PR to revert newcult, spice up oldcult

[Oldman Robustin]

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/15690

• The "X acolytes must escape" objective has been disabled.
• Invoking the imbue talisman will consume the imbue talisman (RIP talisman factories)
• Invoking a stun talisman will brute the caster for 15, up from 10
• Stun talisman's stun duration reduced to 9 tics, down from 10
• Stun talisman no longer mutes for the full duration, now applies 4 tics of mute, down from 10, and 15 tics of stutter and a new cultslur proc that should make it difficult to decipher radio messages for help, but with the downside of making it obvious that the victim isn't merely drunk
• Cult retains the timestop rune, requiring 3 casters (fun rune, can't be as OP as blood boil anyway)
• Experimental: Drawing a Nar-Sie rune will send out a notification similar to newcult's. Drawing the nar-sie rune now takes 10x the time of a normal rune. If coded properly (hah) it should name the cultist who is drawing the rune and their location, giving the crew a small window to intervene before the ritual is complete (invoking the rune is still the same and will occur instantly).

[lumipharon]

4 ticks is not a long time to get someone's headset off after cuffing them (and I presume impossible if they have a helmet.
Why nerf the imbue rune? All that does is make prep work more tedious.

Also I would strongly reccomend against taking extra long to make a nar'sie rune. if there's actual opposition to the summoning itself, the drawing time makes no difference. What WILL happen is RAGE when cucks bump you mid draw repeatly.

[ShadowDimentio]

>Stunpaper is nerfed a bit but not removed

Compromise! I'm okay with this.

[InsaneHyena]

I never thought I would say this, but Robustin is based.

[Super Aggro Crag]

(b '-')b

[PKPenguin321]

imo we should make stunpaper have 2 (or maybe 3) uses and make it only obtainable via the roundstart paper, but leave everything else like it's stun values alone

[Oldman Robustin]

4 ticks is not a long time to get someone's headset off after cuffing them (and I presume impossible if they have a helmet.
Why nerf the imbue rune? All that does is make prep work more tedious.

Also I would strongly reccomend against taking extra long to make a nar'sie rune. if there's actual opposition to the summoning itself, the drawing time makes no difference. What WILL happen is RAGE when cucks bump you mid draw repeatly.

Sometimes making a strong action take more time, effort, and tedium is a decent way to strike a balance. It always felt cheesy drawing 4 stun runes around a single imbue rune and then shitting out half a bag of stunpaper in a matter of seconds. Once the cult is out'd I find myself pressed for time, limiting my ability to mass-produce stun talismans means I will go into the field with less and in turn I won't be running around chain stunning half of security if shit hits the fan.

Bumping will cause rage but thats for the invoker to deal with, you can always do it somewhere discrete and call the cult only once youve finished it, or have your constructs body block for you while you draw it. It will give the crew a small window to intervene because many people (including myself) had an issue with highpop cults that could use a starting stun talisman to quickly sac their target and then gather up in the locker room to summon nar sie for a new world record. This will act as a speed bump so the cult can't just rush nar sie.

This change to the stun rune was meant to guarantee that the victim gets a chance to shout SOMETHING. I added multiple speech inhibitors though so in practice we will see how coherent the cries for help will be. This was to prevent the cries of "MUH INFINITE CULT PARAPENS". Freaking Cheridan and Joan closed my PR and dragged me into IRC about this shit even in its nerfed form, so powerful people seem to think even my nerfed stun talismans are too strong and are willing to block my PR if I can't persuade them otherwise.

[Zilenan91]

imo we should make stunpaper have 2 (or maybe 3) uses and make it only obtainable via the roundstart paper, but leave everything else like it's stun values alone

I like this idea a lot actually. Gives it a dedicated purpose rather than just the only tool the cult will ever need to use.

[ShadowDimentio]

You just want stunpaper removed, but because straight up removing it would get people like me yelling at you you're trying to say "Guais it isn't removed you only get three max!"

[lumipharon]

If stun paper got removed how the fuck would the cult be expected to convert anyone ever?

[ShadowDimentio]

Excellent question!

[Zilenan91]

>removed

You could just spend 2 supply points on it to get a whopping 6 stuns, more than you'll ever need. Ideally Oldman would revert the nerfs he put to it in his above pr. My problem was never with how stunpaper functioned but with how mass produceable and autonomous in function it was. It never didn't have a use, unlike the entirety of the cult antag's powers. You just made loads of it and threw it at every problem and it was boring.

[lumipharon]

I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about what Cheri thinks, who has the power to stop the whole pr on his own opinion.
According to oldman, cheri doesn't want stunpapers in any form.

[Zilenan91]

That's... strange. Stunpaper isn't really an inherently wrong concept, it's savable certainly but it needs some very fine balancing, and I'm not just talking number tweaks. Limiting it to supply talismans would be the perfect fix. Just like making phazons require anomaly cores to build just less severe.

[Oldman Robustin]

Joan and Cheridan.

I literally had to explain to Cheridan why his idea of replacing stunpaper with "convert paper" that would covert people on use was a BAD IDEA.

There seemed to be this meme that cult having portable stuns was an irredeemable sin.

Anyway, its all variables. If stunpaper is so shitty that cult gets rolled consistently at certain pops, then I can always tweak it back.

The Nar-Sie summon thing is close to what I want as a solution but its honestly more of a "this improves the mode but I can't actually code so I can't put together an even betters solution". It gives the cult some strategies for accomplishing the final objective while fighiting the big problem of cults being able to rush Nar Sie.

If someone wants to throw together a more refined solution, be my guest. Until then I need to figure out why the build continues to fail based on an indentation on a file I haven't even touched.

[cocothegogo]

• Experimental: Drawing a Nar-Sie rune will send out a notification similar to newcult's. Drawing the nar-sie rune now takes 10x the time of a normal rune. If coded properly (hah) it should name the cultist who is drawing the rune and their location, giving the crew a small window to intervene before the ritual is complete (invoking the rune is still the same and will occur instantly).

does being walked into stop the drawing of the rune?

[ShadowDimentio]

Apparently the coders and some players fail to understand that STUNS AND MUTES ARE REQUIRED FOR STEALTH TO BE VIABLE AT ALL.

And no fucking SIX STUNS is not a lot.

[Oldman Robustin]

PR new and improved with green checkmark!

Thanks to Shadowlight213 for being a bro and sorting out the compiling issues.

[ShadowDimentio]

Oldman you might be a powergaming shit but you exorcised newcult from the code so you're alright in my book

[TechnoAlchemist]

And here I thought forcefulcjs would never contribute anything good to the community.

Best of luck getting this merged

[Davidchan]

>removed

You could just spend 2 supply points on it to get a whopping 6 stuns, more than you'll ever need.

You're a fucking moron if you think 6 stuns is all the cult needs to complete a round.

[Zilenan91]

You do realize that's from one person right

[Davidchan]

You do realize that's from one person right

Yes, I do. This means that in a standard round, cult would get at most 24 stuns. Assuming everyone spends half their starting talisman on stuns, which not everyone will do.

Not every stun yields a conversion, and people can be deconverted. This also completely ignores the fact that the starting talisman was designed as a work around for rune research Everything the Talisman does is reflected in the tome with the right rune or combination of runes. This makes all cultists equal and no particular cultist is more valuable than any other, so the loss of the starting 4 cultists in old cult wasn't the end of the world if they passed on their knowledge to the newest converts and gave them tomes. Under your idea, if even a single cultist gets early detected, the cult just lost 1/4 of it's power permanently. Even if they convert more people, they'll never get that talisman and those stuns back, and they can't be replaced.

Our low pop rounds are 20-30 people, med up to 50, and high pop typically has numbers above 60. You're suggesting that Cult gets ONE chance to get a foothold in the crew, if security detects the cult and starts killing/deconverting then there is no chance of recovery.

You don't like cult. I get it. But stop trying to fucking nerf a game mode into the ground that the majority of the playerbase enjoys because you got sand in your clam about it.

[Zilenan91]

Oldman's pr doesn't say anything about making cults need to research or sac for more words again, so I've assumed they also start with all of them once again. This means that, at round start, the cultists have cult robes, cult swords (30 brute), full use of constructs, teleport runes, and all kinds of useful things that will make them very robust right out of the gate.

Especially with the removal of the escape objective, cultists DO NOT need to convert as much as they did in the past.

[InsaneHyena]

Oldman's pr doesn't say anything about making cults need to research or sac for more words again, so I've assumed they also start with all of them once again. This means that, at round start, the cultists have cult robes, cult swords (30 brute), full use of constructs, teleport runes, and all kinds of useful things that will make them very robust right out of the gate.

make cult robust

Hahahahahahahaha. Ahahahahahaha. Oh god. Hahahahaha. That's fucking rich, thank you. Average cult player is a drooling moron, even worse than your average nuke ops player, he's an incompetent idiot who doesn't know how to make stun papers, not to mention teleport runes. The hardest mechanic of the cult was always to get three people to stand around the rune to sac/convert, and than - even more than that to summon Nar'Sie.

[newfren]

god the old 9 people around the tiny little nar-sie rune we used to have

"STAND AROUND THE RUNE"
"JUST STAND THERE"
"STOP MOVING YOU IDIOTS WE JUST NEED TO STAND AROUND THIS AND WE WIN"

[Oldman Robustin]

And here I thought forcefulcjs would never contribute anything good to the community.

Best of luck getting this merged

>TFW nobody remembers you getting an admin wish in 2014 (2013?) for being voted one of the most liked players in the community

Appalling rudeness.

[Zilenan91]

god the old 9 people around the tiny little nar-sie rune we used to have

"STAND AROUND THE RUNE"
"JUST STAND THERE"
"STOP MOVING YOU IDIOTS WE JUST NEED TO STAND AROUND THIS AND WE WIN"

Is it really that bad? I've played cult extensively on Archangel and the people there are around the level of a high-functioning autistic rather than a mentally damaged chimpanzee which is what this sounds like.

[PKPenguin321]

god the old 9 people around the tiny little nar-sie rune we used to have

"STAND AROUND THE RUNE"
"JUST STAND THERE"
"STOP MOVING YOU IDIOTS WE JUST NEED TO STAND AROUND THIS AND WE WIN"

Is it really that bad? I've played cult extensively on Archangel and the people there are around the level of a high-functioning autistic rather than a mentally damaged chimpanzee which is what this sounds like.

well see on archangel the standards for being retarded are a lot lower, it's not as easy to tell there

[Luke Cox]

And here I went to the trouble of writing up a detailed suggestion on how to revamp cult

[Oldman Robustin]

And here I went to the trouble of writing up a detailed suggestion on how to revamp cult

I've learned that you can talk about improvements until you're blue in the face but until you go into Github and put up the PR, its all just piss in the wind.

Your suggestions aren't that details and the ones that are, I'm not a big fan. Only thing I kind of like is being able to sacrifice people for powerful effects like disabling all power for X minutes. I put my thoughts in your thread.

[PKPenguin321]

And here I went to the trouble of writing up a detailed suggestion on how to revamp cult

while i'm not a fan personally of your vision for cult, there's no reason we can't go to oldcult before going to your cult. oldcult is still an improvement over what we have

[kazeespada]

Don't revert newcult. Have newcult be it's own gamemode called supercult. I am going to buff the shit out of them.

[oranges]

god the old 9 people around the tiny little nar-sie rune we used to have

"STAND AROUND THE RUNE"
"JUST STAND THERE"
"STOP MOVING YOU IDIOTS WE JUST NEED TO STAND AROUND THIS AND WE WIN"

Is it really that bad? I've played cult extensively on Archangel and the people there are around the level of a high-functioning autistic rather than a mentally damaged chimpanzee which is what this sounds like.

There was nothing quite like watching a 9+ person cult fail to summon narsie on the shuttle ride back to centcomm.

The ooc used to explode with salt right after too.

OH those were the days.

[Oldman Robustin]

Don't revert newcult. Have newcult be it's own gamemode called supercult. I am going to buff the shit out of them.

Just call it Hand of God, they started to get stupidly close in concept anyway (static defenses, stunmines, utter inability to do shit outside of their defensive perimeter until they got sec loot).

Trying to work out kinks because I really want to see this merged and see how nar sie summoning works in practice. Apparently cult aren't getting assigned at roundstart on a test server, going to suck trying to figure out why.

[oranges]

plus hand of god was well broken

[Zilenan91]

It mostly worked, but it wasn't ever finished.

[Luke Cox]

The Soviet space program also "worked," but I don't think you'd want to get on one of those rockets.

[Cheimon]

Every astronaut since 2011 seems fine with it.

[Helios]

Every astronaut since 2011 seems fine with it.

The Soviet Union still exists?
Or are you saying they are getting on 3 decade old rockets

[Cheimon]

I'm saying the Soyuz rockets aren't outrageously different, yeah.

[Oldman Robustin]

I tested my PR locally. Everything looks to be in order but can't be 100% sure until its merged and people start trying all the weird shit that happens in a real round.

Was happy to see my new Nar-Sie rune worked exactly as planned. The timing on it feels good, about 30 seconds to draw and then another ~X seconds for 9 cultists to get in formation... enough time for vigilantes or sec to at least engage in combat and disrupt the formation. This should prevent the "lol we sac'd our target 2 minutes in and I summoned ghosts and pooped out nar sie in vacant office before most people had even finished setup for their jobs" meme.

I also nerfed scaling since the OP. Minimum population for cult is now 35 and the scaling is basically 4 cult from 35-60 and 5 cult from 60-90. Between this, the narsie changes, and the stun talisman nerf, I foresee cult having a hard time. Fortunately (as I've said all along) its only a matter of changing a few variables to tweak things.

I plan to make some improvements to the mode in general once I find more code to steal. I'd like to get a prompt for the Nar-Sie rune giving the user a heads up that they're going to hurt themselves badly (40 brute for drawing the rune, enough to start bleeding, super-immersive seeing a cultist bleeding out as he makes the final rune and embraces death) and notify the whole station of their presence. In the long run I'd like to make runes more interesting, bring back research (that will be beyond my skill as a non-coder though), and make nar-sie summons require a special rune placed somewhere in all 5 departments (cargo, sec, sci, med, engi - service isn't a dept., it's a meme).

Edit: It's hilarious how if you made a PR to tweak an aspect of the game, you'll get a 50 comment shitshow nitpicking it to death, but if you make a major overhaul you can basically do whatever you want and nobody will notice.

[Shadowlight213]

• Experimental: Drawing a Nar-Sie rune will send out a notification similar to newcult's. Drawing the nar-sie rune now takes 10x the time of a normal rune. If coded properly (hah) it should name the cultist who is drawing the rune and their location, giving the crew a small window to intervene before the ritual is complete (invoking the rune is still the same and will occur instantly).

does being walked into stop the drawing of the rune?

Yup! It certainly does. Wall runes seem to sort of help though. Also removing the narsie rune with a tome is instant, so you might end up with some asshole removing the rune once actually finish it. (Or forget that you're still holding your tome when you try and invoke it.)
I'll probably add logging to removing the narsie rune as well as an admin message. Might add a delay as well to prevent accidents.

[Oldman Robustin]

Yea if this PR works out, fleshing out the narsie rune would be an objective.

For now it's just waiting for someone to merge (how the hell does that process work? why is merge begging a thing?)

[PKPenguin321]

(how the hell does that process work? why is merge begging a thing?)

because the maintainers are human beings that aren't scanning for PRs to merge 24/7, and if we made PRs get merged automatically after a certain amount of time all sorts of dumb shit would get into the game
just go into the IRC and ping every active maintainer you see in there semi-oftenly (maybe @memo some of them if they're afk)

[Oldman Robustin]

Well yea, it just feels silly when there's this intense burst of interest (ROBUSTIN GET IN IRC IMMEDIATELY!!!) followed by meh for days.

What is the actual cost of merging a PR with 60 commits? Shadowlight and I just spent like 2-3 hours trying to figure out how to clean it up with #coderbus helping but there was no easy answer.

[Steelpoint]

The cost is sitting in IRC for hours shilling to anyone and everyone with commit access until someone decides to either kick you or merge your PR.

On that note the sooner this PR is merged the better.

[onleavedontatme]

Edit: It's hilarious how if you made a PR to tweak an aspect of the game, you'll get a 50 comment shitshow nitpicking it to death, but if you make a major overhaul you can basically do whatever you want and nobody will notice.

I highly reccomend reading about bikeshedding.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

As to the PR, code is not ready yet. I am not even a real maintainer and I have found several bits that need to be changed.

[Malkevin]

Edit: It's hilarious how if you made a PR to tweak an aspect of the game, you'll get a 50 comment shitshow nitpicking it to death, but if you make a major overhaul you can basically do whatever you want and nobody will notice.

Thats because people are lazy and can't be arsed reading through dozens of changes.

[Oldman Robustin]

I understand now, been meaning to put up a PR for nerfing the RD's armor... now it's going to be:

Experimentor REVAMP!

-Tons of useless changes that will be difficult to read through
- Stuffed in the middle: Revert: RD's TRA has been reverted to a prior state to compensate for these improvements to science.
- Wewlads