Xenos are too common for how unfun they are

[Armhulen]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Were spiders nerfed super hard since they became a playable? Because last time I checked they overpowered the crew 100% of the time.

1. Yes, they did. They're still viable though.
2. They did, but then again so do xenos. They can still overrun based more on sheer numbers

[FantasticFwoosh]

^^^ to armhulens point

Spiders are under maintained with terrible code (recent fix of how re-webbing a person allowed you to spam eggs because a exploit was never patched up), while xenos are obsessively over-maintained, we can alter xenos literally forever but they are still going to be strong, fixing spiders is as easy as properly giving them UI buttons rather than having to work over the 'Spider' tab, and reworking the mechanics.

- Spiders are simple mobs and not carbon with their own suitable loot table, eggs foodtype is already dropped by spiders as well as legs & meat, we can probably find ways to make clearing out spiders profitable besides eating them.

- Story and narrative wise if you look at the native place where Aliens exist, they are not in the film Alien & Alien 3 onwards designed to be 'beatable' and more as silent solo antagonists that pick off the crew 1 by 1 (given that a entire crew cannot defeat 1 double esworder without a lucky circumstance) wheras the film ALIENS is a enjoyable but lore fallible movie where a heavily armed & gearchecked PMC blow away xenos into gunk shattering the illusion of the first movie of a invincible antagonist akin to what happens on Colonial Marines, it might be the wrong format for us.

Spiderlings reportedly are as structurally strong as webs due to poor coding.

> On xeno balance im leaning towards whether we should revert & remove carbon based xeno mobs entirely (carbon Drone, Queen, Sentinel) that promote base building and instead manufacture the xeno hunter to be much more reliable and balanced as a antagonist that acts by itself with the same kind of role as a Ninja but somehow objectify that the hunter needs to consume/kill X amount of people to greentext given that it will trigger a shuttle call if panicking crew doesn't do it itself.

Sligneris's suggestion of a hunter based mode would be a good idea to model this on, highpop drop 3 hunters during a "Bughunt" round and 1 hunter as a summoned admin button antagonist. Push the facehuggers/regular drone etc mobs either out of the code or so far away, nowhere near to close to the current events of the round and only in references so they don't cause such a shitstorm.

1 hunter antagonist that gets cut into a million pieces for tech, brains, organs plus a 1 time selloff of 15000 point hide when put through a meat processor that can also be caught & contained inside xenobio seems like a good trade rather than marking the station for death every time someone finds a facehugger like what used to happen on asteroid.

[Armhulen]

^^^ to armhulens point

Spiders are under maintained with terrible codeNot my fault they are not maintained (recent fix of how re-webbing a person allowed you to spam eggs because a exploit was never patched up), while xenos are obsessively over-maintainedYeah, we can alter xenos literally forever but they are still going to be strong, fixing spiders is as easy as properly giving them UI buttons rather than having to work over the 'Spider' tab, and reworking the mechanicsYees for UI and stuff but the mechanics are mostly okay. I kinda played around with the idea of planting webbing floor which would make nests much cooler but we do not want a repeat of xenos, the nest should be optional.

- Spiders are simple mobs and not carbon with their own suitable loot table, eggs foodtype is already dropped by spiders as well as legs & meat, we can probably find ways to make clearing out spiders profitable besides eating them. Yeah sure, i mean survival is a pretty big reward for killing them off since they are a round ender but hey i agree

- Story and narrative wise if you look at the native place where Aliens exist, they are not in the film Alien & Alien 3 onwards designed to be 'beatable' and more as silent solo antagonists that pick off the crew 1 by 1 (given that a entire crew cannot defeat 1 double esworder without a lucky circumstance) wheras the film ALIENS is a enjoyable but lore fallible movie where a heavily armed & gearchecked PMC blow away xenos into gunk shattering the illusion of the first movie of a invincible antagonist akin to what happens on Colonial Marines, it might be the wrong format for us.His goof is sweaty, knees weak, fetish is heavy, vomit on the sweater already, copyright spaghetti

Spiderlings reportedly are as structurally strong as webs due to poor coding. Yeah holy shit you hit them and they make metal noises??

> On xeno balance im leaning towards whether we should revert & remove carbon based xeno mobs entirely (carbon Drone, Queen, Sentinel) that promote base building and instead manufacture the xeno hunter to be much more reliable and balanced as a antagonist that acts by itself with the same kind of role as a Ninja but somehow objectify that the hunter needs to consume/kill X amount of people to greentext given that it will trigger a shuttle call if panicking crew doesn't do it itself. See beloy

Sligneris's suggestion of a hunter based mode would be a good idea to model this on, highpop drop 3 hunters during a "Bughunt" round and 1 hunter as a summoned admin button antagonist. Push the facehuggers/regular drone etc mobs either out of the code or so far away, nowhere near to close to the current events of the round and only in references so they don't cause such a shitstorm. I kinda like it if we are not removing them

1 hunter antagonist that gets cut into a million pieces for tech, brains, organs plus a 1 time selloff of 15000 point hide when put through a meat processor that can also be caught & contained inside xenobio seems like a good trade rather than marking the station for death every time someone finds a facehugger like what used to happen on asteroid.

Once again, survival is a pitty good reward

[Scott]

Assumptions. Spiders were balanced for never being player controlled, they were NPCs so they required some overpoweredness to balance their lack of intelligence, then someone thought it was a good idea to make them player controllable without a re-balance.

[Armhulen]

Assumptions. Spiders were balanced for never being player controlled, they were NPCs so they required some overpoweredness to balance their lack of intelligence, then someone thought it was a good idea to make them player controllable without a re-balance.

And they're weaker than xenos

[Scott]

They aren't. Xenos might be more capable for individual combat, but spiders reproduce much much much faster, there's always going to be more spiders, it's a much more powerful snowball effect.

[Armhulen]

They aren't. Xenos might be more capable for individual combat, but spiders reproduce much much much faster, there's always going to be more spiders, it's a much more powerful snowball effect.

This is actually a great point but it doesn't matter since xenos snowball the entire game anyways, if spiders do it too it's not that much more hellish.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Spiders breed off virtually the same system = 1 living body for a spider but the big flaw that can be addressed is spiderlings (in of themselves) and/or how many spiderlings spawn from the egg.

[Armhulen]

in the spider's defense, killing the egg denies like five spiders whereas when one infected humie is in the xeno base you can't really stop them from making a new babby short of having an entire surgery kit on you

[Reviire]

Oh and to touch on the actual problems xenos seem to have:

Xenos frequently get stomped out too early, and the queen has very little to do for most of the game because of her lack of speed.

So to remedy this: I have two things I'd like to try out (whenever I get off my lazy ass and do them)

1. The queen's egg laying process is changed to be a stationary ovipositor, which periodically lays eggs (every 10 seconds, maybe). This eliminates scenarios where queens don't lay enough eggs. She also gains blob-like vision that is independent of her body while on the ovipositor, in order to oversee the hive, combat, and whatever else. Weed nodes behave like cameras, so there is incentive for the crew to destroy those, and for xenos to plant them everywhere.
2. Xeno spawn event starts with two full grown xeno drones. This is to hopefully give a chance to whoever is the more competent player to be the queen, and to allow xenos to IMMEDIATELY start hunting as soon as the queen is set up, rather than waiting for idiot players to run into the nest and an additional ten minutes while they burst and grow to adulthood while under perpetual assault.

I'm fully aware that xenos have an absolutely RIDICULOUSLY MONSTROUS snowball curve, where they presently start extremely weak, and become unstoppably godlike later on. The boring part is usually the start of the curve, so hopefully this'll remedy that a little bit.

Dude I'm not even gonna read the rest of the thread. Give the alien queen blob-vision, turn it into a more Natural Selection esque mode, it'd be way better. That'd be amazing.

[Armhulen]

Round wonder can be STOPPED? GASP

[FantasticFwoosh]

In a round that was just ran (and has gone past so i can talk about it), a particular (ask over PM if you want to know) ckey in OOC as HOS somehow gained a egg sac and started laying (bordering on fetishistic) xeno eggs around just because they could and because '"they thought they could keep them contained".

- Wanting to insert xenos into the round by player action is a HUGE no-no, adding them because they are cool under the misconception they are cool is really bad.

This is one of the worst applications of the xeno lifecycle, when people start to breed round-ending xenos for the hell of it with no way to control them they invite a round end like releasing the singularity so admins really need to not break the same laws they enforce for themselves comparably, I know its a headache for you personally WJohn in justifying making xenos close to every round to farm them (never happening in retrospect to your xenobio ideas unless they are SOLID) while there are antagonistic carbon mobs as the subject which are 100% more dangerous than the simplemob xenos despite having similar weakness.

- A stupid AF bunch of ashwalkers can kill the entire simple-animal xeno hive with teamwork & spears, or just trick the xenos into going outside and getting crisped up into ash. You could probably make a simple mob xenomorph xenobio setup with NO carbon mobs by using a incineration room, or a room with a automated emitter/tesla shocker.

> I would still prompt that carbon drones/sentinels/queens etc be removed in favour of carbon hunters or put bigger emphasis of sentience potions necessary in a simplemob larva to make carbon xeno mobs similar to how we make changelings with xenobio so that they are friendly & obedient to their master (going from there to neuter the conversion mob of it, you can then harvest that carbon hunter for organs/have them work for the crew or antagonistically)

- Intelligence is a BIG factor to the danger level of xenos, ofc there are bad xeno players but most xenos are extremely competent if not specialised to that style of play, sentient spiders also seem to do well, but the life cycle is simplistic enough for spiders that once they get going (a nurse eats a egg, spawns more nurses that disperse & eat) they can look after themselves on simple mob AI.

[Slignerd]

Actually, some way to guarantee xeno loyalty to whoever laid the eggs (carrying over through any resulting queen), much like sentient creatures and golems, would be pretty cool.

[cedarbridge]

In a round that was just ran (and has gone past so i can talk about it), a particular (ask over PM if you want to know) ckey in OOC as HOS somehow gained a egg sac and started laying (bordering on fetishistic) xeno eggs around just because they could and because '"they thought they could keep them contained".

- Wanting to insert xenos into the round by player action is a HUGE no-no, adding them because they are cool under the misconception they are cool is really bad.

This is one of the worst applications of the xeno lifecycle, when people start to breed round-ending xenos for the hell of it with no way to control them they invite a round end like releasing the singularity so admins really need to not break the same laws they enforce for themselves comparably, I know its a headache for you personally WJohn in justifying making xenos close to every round to farm them (never happening in retrospect to your xenobio ideas unless they are SOLID) while there are antagonistic carbon mobs as the subject which are 100% more dangerous than the simplemob xenos despite having similar weakness.

I should know better than to reply to one of these poorly thought out walls of text, but here we go.

- We allow players to set up the singularity as a power source to power the station. People who set said engine loose intentionally as non-antags get dunked for it. People who set it up and it gets loose by other means are not liable merely because an antag set the engine loose. Punishing players for antag behavior occurring would be stupid and your suggestion above is roughly akin to that.

- Players have been "trying to contain" xenos for ages. That's why we have containment fields in xenobiology in the first place. The fact that they always or almost always get out is not the same as setting a singularity loose and they aren't even comparable. One is actively destroying the station, the other is doing a job in the job's normal capacity which could ultimately end in damage given some negative circumstances.

So no Fwoosh. We're not going to start banning people because xenos escaped from xenobiology the same way that we don't ban engineers because power got cut to the singulo containment.

[iamgoofball]

I'll just remove both

[Lazengann]

Fun facts, that HoS(snip) with no provocation stunned me, trapped me in a resin nest on the bridge, cuffed me, and laid two facehugger eggs next to my prone body. I was the Captain. He said he'd only let me go if I was okay with xenos. He got killed.

Such is life on Sybil, if Cedar isn't on then there's rarely admins on in the AM weekdays EST.

[cedarbridge]

Fun facts, that HoS with no provocation stunned me, trapped me in a resin nest on the bridge, cuffed me, and laid two facehugger eggs next to my prone body. I was the Captain. He said he'd only let me go if I was okay with xenos. He got killed.

Such is life on Sybil, if Cedar isn't on then there's rarely admins on in the AM weekdays EST.

This isn't for ban requests but this issue was also handled so I don't see a good reason to toss around names.

[Lazengann]

We don't have ban requests. I edited it out anyway.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Actually, some way to guarantee xeno loyalty to whoever laid the eggs (carrying over through any resulting queen), much like sentient creatures and golems, would be pretty cool.

Hold my drink, i got this, talking in this thread spurred a idea thread; i hope i can muster your support slig.

How to control/balance xenos - WJohn immediatley hates it, thats a good sign.

[Slignerd]

Let's remove freon instead.

[BeeSting12]

Let's remove freon instead.

this is the real good idea in this thread.

[iamgoofball]

Let's remove freon instead.

this is the real bad idea in this thread.

[BeeSting12]

Let's remove freon instead.

this is the real good idea in this thread.

see even goof agrees

[FantasticFwoosh]

Fun facts, that HoS with no provocation stunned me, trapped me in a resin nest on the bridge, cuffed me, and laid two facehugger eggs next to my prone body. I was the Captain. He said he'd only let me go if I was okay with xenos. He got killed.

Such is life on Sybil, if Cedar isn't on then there's rarely admins on in the AM weekdays EST.

This isn't for ban requests but this issue was also handled so I don't see a good reason to toss around names.

Same guy i was talking about in a earlier post, but this is the kind of behaviour where people will do on a whim, releasing the singulo level possible round destruction "For the hell of it", xenos dont contribute power and have cheesy non important drops (1 time tech upgrade then expendable) the organs are impractical and also greify, while the rest of the xeno remains cargo/food profitable (which are features of simple xenomorphs while the pointless stupidity of tech & organs are carbon ones)

In that situation where a Head centcomm member is purporting this kind of griefing by laying eggs all around, the only solution is to smash the eggs and convince them to stop or you are forced to KILL them.

- Trip down memory lane for you Cedarbridge in people that rabidly want to defend their future prospects of antagonists or inserting xenos into the round just because.

Nobody seems to remember the face huggers that generated atleast 70% of the time inside plasma lined rooms on mining asteroid? it used to be common that 1 particular named lizard miner used to hunt these exclusively and bring them back at short notice in every single round, just to bring xenos into it and a loose promise of free antagonist. Some people welcomed it, some people got so sick of it they tried to kill the miner. I think that person got eventually banned or warned for that. (unless they are a admin now, as you do )

Atleast 2 years on nothing has changed and wherever they are found, either in the hearts of admins pressing buttons, our design leads private picture folders or miners/ghost roles hunting them out for free antagonist, its becoming really really overplayed and over-thought about to the point where this thread exists to barter whether they should be removed.

[Incomptinence]

Stop being weak the ghost role meta rushing the hive is bad but an extreme niche case and admins can easily deal with something like that. Most of the time the ruins will be too far apart away for them to bother.

[FantasticFwoosh]

Stop being weak the ghost role meta rushing the hive is bad but an extreme niche case and admins can easily deal with something like that. Most of the time the ruins will be too far apart away for them to bother.

You need to be a cultist too, to convert, but as a conversion antagonist, all the xenos need to do is drop facehuggers. Like really there was a random xeno event today on lowpop, even when the xeno gets robusted its wedged and forced into the round. There's not even anybody there to take (and the xeno event is random) i've already expressed my thoughts on how to go about stopping sentient larva bursting in my "controlling xenos" idea thread (by making non deliberate xenos burst simplemobs)

[Slignerd]

> The solution to fixing a role is to stop players from having opportunities to enjoy it

What's next? Following in Bay's foodsteps and remove player blobs?

[Armhulen]

> The solution to fixing a role is to stop players from having opportunities to enjoy it

What's next? Following in Bay's foodsteps and remove player blobs?

Or replace them with spiders hey HEY

[confused rock]

Cmon guys its like 1 line to reduce the event chance

[Armhulen]

Cmon guys its like 1 line to reduce the event chance

It's more than one line to replace them with spiders hey HEY

[FantasticFwoosh]

> The solution to fixing a role is to stop players from having opportunities to enjoy it

What's next? Following in Bay's foodsteps and remove player blobs?

Yes.

You can't make swarmers. You are at the admins discretion to distribute antagonists. We removed blobs in their current form to not be players in the round and instead made it purely roundstart/button press. Objections?