/tg/Station 13

This should not be NTstation exclusive but I will post it here since Basil is dead (for now atleast) and Sybil is highpop.

Almost all gamemodes in the game are balanced for highpop. If you played on Basil or play on Artyom, you probably know that this causes problems on low-midpop. Some gamemodes are only avaible for 20+ pop, some gamemodes don't work well with anything below 30 players. Lowpop is suffering, but it shouldn't be that way.

So I'd like you to post ideas to make any of the gamemodes more fun/balanced for low-midpop. Maybe even ideas for low-mid only gamemodes? After all, low- and midpop rounds tend to be a lot less chaotic. I am sure there is potential for some fun gamemodes in there.

I'll start:

Nuclear Emergency

This mode is really problematic on low and even midpop. Usually there is few or no security and/or no heads to properly secure the disk... and then suddenly 5 heavily armed players storm the station and easily destroy anything blocking their path.

I think this could be improved greatly by scaling the amount of operatives based on the amount of security and overall players. Even if there is no security, fighting only two heavily armed operatives seems pretty doable even for a lightly staffed station. They should still get the same amounts of TC however! This could also lead to more varied rounds. Maybe there is only a single operative who decides to buy a mech and fight against the entire station by themself? Or maybe just two operatives who have an easier time to try and go stealthy. It seems like a better thing than the 5 player mass murder squad that we have right now.

Sounds good. Perhaps wizard with less spells? Dunno how you'd make blob more balanced for lower pop, without doing a lot of tweaking to numbers (energy charge rates/hp of shit, or whatever).

A wizard who means serious business can kill any amount of people, though. It's hardly designed for balance as is.

perhaps having certain spells not avaliable under certain pop levels? jaunting/blinking faggotry when there's like 1-2 guys with guns is even more awful then when it's large pop.

I've tried and made a few changes to some of the gamemodes to make them nicer for lower pop:

Cult changes: https://github.com/NTStation/NTstation13/pull/958
Blob changes: https://github.com/NTStation/NTstation13/pull/959
Nuke Op changes: https://github.com/NTStation/NTstation13/pull/960

Put up your polls!

I regularly play on a server that averages 12-20 people. The climate's a lot different to tg and people are a lot less generally interested in murdering each other at the drop of a hat just because some text said they could without being banned, but I guess I should still have a little bit of insight.
Cult, revolution, blob, and nuke ops are pretty much all completely unviable and eventually got turned off, just because the balance of heads/crew, fullness of departments, and general crew manpower levels shift dramatically and unpredictably every time the round ends.
Those minimum player counts look about right according to my own experience.

We even tried making nuke ops scale with playercount to the point that you could have solo operatives but that still wasn't very much fun for anyone.