/tg/Station 13

I plan on writing a detailed suggestion for how we can revamp oldcult without ruining it, but before I put the work into a write up I would like to know what it was that people thought was wrong with oldcult. I have some general ideas of what was wrong, but I'd like to see what the community's consensus is.

I think the only problem that could be addressed (and was?) was cultists taking a medibot to somewhere remote, like the derelict, to research rune words.

Maybe the rune book could use a friendlier interface, it was pretty shit.

Other than that, the mode is mostly a stealthy take over, and you know how people react to stealthy antags.

If by oldcult you mean back when we had stun talismans, I never really worked to my objectives whenever I got cult because I found researching runes to be too cumbersome and contrived.

I turned cult off since and new cult isn't any better.

I know others seem to hate conversion game modes, but I love conversion as it allows me to participate in the round instead of sitting in deadchat for 40 minutes. Even when we changed from 'Magical Rev cult' (conversion rune only required 1 cultist) to 'Pokécult' (nerfs to conversion forced cultists into creating construct armies instead), it was still more interesting than 'COps' (Cult Operatives, as current cult is Magical Nuke Ops).

I enjoy modes where I can take part in the round without being a Security or Antagonist player. (Excluding muder victims, of course)

I never got the hate for conversion modes either. Cult was actually the perfect conversion mode IMO since it took more than just flashing/jabbing

I felt the way it was set up made most of the rune magic completely irrelevant.

The only magic ever used was make stun papers, convert/sacrifice and make constructs. SOMETIMES a teleport rune.

It just became a slightly slower form of rev.

CPTANT wrote:I felt the way it was set up made most of the rune magic completely irrelevant.

The only magic ever used was make stun papers, convert/sacrifice and make constructs. SOMETIMES a teleport rune.

It just became a slightly slower form of rev.

What if runes required more but had more powerful effects?

>infinite parapens
>scaling was garbage
>research was clunky and confused new players but provided 0 hurdle to veterans
>conversion mode when half the game is already conversion modes
>the way the mode was set up (stealth/snowball/carry) actively punished security for not metagaming and crushing them early game (which was boring). Poor pacing

I have an idea for a cult leader of sorts, and perhaps strange supernatural stuff should happen around them. I love the idea of a literal witch hunt being associated with cult. The key to solving this issue is for cult to have to do something that will make them known at some point. For revs it's killing a head, for gangs it's tagging, etc.

none whatsoever

if the cult got caught early trying to convert somebody or whatever, the round got super cucked because cult relies on stealth so heavily

It was never finished... it was barely started in fact!

By the way, when you refer to old cult you really need to clarify which one you mean, there's like five different iterations of cult
You have:
-One word cult - the original version Urist coded, three cultists started with one word. Research or sacrifice was needed to get the other words - you were completely boned if the two other cultists were remtards (which was most of the time)
-Two rune cult - original version but newly coded constructs added. Four cultists had the words for sacrifice and convert distributed amongst them. It was slightly less likely that all three of the others were fucktards but it still happened enough.

The problem with the above was that it would take you around an hour to brute force all the words, by the time that happened some fuckwit will have got bored and released the singularity to force a shuttle call.

-Two word cult - my first tweak to cult, cultists got two starting words each. Made research largely unneeded if the cultists worked together. This is also when constructs got buffed a fair bit. - I would say this one was the most balanced and fun of past versions. Instead of fucking off to nowhere for an hour cultists would set up maint bases and actually experimented with different strats.

-Convert cult/pokecult/sadbutt cult - the one where the cultists would have the entire non-implanted population of the station converted in five minutes (because it was the only thing they could do - research couldn't be done without sperging over patterns and the way words were given from conversion meant it was near impossible to get the other words before being spotted, no deconversion mechanic and the cultists just looked like normal people with no way to test them. Sec's only hope to win was to kill everyone. This was by far the worst iteration of cult, if you think the current version is bad atleast be thankful that the current one generally ends quickly.

-Saccult/constructcult/murderbonecult/malcult - first pass on a major set of changes to cult I had planned out (as in I did have in fact several txt docs and forum posts detailing my planned changes)
Main changes were: Cultists could be deconverted, there was six/nine starting cultists - I can't remember what words they started with, I think they all started with all the words for sacrifice and convert (four words total), main way of gaining words was via sacrificing people, convert took three people - lots of people complained because they couldn't work out as I was taking cult away from being a conversion game mode which had now become so hated due to Sabaton's abortion of a mode.
Main issues were that I was primarily interested in making the big changes and then observing the results of live play testing to see the results, as I predicted cult was far too strong - it'd been balanced by the concept that everything was gated behind a soft one hour wait, now cultists had most of their stuff up front and had a large starting number of cultists things were very very murderbonerly.
I had intended to do balancing tweaks and further development on cult but then real life happened and two weeks later I started a new job, which had shite hours and job itself was pretty crappy, so that and the fact I was getting more and more weary of dealing with coderbus meant I kept pushing development work to the side.
I did eventually, several months later, get around to making a balancing PR (which you can find in this feedback forum) but all that happened with that is that I blew my lid and closed the PR and locked the thread after getting double teamed by certain people...

-'new'cult/cult-ops/summon cult
I have no comment on this, I've only seen it once since I started playing again.

i'm fairly certain when people say oldcult they mean what you call saccult, AKA the one just before what we have now

Two-word, actually.

I meant the one before sacrifice cult.

i'm fine with either saccult or two word, i just don't like newcult

Also I don't like constructs because they basically STILL make it a conversion gamemode.

Cult would be interesting if cultists themself actually got stronger from sacrificing people and would be able to cast low lvl non rune spells and such.

Just make it so that every cultist gets stronger simultaneously and you have a nice team and progression based gamemode.

We miss a gamemode with progression anyway.

Something we can always do as a server is take a look at what other servers do for their versions of modes. For cult, I feel like Archangel absolutely nailed it to the point where it's my absolute favorite mode over there. It's effectively saccult from what I've seen, and they can only make stunpaper through their supply talisman, meaning it's basically your big "oh fuck" weapon you use on space marines, when you don't have stuns, and other things like that. To compensate for this lack of disable, they give their cultists ways to summon Nurgle Spawn which are ventcrawling monsters that are immune to stuns. They aren't too robust, dying in a few shots, but they're very fast and do a good bit of damage. Their real purpose that's incredible, however, is allowing cultists to do things that affect the round while not actively doing these things themselves, which means that the cult who is in their base sacrificing people and converting doesn't mean that everyone else is bored to tears. They summon these through a rune that takes very little health from the cultist to spawn, meaning it's quite spammable and you can keep a good flood of them out of the gates.

Granted, security over there don't have loyalty implants because they don't have rev or gang so they can be converted just like everyone else. This would be bad here since security can't really effectively deal with infighting due to them not having an abundance of lethal weapons like the Guardsmen do on Archangel, which would mean that all cults would do is stunpaper one officer, then he'd tase and convert everyone else while security would be unable to stop him, then just win the game from there, reducing the mode to what Gang was back when implant breakers converted, a race to convert sec where once they do it they win. This would be fixed by adding many more laser guns to the armory with very high capacity and increased armor values on armor in order to deal with this infighting, but that would create innumerable balance problems so *shrug

They also can summon cortical borers which can enter peoples ears, be weird, heal you, do all kinds of shit that is both helpful and fun.

CPTANT wrote:Also I don't like constructs because they basically STILL make it a conversion gamemode.

The key difference is that when someone converts someone to rev/gang/cultist you have no way of telling if they're a bad guy or not (unless they're dumb enough to wear cult robes)
A construct you can easily tell that its something that needs destroying.

Malkevin wrote:

CPTANT wrote:Also I don't like constructs because they basically STILL make it a conversion gamemode.

The key difference is that when someone converts someone to rev/gang/cultist you have no way of telling if they're a bad guy or not (unless they're dumb enough to wear cult robes)
A construct you can easily tell that its something that needs destroying.

Yes but playing a construct usually consists of being told to wait in a maintenance room half the round until someone finally tells you to go loud and then you go on brief rampage.

Stunpapers were functionally infinite, pretty clunky to make, and very powerful. Did they even have inhands?

Oldcult, to me, seemed to have a few weirdly clunky bits to it. Papers, for example, were identifiable by clicking them, but not by examining. Deconversion required an active chaplain (because it needed 15u holy water), so good luck if one wasn't there (less of a problem now with such big chaplain buffs). It also took a very long time, and it was very easy to mess up: you could get halfway along and think they were breaking down, have them stutter cult phrases, and then they could remain cultist if not really thoroughly babysat. Implants weren't relevant to deconversion, just to preventing re-conversion, so you would often get people implanting a cultist and thinking it was job done. Just making this whole process more straightforward to understand and change would help.

Cultists don't have any real tell until 5 minutes into forcefeeding them. Before that if they don't have items or a clear DNA match they're functionally invisible. Now, that was good for infiltration, but also very bad for ending the round if security was doing well. You'd essentially see a security department trying to kidnap, forcefeed, and implant literally everyone. If there was a more obvious tell (I dunno, a carved rune on the naked chest? once they've gone loud?) then that tactic might be less necessary.

I don't know. Cult more than any other mode represents the idea of development in increments, by very different people with totally different goals. I'm not unconvinced that just cutting a whole bunch of the stuff in it and focusing it on some really simple basics would hurt. You could probably get rid of a bunch of runes and end up with a mode that, to the average user, was a lot more fun, even if it had less end complexity.

Do we have to have deconversion in a conversion mode?

Depends on if you can accept sec killing everyone or not.

Malkevin wrote:Depends on if you can accept sec killing everyone or not.

Well, a middle ground. Cultists cannot get deconverted but reject implants.

One idea I'm thinking of for my "CoxCult" suggestion is some sort of vengeful spirit mechanic, where people the cult sac but don't convert or use become revenant-like spirits that actively haunt and sabotage the cult. A reverse-conversion of sorts.

Infinite Parapens was always an easy fix but for some reason nobody ever undertook it.

1) Make imbue runes disappear on use. This alone adds a significant amount of time for making stun talismans. Sure some cultists will still try to get a backpack full of em, but it will generally discourage spamming them when you cant just make 4 stun runes + 1 imbue and then spam the imbue for 4 stun talismans. I've played oldcult more than virtually anyone else and I found myself making many, many more stun talismans once we got all words at roundstart and I found out that I could draw several stun runes for a single imbue.

2) Re-add research so we can't shit out stun talismans at roundstart.

3) Make the mute shorter or remove it altogether, jesus christ is that so hard?

Or just remove research completely and force cultists to actually sacrifice people to get all the words.

Another suggestion is have Stunpaper only be from the starting paper

Yeah that's what Archangel cult does and it's great.

yeah, honestly stunpaper is only intended so that the cult has a reliable stun/mute option from roundstart so they don't get instacucked
they shouldn't need it nearly as much lategame
maybe only make them purchasable from the roundstart paper, but give them 2 or 3 uses instead of just 1

Nah 1 use. It's quite a good stun, goes through everything but the chaplain, 7 second stun, 15 second mute. You don't really need anything else.

Ignore the VERY vocal minority of rustled people who can't handle stealthy stuns/mutes, it's mandatory for stealth to be viable AT ALL as evidenced by how its removal has cucked stealth completely and how parasting's removal heralded the death of ling.

Cult mechanics were too obtuse/complex to learn for a central antagonist. Newbie cultists have no idea what they're doing in regards to talismans and tomes, not to mention getting involved in more complex things like runeword research. Also keep in mind that in a station full of validhunters, simply being seen with a tome can get you lynched, so just trying to learn how to play cult can be a dangerous prospect.

Cult research was always just trial-and-error anyways. You just sat in a room with a medibot, standing still, clicking on what karazet or balaq or whatever meant until it worked.

If stunpapers were only available to starting cultists in a limited supply it would force them to come up with something else for the lategame.

Suggestion thread based on the feedback is up: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5997