/tg/Station 13

Currently Nuclear Operatives have really poor win rates at war ops. Just this weekend I've seen Nukies go 0 for 2 on Mid/High pop sybil. The most common reason war ops fail is that after waiting Twenty minutes they show up to a station full of disposal traps, gun wielding crew, and prior to the elance removal a swarm of suicide bombing tiders. There are a few changes that could give nuclear operatives better odds when fighting 50-70 crew members.

• Scaling the arrival time to be inversely proportional to the server population. This would give nukies a better chance of getting in and out before the crew orders several dozen guns from cargo.

• Scaling the number of nuclear operatives to be higher than it currently is on high pop. I've seen roughly half a dozen operatives on the highest pop rounds which normally means nukies are outnumbered 10 to 1 adjusting this to maybe 6-7 crew per operative would boost their odds

• Make warop specific gear extremely overpowered. This could be done with the addition of either very expensive new items or just buffing the already expensive items such as making the Mauler emp-proof, adding a stun immunity mod suit module, giving all guns 100% higher capacity magazines instead of the current ones

• Create a new hybrid nuclear operative / syndicate sleeper agent role that is a crew member antagonist who works directly with the nuclear operatives to sabotage the station. Currently traitors can buy a key to talk to the syndicate but they're under no obligations to help the operatives.

HeyHey wrote: ↑Sun Dec 11, 2022 7:37 pm

• Make warop specific gear extremely overpowered. This could be done with the addition of either very expensive new items or just buffing the already expensive items such as making the Mauler emp-proof, adding a stun immunity mod suit module, giving all guns 100% higher capacity magazines instead of the current ones

Nukies already have wizard-tier levels of overpowered gear, where they can kill you pretty much by looking in your direction for a few seconds; nukie ranged weapons are ridiculous and only don't feel that way when the crew directly counters them by putting windows all over the halls to block the bullets. If you choose to engage them in melee combat, they can pretty much instantly win by ctrl-clicking on you once(CQC) and also get access to one of the most powerful melee weapons in the game.

Their armor is SIGNIFICANT, especially in combat mode: Fighting nukies in-atmosphere, you're already losing nearly half your hits, especially in melee. Most war ops will be using the more expensive Elite modsuit, let alone the shielded variant that nullifies the first three hits in a fight. Here's the armor the crew gets: barely half of that at most. For nukies to be much stronger in direct combat, they'd have to be packing instagib rifles.

Heaven forbid they engage in indirect combat; they can vastly increase their odds by bombing the station before directly attacking, sabotaging the AI and telecomms systems, blowing up the engine, flooding plasma. Their kit is heavily geared towards quick smash-and-grab conflicts with the presence of a limited amount of quickly swapped ammunition, high-damage weapons that outperform anything the crew can acquire, and a variety of explosives for breaking into various rooms of the station.

Let's look at what the crew typically does to fight war ops: Most operatives do not play around these tactics. Most operatives just charge in and start randomly butchering their way through the crew until they die. This isn't an operative gear issue, this is a skill issue. All of these tactics can be played around in some way; the nukies just aren't willing to do it. Here are a few examples:

• Create a new hybrid nuclear operative / syndicate sleeper agent role that is a crew member antagonist who works directly with the nuclear operatives to sabotage the station. Currently traitors can buy a key to talk to the syndicate but they're under no obligations to help the operatives.

This is something I can agree with though; currently it's really hard to work together with the nukies because you can't add yourself to their faction. This means two things:
1) you aren't visibly a nukie to them and will inevitably become a casualty. No hud marker = you are dead.
2) they have to do some cheeky shenanigans to get you onto the ship if you want to evacuate with them, because you will be targeted by the ship's turrets.
A way of adding yourself to their team as a traitor would be nice, even if it only unlocked from a war declaration.

Nuke ops is meant to be a challenge mode, so it makes sense that it becomes a noob trap full of flukies. Nothing quite says "my turn on the instant suicide antag" like loudly announcing themselves to the crew and giving everyone 20 minutes to prepare, even if this is the second or third war ops round in a row.

My nukie tips:
1. Dont use traitor weapons while going loud. 2. SHOCK DOORS. 3. Invest in meds. Flukies just need to stick together and not try and melee crew tbh.

Hi, fikou and I are working on Ops at the moment. While I can't speak to his opinions on the matter, I'll at least share mine. Here is a big thingo in a spoiler
Anyway, to your points:

1) Faster arrival times aren't going to change much, and could harm the ops as well. Most of the things you brought up aren't actually that difficult to put together quickly. Maybe disposal loops are the one way in which they could get screwed over.

2) This is already true. There is also an increase in TC granted to ops proportional to the amount of crew on the station. What I think you're trying to say here is that the numbers are off and the hardcap on the number of ops is too low. That's maybe worth investigating, honestly.

3) Based on what you're suggesting, people are finding ways to never have to engage nukies on their terms, which means giving them additional equipment literally doesn't help. Much of the list is good, but could use some refinement. Much of the list is actually just bad, and we removed a lot of that equipment or have buffed it. But no amount of gear will necessarily solve the problem of its pilot, or what happens in situations where the operative is caught in a trap that removes any agency in how they escape it (probably because it was instant death). We're not interested in buffing nukie gear if its not weak whatsoever and buffing it further isn't going to be conducive to a higher win rate. It makes players with a stronger grasp of the game stronger, but it still leaves the players with less experience still in the lurch, because these tricks will kill new players more than older players, and a predominate amount of op players are probably relatively low playtime for the role. To me, this was exactly where Blood Cult went wrong. It has all the tools to make the knowledgeable player a god, but none of it helps a new player reach competency.

4) Dynamic exists. If you, a traitor or changeling or whatever, are opting to use your antag status to fight ops and not cause problems, that's entirely up to you but I think you're missing a great opportunity to help sow more chaos. Additionally, progtot also has a nukies lite round ending objective, so that seems to be stepping on their toes.

I would like to point out it's still a fairly common occurrence for nukies to forget that they can't breathe in space and don't set their internals. Players being creative is also a problem for less experienced nukies, but you can't account for everything no matter how much TC you get.

I think that nukies are too heavily outnumbered to terrorize the station effectively, even on Manuel. I also think that, because the shuttle usually gets called immediately at 20 minutes, the nukies can't try to make much of a strategic play. They HAVE to move in and kill their way to the disk as quickly as possible. What if warops prevented the shuttle from leaving until the (human) ops were dead? This would allow the warops at least a bit of time to hit important targets to soften up the station first instead of just trying to zergrush the disk with a 13 minute timer.

the win rate doesn't need to be 50/50

I would like to point out it's still a fairly common occurrence for nukies to forget that they can't breathe in space and don't set their internals.

UX problem, not player problem

What if warops prevented the shuttle from leaving until the (human) ops were dead?

Then you would be breaking the only part about war ops that actually works which is that it ends quickly

Winrates look fine to me, not 50/50 but not a blowout either https://moth.fans/data/nukes-n-flukes/

All while constantly fluctuating as time goes on and different players come in

I wouldn't want the winrate to be 50/50. But I would like to see it be at least 25-30% consistently for ops (for ops in general, rather than just war or just non-war). That would mean that many of the problems that keep players from being able to play ops at all might have been smoothed out. Approachability and ease of pick up really do make it hard to play.

Shouldn't the winrate be slightly in favour of the team antagonist? After all, every round ends with a shuttle being called; it would make sense that a team antag should be a huge threat that often requires evacuation.

Nuke ops being a huge threat that often requires evacuation is orthogonal to having an above 50% winrate. This is proven by the fact that they are already the former without the latter