Powered Hardsuits

Development PR Reviews
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This thread is intended to kickstart discussion on the Powered Hardsuits design document. You can find this document here:

@Blackern5000

I was reminded of this when I was, yet again, reminded of current hardsuit balance. You can see the discussion that sparked my interest in getting this reviewed here.

Overall my thoughts of the idea are in support. I’ve stated some of them below. Note that this is my argument on how it would help, not the author’s argument in the design document.

Current Hardsuit Balance

For those that don’t know, we generally discourage people from staying inside hardsuits all shift, as it invalidates many mechanical threats that are supposed to be of danger to the player (spacing, barotrauma, or otherwise).

Currently, we mechanically discourage people from staying in hardsuits via slowdown. That’s about it. A slow hardsuit makes it not attractive to wear unless there is a dire need for its usage.

This commonly results in a noobtrap where players “don’t get it” and wear the suit all shift, and then complain that their work is slow and sluggish, and don’t find enjoyment in the gameplay loop.

Proposal

In general, the proposed changes aim to make hardsuits have a consumable resource in the form of a battery. This battery would power the hardsuit and enable any special intrinsic abilities that are a part of it. These suits would only be able to be recharged at a suit storage unit, encouraging putting them away when they are not needed.

I think this would make for more interesting gameplay and make hardsuits an even more important resource. It would also make balancing discussions around them easier as right now our options are balancing resistances, speed, pressure/fire protection, etc.

Technical Feasibility

This seems really easy to implement. Most stuff like magboots, speedboots, batteries, etc. are all componentized and some might only require minimal atomization. Any components we develop can also probably be easily slapped on something else with a battery component or otherwise.

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You will have to make power cells predicted first or all of the code will be unpredicted.
So I would not call it easy at all.

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I have 129 hours in atmos and wear my hardsuit all shift. I’ve been happy to eat the slowdown given my job is nearly always dealing with hostile atmospheres such as botany mutations with random gases. Frezon leaks. Bomb damage. Ect.

While salv is the other department that is always in hard suit literally in space most of the time.

From the perspective of these two jobs having ‘downtime’ out of suit is not the experiance they play the roles for.

For salv it means they have to stop between jobs to get there suits ready again, adding a ‘chore’ to their return to base.

Engi they will have lost time dealing with various crisis such as plasma fires, spaced regions and other engi-based problems or alteratively have to return to dock early delaying bomb repairs and making it more likely large bombs force evac. (as crew often evac even if engi can easily repair the problem.)

Outside of these two jobs the other station roles only use the suits sometimes for situations that call for it (paramed saving people in space, sec fighting dragons or in nukies) So.. I’d not want to stop suit usage altogether but find a way to encourge the optional group to not permeantly use it while removing friction on the group that needs it for day to day work-work.

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The already support prediction via the power cell toggle stuff.

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And this game already suffers from inaccurate battery times. Like a “high cap” battery can only last so long. Meanwhile in real life, a high cap battery can last hours and hours. I’m sure there may be an in game reason for this, but a hard suit that is meant to save lives should last for hours. Otherwise we might as well add battery life for E-swords.

Although, to allow people to actually do their jobs we could add a job based way of recharging.
For example, an atmos suit that can use heat to charge.

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Nah, all the power cell draw/recharge stuff is server side only.

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Conceptually, this would be good, technically, no idea.

Something that makes hardsuits less unbearable at least, and on the point of salv, salv is supposed to come back anyways, so there’s not really an issue with that IMO.

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Time in shift is warped. thats why we need to eat and drink so much compared to real life where you can eat maybe twice a day

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Salv comes back, but sometimes they want to go right back out again after droping there materials in cargo and I dont think thats a ‘wrong’ playstyle we should punish. If salv wants to do a few back to back missons before stopping for a drink something to eat and maybe vist sci for some upgrades I think thats perfectly acceptable gameplay for that role.

I’d also say that engi wearing the suit all shift is also acceptable. once they have setup atmos the major things they will be dealing with is Spacing from various events or antags and refilling or repairing Singlo/telsa. knowing that basically every problem you’ll face as engi will require your suit on your not gonna want to put it on and off all the time and often you’ll go from one of these jobs to another.

I will also point out we have Kessler Syndrome as a round type any suit down time during that would just be even worse given its already a very stressful round type for engineering.

The way I see it we have two types of hardsuits; Those where the roles job tasks them to wear hard suits in order to do their job with downtime being the only time to remove it. (engi/salv) and those jobs where we want the hardsuit used where its warrented (Sec, Med, clown, mime, RD, ect.) So.. idlely you’d want to not punish Salv/Engi while punishing the other section. Allowing those whos job revolves around working in spaced area’s to get on with their tasks without friction while those who should only look to the hardsuit when nesscary to be punished for constant use.

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That being the case it seems to me the solution is rather simple. Engi/Salv suits have built in micro reactors. They NEVER run out of power naturally but can be EMP offline temporally as central command knows that when it comes to their day to day activity being in space is the default not the exception so fitted them out to always have power.

Meanwhile jobs where we dont want them in power armor all the time have cells based on the length of usage we’d expect.

Sec can have rather long engagements with nukie play and forcing them to exit the fight to recharge is not the gameplay sec is into so I think Sec armor should run on HV cell timers, but dont recharge fast once depleted.

Paramed and CMO on the other hand should only be using there suit when retriving people from spaced areas, or to protect themsleves when medbay is spaced (bomb sites, Sci-plosions, Externals, areas where nukies are fighting) There power suit can aford the Medium cell but has much faster recharges as sometimes you need to get a few back to back trips in.

RD should have the small cells. in my mind the only time RD needs to suit up is if they expect an artifact is gonna attempt to blast them apart and space the room or if they know AI access is spaced and need to evac. both of these situations happen for a breif moment and resolve so having a small cell should be more than enough

Clown/mime power armor is crafted by the player. We could have them use whatever power cell they provide but it would be really strange if they had better suits than Sec.. I havn’t thought of how to resolve these two logically.

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This doesn’t make sense.

The entire point of powered hardsuits is to add another currency (power in this instance) that you have to keep track of, which attempts to mechanically prevent a lot of issues present in current day hardsuits:

  • Antags only have to do very little in order to stay in space indefinitely. They can use supercooled oxygen, and even if that was not viable, they could prepare large tanks in advance.
  • It is very hard for Security to deal with antags who hide in space due to the nature of Security’s balance. Attacking from the station → space is generally very hard and there’s a lot working against security.
  • Regular crewmembers currently spend too much time in their suits, which causes a detriment to their perceived gameplay. Ex., I previously mentioned Engineering’s problem of commonly spending too much time in their suits.

Giving players infinite charge because they frequent space or hostile environments defeats the purpose of powered hardsuits.

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Point of Information 1: I don’t think this actually really incentivizes less usage of hardsuits.
Engineer hardsuit for instance:

  • Boo hoo my flashlight is out of power, so now what? I’m just gonna keep working until I have a moment in engi to recharge.
  • Welding protection is moot due to engi goggles for engis anyway.
  • The two major things an engi suit is used for is
    1. Pressure protection (not changed in this ddoc)
    2. Basic protection from station fires (not changed in this ddoc)

This doesn’t actually give engi a reason to wear their hardsuit less overall, merely keep it depowered until it’s needed.

PoI 2: I like @ArtisticRoomba 's idea in the PR comments that atmos hardsuits should have their high-pressure protection to be always on, but with power drain scaling from 0 at normal pressure to higher drain values at higher pressures.

PoI 3: With the captain’s suit getting rebranded to a “voidsuit”, would that mean it would be getting a speed buff?

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There will probably be more implementations or features of powered hardsuits, the ones listed in the ddoc are simply examples that demonstrate the general idea.

My general idea (for solving the terminal engi hardsuit issue) was to have engineering/atmos hardsuits have a speedup when your suit has power. When your suit dies, you’re significantly slowed, and thus encouraged to store the suit for charging. Thus people will see hardsuits as a tool used in explicit situations instead of a tool that you simply put on and use for the entire shift.

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Boo hoo my flashlight is out of power, so now what? I’m just gonna keep working until I have a moment in engi to recharge

This doesn’t actually give engi a reason to wear their hardsuit less overall, merely keep it depowered until it’s needed.

The doc literally says that running out of charge would give you a major movement speed decrease (25%-75% depending on the suit)
Errant fails reading comprehension. Somewhat. But I guess the idea is that using or carrying a hardsuit that’s off, whether or not it has remaining power available, should be sufficiently annoying to deter it being the go-to option

On the topic of voidsuits, if they will now be the “spend infinite time in vac” suits, is that not also a problem? Is the only deterrent here their comparative rarity? Can an antag just kill the Captain and do the same “haha I’m in space come get my laser pistol” thing as before?

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Likely, unless alleviated through some other method.

Something that could be looked at is suit puncturing. Suits that are not hardsuits (voidsuits maybe, EVA suits, etc.) could get holes punched in it when shot. This would make the person’s air run out or they could lose significant insulation, and potentially force them inside.

This would help against two problems that the Captain’s hardsuit has (even though it is indeed a unique hardsuit):

  • The hardsuit is usually combined with the Captain’s other equipment (jetpack, laser) to validhunt with efficiency.
  • Antags who get the Captain’s hardsuit and equipment can snowball.

Suit puncturing could be repaired at a suit storage unit, science, HoP’s suit fabricator, whatever.

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Idea I just had: For engi hardsuits, for example, there could be an ability called Movement Optimisation:

  • Drains power such that the power would go 100-0% in 3-5 minutes.
  • Reduces speed reduction from hardsuit completely via manual control of leg joints (doesn’t affect magboot slowdown)

And in exchange engi hardsuits could get 5-10% more slowdown during normal operation.
This fixes two problems:

  • Engineers often can’t get to a spaced area fast enough. This is solved by providing them with a quick power surge that can get them pretty much anywhere on the station, at the cost of all their power.
  • Engineers will spend too much time out-and-about in their hardsuit. This is solved as it provides a strong incentive to keep your hardsuit at 100% charge, allowing you to reach the spaced area from your suit storage in 1 or 2 minutes.

Furthermore, it makes engineering antagonists more interesting, as they could use this power in intermittent bursts to make getaways from security into spaced areas.

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I think at this stage we should not get lost in theorycrafting and discussing individual hardsuit models and their attachments. Work out the generic principles about common hardsuit attributes first.

The general idea sounds good to me, whether or not it’s perfect. The one concern/caveat I have is that we should be very carefuly that initial implementations of battery drain are not annoying. Some amount of dislike from players is going to be unavoidable, it’s a nerf after all. But we should reduce the amount of annoyance it introduces as much as we can. (I guess releasing it with some nice addons woud also help there, but we can do that after initial iteration)

I say that we give it a tentative approval and then give it a try in closed tests, before we put it on Vulture.

((Also, Design Doc Process rewrite moment))

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I agree with the base idea of powered hardsuits since we can’t just rely on slowdown for balance.

The only real blocker with it in my opinion is:

  1. Not enough designated cell chargers or suit charging areas
  2. EMPs being completely binary devices that will wreck both antag and crew hardsuits
  3. We would still be dealing with hardsuits going missing from departments without a suit kiosk or localised suit storage.
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Your entirely right, this would undermine the power hardsuits as a thing but only for the jobs that we shouldn’t be punishing for round long use.

The point of powered hardsuits is to discoruge all round use of hardsuits. In engi and salvs case though all round hard suit is required to do their job effectively. By preventing Engi and salv having round long usage it would both hinder there core gameplay experice and have people less likely to pick up those roles.

The idea I put forward is we need to proportionately discourge use, for Engi/slav we shouldn’t punish round long use at all as thats part of there core job. both there core gameplay loops involve be in spaced area. Engi repairing holes in the station or going into the spaced PA area for repairs/refills is most of their duties outside of this they have to do one time distro setup and provide Sci with cans which is a quick job. Slav’s case they are heading out to mine space rocks or rummaging in derelict space junk. IMO we shouldn’t punish people for playing there role correctly which in these jobs would be using power suit for day to day activity.

I think that we can try to encourge Engi all day but its out of touch to think they will ever stop perma usage. The way I see it, if we are forcing them to abandon there jobs in order to recharge they are just going to be anoyed and demmand the changes reverted or just entirely abandon having the role enabled as its too much hassel to be bothered with.

It seems to me that you believe being in perma hardsuit as engi is not correct for there gameplay despite all the day to day challenges they are presented with being entirely based in spaced area’s.

I disagree.. if we apply the conditions universally it will disproporitally effect some jobs on the station more than others. for example RD would have no issues barely using there suit, as for them it can already just be a tool. Meanwhile Salvage will be hit HARD and have to stop doing there job while waiting for the suit to recharge multiple times per a shift. This is why I suggested a tailored responce where we give nerf those who really we dont want in hardsuits all shift, while those who kinda have to be in hardsuits all shift to even do there work we dont want to punish.

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I’m all for any form of resource management and this seems like a pretty solid foundation to work from in balancing out hardsuits. I’d also be curious in the future about upgradeable suit chargers for science to assist with though that’s future theorycrafting for later.

Ingrained abilities is an interesting idea to add as well and I like the utility it presents as a sidepath to just straight up item usage but the baseline concept itself is strong enough to warrant testing before anything else is really added to the idea. I doubt it’ll negatively affect Engineering that much since they need to learn when and where to use their hardsuits anyway rather than keeping them on all shift (Though granted more problems for them to repair and solve aside from spacing could certainly help but that’s another issue altogether). Salvage is however the one department I’m most interested to see how this affects, especially Salvagers choosing to go out to the VGroid but I think they’ll adapt. I’m always against the general idea that any major change to Salvage is immediately going to result in every Salvager ever quitting and never doing it again. A bit of downtime where they need to wait for their suit to charge is fine since there’s plenty of times as is where they need to wait for the magnet to reset, or want to assist with the department, or go upgrade their equipment with Science, etc.

It’d also make EVA helmets (on emergencies) separate items again you had to put on which I actually did enjoy as part of gameplay because I’m one of those psychos.