/tg/Station 13

How do you feel about silicons? This can either be code wise or player wise.
Are they too powerful and need to be nerfed?
Are the players who play silicons shit right now?
What could be done better?
What cool tools could we add for borgos or AI?
This is meant to be an openly forum to discuss silicon balance, and I am hopefully going to post one of these weekly!
(New portal to the past coming soon btw)

Playing silicon is a fucking nightmare because silicon policy sucks ass.
You're not even allowed to suicide. What kind of masochist would willingly choose this?

Are they too powerful and need to be nerfed?

Live reaction of me reading this:



No. The entire point of silicons is that they need to be better at their jobs than their meatbag counterparts. They don't have hands, only their modules, and are law bound. Anyone that says different is fucking wrong. Mining borgs need a plasma cutter upgrade. Mining with just the PKA is hell.

I got so mad I clicked every single button on the forum formatting thing and editted this post twice.

conrad wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 5:21 pm Are they too powerful and need to be nerfed?

Live reaction of me reading this:



No. The entire point of silicons is that they need to be better at their jobs than their meatbag counterparts. They don't have hands, only their modules, and are law bound. Anyone that says different is fucking wrong. Mining borgs need a plasma cutter upgrade. Mining with just the PKA is hell.

I got so mad I clicked every single button on the forum formatting thing and editted this post twice.

As somebody who plays silicon a LOT, I agree, just wanted an open forum to discuss what others think.
Mining borgs... UGH I hate them so fucking much. The worse part is they can't use any of the fun loot they get, so they are stuck doing the boring ass shit and giving miners all their points. Not being able to fix burn damage is also cancer.
The fact that the engi RPED has limited space pisses me off to no end.

HOGAN should be the default lawset, and we should get secborgs with guns

Malf AI could use a few small buffs, otherwise the biggest issue I see is tackling the cultural issue of silicon players being valid hunters instead of chaos factories. Silicons are at their best when they add interesting twists to the stories of the round by creating a separate line of thinking that players are rewarded for engaging with. So often I talk to silicon players that try to weasel out of law 2s by humans to do something that does not harm humans but is vaguely antagonistic because of possible "future harm". Worst is when they then out the human for giving them the order and get said human killed. From talking to people, there seems to be a mindset that the AI is a member of command and therefor "wins" if the station/captain "wins".

I dont think silicons really have any outstanding balance issues, apart from a few of the borgs being a little undertuned.

AI is more fun when played crew-aligned and I'm tired of people pretending it isn't.

You don't have to think about it anymore if you straight up remove them. *Taps head

Borgs should be weaker, AI should be much stronger

Death comes too cheaply on both sides of silicon balance.
It is too easy for an average crewmember to kill/subvert a cyborg, to the point that they're only really a threat if they're emagged or malfunctioning.
It is too easy for a malfunctioning/emagged borg to kill a crewmember, which is especially confusing given that, outside of the mining borg, they weren't built to kill things.
It is too easy for crewmembers to completely ignore the AI satellite's defenses; I can name a number of strategies off the top of my head that bypass most of them entirely, and that's not including the one that only really works on Icebox. The safest place for the AI to be is walled off in some abandoned corner of maint(or mining station), because most of the station doesn't know where they are unless they go out of their way to figure it out.

vect0r wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 5:27 pm

As somebody who plays silicon a LOT, I agree, just wanted an open forum to discuss what others think.
Mining borgs... UGH I hate them so fucking much. The worse part is they can't use any of the fun loot they get, so they are stuck doing the boring ass shit and giving miners all their points. Not being able to fix burn damage is also cancer.
The fact that the engi RPED has limited space pisses me off to no end.

Wait have you not figured it out yet? Mining borgs exist solely for the purpose of slaughtering the crew in space after the AI has the sat tubes destroyed and goes delta. All you need to dab on organics as a mini fighter jet is a range upgrade and ion thrusters.

Jackraxxus wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 7:32 pm AI is more fun when played crew-aligned and I'm tired of people pretending it isn't.

Wrong, I love vaguely hostile Asimov AIs and I love it when they completely flip out over human harm because of black-and-white roleplay

Jackraxxus wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 7:32 pm AI is more fun when played crew-aligned and I'm tired of people pretending it isn't.

Eww
Do you upload Paladin every chance you get?

I dislike posibrains and how rare it is for antags to be forceborged. Actually I dislike how rare it is for anyone to be borged now outside of deranged roundstart borging requests. If theres a corpse outside of med during nuke ops i should be allowed to toss it into robotics for a new cyborg crewmember.
Cyborg movement should be less organic. Cyborgs are moving hunks of metal, they should be immobile without a dolly to load them onto and while moving they should displace anyone they run into. Imagine an engiborg moving down a 1 tile maintenance shaft, you aren't getting past it. If on combat mode borgs should crush anyone they move into against any walls or machines infront of them. Ever seen someone get crushed into a wall by a car? Thats what a cyborg should do, just a bit smaller.
AI under asimov is a management role and could benefit greatly from a review of other management gameplay. Give me THE CLAW from rollercoaster tycoon.
Robotic eyeballs should be limited to the camera network's vision so crew have a reason and a way to fix the camera network's blindspots.

conrad wrote: ↑Tue Apr 04, 2023 5:21 pmMining borgs need a plasma cutter upgrade. Mining with just the PKA is hell.

It's not that bad once you have the 3x3 AoE upgrade.

I think most of the flaws with silicon are specifically flaws with silicon policy. Silicons in their current form are far too crew aligned, and while there are definitely parts of silipol that are necessary, I think a lot of it could go.

Malf AI could use a few tweaks (e.g. the AI gains a GPS signal if it starts going delta. Going delta should entail fighting the crew head-on and winning, not hiding in some corner of maints). Other than that silicons are actually pretty balanced, in a weird way. A malf AI who really knows what they're doing can cripple the crew with ease by destroying the ore silo and other key machines and plasma flooding before going delta, and make it all but impossible for the crew to fight through the satellite in time. But a malf AI without that kind of game knowledge can easily get demolished in seconds if it misses a vital target (e.g. the lockdown console). When a malf AI fights the crew, the winning side tends to win hard.

Hacked borgs are much the same. They have tons of ways of taking out crewmembers (fake beer, funny stun arm, nitrous/plasma flooding), but the crew has options too (lockdown console, flashes, EMP). There is an argument to be made that fights shouldn't be decided by a single hardstun, but that's a different topic entirely.

Silicon players on Sybil are a bit of a mixed bag; you have good ones but you also have shitters. Pretty much the same as non-silicons on Sybil, to be honest.

The only major silicon addition I can think of would be a science borg. Basically engie borg-lite, except for the addition of an experimental scanner module. And it would be able to receive the RPED upgrade just like engieborgs. I can guarantee, the advanced stock parts experiment would get done far more often if science borgs were a thing.

Antags retaining antag status while borged is genuinely terrible for many reasons

Bring back Secborgs, you cowards, no balls

Silicons act crew aligned because of unchecked validhunting and because lacking secborgs means that if you act against the crew while still on default lawset (meaning you can't just kick their asses harmfully) they can simply kick your ass and you have no real solution to it. This was theorized months ago and proved by the trial of Secborg Return on Campbell.

It's balanced, perhaps slightly in favor of an emagged borg over a player but that's fine. Both one-click wins on each side, stunhand vs. flashes, except the borgs have the added advantage of being fireproof/spaceproof/stunproof/no slowdown/no shock/environmental control. So the borg's probably stronger but add in things like ion+flashbangs+EMP+laser pointer, and it's somewhat close-ish.