/tg/Station 13

For the longest time bloodcult has had the same design problem. The crew has no win condition besides calling the shuttle. This has lead to a skewed winrate for cult, because there is no incentive for the crew to actually fight the cult. The buffs to cultists like talisman-less spells, and cult bolas to help the cult winrate has only made sticking around and fighting the cult an even less appealing option, as now you have snowballing conversion AND wizard spells.

This problem can be solved by going back to the basic design of the mode and think about it. How do we get the crew to stay and fight?

The easy answer is to steal from revs and not have the shuttle leave during cult. That is honestly shit, and leads to the 30 minute long rev round stalemates we see now.

The better answer would be to steal from revs and add targets the crew needs to remove from play to win, like the headrevs. You can tie conversion to headrev cultists or not, but having a concrete win condition for the crew would actually give a reason for them to fight the cult instead of calling the shuttle at 25 minutes and deconning all the comms consoles.

If this is done you can have the shuttle be a neutral win, so that both the cult and the crew can use calling the shuttle to deny the other side a win if they are losing too hard. A comeback mechanic of a sort.

Maybe take some ideas from nuke ops.

Crew Major Victory:
Sacrifice target is alive, cult leaders are killed.

Crew Minor Victory:
Cult leaders are killed, sacrifice target is dead.

Neutral Win:
The shuttle leaves the station with the sacrifice target on it.

Cult Minor Victory:
The sacrifice target is dead/marooned and the shuttle leaves the station.

Cult Major Victory:
Nar'Sie is summoned.

BeeSting12 wrote:Maybe take some ideas from nuke ops.

Crew Major Victory:
Sacrifice target is alive, cult leaders are killed.

Crew Minor Victory:
Cult leaders are killed, sacrifice target is dead.

Neutral Win:
The shuttle leaves the station with the sacrifice target on it.

Cult Minor Victory:
The sacrifice target is dead/marooned and the shuttle leaves the station.

Cult Major Victory:
Nar'Sie is summoned.

This would be the ideal, but any change that would make fighting the cult required for the crew to win would be a big boon to the game mode.

The biggest worry will be dealing with the balance fallout from actually forcing cult fights. Current cult balance is heavily in favor of cultists due to the fact that the crew was never required to actually fight them to win a cult round. However simple changes such as allowing non-cultists to use cult knives/swords/bolas might be the first place to start.

I think this is a good idea, shuttle calls give many cult rounds an anticlimactic ending.

There is already a mechanic for a cult leader, pehaps tie everything to that?

It might actually solve the problem of the cult being solo'd by a singular gamer mincing through everything and everyone, and the rest of the cult being bullet chaff. If the person who is a cult leader is murdered, you lose, so it requires protecting the important guy as much as being robust on an individual level. (Also funny early cult loss)

That said it should probably be balanced by the leader having some protections available to them that other cultists don't get. And he in particular needs more significant tells compared to your standard cultists each time the cult begins to ramp. We don't want a situation like before were the cult leader just hides among his mass of cultists and the round never truly ends because you can't tell which one is the important cultist. We had tells added for a reason.

Whether that tell is visual or found out via deconversion (actually giving reason to deconvert in cult, gasp!) is honestly something that would needs to get worked out, but I do really like the idea of a cult leader being WAY more important to cult than just being the role the robust gamer takes to finish the round.

Great idea. While we're at it, revert cult back to tome and talisman days.

InsaneHyena wrote:Great idea. While we're at it, revert cult back to tome and talisman days.

this. i hate having the action buttons all over my screen

BeeSting12 wrote:

InsaneHyena wrote:Great idea. While we're at it, revert cult back to tome and talisman days.

this. i hate having the action buttons all over my screen

The talismans also allowed security to disarm a cultist of their weapons fully. The current spell system means you are better off just murdering a cultist if you catch them without a source of holy water as they will still have their stupidly overpowered stun ability.

Also remember that the change doesnt necessarily need to be a headrev, but just a win objective for the crew. For example /vg/ cult has 5 blood obelisks that the crew has to destroy to stop the summoning. Granted /vg/ cult is a vastly different game mode to /tg/ Robustincult.

Notice how cult is really a broken implementation of rev?

Remove cult

NecromancerAnne wrote: Whether that tell is visual or found out via deconversion (actually giving reason to deconvert in cult, gasp!) is honestly something that would needs to get worked out, but I do really like the idea of a cult leader being WAY more important to cult than just being the role the robust gamer takes to finish the round.

just kill everyone then the tell is you end the game if you get the right guy

oranges wrote:Notice how cult is really a broken implementation of rev?

Remove cult

I agree with you. But try to do it without the playerbase screaming its fucking head off.

oranges wrote:Notice how cult is really a broken implementation of rev?

Remove cult

I would love to have a cult based around a fixed number of cultists who gain powers by sacrificing people.

now that dynamic mode exist maybe give chaplain a power to pinpoint the last cultists if they reached x stage and then they got wiped, as opposed to the static mode there is no need to shuttle call cause antag died and dynamic will spawn new shit

Turn it into a slaneeshi cult and make them turn everyone into catgirls and lizards

I would love to have a cult based around a fixed number of cultists who gain powers by sacrificing people.

We already did that, and it was fucking awful. I'll say that again, bring back papercult.

InsaneHyena wrote:

I would love to have a cult based around a fixed number of cultists who gain powers by sacrificing people.

We already did that, and it was fucking awful. I'll say that again, bring back papercult.

Back then it had a shit interface and everyone was just turned into constructs instead.

CPTANT wrote:

InsaneHyena wrote:

I would love to have a cult based around a fixed number of cultists who gain powers by sacrificing people.

We already did that, and it was fucking awful. I'll say that again, bring back papercult.

Back then it had a shit interface and everyone was just turned into constructs instead.

That was also before Robustin fucked over cult balance by overbuffing cultists. So they might be more viable now than before.

RESEARCH OR BUST

Cult is too powerful as it is, the reason the shuttle is called asap is because cult snowball is almost inevitable unless you completely snuff them out.

Yakumo_Chen wrote:Cult is too powerful as it is, the reason the shuttle is called asap is because cult snowball is almost inevitable unless you completely snuff them out.

Which was caused by poor balance decisions based on cult winrates. Cult winrates being as low as they were because the crew's only win condition was calling the shuttle.

This problem should have been fixed before the mode was even implemented, years of patchwork buffs and changes while avoiding the core problem of the shuttle call has only made the problem even worse.

Personally I agree with oranges, cult is shittier revs and really shouldnt exist as a game mode. But try to get a removal through of something as long standing as cult and watch the shitter and digg crowd scream bloody murder.

Fixing Cult is easy as giving crew a reason to fight the cult. This is of course a multilayer problem but if crew abandons the station to the cult, it should automatically be a cult minor victory. If their goal is to summon a dark god on the station, leaving them alone to do that should be as bad as tossing the disk at the nukes as you board the shuttle and spam the launch early codes. (Off topic, but thematically the Cult summon would be so much better if instead of summoning Nar'Sie, cult instead dimension jumped the station into the Not!-Warp so chaos demons could board the station and slaughter crew.)

Change the delay shuttle call for cult into a complete sabotage that causes the shuttle to crash randomly into the station. If the crew isn't absolutely sure the cult is dead before they call their exit, they'll pay severely for it when their hope of salvation becomes a harbinger of doom at the last minute. Bonus points if you make this a channeling ritual where 3 cultists can force it off course, 5 or more can specify where they want the shuttle to land for maximum damage (and punish any Command/Sec deciding to just turtle up in Security/Bridge/Cargo)

Give Chaplain the ability to perform rituals on cult artifacts to cleanse them and make them into weapons to fight the cult, regular crew can douse various artifacts in excessive amounts of holy water to remove the taint. Any of these cleansed items could be exported to CC or broken down in the Destructive Analyzer to allow ordering/creation of more anti-cult weaponry specialized in disrupting their spells and destroying constructs.

As with the above, allow splashing holy water on cult constructs to stun them (aka as if EMPing a borg) and let chaplains free them from the cult. This could either just allow the construct revenge on their murderers or allow option for the constructs soul to be shunted back into an organic body. If cult is going to send their constructs on suicide missions, they best be prepared for that to backfire.

I'm aware that there is nobody on the coding staff that can be bothered to try and implement these, but the biggest problem with /tg/ conversion modes is that the converts become stupidly powerful and the actual crew's best option in almost every case is to simply avoid conflict until they can evacuate or launch a massive assault on the convert's base. Maybe conversion modes wouldn't be so fucking hated if coders would bother giving crew means to fight back beyond deconversion specialized to the game mode rather than just making the converters OP as possible.