/tg/Station 13

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/7109

There was some disagreement over this so I figured I'd put it to a poll. There's some discussion in the PR to get you guys started.

Let's buff syndieborgs even more guys fuck teamwork

Borgs should have to rely on the operatives to find the disk and shouldn't just run away and lone wolf it with his own pinpointer.

I second Tsar's post. I feel that giving the ALREADY super-strong borg an undroppable pinpointer is a bit much.

Yeah except

"Borg, go kill the AI"

"Okay, complete. Where are the rest of you now?"
"Guys?"
"Okay i'll check the bridge."
"Hello?"
"I'll check armory then."
"Does anyone know where the fucking disk is holy shit."

I do agree that syndiborgs are too powerful right now, but I don't think that hamstringing them in navigation and usability is a proper way to balance them out.

I agree with not buffing syndie borg, but what Saegrimr said happens A LOT. It's really fucking frustrating to be a syndie borg, follow your orders and do a good job, then your shitty team mates wordlessly do their shit, and either get the disk or die without saying anything. Then you literally have no choice but to 'lone wolf' while trying to find your people. More then once I've had ops activate the nuke, without once saying anything to me as a borg the entire time.

That's more of a player issue though. Borgs with pinpointers would be mechanically pretty fucking strong.

The borgs are too OP to be able to go after the disk by themselves, imo. I guess a pinpointer to the nearest op would be good, though.

I dont think the borgs are powerful anymore with the ebow and laser removed, so the pinpointer wouldnt really hurt.
I still see teams go "let's get as many borgs as we can" and then they get fucked.

Yeah, the LMG/Nade launcher really did nerf Snydi Borgs severely in terms of stopping power.

Hence why I support a form of Syndiborg Pinpointers.

Jesus I didn't even know syndiborks got needed. If they don't have ebows anymore then I'd be alright with the pinpointer

The LMG is a lower damaging weapon (20 to 30) that has limited ammo. It works akin to the Captain's Laser but from my experience you burn through ammo fast and it tends to run out a the worst time.

So yes, Syndi borgs were severaly nerfed and are now a true support role rather than a assault platform.

How about this:

Syndiborgs have an operative pinpointer. It points to the nearest nuke op and gives their name. If there are no active operatives, it points to the disk so they can at least win a minor victory.

Edit: I have had a PR for this for a while and I just now updated it to have op pinpointers that point to the nearest Syndicate.

Its not an issue of borgs running off alone and more that they kinda end up as a fifth wheel without their own pinpointer. I mean really, we don't limit ops teams to a pinpointer for every other op on the team so they have to work together. Excluding borgs after already nerfing their weaponry is pretty awful.

It makes sense that they would have a pinpointer. They are a custom built syndicate cyborg after all.

No reason for them not to have one. Hand it to them.

DemonFiren wrote:No reason for them not to have one.

Except for balance issues of course, Ops are already incredibly reliant on syndiborgs as it is. I almost always see the old triple borg strategy nowadays. With pinpointers on borgs the ops will literally have NO reason to choose the other items over the syndiborg and stealth ops will be even less common than they already are.

I just wanna see more Nuke Ops try the Solid Snake method rather than just buy 3 borgs and gg no re.

Yeah syndieborgs are already powerful enough, let's not turn nuke ops into syndie borg attack 101

They already have enough gear to aid the operatives, if the operatives die or don't take pinpointers, that is their own fault

Not having pinpointers meant they couldnt act as a lone wolf and had to stick together with the other ops.

As someone who gets syndie borg all the time, pls no

Ikarrus wrote:Not having pinpointers meant they couldnt act as a lone wolf and had to stick together with the other ops.

As someone who gets syndie borg all the time, pls no

This would be relevent if the borgs didn't already run off alone. Except they do it now to pointlessly murderbone crew instead of move toward the disk. Since the ops are all moving to the disk following their pointers and the borg does not, it has nothing to orient itself towards the target so it just wanders around killing randoms and being useless until it bumps into another op on accident or gets flashed.

Make pinpointer point at nearest op.

I'd strongly prefer it if it was used to direct the borg to the nearest op instead of the disk.

Finding the operatives is more important than the disk itself for a syndiborg. Since you can't arm nuclear arms without arms.

Might actually be more of a buff but I support it on the basis of being more interesting than another pinpointer.

Not that a pinpointer is a huge buff anyway, babies.

Don't we still have that radar nanomachine that doohl coded?

Can't we have that detect nuke ops and give them to nuke ops + syndie borgs?

It'd help keep all of them together and we wouldn't need to give borgs pinpointers.

No, I think that got removed along with all the other badass nanomachine tech.

PR has been changed to give syndiborgs special pinpointers that point towards the nearest operative. Poll has been reset.

Would make subverting a syndiborgs a very powerful tool. Just saying.

If the crew are in a position to subvert a Syndiborg then someone has gone horribly wrong and the Ops have most likely lost.

Steelpoint wrote:If the crew are in a position to subvert a Syndiborg then someone has gone horribly wrong and the Ops have most likely lost.

This, either that or the syndieborg is a lone wolf piece of shit.

Cheridan wrote:PR has been changed to give syndiborgs special pinpointers that point towards the nearest operative. Poll has been reset.

Kindoff unrelated but does this mean we could have traitor pinpointers which point towards your target?

Deantwo wrote:Would make subverting a syndiborgs a very powerful tool. Just saying.

It shouldn't be possible to even do that, honestly.

MisterPerson wrote:It shouldn't be possible to even do that, honestly.

I mean you could probably steal an emag from a dead one, but I haven't actually checked if syndieborgs start as technically emagged to make sure they can't get emagged again.

Like someone else said, if you have the luxury of looting a dead nuke op for his emag and flashing their borg, they're already losing.

Saegrimr wrote:

MisterPerson wrote:It shouldn't be possible to even do that, honestly.

I mean you could probably steal an emag from a dead one, but I haven't actually checked if syndieborgs start as technically emagged to make sure they can't get emagged again.

Like someone else said, if you have the luxury of looting a dead nuke op for his emag and flashing their borg, they're already losing.

You need the emag to open the Borg's cover (or one of the Ops' ID cards). You can then purge its laws with a purge board, then give it new laws so it will turn on the remaining Nuke Ops.

I had no idea you could use law boards directly onto borgs.

Oh look no one will ever bother with trying innovative syndie shit. Now they can just spawn syndiborgs to do EVERYTHING for them.

soulgamer wrote:Oh look no one will ever bother with trying innovative syndie shit. Now they can just spawn syndiborgs to do EVERYTHING for them.

Did you even read any of the thread?

I have to say its not all that obvious that the sydi-borgs pinpointer points towards ops. It looks exactly like the regular pinpointer and iirc they aren't even renamed. A sprite re-skin might help or at least some more info.

Confused the hell out of me last night at any rate.

peoplearestrange wrote:I have to say its not all that obvious that the sydi-borgs pinpointer points towards ops. It looks exactly like the regular pinpointer and iirc they aren't even renamed. A sprite re-skin might help or at least some more info.

Confused the hell out of me last night at any rate.

They are renamed. A sprite change isn't really warranted, though, because the average nuke op player is observant enough to note "huh, this has a different name and description, so it must have a different purpose as well." I might make a pull request in a little while to improve it - I've already had a few ideas, like a pop-up list of ops to track.

Recolour it. Good enough for lazy jrpgs good enough for us.

Phalanx300 wrote:

Cheridan wrote:PR has been changed to give syndiborgs special pinpointers that point towards the nearest operative. Poll has been reset.

Kindoff unrelated but does this mean we could have traitor pinpointers which point towards your target?

There was a PR for this, but it had a big issue. Namely, the way you picked items for a Steal objective was simply selecting from a drop-down list. It was messy, metaish, and could lead to situations where the HoS lifts one off a traitor and gets to hunt down every objective on the station.

If someone changed the selection method (reading the objective datum would be the best, probably) then yeah it would be a good addition.