Cultist Deconversion?

[onleavedontatme]

So earlier the chaplain arrests two cultists. I help him bring them to the brig. We bucklecuff the cultists, and feed them holy water. One of them warps away, so I aggressive grab the other, he warps away as well. The cultists of course get their chems purged with a tome in their base.

Before I made a salty i ded PR I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything (like a way to prevent this short of killing and incinerating them as soon as we caught them). It seems incredibly dumb to have a deconversion method that takes a minute plus and at any point their team mates can just cancel the deconversion from another Z level and you're powerless to stop it. Cruel newbie bait to trick people who are trying to play nice and by the rules and deconvert instead of murder.


I forgot this was an issue because I usually kill cultists on sight, but every few months a compulsion to be friendly and merciful and act like a decent head of staff takes hold and I end up regretting it.

[Nabski]

My favorite part of this is I can't tell if it was clock using the teleportal buildings or blood using the summon cultist rune.

[DemonFiren]

every few months a compulsion to be friendly and merciful [...] takes hold and I end up regretting it.

That sounds like something an admin would say.

[BeeSting12]

I have no opinion on this since I usually kill anyone that I even suspect is a cultist. My only idea for a solution is holy water making blood magic not work.

[D&B]

I remember that round.

Good times

[Dr_bee]

you can always spray holy water around the brig with a fire extinguisher. It stops them from being warped away but sadly cant stop them from warping in as they can just warp in on a disposal outlet because you cant spray water on machines leaving blatant open tiles for them to use their stupidly broken mobility.

yes I am a tad salty, Clock cultist teleportation needs to be toned the fuck down.

[Hathkar]

How about simply having holy water in your system prevent you from being summoned by other cultists? Something something holy disruption.

[Deitus]

How about simply having holy water in your system prevent you from being summoned by other cultists? Something something holy disruption.

this would be the best solution that has a chance of happening, but in my opinion i dont know why holy water has to take time to deconvert anyway. all it does is clutter the brig and create confusion on who is currently being deconverted vs still needs a dose, and inevitable griffing from the soon-to-be deconvertee when they're dosed and uncuffed ("i was still cult when i beat that officer to deth!!!1")

just make holy water dosages instant deconvertthis will never happen because MUH SLIPPURY SLOPE

[Dr_bee]

How about simply having holy water in your system prevent you from being summoned by other cultists? Something something holy disruption.

this would be the best solution that has a chance of happening, but in my opinion i dont know why holy water has to take time to deconvert anyway. all it does is clutter the brig and create confusion on who is currently being deconverted vs still needs a dose, and inevitable griffing from the soon-to-be deconvertee when they're dosed and uncuffed ("i was still cult when i beat that officer to deth!!!1")

just make holy water dosages instant deconvertthis will never happen because MUH SLIPPURY SLOPE

It kinda removes the ability for cult to counter weaponized holy water. One shotgun dart of holy water is enough to deconvert if I remember correctly. Speeding it up and adding visual feedback of it working would be better.

Have cultists with holy water in their system generate a black aura, this also gives holy water a use for testing to see who is cult, while still preventing it from being weaponized via syringe guns or shotgun darts.

[Deitus]

How about simply having holy water in your system prevent you from being summoned by other cultists? Something something holy disruption.

this would be the best solution that has a chance of happening, but in my opinion i dont know why holy water has to take time to deconvert anyway. all it does is clutter the brig and create confusion on who is currently being deconverted vs still needs a dose, and inevitable griffing from the soon-to-be deconvertee when they're dosed and uncuffed ("i was still cult when i beat that officer to deth!!!1")

just make holy water dosages instant deconvertthis will never happen because MUH SLIPPURY SLOPE

It kinda removes the ability for cult to counter weaponized holy water. One shotgun dart of holy water is enough to deconvert if I remember correctly. Speeding it up and adding visual feedback of it working would be better.

Have cultists with holy water in their system generate a black aura, this also gives holy water a use for testing to see who is cult, while still preventing it from being weaponized via syringe guns or shotgun darts.

i didnt know that holy water could be used like that, ive never seen it done. your suggestions are also genuinely good in light of this.still wont get done though

[onleavedontatme]

How about simply having holy water in your system prevent you from being summoned by other cultists? Something something holy disruption.

I'd still rather just kill them in the hallway than risk them warping away while I take them back to the brig

[Deitus]

to be perfectly honest this is usually the better idea, and if there's no chaplain this is the admin-approved way to do things. even with a chaplain i get pretty sick and tired of deconverted cultists wordlessly running out of sec and then reappearing five minutes later reculted. loyalty implants help but then they just come back as constructs.

[Dr_bee]

to be perfectly honest this is usually the better idea, and if there's no chaplain this is the admin-approved way to do things. even with a chaplain i get pretty sick and tired of deconverted cultists wordlessly running out of sec and then reappearing five minutes later reculted. loyalty implants help but then they just come back as constructs.

Making sacrificing dead people give constructs was a mistake, it gives no incentive to not go full murderboner as it doesnt matter if you kill anyone you still get a free convert, and this one you cant de-convert.

Conversion in cults needs to be hard to do as mass conversion is stupidly powerful due to causing exponential growth of antags, Clock cult at least requires you bring the person in alive, you cant escape blood cult.

The central conversion mechanic of both cult modes is just not fun to fight, and you cant even opt out of antag status like you can with other antag roles. It is why I asked to be cultbanned, I hate playing as bloodcult so Id rather be force ghosted when converted.

[Oldman Robustin]

Summon Cultist has been one of the least used runes and I kind of liked the gameplay options it opened up where you could potentially use a cultist as bait to reveal or even destroy the primary cult base.

Kor all I can say is that if cultists don't yell on radio about wanting a summon then its exceedingly rare for them to get a summon, it would rely on one of three things:

1) An observant cultist reporting the arrest on the other cultist's behalf

2) Someone snooping at the brig

3) Someone actually using ghost form to spy on the brig and notice

As rare as summoning is, those 3 things are even rarer, I'm talking "I can count on my hand the number of times ive seen it in the past year". If someone is yelling on radio at least you get the choice of killing them and the person who yells is making the overt gamble that the cult will draw a summon rune and use it before someone can click on them ~15 times (cant summon dead cultists).

A real go-getter would grab a tracking implant, slip a beacon into their pocket (you could even do what I try with CC and have a security strike team waiting in the teleporter room, nab a cultist, get them to scream on radio, pickpocket a pocket and slip the beacon in). Cultists can usually only pull off a summon from a main base so having multiple sec suddenly pop out of thin air would be a deathknell for the cult most games. Either way revealing the cult's base is a good trade for losing one stripped cultist (most tend to be useless without an ID or clothes).

ALSO I buffed the deconversion process in my cult PR so its faster and takes less water now (~20% faster and less water). So maybe you should've been testmerging my PR instead of ided'ing

Weaponized holy water is also getting a couple other buffs in my PR. Religious crates now deliver 400 holy water and a single drop of holy water will dispell any of the cultist's blood magic. Before throwing a holy melon would only mean someone might deconvert if they didn't notice or were ignorant and didn't get the water purged. Now something like holy water smoke or throwing holymelons means you've done the current equivalent of deleting all the talismans in their bag/pockets/hand.

Having said all that I am 100% cool with nerfing summon or manifest if they end up getting used enough to actually be a problem. People are figuring out that pylon spam makes manifest viable again and I might just pre-emptively nerf it. Summon seems fine at the moment since its rare, requires teamwork, exposes people to risk, often disrupts cult operations just to pull a naked cuffed dude out who often has no way to contribute because teleport runes are just going to trap you somewhere if you dont have an ID (and having a decent teleport network also means teamwork, effort, risk) and there's a good deal of counterplay. Keep in mind once you strip the radio Mr. "SUMMON ME THEY GOT ME" Cultist has no way to update the cult that "OH GOD THEY PUT A TTV IN MY BAG ABORT ABORT".

[Dax Dupont]

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/33374 needs to be finished

[onleavedontatme]

Yeah tracking implants and bombs are cool counterplay and whatever for veteran players, but those both still rely on the player knowing they're not supposed to deconvert despite mechanics to deconvert+years of pressure from admins and other players to deconvert rather than murder. It just isn't intuitive.

Security also doesn't have a way to quickly shut down a call for help short of putting the person into crit, which is again, something we discourage for security players when stun+cuffs are available.

[Cobby]

you can always spray holy water around the brig with a fire extinguisher. It stops them from being warped away but sadly cant stop them from warping in as they can just warp in on a disposal outlet because you cant spray water on machines leaving blatant open tiles for them to use their stupidly broken mobility.

yes I am a tad salty, Clock cultist teleportation needs to be toned the fuck down.

Use a mop silly or transfer to a small container then splash on ground

[CPTANT]

Deconvert just takes stupidly long to begin with.

[Bombadil]

Blood cult teleport requires 3 people getting around a rune its a pretty rare occasion

[Cobby]

Blood cult teleport requires 3 people getting around a rune its a pretty rare occasion

can't you use shades/constructs?

[TribeOfBeavers]

I usually use braindead assistants for runes that need multiple people. There are always a few around somewhere to convert.

[CPTANT]

Blood cult teleport requires 3 people getting around a rune its a pretty rare occasion

can't you use shades/constructs?

You can.

It doesn't happen that often, but when someone has teleport support he is just basically impossible to catch, at the first sign of trouble he just shouts for help and is safe again.

[Oldman Robustin]

I mean implants/bombs/whatever aren't mutually exclusive with deconversion.

You leave their radio on, you give them the good boy juice, then either they get the summon and you get the cult base or you get the deconversion and maaaaybe you have to tell them to give you a bomb back (also tracking implants feel like they should be added to the Security protolathe).

As for the pressure to murder, again, for me 99.9% of the time if they aren't screaming on radio and you didn't literally YOINK them out of a cult base with other cultists watching - the person you nabbed isn't going to get a summon. It would require another cultist to both make the effort to figure out that a cultist got arrested and then go to the trouble of making the rune, getting the extra invoker, fixing the dude up after he got summoned, etc. I can barely get other people to help me when im fighting in the same room. They can't commune while stunned or restrained so again if they didn't yell the cult has no way of knowing the dudes even getting deconverted. Spirit Sight got scribed 10 times in November. And most of those were almost certainly to track down a sac target - so its a virtual certainty that if you can keep cultists somewhere away from prying eyes, they have no chance of rescue. I'd highly recommend dropping the cell shutters for that reason alone.

If they do scream for help then the choice available to the sec player is pretty clear. Take the chance they won't get summoned (they probably won't) in exchange for getting another ally, or drop them because THEY knew the risk of catching a summary execution when they do that.

Deconversion is faster in my PR but I might tweak it a little more (-5 to -10%) if it still feels too long. I am pretty adament about not having a braindead deconversion system though. It's pretty fundamental to cult that deconversion is a more active process that requires a little more strategizing and you can't just set up a concentration camp in Cargo and win by jabbing everyone with a needle.

Also I tested and confirmed that holy water smoke blesses tiles. No I dont think blessed turf but I just wanted to mention that.

Blood cult teleport requires 3 people getting around a rune its a pretty rare occasion

can't you use shades/constructs?

You can.

It doesn't happen that often, but when someone has teleport support he is just basically impossible to catch, at the first sign of trouble he just shouts for help and is safe again.

You do have 2 really effective options for this:

1) Buckshot

2) Ask the AI to cut common radio. Its a double edged sword but the victim will have no way of notifying the cult that they've been taken (unless they grab a bounced radio but I've never seen SS13 reach that level of 5d chess yet).

[SpaceManiac]

(also tracking implants feel like they should be added to the Security protolathe)

They already are, tech is Subdermal Implants and both chemical and tracking implants are flagged for medbay and security.

[CPTANT]

I mean implants/bombs/whatever aren't mutually exclusive with deconversion.

You leave their radio on, you give them the good boy juice, then either they get the summon and you get the cult base or you get the deconversion and maaaaybe you have to tell them to give you a bomb back (also tracking implants feel like they should be added to the Security protolathe).

As for the pressure to murder, again, for me 99.9% of the time if they aren't screaming on radio and you didn't literally YOINK them out of a cult base with other cultists watching - the person you nabbed isn't going to get a summon. It would require another cultist to both make the effort to figure out that a cultist got arrested and then go to the trouble of making the rune, getting the extra invoker, fixing the dude up after he got summoned, etc. I can barely get other people to help me when im fighting in the same room. They can't commune while stunned or restrained so again if they didn't yell the cult has no way of knowing the dudes even getting deconverted. Spirit Sight got scribed 10 times in November. And most of those were almost certainly to track down a sac target - so its a virtual certainty that if you can keep cultists somewhere away from prying eyes, they have no chance of rescue. I'd highly recommend dropping the cell shutters for that reason alone.

If they do scream for help then the choice available to the sec player is pretty clear. Take the chance they won't get summoned (they probably won't) in exchange for getting another ally, or drop them because THEY knew the risk of catching a summary execution when they do that.

Deconversion is faster in my PR but I might tweak it a little more (-5 to -10%) if it still feels too long. I am pretty adament about not having a braindead deconversion system though. It's pretty fundamental to cult that deconversion is a more active process that requires a little more strategizing and you can't just set up a concentration camp in Cargo and win by jabbing everyone with a needle.

Also I tested and confirmed that holy water smoke blesses tiles. No I dont think blessed turf but I just wanted to mention that.

Blood cult teleport requires 3 people getting around a rune its a pretty rare occasion

can't you use shades/constructs?

You can.

It doesn't happen that often, but when someone has teleport support he is just basically impossible to catch, at the first sign of trouble he just shouts for help and is safe again.

You do have 2 really effective options for this:

1) Buckshot

2) Ask the AI to cut common radio. Its a double edged sword but the victim will have no way of notifying the cult that they've been taken (unless they grab a bounced radio but I've never seen SS13 reach that level of 5d chess yet).

Buckshot is the best answer but still not ideal, any damage and they will just recall.

And lol grabbing a bounced radio isn't 5d chess

[Oldman Robustin]

Grabbing a bounced radio as a cultist risks constantly exposing both yourself and your allies as cultists - taking it on the gamble that it will allow you to get a summon before someone kills or spaces you is a pretty nuanced move.

[Steelpoint]

Yeah in all my times as HoS I've never seen a Blood Cult (never got in a round with the new clock cult) teleport away captured Cultists before I had a chance to deconvert.

If such a scenario occurred I'd take that as the green light to go full lethal on any suspected cultist akin to dealing with a Traitor with Freedom/Adrenal implants.

[Selea]

maybe we should forbid teleporting from holy tiles?

[onleavedontatme]

And lol grabbing a bounced radio isn't 5d chess

Yeah seriously. Syncing my arrests with the AI so I can use my armory weapon to crit the guy and then strap a bomb to him is apparently standard and expected gameplay for a regular security officer though.

Take the chance they won't get summoned (they probably won't)

Hoping the cultists play terribly or don't know how to use their powers is basically the feeling I get when playing against them, yeah.

It feels like you need captain level access to possibly have enough gear to deal with the variety of things they can do (ballistics for the constructs/EMPs, RCD for the walls, space suit and jetpack for the space bases, mining access, null rod to not get nuked by their runes, janitoral bombs for the teleporting, chaplain for the deconverting, etc etc) and while you need to coordinate with all these people who are slowly going missing and your gear degrading they've got their magic comms and corpse/AFK conversion into more fully equipped guys. All the fun of rev but your deconversion sucks and the revs all have parapens (soon stungloves!) and a hivemind and turn corpses into taser proof monsters with AoE stuns or warping to instakill the AI while they build fancy bases with shielded suits and crazy swords and use ghost mode to scout you out.

Yes "i ded" but the deck just feels stacked against you in a way that isn't much fun. Most of what you do feels flat out ineffective as a normal officer.

[EagleWiz]

The only viable blood cult deconversion method involves an AI combat module and the paladin lawset. Lets not forget that a lot of our players are new/inexperienced/morons, and new/inexperienced/moron sec officers often believe deconversion is over long before its actually finished, and then end up releasing the cultist to get the holy water purged and go back to culting.

[Dr_bee]

And lol grabbing a bounced radio isn't 5d chess

Yeah seriously. Syncing my arrests with the AI so I can use my armory weapon to crit the guy and then strap a bomb to him is apparently standard and expected gameplay for a regular security officer though.

Take the chance they won't get summoned (they probably won't)

Hoping the cultists play terribly or don't know how to use their powers is basically the feeling I get when playing against them, yeah.

It feels like you need captain level access to possibly have enough gear to deal with the variety of things they can do (ballistics for the constructs/EMPs, RCD for the walls, space suit and jetpack for the space bases, mining access, null rod to not get nuked by their runes, janitoral bombs for the teleporting, chaplain for the deconverting, etc etc) and while you need to coordinate with all these people who are slowly going missing and your gear degrading they've got their magic comms and corpse/AFK conversion into more fully equipped guys. All the fun of rev but your deconversion sucks and the revs all have parapens (soon stungloves!) and a hivemind and turn corpses into taser proof monsters with AoE stuns or warping to instakill the AI while they build fancy bases with shielded suits and crazy swords and use ghost mode to scout you out.

Yes "i ded" but the deck just feels stacked against you in a way that isn't much fun. Most of what you do feels flat out ineffective as a normal officer.

Removing getting free soulstones from trying to convert mindshielded people or dead people would be a wonderful change, why even mindshield people if it just means they turn into a fucking teleporting or huge HP construct asshole instead of an easy to crit cultist.

[EagleWiz]

Be fair here - the teleporting construct would probably lose to an assistant with a toolbox, and the huge HP construct would definitely lose to that assistant swiftly backpedaling while chucking floor tiles

[Dr_bee]

Be fair here - the teleporting construct would probably lose to an assistant with a toolbox, and the huge HP construct would definitely lose to that assistant swiftly backpedaling while chucking floor tiles

It still permanently denies any chance at ressurection as well as making a minion.

The problem with the constructs arent 1v1 fights, it is constructs combined with normal cultists.

[Cobby]

Sacrificing at all should deny the stone.

You fucked up and got the guy killed, you shouldn’t be able to get a super demon out of it.

I’m not sure if cult wants to be a “boom” strategy gamemode or a “rush” gamemode but it seems like they kick ass in general.

The skill ceiling has definitely been lowered for cult, and the game basically ends up being a litmus test of if you’ve played cult before arguably moreso than any other primary antag.

[Oldman Robustin]

I laid out the dichotomy pretty clearly. Strip the radio asap and if they didn't yell for a summon theres a 99%+ chance they arent getting one. Carrying a tracking implant is also all but impossible for them to counter if you can get the warden or AI to check it shortly after they disappear, they will probably assume it was a pointless mindshield anyway.

Every team antag is balanced around the assumption that sec can, and should, access the armory. Buckshot is not some ultra rare option for sec and most competent sec will want them for constructs anyway. Most of the other scenarios i laid out were just hypotheticals or advanced cultfucking strats, hardly necessary for deconversion.

I mean you started this as a deconversion thread but then you complain about EMPs which are a surefire way for a cutlist to deny themselves the ability to yell for help. Communion is not a hivemind, its the weakest form of stealthcomms we have because it has a tell and it cant be used while cuffed or stunned. Saying you need a null rod not to get “nuked” by runes is flat out disengenuous since i dont think bloodboil has seriously impacted a round for years.

“All the fun of rev” is getting swarmed by 8 hostiles in a hallway 5 minutes into the round where nobody will help you, cult grows much, much slower most rounds and that gives sec much more of a chance to turn the momentum in their favor. Cult also invites the team to group up which enables turnabouts that you virtually never see with other more decentralized teams. Lastly, yes taking on every cult strat at once would require a shitload of gear, which is why this is a TEAM mode and why the loyalist “team” has had a good degree of success in shutting down blood cults. Sec doesnt need to stomp every rune and shotgun every cultist, engineeers can often render 10 minutes a cult base build moot in 10 seconds with an RCD, a single can of plasma will counter any summon attempt, one loyal xenobiologist is a mortal threat to the cult as well, you complain about an AoE stun but its a slow moving projectile with friendly fire, flashbangs on the other hand...

The theorycrafting goes on but Kor seems haf blind, like the cult is always bringing the full force of its arsenal down on him while engineering, robotics, xenobio, toxins, genetics, atmos, chemistry, and cargo are all apparently AFK and he has to solo everything. I was debating the nuances of a single “OP” cult item last week while observing when at the 22m mark a gygax smashed down the wall of a base and wiped out a majority of the cult with the tesla cannon in under 20 seconds. Im not saying the cult needs to be able to win that scenario either, im just pointing out that its a fallacy of arguing that a “fresh off the shuttle” officer is at a disadvantage when facing every conceivable cult tactic when the reality is that the cult faces mortal non-sec threats from almost every department that are also highly varied and impossible to counter all at once. Its not always going to be fair, thats SS13.

Edit: I also resent the "well the only reason cult loses is when they're clueless" argument. We balance around the players we have, not some impossible ideal. Good cults will roll bad sec, good sec will roll bad cults, and from my hundreds of rounds of experience, evenly matched sides will tend to favor the loyalists - especially after I forced the cult to summon in semi-public places. It's not unique to cult either, see: every other team mode. Kor never seems to buy the idea that cult balance is largely down to the numbers and the numbers can always be tweaked - I could ruin the cult's winrate in a single PR where I just add or subtract 1 from a bunch of number-based vars. It's also why I want to move ahead with the Cult PR so we can at least get a firmer idea of how the new cult meta is going to shake out before I decide where, and if, some of those 1's need to go.

[captain sawrge]

cult fucking sucks and is boring as shit

[captain sawrge]

can we please remove Robustin's Mode from rotation already mods

[Dr_bee]

Balancing around the entire station working together is not a good idea on /tg/ sadly. Departmental interaction and cooperation is at an all time low and the only time I ever really see people working together is during war ops, and to a lesser extent war cult.

[Qbopper]

"conversion modes suck" is a meme

it's also true

kor pretty much sums up how i feel - being punished for trying to play nice is the opposite of good gameplay and it's really not feasible to deconvert when it takes SO LONG and you can just get fucking zip zap zooped out of the brig at any time

maybe holy water could work much faster and you could make it so the warp target can't be cuffed? I'm not really sure what a good way to solve this would be beyond removing conversion modes

Balancing around the entire station working together is not a good idea on /tg/ sadly. Departmental interaction and cooperation is at an all time low and the only time I ever really see people working together is during war ops, and to a lesser extent war cult.

it's been a few months since i've played consistently but this was an issue then as well

people will choose to break into a department and take whatever shit they want because they know sec will likely be busy/not bother and they don't need to talk to anyone or ask for anything

[Oldman Robustin]

Deconversion is faster in the PR. Adding a cuff/holywater check to prevent summoning would make it all but useless.

I'm currently toying with a few options to make it less attractive to operate a spacebase/miningbase and I ~may~ incorporate that into summoning.

My biggest concern is that revealing when a cult is coming from off-station also has the necessary corollary that when you DON'T see a "tell" that you know the cult is operating from ON the station, making it easier for sec to focus its efforts.

My plan would be a visual effect that would exist for a moderate amount of time after a cultist is teleported to/from the station to space or another z_level. But if someone got summoned and you didn't see the "effect" then instead of sec going "well he got summoned, we have no idea where, fuck" it becomes "well he got summoned somewhere on station, sweep maint NOW". That in turn might ultimately buff off-station shit since if sec can narrow down where you are when you teleport, you might as well be somewhere they can't easily storm.

[Dax Dupont]

can we please remove Robustin's Mode from rotation already mods

[onleavedontatme]

Adding a cuff/holywater check to prevent summoning would make it all but useless.

Maybe it doesn't need to be that useful? Why do they need that crutch? It's intensely frustrating to play against an enemy that outclasses you in almost every way* (except an early round pitched battle, which won't happen if they at all know what they're doing) and has powers that just instantly undo whatever progress you are making against them.

*Such as

Conversion: Cultists can convert anyone instantly. They can even convert dead bodies or AFKs or NPC bodies into new, fully kitted players. Security takes 2+ minutes to deconvert with the help of a joke civilian role and cultists can remotely cancel the process.

Resources: Cultists need some plasteel and after that they can produce whatever the hell they want from another Z level. Most thinks are replaceable for free, or come standard on conversion. If you leave just a couple cultists alive they can churn out new people and restart the whole thing. Security can get mechs or bombs or whatever, but those places are vulnerable to attack or conversion. When they run out of ammo or implants or guns they can't spawn them back in for free.

Communication/Teamwork: Cultists have unbreakable hivemind comms that works cross z level. Security has a radio that gets compromised very easily, or turned off entirely by a Wraith. Every cultist can use ghost vision to hear/see/find anything. Security relies on the easily neutralized AI. Cultists can 100% trust anyone with the HUD icon on their head. Security has to beware of the entire crew.

Gear: You start with better stuff as security, but cultists are probably going to get hold of it+they have their own gear that you get stunned for trying to pick up. They get monsters that are immune to the majority of your weapons. They get unlimited AoE talismans that turn off the majority of your weapons.

Healing: It takes security 5+ minutes in a vulnerable room to revive a dead team mate. It is instant for cultists to revive people.

And so on. Calling me blind or whatever is not gonna make me suddenly have fun in a mode where the antag multiplies like crazy in secret on top of having a large arsenal of powers. Not fun being a punching bag in a war of attrition vs a team that suffers zero attrition. Yeah it's a team mode, but one team has all the tools to promote cooperation, and the other team either lucks out with facing confused newbies or otherwise just suffers.

[Oldman Robustin]

Every antag should be an unkillable monster in *theory. There's absolutely no reason an NVG+Revolver traitor should lose to anyone. There's no reason a bunch of dudes who can ambush the crew with automatic weapons and infinite LMG borgs should ever conceivably fail to get some floppy bit of plastic wedged between the least robust crewmember's asscheeks. Wizards who target crew in order of their threat level should be able to steamroll the station without breaking a sweat. Team antags that can swell their numbers from 3 to 3 x Sec's entire roster in under 5 minutes should never even come close to failure. Space-immune assholes who can teleport almost anywhere with a virtually free and infinite ghost army should be able to kill the station within 40 minutes, failing to defend a heavily fortified space citadel with thousands of HP of autonomous defenses would be inconceivable.

If I wanted to be really snarky I'd just repost what you said with minor variations for "clock cult". But I will point out where you are flat out wrong:

1) "They can even convert dead bodies or AFKs or NPC bodies into new, fully kitted players."

NPC's become empty shards, shards are marginally useful at best and certainly doesn't count as a "conversion" or a "fully kitted player". AFKs yield a shard (for now), which still isn't a "fully kitted" anything except a really annoying ghost. It should be possible to convert an AFK then "revive" them after my PR but I hadn't even thought of that until you mentioned it. If its a serious concern you have it's like 10 seconds to change it from requiring a mind to requiring and mind AND client to convert.

2) "If you leave just a couple cultists alive they can churn out new people and restart the whole thing."

Probably the area where I couldn't disagree with you more. Cult comebacks are virtually non-existent. Cult's typically get one shot at building momentum, if sec ever gets momentum back once the cult has been found its all but guaranteed GG for the cult. Once the round starts the cult is 100% responsible for its development while the crew gets someone new every 60 seconds. If a cult is broken then sec will have no problem implanting and arming those proven trustworthy and borging cultist faster than even the best cultists can sneak off with someone to convert or revive. Everyone going after the cult is implanted and even if you beat the odds and kill one your only option is a construct. Which late-game becomes an absolute joke versus sec's arsenal. Shotguns become standard fare and wraiths/arti's find themselves staring at their own ghost if they try to get close enough to land anything. Both wraiths and juggs are also more fragile in my PR. The ONLY, ONLY tactic left when there's only a couple cultists left is to pray that somehow the smartest cultists are the last alive (its always the opposite, smart culties died trying to do something risky, yet critical for success, the last 2 are always "HEY ANYONE STILL ALIVE? I WAS MAKING DEATHNETTLE FOR EVERYONE, IM GOING TO GO HIT A SEC OFFICER WITH ONE NOW WISH ME LUCK"), somehow the cultists still have a massive reserve of runed metal, and they manage to set up a convenient public teleporter link to a secure pylon spam base where they can send a stream of ghosts to fuck with the crew. Even then that requires several minutes of recovery and doesn't help you recover momentum when your only presence on the station is "valid on sight" ghosts who basically have spears for weapons versus people with fucking guns. One landed taser shot = One dead ghost. One flashbang = Dead Ghost Wave. All you can pray is that sec is really sloppy and you manage by sheer RNG to grab the most robust dead players for your ghosts. The rune has to be somewhere public because your ghost army can't access shit on it own so all it takes is one enterprising crewmember to drag a locker over the rune and suddenly all your ghosts are trapped with you or teleporting to abandoned runes in maint that don't let them get anywhere.

Even then I don't like manifest ghost that much and I haven't seen it turn around a failing cult since Joan nerfed it. It when you say stuff like this that I stop taking you seriously because anyone who's observed more than a couple cult rounds notice how easily the cult can unravel and how utterly hopeless it is once the leadership has fallen. Ultimately it all boils down to the fact that once the cult is on the retreat the only thing they can do is bring out more shit that's melee-only against an ever-increasing arsenal of shotguns and lasers.

3) "Cultists have unbreakable hivemind comms"

It "breaks" the moment that you get stunned, slipped, cuffed, pushed, crit, whatever. Calling it hivemind isn't even remotely fair, its just reaching for the buzziest word in your arsenal because the REAL hivemind is a terror to deal with. Hell even Syndie keys work up until you're crit or stripped. One tactical soap, one quickdraw taser, one spraybottle in maint, and your only recourse is squealing on common radio. Getting one-way commentary from the rest of the cult while you're being dragged off to the brig or beaten to death is no concilation. It's a secure communications channel and nothing more. Hell even comms channels have the advantage of being usable in the chatline with just a simple two-character key, communion is a button that you have to click in the corner of your screen that brings up a big ass popup that blocks vision of everything around your character and literally gives you "im valid" whispers.

As to the rest of your point? What's the point? This game used to bring a shitload of paranoia, cult is one of the last antags that still has you on your toes and I love it. Loyalists don't get a HUD but it's not terribly hard to parse the suspicious from the harmless. When I play CE its laughable how obvious the distinction is between "dude who is just doing their job waiting to see how the round plays out" and "dude fucking booking it into maint because he's hard up to get his cult game on". While you shouldn't trust strangers, sec can easily solve that problem by just searching people who were near runes, lurking in the wrong dept., or stalking maint. With incredibly rare exceptions if the person doesn't have a tome, soon to be dagger, you can slap them with an implant and toss them a spare weapon. I have yet to see it backfire.

4) "They get monsters that are immune to the majority of your weapons."

Only if you somehow pretend the armory doesn't exist, at which point every antag becomes 200% more potent if you're pretend sec is limited to one taser and baton, fox only, final destination. 3 lasers kills an arti, 4 kills a wraith, Juggs can soak 16 lasers (including the reflection mechanic) but good luck dodging any. Melee-range buckshot one-shots Artificers, one-shots Wraiths, and three-shots Juggernauts. That means even the lowliest assistant can craft an improvised sawn-off in 2 minutes and proceed to annihilate any construct they see. Maybe you're just adverse to shotguns Kor but anyone who has used them against the cult knows that once you pick one up there's only one "monster" in that fight and its not the constructs... Autorifles seem to be picking up in popularity too. No difference than lasers for artis/wraiths but against Juggernauts it simplifies the matter and lets you burn them for merely half-a-mag (in my PR at least). I get the appeal of being able to dunk antags with nothing but your basic loadout but the cult is a serious threat and its fair to expect Sec to put on their big boy pants and arm themselves appropriately or to otherwise suffer a disadvantage.

5) "It takes security 5+ minutes in a vulnerable room to revive a dead team mate. It is instant for cultists to revive people."

The only thing that takes 5 minutes in genetics these days is getting the bluespace RPED fairy to pass by and give you the GODCLONER. Back yourself up then laugh your ass off when the cult kills you because you'll be popping out with genetics powers before they even manage to get you to a rune. You think summon is unfair? You think revive is unfair? It is 100% possible for security to have its own autocloner 5 minutes into the round and it does BOTH and it does it instantly without fail, no radio screams or teamwork required. There's a reason revive runes are so rarely scribed, getting a cultist's corpse back tends to only happen in cases of extreme negligence by security or when the cultist dies to an event/accident/stupidity. In October (last full month of data), there were only 37 revive runes across 57 rounds. Assuming that some rounds had multiple runes it's fair to say that a majority of cult rounds NEVER see a revive rune get used.


That's why I'm calling you blind to this stuff Kor. You've got this image of the perfect cult in your head lead by our most robust players, effortlessly bringing every advantage to bear while every trick up the crew's sleeve is flawlessly countered by this alpha-cult. The last complete data I have shows cult with <30% win rate. In that same data the Revs sat at 46%, Nukeops sat at 45%, and I guarantee you after Xhuis's last defense overhaul the clockcult is sitting on at least 45%. I get that win-rate isn't everything but when we're talking about big-picture balance, it means a LOT. As for gameplay, the cult remains an antag that is largely melee-only. Yet cultists can overcome that weakness by killing armed crew but that's a double-edged sword and it's the case for every single conversion mode. If an officer runs off and dies alone with no witnesses, nobody watching suit sensors, nothing, then the team antag just got a massive edge whether they are cultists, clock cultists, revs, lings, anyone! Idiot officers serving as caches for the enemy is just one of those things you have to accept and get over.

Which is why it's hard to talk to you about this Kor. When I play sec I find myself cherishing a blood cult foe. It opens the door to all kinds of theatrics. A couple weeks ago we realized the cult was porting in ghosts from the whiteship. I grabbed a GPS and jetpack and with nothing except a single egun I was able to stop their operation. I boarded swiftly, disabled the CE as I opened up the central room, immediately 4 ghosts were upon me, but I was able to juke them between pylons and rushed the summoner, I pulled him off the rune right as they surrounded me and suddenly it was just one panicked summoner surrounded by piles of remains. Cult offers all the stunting opportunities that revs do, but without having to depend on playing Concentration Camp Simulator 2557 in Cargo. The more the cult invest in their base, the more devastating it is if your daring raid manages to burn it to the ground/expel its contents to space/etc.

[Oldman Robustin]

Lastly on the flip side I'll offer my security perspective on why the cult seems so weak and why I absolutely do not understand where Kor's description of this antag that "multiplies like crazy in secret on top of having a large arsenal of powers. Not fun being a punching bag in a war of attrition vs a team that suffers zero attrition." It's not unusual for me to feel like a punching bag as sec, but playing against blood cult is NOT one of those times. Also I have literally never, in any cult round I have ever played since we tossed 1-man conversions for good, seen a cult that manages to "multiply like crazy" while also "in secret" (plus the average cult win takes a full 20 minutes longer than a rev win - I could write another small novel on why the cult never "multiplies like crazy" due to all sorts of incentives and bottlenecks - but I'll move onto my view on fighting the cult as security:

1) Cultists depend on maint. The cult cannot typically operate on camera. Even if you try to cut cameras, the AI receives a notice when cameras go down and the static makes it obvious anyway. The vast majority of cults resort to making most of their plays in and around maint. When cultists make a play, its going to involve retreating to the necessary follow-up rune (teleport or offer) in maint. Also, current population levels make it extremely easy to keep tabs on all corners of maint with a high degree of confidence.

2) When you patrol maint as security against a bloodcult, there is NO CULT MECHANIC that poses a risk to your life. The cultists have a lot of fun toys but at the end of the day you have a gun that will end their round in a single shot and they have a melee weapon that can do the same to you. If your gun isn't available you still have everything from pepperspray to flashbangs to let you handily dunk cultists. I absolutely fear stupid shit like soap and water killing me far, far more than anything the cult has access to. But even then those are ambush tactics and when you're sweeping maint, you're usually the predator, you should be getting the first shot off, not vice-versa, and when I have fallen to slipmemes I recognize that I would've died the same way to revs, lings, and anyone else willing to resort to slipmemes.

3) You aren't alone. If sec players were all you had to fight the cult, you might be in hot water, but that simply isn't the case. Call them validhunters, call them heroes, it doesn't matter - they are more effective than the typical sec player and they will punch well above their weight. The engineer will peel a space base like a tin can and cackle as all the shells, shards, talismans, and loot fly off into the abyss. Give them the finger as they are forced to flee back to station while you smash all their precious structures to rubble. Genetics will spot your base from 2 rooms away and sing your doom on the radio - even the most stealthy cultists will be out'd before they even know they've been seen, suddenly one SMASHED wall later and the cultist is screaming for a summon through broken teeth - one that will never come before its too late. The list goes on an on. Miners, roboticists, chemists, atmosians, scientists, cargo, botany, I've seen virtually every job single-handedly break the cult's back. Obviously cultists can also take those positions but they can't plumb their job for the most rewarding tools AND serve as an effective cultist during the critical early round. I've seen plenty of cultists try to get the best lavaland gear, brew the best virus, farm the best slimes, isolate the best power, only for the rest of the cult to have collapsed in the meantime. The simple fact is that for most of any cult round there is one immutable truth: the cult is outnumbered.

4) They aren't clock cultists, they can't teleport in any room of their choosing. The chief thing keeping off-station cultsin line is the fact that bringing together a diverse cult off-station then trying to push BACK onto station with a full load of talismans, weapons, whatever, requires that you can actually teleport somewhere where you're effective. The cult LIVES AND DIES based on the effectiveness of their teleporter network. You can put 50 pylons, forges, altars, and archives on the darkest corner of Lavaland and it wont matter at all if the only place you can teleport is virology. You need to be able to smoothly extract victims for conversion before they can start yelling or you'll never get enough cultists to defend your summoning. You need teleport runes to places without specialized access so that anyone who uses them isn't just stuck inside asking for another teleport rune elsewhere. We've evolved from "null rods only" for rune removal to now even the most basic of tactics (dragging a dense object on top) will shut down a teleport rune. Shutting down the cults "prime" rune immediately creates a huge bottleneck in movement that stalls the entire cult's progress. Alternatively if you find a rune that seems pretty convenient, it's incredibly easy for you to turn that into a trap and ambush cultists as they appear. Here's a short list of things that will survive coming out of a cult rune that you've got a shotgun aimed at:

Furthermore I've added new mechanics to the Cult PR that present a significant disadvantage for cults teleporting from off-station. Which brings me back to one of the first points I made: cults undergoing a pretty massive overhaul so why are we here bickering about Newcult 1.0 when Cult 2.0's new strengths will give me room to nerf some of the more annoying cult tactics.

[Dax Dupont]

Does the win rate include 4 month old rounds? What's the recent numbers

[Oldman Robustin]

Couldn't tell you without bugging Atlanta. His old (good) site stopped tracking monthly data and his new site is broken to hell.

Not to mention cult win rates were busted for most of December when we refactored to team antags. Cult was incapable of reporting a win to the stat system (the in-game credits still worked fine).

Late September was the last big balance addition with my bastard sword and the win rate actually dropped ~2% in October. It's probably just noise but I've been pretty adamant that the sword isn't really problematic. Its terrifying when the cult has no real threats left, but anyone with a brain and a gun should have no problem dunking a sword user - so much of the time it turned out to be a retard magnet that would just result fresh converts hitting up the nearest forge before running off and dying trying to SCOTLAAAAAND the brig. Ultimately I felt a good compromise was making it only forgeable by the master so that they could decide what strategy to take.

This discussion reminds me too much of last year's round length debate where everyone was pretty much talking out of their ass until data showed up. The healthiest thing we can do for the cult right now is run more test merges so I can tweak this PR properly with as many data points as possible. I'm actually kind of happy (1) nobody was offended by it enough to open a feedback thread for ranting and (2) no feedback thread and a last-page PR means only the honest and sincere feedback comes through and I'm not dealing with OOC-tier balance bikeshedding. I'm also curious to see how slowly introducing "soft" costs for base-building off station will work out.

Edit: Fun Fact, since the server started in 2011 the historical cult winrate is 29.9% and revs are 55%. The cult winrate from around January-May last year was a perfect 50% for all but one month. Then I limited the cult summoning spots with https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/28137 in early June and suddenly the cult shit the bed when they actually had to face-off with the crew instead of just assassinating one dude and then summoning in Port Aft Abandoned Aux Storage with manifested ghosts before anyone could even find them. I'm still surprised by how drastic the change was but it's only reinforced that I need to pay attention to data/observing rounds and not Github shitposting. From what I could tell it's a combination of the cult simply being weak in a flat-out brawl, with talismans often spread thin and quickly exhausting in the face of a protracted fight, and many players learning that "let the cult come to them" to speak and save their grand sabotage for when they have to summon. I saw so many losses this Fall which boiled down to someone dropping WMD's during the summon attempt and wiping out 90% of the cult. Even something as simple as a plasma can would make the room uninhabitable and the heat/pressure would push everyone off runes while they cooked to death.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

what about those meme swords though

[SpaceInaba]

its been a while since I've seen a post with a scrollbar

[Oldman Robustin]

Memeswords became a "Cult Master Only" option in the PR. They still have a 20m timer before even the master can forge them. I might tweak the order of the special procs so that they happen at the beginning, not the end, of the attack - since that's what allowed some people to get dusted while "standing up" - the attack actually hardcrit them and then immediately dusted them before the crit animation kicked in. Im still open to an assortment of minor nerfs but I still dont see the sword as a problem yet - cultists are having fun with it but at the end of the day someone with even a flash/slip/stun, let alone a gun, has the advantage in that fight. I would absolutely favor an assistant with a bar of soap over a bastard sword cultist in a fight. Not to mention the big cooldown "spin" takes a full second after starting before it does damage, while slowing the user down, I simply don't see the sword winning many real fights. I do see the sword used to chop up unarmed people in the halls and I got absolutely buttblasted a couple days ago when the cultists set up a sliptrap on the main path to the summoning site and like 15 fucking peopole got slipped n' sworded, but that goes more to slip balance than the unsurprising ability to kill people who have slipped in front of you.

Edit: Also I added a client check to the sac rune in my PR, so you won't be able to convert braindeads anymore.

[Wyzack]

Both cult modes are garbage and have been since their inception despite every attempt to make them not totally fucking suck dick