the lube is no longer much of a threat (just an annoyance).
Its when the nukies lube the area around an armed nuke where the crew almost has to counter it, or disarming / beating the nukies becomes much tougher.

That being said, the counters that exist do work - they just need to be used
Cleannade takes a while, both to spread and for the water to evaporate, but if used quickly the crew will have time before the nuke explodes (and during that time they can still shoot the nukies) Janitors players either need to be more focused on that, or cargo needs to learn to buy cleaning supplies alongside the boom-sticks
Grav boots, ofc, also work, but the slowdown is indeed a massive weakness, not to mention that there are not many gravboots on a station nor are they easy to obtain for most crew. The only real way to have more is to have science print them (and also research them)
Turning off the grav has a similiar problem to the nade - it takes time (and someone needs to be prepared to do it) however, unlike the nade, the AI can also do it, so as long as theyre still running, crew can just request it once they see the lube. And while fighting without gravity sucks, it affects both sides - only a loneop and agent start with magboots; most nukies buy no-slips, which become worthless when grav is offline.
Finally, and this is the important part - when grav is offline, gravboots dont give slowdown, they are just a buff. if crew turns off grav and starts handing out grav boots, they can have a massive advantage. The nukies can simply grab boots from a corpse, but they still lose the 2 TC on the noslips and it requires them to stop and loot.

Crew needs to be more trigger happy about the gravity generator. Nukies have their meta and a lot of them follow it very closely, so crew needs to develop their own meta and learn to use it.
Right now, the crew “meta”, or more correctly, just what the crew does most of the time - is terrible: a ton of caps try to fight nukies, which, good idea because they have good weapons, bad idea because they are the thing the nukies want - command players should learn to move the disk around to control the nukies. if the nukies managed to wipe an area and are now pushing to where most people are, the disk should be moved around the nukies, force them to change direction, and give the crew time to revive people (and you dont need to do this by flying around the station and round delaying, there are more than enough hallways and maintance routes)
During war ops, a lot of players move the sec lathe to cargo, also a terrible idea - sure, thats where the mats are, but its also exposed to space and the most obvious place for them to attack. Nukies have to get into the station from space, important stuff (like weapons, ammo, and meds) should be as far away from space as they can, and the disk should never be at that spot, so the nukies have to pick either progressing their goal or harming the station, but cant pick both.

Okay ive rambled long enough, point is - nukies meta is very refined, anti-nukie meta is very much not. If you get to be command during a nukie round, dont fall into common mistakes, try to enforce good counters, so others see they work and use them themselves in the future. The better crew will get against the meta, the more nukies will be discouraged from it, and the more creativity or robustness will be required from them

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Worth noting that there has been a bit of discussion lately regarding Wizard. They are actually supposed to attack the station, and being a friendly wizard is actually rulebreaking. I personally find friendly or ambivalent, chaotic wizards much more fun than just insta-murder wizards, and I feel like their antag status encourages validhunting and playstyles that just cause too many RR to be fun.

However, the rules are what they are right now, and unless the rules change, wizards do have to attack the station. The wizards that play loud are doing so correctly, even if it’s not fun for those of us that like to focus on RP over “winning”.

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i feel like this is false, i thought the thing about wizard was “so long as you are doing antag stuff, its fine”. Like if you go in with the intention of just being a mindswap menace its fine because youre doing antag stuff.

Like most things are valid, just dont show up and be like “oh im scribbles the silly! i love making flowers and helping crew”.

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