RnD powercreep

[hanshansenhansson]

RnD currently has the problem that it requires no risk and low effort and offers a very high reward. All you have to do is follow a cooking book for ~20minutes, and you get all the fancy stuff you could ever wish for.
There needs to be some randomness, some danger or even some more interactivity than just deconstructing stuff. I mean, why would you need a fancy science-space-station if all it does is deconstruct 20th century shotguns to get xray guns?

So many coders added some fancy gadget to science, without any thought of balance. Most of those items are cool as fuck, can't deny that. But they are not fun to play against, as there is nearly no counter. As Antag you either win before the 20min mark, or the fun is gone. Most of the stuff RnD can make removes entire aspects of the game and buffs powergaming people way too much.

Stuff that I think should not be that easy to get / widespread on the station or just entirely removed and made antag/admin only:

• - Nightvision of any kind
  What is the use of all that creepy dark maintenance, when every second person has a night vision anyways? They are so cheap and easy to get, even assistants won't get refused if they ask for them. Especially with Shadowling coming up, darkness needs to be creepy again. There was a time when the nightvision from the abandoned teleporter was a rare and valuable item. Be the xeno, slash the APC so there is no light? Crew don't care.
  
  - Xray/Thermal implants
  They just break everything. Why are they this easy to get? Or even in the game? They remove so many aspects from the game. You can not hide anywhere anymore, you can not lure people into traps. You can do nothing except go murderbonering in bright daylight. Because that's what every place becomes as soon those they get handed out. If I play something Security/Validhunting related job, I can check by science after 30mins, get my nightvisions and an xray implant. Got a cultbase? Lingstash? ERP-hideout? Doesn't matter, I will see you perfectly. No need to run and trying to hide behind some wall, I know you are there. Xray as Genetics power was fine, as it takes ages and actual work to get and apply to people, but with RnD it is just way too easy.
  
  - Xray guns
  They are nice and interesting, yes. But way too easy to get. Just now the blob round that made me make this post: 25mins. You need to win in 25mins (minus the burst-time, even) as blob, or you are gone. If you do not roll acid, you are fucked. This is absolutely no fun for the blob player, and no challenge at all for the crew. All it takes is one competent Miner and one Scientist.

Ideas on how to fix this (of course, there will be an outcry because now common items will be made rarer):

• - Remove the deconstructor. Move RnD completly to the experminetor. Low tech levels should be easy to get, medium ones a higher fail risk (= item loss or harm), and high level tech should require a lot of risk, luck and failure to get. Make the whole RnD process more interactive than "steal teleporter board" and "order shotguns".
  
  - Add an extremely high tech-level requirement to the overpowered stuff. Those high tech levels should only come from xeno-items or syndieitems. Have Scientists dig for them or something, find the Xenogun, get a chance to get tech for X-Rays (if you do not fuck it up in the expermentor). Deconstruct the syndie-thermals or a ling-brain to get to thermal-implants. Deconstruct a changeling-corpse for the nostun-implants. Stuff like that. You should not be able to get all the imbalanced items in a normal shift though, maybe 1/4 of them or so, to keep it fresh. They should be items you are proud of being able to produce, not just another thing you spam out every round

[Scott]

yep

[Alex Crimson]

Shut your whore mouth. R&D is fine. Or would you rather have random chance a factor in R&D and never see high level research again? The Experimentor is a gimmick.

If you dont want to use an R&D guide, then by all means dont use one. Having randomised R&D would be like Telescience without the coordinate calculators. nobody will use it.

[hanshansenhansson]

No, it is not about me being to stupid to RnD. It is about RnD fucking over half the antags after half an hour of cookbooking

[Scott]

You better start coming up with a better system. It's not that you're wrong, but just pointing out something that is known is not going to change anything. You either come up with something better and work on it / hope a coder is willing to do it or you accept the easy gifts of science.

By the way, implant get has been nerfed.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

R &D needs a serious shakeup.

Something on the level of losing most of its NV and he'll, maybe even losing robo again.

[ThatSlyFox]

Talk shit about science being OP and all the powergamers come to defend it.

But seriously just witnessed a round where science got x ray guns in 30 minutes on a blob round. Meaning a blob has 30 minutes to win before he gets raped in a way that he cant fight back.

I would be in favor of moving the weapons production aspect of science out of science. As well as making mechs id locked. The current wave of implants we have(reviver implants coming ) just need to be removed.

Mining also doesn't need science anymore for tools. They have a diamond pick as a vendor option which is cheap. Making every item in science to need 3x as many materials as well as removing the powerful tools in mining vendor could slow science down some. Possibly to a hour where it should be.

Possibly requiring space exploration should slow down science as well, but it would have to be random.

The tech tree shouldn't be something you can skip around in. Using 3 mech syringe guns at the start shouldn't just up the techs by 5 levels. You should be required to do everything in between.

Just some ideas.

[Alex Crimson]

Hey, im fine with balancing R&D items, but randomising the origin tech stuff or making the shitty Experimentor the only way to gain research levels are terrible ideas.

Also a 30 minute blob round? Sounds like it deserved to get rekt.

[PKPenguin321]

I feel like the answer is giving other parts of the crew some of the cool toys science gets instead of giving every single new feature to research
"New eye/brain implants!" -given to research
"New fancy guns!" -given to research
"Phazon mechs are buildable now!" -given to research

Maybe we should have a separate department that's similar to science that gets some of the cool toys but isn't science..?

Or make it harder to produce the items once they're researched, instead of pushing a button and having the protolathe poop out 5 of them

[Alex Crimson]

Maybe separate R&D items into tiers and have each tier take much longer to create via Protolathe? Or limit higher items to producing only one item then going on cooldown for a while? Seems like it would be possible to exploit the system by making multiple Protolathes or half-deconstructing one, but whatever.

The only way you could give these items to areas other than R&D is by adding some sort of currency system for each department and give them the ability to buy the items from centcomm. Or just add the items to Cargo, which is a terrible idea because Cargo abuses the fuck out of its points.

[DemonFiren]

Once upon a time, Bay had an idea called 'rapid prototyping' which practically would have forced scientists to build all their shit on their own, every gun was to be assembled manually from a modular system.
Tech levels would be gained from deconstructing borked components, afaik.

Of course, pocket-portable WMDs could ensue once you'd proceeded far enough.

[TheNightingale]

As a regular RD, anyone who says that endgame R&D is balanced isn't being honest. Science, more so than any other department, has access to shiny toys - and due to the nature of R&D, anyone competent, or with a guide (http://pastebin.com/p631LtdZ I'll just leave this here) can get those easily. I wouldn't say night-vision is a problem - you can achieve the same effect just by having a helmet light source, a pocket light source, your PDA and a weapon with mounted seclite.

I like the idea of high tech levels needed for the blatantly overpowered very useful things, such as x-ray implants, thermal implants (which are objectively inferior to x-ray+NVSec/MedHUDs) and x-ray lasers.
Biotech 6 (unobtainable without alien brains) for thermals, 7 (unobtainable without two alien brains!) for xrays, and Plasma 5 for x-ray lasers (unobtainable without pyroclastic anomaly cores).

This way you have to choose between a phazon and x-ray lasers... and if you've managed to debrain an alien, you deserve thermal/xray vision.
Illegal 4 is good too; you need more than just a syndicate toolbox and a tyrant module/stetchkin.

[Scones]

There was a near universal consensus in the thread about them that XRAY/THERMAL IMPLANTS NEED TO GO OR BE GATED REALLY INTENSELY BEHIND VERY RARE CONTENT

R&D is not the issue. R&D is REASONABLY GATED behind materials. MINING POWER CREEP is the issue. Mining balance issues mean that 2 miners clear the asteroid in a half hour and the scarcity/resource management that is intended to keep R&D in check go 100% out the window. This is not an issue of R&D being too strong once they have the resources, this is an issue of Mining have a much too easy time with bringing said resources. Look at the current KA, which is still comically efficient and just does whatever it wants. Now we have the plasma cutter AKA the lasergun lite, which really only makes the issue worse.

X-rays guns are specifically sort of interesting, my understanding is that they were added as a sort of gimmicky fun weapon but quickly became known as BLOB DESTROYER 9000. They probably should be moved because they are in fact gg no re for blobs 100% of the time with the exception of rounds wherein the blob has A.) Eaten R&D or B.) the crew is lobotomized to the point where they cannot fight the blob with or without the guns.

R&D needs a serious overhaul at some point, something to hopefully redefine Science into more of a genuine research effort and less of a cookbook exercise to become a gun factory. Not that it'll happen anytime soon. If it's on the table, someone should consider a xenoarch system like Bay's.

[TheNightingale]

X-ray guns do have genuine, non-overpowered uses (dealing with perma'd prisoners whilst simultaneously practising your aim; killing aliens trapped in a confined space), but blobs really can't defend against them. Maybe make the x-rays stop after they pass through a few tiles of denseness (mobs, walls, blobs...)? They'd still be the go-to blob destroying weapon, of course, but they'd be less game over than before.

And... as much as I love the current KA, it needs nerfing. It does, really. Mining drills need their old mechanic (i.e. no battery) back, too, because they're redundant even in the face of a normal pickaxe. But that's another issue for another time.

As you said, Scones - mining is easy, and that makes R&D easy, and that means Science can have top-tier weapons and gear easily. But how can you solve that? Nerf mining's ease in finding minerals? Their tools?

[lumipharon]

KA's are the most horribly overpowered item in the game.

Not only can you literally run in a straight line melting a 3 wide path in front of you, destroying the entire astroid in 30 minutes, but it's also a super robust weapon, that some some retarded hitscan shit to boot.


What was done with the phazon, and now the xray/stun implant was good. They were gated behind semi rare items that you can't simply powergame to get in 5 minutes, like literally everything else in the game.

Phazons need anomaly cores - an event that isn't super rare, but involves you getting to the (potentially deadly) anomaly as soon as it's reported and safely neutralising it. Then it's one core for one phazon, so you can't poop out 20 afterwards.
Aliens are semi rare, and if you manage to get one's brain, you deserve the implants, which are both rather useful when fighting aliens.

Honestly there just needs to be more semi rare ways to get tech levels up for the really strong shit - so in a given round you'll be likely to get some of these powerful items, but it would take a good bit of luck/a long round to get ALL of them.

Shit like the revive implant (which literally just brings you back to life and heals you, what the actual fuck) should just straight up not be constructable however.


In term of xray lasers, the current blob meta is 'kill R&D or mining/cargo, or get rekt. So it is very much counterable, but it's pretty shitty. Just make like, strong blob tiles resist or immune to xray lasers and it would be fine - they'd still be powerful, letting you take out undefended nodes etc, but there would be actual counter play.

[onleavedontatme]

>Honestly there just needs to be more semi rare ways to get tech levels up for the really strong shit

That waa one of the ideas behind the train wreck that was away missions. A way to add new weapons/seeds/items/xeno shit that wouldnt be in every round.

I still think that away missions could have merit if more concrete planning was put into them this time. I tried to do too many different things with them and it was a mess.

[lumipharon]

The old away missions were bad because they were stufed full of things that will kill you, and stuffed full of overpowered shit.

Seriously, 20 people would wander into an away mission, 19 would die, then one chuckle fuck would come up dragging literal bag loads of guns and shit out with him.

The two new away missions are good though, why were away missions disabled again?

[TheNightingale]

I have a copy of the old code (with the Dark Souls-esque away missions), and it really is just like you say. I like that about them, though - the best way to clear an away mission was to toss a bombcap bomb or five through the gateway, by the looks of it.

Can simple mobs (including hostile syndicate operatives, e.g. Cargo shuttle - which is currently broken?) detect someone using a chameleon projector?

[onleavedontatme]

The old away missions were bad because they were stufed full of things that will kill you, and stuffed full of overpowered shit.

Seriously, 20 people would wander into an away mission, 19 would die, then one chuckle fuck would come up dragging literal bag loads of guns and shit out with him.

The two new away missions are good though, why were away missions disabled again?

I got excited about showing off my new shit and enabled them too early in the rounds and the station would just get depopulated. Antags got upset they had nobody to esword.

Also yeah poor quality control on the maps/no clear consensus on what maps should be.

Some were just nothing/silly, some were pretty much empty loot boxes with pulse rifles for whatever reason, and some were those batshit death gauntlets (meant to be done 45 minutes into the round with mechs, but again, enabled too early)

Anyway, too many different ideas, rushed maps to get the feature working, too popular cause it was new, bad balance, etc.

Also would take a ton of extra work to make away missions truely unique and alien instead of a series of generic dead stations with some overpowered loot

[oranges]

The away missions Wjohnston mapped tend to be pretty darn good.

[Reimoo]

Right now science both serves as RnD and manufacturing. They can make the prototype AND mass produce it. If you could split those two functions up and give the latter to another department, (engineering?) perhaps the added inter-department dependency would slow things down a bit.

[Babin]

You can get xray guns with only a small number of uranium nodes mined tbh. It's not even a matter of skill, it's just a matter of getting the miner to come back sooner with what's needed rather than coming back later with a massive stockpile of ore that nobody's going to use.
You used to be able to do it with just one (!) uranium ore per xray gun, but that was fixed. I don't know the number now. It's still low, just not one.

I do like that R&D can replace almost anything that gets wrecked. If chemistry's dispensers are blown up, R&D can replace them. If the cloners are destroyed, R&D can replace those too. Autolathe? That too! I love that you can rebuild the majority of things like this. The current meta, though, just means that R&D ends up building things for themselves. The science department is also practically a bunker, with a lot of r-walls and the front entrance has two airlocks before you can enter. The cookbook approach to research means that everything is available in just a few minutes, and there's just too MUCH that's available in this way. If I were planning to pull off a hijack objective, science would be the department I look to. I recently began to realize that maybe some things shouldn't be replaceable in this sort of server. Maybe in several-hour-long higher RP servers that would be good, but here maybe that chemmaster should just stay gone when it's been blown up. The rounds are short enough, the machines will be back next time.

I like what's been done with phazons. I think we should tread carefully on making things too RNG-based to the point where some rounds you just won't have access to a thing. With phazons, you'll probably see a core if the round goes on long enough because of how random events become exhausted over time.

Experimentor is awful. Unless your objective is corgi meat. Then it's still awful because it makes the objective even more trivial.

[Malkevin]

Make xray guns fire the same projectile as particle accelerators, I don't think radiation harms the blob

I've said the idea before that cargo should have a new prodo-lathe, they're meant to be the department that supplies other departments with their shit after all

[420weedscopes]

experimentor

[Bombadil]

experimentor

Yeah RNG fun whoooo boy. Can't wait to have my flesh ripped out constantly

[ThatSlyFox]

experimentor

It will turn R&D into genetics. No department deserves the fate genetics got.

The ideas that people are saying to let cargo handle the development and let science only be the researcher sound great. It won't solve the issue of x ray guns being pumped out within the first 30 minutes but it is a start in the right direction I believe.

Something has to be done about mining though.

Mining also doesn't need science anymore for tools. They have a diamond pick as a vendor option which is cheap. Making every item in science to need 3x as many materials as well as removing the powerful tools in mining vendor could slow science down some. Possibly to a hour where it should be.

[iyaerP]

Experimentor is pure shit.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

It only existed as an ecuse to remove telesci

[imblyings]

For anyone wanting to gut RnD or gate off the end-game stuff, are the same people also willing to come up with a plethora of new low-level and medium-level items, tech and machinery, along with the gameplay mechanisms that accompany new content? I say this because after nearly half a decade of playing SS13, most jobs are formulaic as fuck and RnD only becomes interesting at the end-game content and if you remove the end-game content or make it sufficiently hard to access, RnD literally is not worth playing.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Yes

[ThatSlyFox]

For anyone wanting to gut RnD or gate off the end-game stuff, are the same people also willing to come up with a plethora of new low-level and medium-level items, tech and machinery, along with the gameplay mechanisms that accompany new content? I say this because after nearly half a decade of playing SS13, most jobs are formulaic as fuck and RnD only becomes interesting at the end-game content and if you remove the end-game content or make it sufficiently hard to access, RnD literally is not worth playing.

30 minutes in is not late game yet science is getting late game gear at that time. 1hr+ is late game which is around the time you would see admins spawn aliens and such which have no chance of ending the game since science has 2 durands and xrays and such.

We have been trying to come up with ways to extend the time it takes, not completely block off the content.

[Konork]

For anyone wanting to gut RnD or gate off the end-game stuff, are the same people also willing to come up with a plethora of new low-level and medium-level items, tech and machinery, along with the gameplay mechanisms that accompany new content? I say this because after nearly half a decade of playing SS13, most jobs are formulaic as fuck and RnD only becomes interesting at the end-game content and if you remove the end-game content or make it sufficiently hard to access, RnD literally is not worth playing.

30 minutes in is not late game yet science is getting late game gear at that time. 1hr+ is late game which is around the time you would see admins spawn aliens and such which have no chance of ending the game since science has 2 durands and xrays and such.

We have been trying to come up with ways to extend the time it takes, not completely block off the content.

I think the point where admins start trying to intervene to end the round is more overtime than late-game. Late-game kind of implies it's nearing the natural conclusion for the round, while admins spawns imply that the round's passed and missed that point.

[RG4]

>X-Ray guns beat blobs TOO EASILY
This has never been a problem before at all. X-Ray lasers require combat 6 and a pretty generous amount of uranium used to make them, even with upgraded machines. Not to mention Blobbernaughts are pretty fucking robust.
>R&D MAKES THEM 30 MINUTES INTO THE ROUUUUND
I can make them in 15 minutes, but I have to rely on cargo ordering combat shotguns and mining giving me minerals.
>Science wing is a bunker!!
Have you even experience science exploding mid-round? I know I have countless times to say that doesn't mean shit when toxins fuck,gold slimes,or just NO2 and Plasma getting released on a consistent basis can ruin the entire flow of science.
Honestly R&D is more dependent on mining to even GET the good tier shit that everyone loves talking about. I've spent minerless rounds upgrading things on the stations with the parts I could use, hell many of high tier upgrade items like Ultra-High Power Micro Laser and Phasic Scanning Modules NEED silver and uranium to be made and without mining or anyone mining at all means it won't get made.
All guns from R&D - Silver,Urainium, Diamonds
Nightvision Goggles - Uranium
Bags of Holding - Unrainium,Diamond, Gold,Plasma and Silver
High Tier AI modules - Diamond or Gold
Mechs - Diamond,Uranium and Silver (cept Phazons but fuck them.)
As said before for R&D to be powerful during mid or late round it is COMPLETELY reliant on having people willing to go out and mine

[lumipharon]

It's more an issue lately because mining is so brokenly OP and easy right now.

R&D/robotics without mining has shit all.

[Akkryls]

It's more an issue lately because mining is so brokenly OP and easy right now.

R&D/robotics without mining has shit all.

Stop trying to make mining harder.
For fuck sake, before Ergo messed with it, it was a laid back job where you could chill and still get minerals to bring back for science.
Now we have to deal with mobs roaming the asteroid that might suddenly ruin your day, and due to the asteroid being isolated, you will never be cloned.

Why is it a bad thing that the second most miserable job on the station can actually do their job without having to leap through a thousand hoops of artificial difficulty.

[imblyings]

essentially

don't touch mining, it's in a golden age.

[Alex Crimson]

Na, i agree with Lumipharon. Mining is way too easy right now. That Kinetic Accelerator decimates the mining asteroid.

I freaking love mining, but i do think it needs rebalancing and some extra mechanics to make it interesting. Xenoarchaeology when?

[lumipharon]

I didn't say make mining hard.

I said remove the bulldozer rock wrecker that the fully upgraded KA.
Doesn't matter if mining mobs exist or not, or if mining is even enjoyable or not - the upgraded KA simply means you can mine at a retardly fast pace, and just indiscriminantly burn the entire roid.

If the KA isn't nerfed, then mineral spawn rates need to be - unless you think getting 10 thousand unused mining points is not fun compared to 20 thousand unused mining points.

[Alex Crimson]

Yeah i know. Like i said, i agree with you. The KA is ridiculous.

The rest of the stuff i posted was my own thoughts.

[imblyings]

KAs are fucking brilliant, if they're removed, drills better be reverted to not needing power and some sort of auto-pick up ore satchel implemented.

And there is literally nothing wrong with decimating the asteroid, I find it fun as fuck to plow through with little care for anything other than gibtonite. Hell, up the gibtonite spawn rate and nerf gibtonite to not do much damage in environments with air if you want, so KA users have to be more careful while not being able to exploit gibtonite easily. Although as it is, gibtonite rarely gets used for antag purposes.

[DemonFiren]

Gibtonite rate buffing I could actually support. Rock the asteroid in a massive chain of explosions from the mining outpost to the abandoned station?

[imblyings]

Maybe just enough so miners need to do something other than straight plowing through the asteroid. The same KA but higher risk if they want to rip and tear.

[leibniz]

I share this concern, I dont really think that x-rays, phazons, the new implants are good additions in their current form.
Sometimes I feel that people are like "Wow, I can code cool shit, we need to add this NOW" but dont really think about the consequences.

[Babin]

What if we had some sort of timed component to research?

Current:
Put item with [3 bio, 3 material] into analyzer
Destroy
Get up to [3 bio, 3 material] research.

What if:
Put item with [3 bio, 3 material] into analyzer
Destroy
You're now given potential levels, but it takes time to research them. It's like queuing up the exosuit fabricator.
Decide you want to finish materials before bio.
Machine spends a minute researching [2 material] then another minute or two on [3 material]
Machine then spends time on [2 bio] then more on [3 bio].
You can grind up other things during this time, it just adds more potential levels which need to be researched before they're available.

So the end result for grinding any one item is the same, except there's a time-based progression curve where scientists can't churn out fucking endgame equipment five minutes into the round. They also have to involve themselves more in the process, deciding which branches of research they want to finish first and which ones will have to wait until midgame. Blob on board? Rush to X-Ray gun. Scientist traitor planning to antag? Maybe go for a syringe gun and chem dispensers.

Another thing could be to fix the reliability of items to be less arcane and affect more items. How many people ACTUALLY know how reliability works? Even once you figure it out, how many items is it ACTUALLY relevant on? The only one that sticks out to me is the advanced energy gun. Power cells can be printed at 100% reliability from an exo fab. Most items don't have any effect beyond "hurr upgrade your DA before you grind me up". Put an in-game explanatory book, flesh its description out on the wiki, and make more items have actual effects at low reliability levels.

[Saegrimr]

Putting a clock on it wont solve the problem, it'll just make people never touch R&D.

[Babin]

They'll have to touch it if they want their fun toys. All this does is slow them down so that they're making the powertoys a bit later in the round. Given that R&D literally has access to chemistry equipment that even the chemistry department doesn't have, autolathes, cloning pods, camera consoles, and more, they're in many ways the strongest department on the station.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Look out though, you'll end up with Lumipharon screaming at you about how YUR JUST MAKIN FETCH HUNT POINTLESS LONGER AI WANT MAH EXRAYS NAO!

[Babin]

Most of Lumi's commentss are justified. Most of the "improvement" pulls for R&D that have been proposed actually don't do much. The mech syringe gun nerf, for example, doesn't really change a whole lot. It just means newbie researchers will have to look harder while those that know how to pastebin will still be able to finish research at warp speed. Improving the reliability of mass spectrometers, as you mentioned in the PR, would only modify the cookbook to include mass spectrometers (which incidentally are pretty useless for anything else). Such is the nature of the cookbook.

Also Lumi is not the only person who doesn't like your PR. There's other people thumbs-downing it.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I meant lumi because he was the prime "It won't work it wont slow science down at all! What's the point!"/"This will ruin science 5ever 4 me makes it so long #fetchquest" guy. I've actually pretty much ignored the people who are shouting both diametrically opposed views at once.

Also, I like mass spectrometers. They should exist more.

And I've actually accepted a boatload of suggestions and legit feedback on "Oh my god you broke X with this"

[imblyings]

I think you're suffering from some tunnel vision here

RnD as it is, the system itself, can't be improved. Speedruns are in fact the best possible solution for it outside of complete overhauls, evolved from years of experienced players gradually min-maxing the fun available from the game. Their views shouldn't be discounted because they're not wrong. It doesn't slow down science because anybody competent in RnD will adapt. And they don't like the general effect or aim of this change, which is to slow down what was a faster progression towards endgame RnD, which like I've said, is the best possible solution for RnD outside of an overhaul. It might seem like opposing views but they're not and both are valid points.