[Ready?] Cult Overhaul. Yep. #13552
[Ready?] Cult Overhaul. Yep. #13552
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WJohn
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For the rune modifiers, they should be runes that aren't circular, and when drawn next to a rune add to the design of that rune, and dont function on their own. |
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Suddenly, resurrection runes are worth using. |
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Possible rune modifiers; Also, modifiers should probably take up a 'slot' so you can't just slap mods in until you've got a super rune, but I'm guessing that's already planned and just not stated. |
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^ blood boil landmines. |
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I liked the concept of religious fanaticism and people forcefully indoctrinating into the cult, like an actual cult but with actual cult magic unlike irl |
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A couple of my friends are in a cult and they don't try to forcefully indoctrinate me No really, I'm serious |
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cult is a spectrum |
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Who are you to call the Geometer evil? |
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She just wants to be loved. |
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10/10 IGN MERGE IMMEDIATELY Other than that I'm loving the ideas here, cult nukies was actually an idea I was thinking about proposing myself in the forums. |
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This literally just sounds like you're turning Cult into Hand of God. |
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Hand of god has conversion and awful communication, as well as much less obvious objectives. It's more like gang, with magic instead of guns, only one gang, and no conversion. |
| "<span class='danger'>You punch [src].</span>") | ||
| damaged(5) | ||
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| /obj/structure/constructshell/large/attackby(obj/item/weapon/I, mob/living/user, params) |
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You have two attackby procs, so you can't add summoning orbs to the shell.
Also don't check for item/weapon, there are non-weapon items with force.
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One of the core themes of cults is their recruitment. Cult aren't just a bunch of Nukeops with hooded robes. Nothing about this sounds like a positive direction or improvement on cult, remove recruitment, remove stun talismans... either you end up giving cult something even MORE broken or you leave them to wither and die like lings were after parasting was remove. There's no direction to these changes besides "lel cultops shud be gud". Your instinct was right that recruitment wouldn't be viable without stun talisman, but removing both was where you goofed up. |
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This overhaul proposes removing conversion. My justification is that stun papers are cancer, however it's very hard to convert without them. Thus, this removes both. |
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@tkdrg So will the cultists start as part of the crew or will they spawn in their own culty spaceship to then warp to the station from |
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They spawn as part of the crew. It is expected that they ought to build some secluded base on the station and defend it in order to summon narnar. |
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So will you be making it much easier for them to get cult armor/swords? Because they're really gonna need it. Edit : Oh also can you make it so that there's a way to find out if someone is a cultist like we did for shadowlings? Implants or holy water could fill that purpose because having stealth cults shitting around and doing nothing all round would be pretty bad |
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It's still the same, except now only a third of the cult can scribe the rune. I don't see how "write rune, click" is difficult. |
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So only 2 guys can actually make armor runes? Edit : Ah okay I see that last bullet point. So how this would work is the cult sacrifices a dude and then gets additional rune modifiers for the one who sacced? |
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That's the idea eventually, although that isn't implemented right now (it's the third to last bullet point). Right now, you have to ask the other cultists for help, or rely on your supply talisman. |
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That sounds like a good system. Is there going to be anything in place to prevent a cult from all getting the same rune modifiers when they sac people? |
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The plan is making it all random, so I guess so. |
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My gut feeling is that 2 minutes for nar-sie summon is definitely too short, and it should be like 4-5. The timer should also display in the stat panel so it's not totally unclear when it's going to go nar-sie shaped. |
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2 minutes was just a guess. I'll make it 4. I didn't display anything because It's a spooky scary cult that doesn't care about petty human measurements such as the concept of "time" (and also because nuke doesn't have one either and it just makes everything more despair). |
| /obj/effect/rune/flame | ||
| cultist_name = "Flame" | ||
| cultist_desc = "Sets any non-believers who can see the rune on fire." | ||
| invocation = "Bh'rt an'fi'ah!" |
I'm just gonna throw this out there because it caught my attention: I feel like the game is pretty high on the number of "announce the thing, then defend the thing" wincons right now. Like after a certain number of antags use this, it gets old. |
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Well, the gamemodes that currently do that are Gang and Malf. Meanwhile, we have 4 conversion gamemodes (Rev, Cult, Gang, Shadowling). |
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Swapping out conversion for defence doesn't make it the right decision. There are other things cult can do to summon Nar-Sie, including in a cult's theme rather than in game mechanic theme. As a thing I just want to say out of confusion, gang and shadowling has conversion to stop plaeyrs from being thrown out of the round by being killed or so that seemed to be all anyone said about that aspect. Are we going to go back to a desire of preventing players from being kicked to ghostchat if this gets through? |
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Five, Hand of God has conversion too. Though shadowling and Hand of God are both disabled right now, iirc. Cult has soulstones and constructs to keep people in the round, too. |
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Why's shadowling disabled? Also yeah cultists can sac people and turn them into constructs, so they aren't totally out if they get dunked on. Unless the construct they got turned into dies, in which case rip. |
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Using a soul stone on someone should probably leave a summoning orb if it doesn't already (I don't think it does). |
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It doesn't |
| text += "<font color='red'><b>Blind</b></font><br>Much like the Rite of the Unheard Whisper, the Rite of the Unseen Glance serves a single purpose. Any non-cultists who can see \ | ||
| the rune will instantly be blinded for a substantial amount of time.<br><br>" | ||
| text += "<font color='red'><b>Debilitate</b></font><br>The Rite of the Shadowed Mind is simple. When invoked, it will cause all non-cultists that can see its rune to become deaf, blind and mute for a \ | ||
| considerable amount of time.<br><br>" | ||
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| text += "<font color='red'><b>Stun</b></font><br>Though the Rite of Blazing Light is weak when invoked normally, using it in conjuction with the Rite of Binding makes it much more useful. \ |
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You can't make stunpapers anymore so the "use this with imbue to stun the crew forever" is wrong. You should note that it stuns on cross now instead, something like this;
Though the Rite of Blazing Light is weak when invoked normally, merely disorienting and disabling nearby non-cultists, non-cultists that step on the rune will be stunned without expending its power.
However, the disorientation caused by this rune is quite brief, and when invoked directly, it will not remain for further invocation.
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So cult are supposed to construct their own base on station and defend it without any reliable stuns or conversion mechanic. That was all I needed to hear to support scrapping this entirely. It's one thing to have a small closet you can use to sac/convert people, but a base suited for 5 cultists where you're going to summon a god and hold off tens of dozens of crew who will try to stop you. Like I said before either you have to set Cult up with obscenely strong stuff, stuff that would make nukeops and their syndieborgs go "oh shit thats really strong", and in doing that you're going to either make them about as fun as fighting syndieborgs (average crew won't stand a chance, going to require powergayman with lube or TTV's if you're not sec) or you're going to make them all insufficiently strong and cult gets steamrolled and pretty soon its off rotation for being unplayable. None of this is worth fucking with a solid game mode with its own niche, go screw around with malf if you want to overhaul a mode that is terrible in almost every respect. Plus did I mention like one of the core themes of the 'cult' archetype is their desire to grow their numbers through conversion? |
They have reliable stuns (stun rune, time stop rune, debilitate rune to some extent). They just no longer have any portable stuns. As I've said in the original post, this overhaul was because I (and most people I've talked to) found stunpaper's insta stun+mute really unfun. However, conversion is very difficult without stun papers, so it was suggested to me that it might be viable to just remove it.
That's a valid concern and it's part of the reason why I removed the 5-minute time limit on the orb. It means you can decentralize your saccing and then collect all the cultists on a place when you want to summon. The cults don't usually get steamrolled by this point because they generally have a veritable army of constructs, which tends to hold off the crew for long enough (barring BoHs/TTVs, which have been somewhat dealt with).
The balance is a serious issue, and honestly I'm afraid of it because I'm not great at balance. The playtests right now show that cults are generally really weak, even though I've made some gigantic buffs, just because so many things can go wrong early on and then you end up with red alert shuttle and you have 7 minutes to sac 5 people. However I don't want to buff them too much: a single powergamer cultist can basically murderboner everyone right now already, I'd rather not make that worse. I want to think that people suck due to their lack of experience with the overhaul, but then we have the counter argument of the near-constant fluke ops we keep seeing. The worst part is that I can't think of an easy way to solve this problem. Conversion would reduce it to some extent once you get the converts going, but then you get the issue of "how do we start converting": either we make conversion fast and easy (like rev or gang), or we give the cult a very strong portable stun, which I really don't want to do. Suggestions on how to fix this are welcome, I'm willing to change everything except for the removal of stun paper as that's the whole point of this PR.
Malf is awful too, but I really really hate playing AI and I'd rather not try to improve something that I can't understand. Cult on the other hand I can kind of enjoy apart from the bullshit stunpapers, yet it is generally agreed upon that it is one of our worst gamemodes, so that's why I picked it.
Yes, and it would be nice if we could keep conversion, but gameplay matters more than fluff. If conversion is forcing us to have the toxic gameplay brought upon by the stunpapers then I think removing it is the better choice. |
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^^^:capital_abcd: Wall of text :capital_abcd: ^^^
Theres a difference between core concept and fluff, and I think the line was hit in this case.
That kind of thing is sort of inherent to ss13, and I don't think it could be fixed unless we did something drastic. Came up with some kind of a solution. A final solution. .... Roleplay. |
tkdrg
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Added the cult dagger and squashed commits. Should be ready-ish to go I believe, pending another testmerge for playtesting (I already asked Kor) and Robustin's response to my answer. |
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I probably should warn you that keeping the new cult icon is probably unwise just because of how hard to see it can be aND I LOST TO A GREEN SQUID SEND ME TO HELL |
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but i dont like the green squid i want yours |
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I'll put this up in a bit but I want to test nuke challenge as well |
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it's up already actually, I asked hg and he put it. But sure feel free to take it down. EDIT: I was fairly satisfied with the playtest, so I guess I'm marking this as "ready" for the soul courageous enough to review it. |
Cult is awful, so let's try to improve it. Idea by KorPhaeron. I also took some inspiration from adrix89's sacrifice cult, so credits to him. Also thanks a lot specially to MrPerson and Iamgoofball for helping me brainstorm this, and Joan for the sprites for the summoning orb, the large nar-sie shell, and the new cult antag hud. Basically, we remove conversion, and turn cult into a magic version of nuke, with a small team of stealth elite cultists that have to build a base in the station and sacrifice people in order to build an army of constructs and get materials to eventually summon Nar-Sie. Stun talismans and conversion are gone. Nar-Sie is now the only objective. Sacrifice runes now provide summoning orbs, which you can use to drop a large shell. Insert enough orbs in the shell and you trigger a Delta. Defend the shell for 3 minutes and Nar-sie will arise. This shell is bombproof and singularityproof. It may be summoned up to three times if destroyed, but you will have to start from the beginning sac-wise. Runes are now RNG. Each cultist only gets 50% of the runes. Inspiration is basically The Binding of Isaac here (thank you MrPerson for this!). Furthermore, many old runes were merged/removed and other new ones were added. Almost all were massively rebalanced. Cult now also has a stealthy ritual dagger with high bleeding and throw effects.
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tkdrg
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My thoughts on this haven't changed but I'm getting pretty tired of all these utterly broken modes being shoved into rotation, especially at the expense of actually working modes (like cult). 90% of the stuff you've "learned" so far could've been expressed to you in 10 minutes from an experienced player who has access to a straightforward yet detailed (i.e. all numbers/damage figures included) summary of what this mode entails. Instead we get dozens of clusterfuck rounds where nobody knows whats going on. I would much rather that you go work with whoever's handling Hand of God right now and merge it into one functioning "god worshippers who build a magical base and hold off their enemies while making sacrifices to their god" mode rather than two modes that are broken and nowhere near playable status. This thing will never get a positive review from me while it REPLACES cult, but I'll reserve further remarks for when I test the latest iteration. |
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Its almost like any gamemode we have made ourselves is shit |
I dunno, I really don't think cult is fine as it is. I mean, yeah, it works, but most people generally don't enjoy either being cultists or being loyalists in this gamemode (if the amount of prayers asking for deculting and the speediness of the shuttle calls are anything to go by). And further, this isn't utterly broken. It's different, true, but it works, too, and I personally found it more fun.
Perhaps, but that hadn't been suggested to me before. The six playtests on Sybil were rather confusing for the players, true, but by the sixth all cultists played fairly well and they had a pretty normal round, so I'd think that this is more or less just because it's a new thing.
I did work with Remie on HoG for a while, but to be honest I wasn't satisfied with the end result. HoG had more of a focus on fast conversion and RTS-like mechanics, I'd say that it is much closer to blob+rev than to this cult or to the current cult. The "hold off your enemies" mechanic is here because I believe that it is very cathartic for the players to have a final showdown and a chance at changing the destiny of the round, rather than having the big bad round ender be off-screen and then have dozens of people asking "It was cult?"/"It was shadowling?"/"It was ops?" after the round ends. I don't see the issue with reusing an idea, if it is a good one. I think this is still sufficiently different from the other gamemodes with base defense (gang and malf).
Well, I can't change your opinion about that, I guess. There would be no meaning in having two cults, and I'd rather not discard this one. |
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Looking good, far, far more enjoyable to play against and as. |
YES
Cult is awful, so let's try to improve it. Idea by KorPhaeron. I also
took some inspiration from adrix89's sacrifice cult, so credits to him.
Also thanks a lot specially to MrPerson and Iamgoofball for helping
me brainstorm this, and Joan for the sprites for the summoning orb,
the large nar-sie shell, and the new cult antag hud.
Basically, we remove conversion, and turn cult into a magic version of
nuke, with a small team of stealth elite cultists that have to build a
base in the station and sacrifice people in order to build an army of
constructs and get materials to eventually summon Nar-Sie.
ANY FEEDBACK IS APPRECIATED
Tasklist:
Maybe do some bullshit like "the planets align" so they have to sac in X time window so we dont run into the gang problem of "kill everyone and then dom" (perhaps using the Sun controller).Not needed right now.Rune overhaul: modifiers that change how neighboring runes work. Could reuse the cult structures and runed metal, or some other material with various tiers. Example modifiers: Makes it hit area of effect, but weaker effects the further out it goes. Doubles area but causes you to take a good chunk of damage on activation. The point is for people to experiment with runes to get their favorite effect.Too much effort for too little gain. Of course, anyone else is more than welcome to do it once I push this.