Science needs some more direction, goals, cool stuff to do

[FairlySadPanda]

Why I'm salty about Science

Science at the moment really doesn't feel like it has much impact on the round. There are a few items Science can unlock that impact the station - the Flatpacker, the better sechud with flash protection, the anti-singulo gun, the GORRILA gauntlets - but generally Science is just milling about with too many people in the department for the roles that need doing.

Anomalies

Anomalies generally have a kill-or-farm meta. Anomalies is a one-person job generally done by a RD untrusting of the rest of their team to do it for them, or someone who does anoms every single round. The ultimate goal of someone working on anoms is to exploit the mechanics and find a way of reliably generating oodles of points. This is completely random. If you get lucky, you invalidate artifacts entirely.

Artifacts

Artifacts are a random gacha where the player has no way of actually influencing gameplay. Once you know how to proc a trigger (or if a trigger is a bad one, and ergo the artifact must be dumped) you just need to do it, then wait 40 seconds. Oh hey, the artifact went to a new node, um, points? Oh it's gone backward, well, time to wait another 40 seconds.

Robots

Roboticist is a side-hustle at best at the moment, as it's missing BOTH of its interactions (with AI and proper borg design, and with med as robot arms etc are used to replace missing parts). Ergo it's not a real role and is simply a source of cool drip.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing at the moment is horribly inefficient and undercooked, and well-intentioned buffs like the Flatpacker have just made manufacturing and maintaining equipment more of a magic-box-that-does-the-thing and less actual gameplay. (This has lead to the nonsense situation where savvy players can just ask for their own lathes and flatpackers for Cargo, totally removing any reason to go to Science!)

Techs

Techs are unlocked by points (which are unreliable) and your available selection is unreliable. Unless science is rolling in points, being able to pick a direction of research is essentially impossible, and rounds invariably go to hell too quickly to actually ever see anything remotely deep into tech trees. Worse, the result of tech is entirely new things to manufacture, often in machines science has no access to, with resources science doesn't have.

Current gameplay impacts

Science is optional

If nobody did science in a round, and Cargo broke in and stole their manufacturing equipment, the only thing people probably would miss is the Flatpacker as it cheats having to actually make machines.

Science is boring

If you spawn as a scientist, what are you excited to do in the round? Is there any new interesting goal to work toward this round, or a constant stream of workload coming in to manage? Can you get stuff done and have a fulfilling shift even if you don't get perfect access to the resources you'd need to play optimally?

Science doesn't interact with the antag roles

-> Traitor: maybe you manage to research something you can abuse? Maybe you emag the lathe or something?
-> Nukies: at best you can unlock being able to manufacture guns? But that only really ever happens in warops, and Cargo also can get guns...
-> Zombie: you can neither fight the infection, control it or beat it.
-> Revs: Oh nice, they can make flashes at your lathe? And your department can, uh, make mops to further the revolution...?

Desired outcomes

Science should be COOL

You're a scientist pushing the bounds of intelligence and wisdom out in deep space! It should be dangerous, chaotic and fun! It should get you fun gadgets and toys that you can either screw around with yourself or make a big impact on your fellow crew!

Science should be able to have a fun round without needing a perfect station

Starting the round with one artifact that needs magboots to trigger is not fun gameplay. Waiting fifteen minutes for Cargo to deliver things is not fun gameplay.

Science should be engaging

One key aspect of Science is manufacturing goods out of basic resources, but the tools to do this are so bad that they'd be embarrasing on a casual Minecraft server. The absolute worst way to have a job that takes resources and makes products is to solve the entire thing with magic do-everything-for-you boxes, and what is worse the Flatpacker has made this WORSE whilst making things more convenient, as the old cap/bin/manip build-it-from-scratch approach at least meant you needed to engage with building something akin to how engineering needs to pay attention when making things before they get their own magic cheat-everything Fortnite gun in the RCD.

Artifacts and Anomalies both suffer from the same design problem, which is that they hide being solvable behind a random number generator to try and cheat in engaging gameplay. Anomalies can probably survive this, as they're supposed to be a high-risk-high-reward way of getting points so the player has to be on the ball and make good judgement calls, and remember how to deal with the good-to-farm-but-a-bit-spicy ones. But artifacts are utterly awful at the moment because the player essentially is on a carousel of two actions of wait -> do node -> wait -> do node until the player gets fed up and swaps artifacts or is blocked due to resources. Sometimes you need a multitool to get your points. Sometimes you wait for fifteen minutes for Cargo to get you magboots. Sometimes it's radiation and you just sell the arti. All the while you're wading through some slippery liquid the artifact emitted that refuses to evaporate.

Science should have enough stuff to do for a full shift

The biggest sin at the moment is that science even on an 80-pop server can be done by about three people - an RD fulfilling requests, someone running artifacts and someone running anomalies. You functionally do not need two or more people on either research role. You probably need more chefs/bartenders on a 80-pop server.

[EmoGarbage404]

this really isn't the place to put this?

[mirrorcult]

this is a very vague issue and not the place to put it