The future of cult

[Aranclanos]

Alright so, cult got a few mass changes of people who promised me that they would stay to make sure everything didn't stagnate in a pile of crap, I think the three guys who did that actually never returned to the gamemode. Now, ALL changes weren't bad, we can always steal some little things that were actually good from the revamps. Currently I'm seeing security forced to powergame their ass off to stop the cult early just so they don't get zerged by constructs later on. Some people blame the players, but at the end of the day, it's really the game's fault for failing to provide a good counterplay.

The questions are, do you like the current cult? How would you like the gamemode to be headed to? The most important thing on this thread is not powers or runes or monsters, it's how you would like the gamemode to be played by all sides, the cult itself, the security forces, the civilians, etc.

EDIT: read the fucking OP or I'll report your posts i swear

[Saegrimr]

Requires a wiki and the wiki isn't even that good at explaining it.

Also requires being stealthy which holy shit 80+ people on the server is impossible to get 3 people in a room in maint with a body in there without random mcgreyshits stumbling in.

[ThatSlyFox]

Guess I will be the only one to read the OP then.

Cult currently is terrible. It ends up with security harmbatoning people or cult and their contructs cutting people down in the halls. What can we do? Nothing. Scrap the game mode and come up with another. Cult is not worth saving. We can try little things here and there but history has shown us that we tend to fuck up game modes even more than they already are.

[Arete]

It could definitely use some rubber banding mechanics in general.

Aside from that, I'd be in favor of a decrease in stealth mechanics. Give the cult incentive to go loud, because the cult has plenty of mechanics to keep killed people in the round and playing. This would also sidestep the issue of early detection being such a big issue for sec powergaming and cult having to stealthily gather.

[Reimoo]

Right now gameplay is centered around converting people as fast as possible with little regard to subtlety - something that it shares in common with rev's gameplay. Probably one of the reasons it's accused of being rev 2.0.

Therefore I suggest the gamemode goes the opposite direction. If we want cult to actually play like it was intended with clandestine meetings and mysterious disappearances, and you can't have that when the entire cult is trying to openly go toe to toe with security at round start. Going loud in the early stages of the round should be heavily discouraged gameplay wise, and I think the gamemode itself should revolve around the cultists trying to conceal the fact that there's a cult for as long as possible before trying to start an armed takeover.

For starters, that would cut down metagaming tremendously. Valid hunters can't metagame if they don't know for certain what the gamemode is.
Secondly, we have yet to have a team antag mode where stealth is the primary tactic. I think a quieter yet more methodical team gamemode would result in more dynamic rounds instead of team deathmatch for every "us vs them" game mode we have currently.
And finally, well, muh immurshuns, really. Right now being a cultist doesn't make me feel I am in a cult. It makes me feel like I am a greytider with a magic book.

[Incomptinence]

I am very pleased with construct cult. I really just think it needs some polish to allow it to turn back to conversions if it wants to. STEALTHIER is a stupid direction to strive for, there is still options to be stealthy, cultists just choose not to take them. You can keep one person stealthy, keeping a group stealthy will either be a chore or extremely unfair like convert-cult with its good old cascade of undetectable converts infiltrating perfectly everywhere. A stealth group antagonist mode is possible but I really think to do that you would need to make conversions impossible or irrelevant and basically work off a design of already infiltrated stealth ops blended with changeling communications in a group of three. It fits cult abilities and objectives poorly though.

[Raven776]

I don't like construct cult. It's too easy to gun someone into crit and soulstone them in a very short period of time. It's worse than convert cult because it takes more people out of the round. You get constructed, gibbed, and then lasered down by one of the few security members in the game? You're gone forever now.

[callanrockslol]

Stop messing with major things, tweak small things one at a time until we start getting somewhere good.

Major drastic changes are not something I have confidence in coders actually pulling off at this point, but bit by bit seems to work.

[Scott]

Make construct creation require a sacrifice, cult or non cult, in addition to requiring a soul.

[paprika]

But rev with constructs is what I want cult to be stupid Aran/forum mods

[Saegrimr]

If thats what you want, having the starting cultists being the only humans, and the rest focusing on constructs would sound better.
Plus it'd finally give a win condition for the crew of removing/deconverting all the cultists instead of turning into pseudo-extended when the cultists get dunked.

[Whoisthere]

I like the cult as it is.

It's fun when you are sec, because you have eldritch abominations to fight, cultist bases to find and crack down on, and cultists to catch.

It's fun when you are cult, because you can always find a bunch of people to cooperate with to convert at the start of the round, and often those people and convertees naturally become your team. If they don't, you can always research or construct it up by yourself.

If you are part of the crew, you can get implanted or converted and keep doing your dam job. No-one's gonna touch you when you are converted but don't have a tome and don't attempt to attack people.

If you are a silicon it's kinda shit because you can't damage jugs and you can't harm cultists and even if you get paladin'd or something and the cult is deemed evil, you still have issues identifying cultmembers, but I honestly don't care because I either fix shit as an engiborg or fix people as mediborg, so it doesn't matter if someone's cult or not.

Long story short:

cult is fine

probably will be even better since assistants don't have maint access now

maybe give more of an incentive to convert (constructs don't count as escaped cultists/when standing near runes)

[Malkevin]

FYI: I did have full intention of finishing off sacrifice cult (*), in fact I wrote a full design doc on what I was going to do for phase two - which would've addressed most of the problems introduced (namely that it become even more like pokemon), but thanks to the hissy fits thrown by a few players (mostly Oldman and Paprika) and Giacom being Giacom I realised coding for /TG-station was about as fun as having the AIDs and so I decided to do more fun stuff with my time instead.

*(what you're playing now is literally a rough draft which was made live to see what worked and what didn't, I was observing a lot when I put it up)

-----------------------------------

In fact here's the stuff that was planned to be changed:
http://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic. ... ult#p13673
runes.dm
¬ Changed summon shell from 4 plasteel to 20 metal sheets, apparently it was too hard for people to take apart walls...
¬ Changed the requirements for multi-cultist runes to allow constructs to be included; with the exception of sacrifice, blood boil, and summon narsie. Namely this allows constructs to assist cultists in conversions and summon cultist.
^ NOTE: Constructs still cant activate runes directly, if they can its a bug. [this and above needs testing]
¬ Blood boil has been changed from insta-crit nofunallowed to adding hell water to the victims. You're still going to die but atleast you might be able to take some of the fuckers with you.

talisman.dm
Remove from the supply talisman:
¬ Communicate - it was redundant with tome communication
¬ Stun ¬
¬ And Armor - this and the above were murderboner fuel
¬ Soul stone - redundant with sacrifice producing stones, also made it easier to murder boner.

camera.dm
¬ Removed EMPs triggering camera alarms - this might as well of shown the AI a big red message "HEY! OVER HERE! AN ANTAG IS MURDERING SOMEONE!"

This will allow cultists to use the EMP talisman to disable someones headset and then beat them down with their tome.
constructs.dm
Juggernauts:
¬ Lowered their melee damage from 30 to 20
¬ Lowered BASE reflect chance from 80 to 70
¬ Reflected projectiles have their damage halved

Wraiths:
¬ Increased damage from 25 to 30

The intention is that juggs are the tanks and wraiths are the glass cannons.

Artificers:
¬ Increased their damage to 10 so they're not completely boned when cornered.
¬ Removed the summon soul stone spell - redundant due to sac rune spawning stones. Yes this has a knock on affect to Wizards but they can take the spellbook option multiple times for more belts with stones.
¬ Removed lessor magic missile. I was originally iffy on this idea and in hindsight it was a bad idea. Maybe I'll replace it with a flash spell or something at a later date.

Chemistry-Reagents.dm
¬ Removed the extra damages from Hell Water
¬ Replaced by increasing the holder's bodytemp directly.


Future of the cult (about half way down: http://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic. ... ult#p13944)

*Replace word system with a tiered power system
--live human sacrifices gives lots of power
--dead sacrifices give not so much
--Making cult floors and walls also increases cult power
--converts maybe cost cult power / cost power above a certain number of cultists
--Tiered rune system (see below)

*Do things to reduce the individual murderbonerering
--Remove stun talisman from starting talisman
--|Remove armor too? The tome is already pretty robust.
--Add emp paper to supply tali if not already there.
--|Fix EMPs setting off camera alarms and fire alarms.

*Change blood boil to give the victims hellwater instead of insta death

*Construct changes:
*Juggs:
-Remove RNG on jugg reflection, have lasers always do reduced damage but also reflect back reduced damage lasers.
-Change melee resistance to reduce the attack damage by 9 instead of it being a 10 damage threshold
-Reduce attack damage?
*Wraiths
-Increase attack damage? I think juggs should be the blackguard tanks while wraiths are the glass cannon bezerker babarians
*Artificers
-Remove lMM, replace with something else - probably something simular to the flash powder effect
-Add arcane altar to the list of buildables, it'll be a child of alium nests so you just need to buckle someone to it without needing cuffs.
--Allows a single cultist to convert someone buckled to the altar
--Sacrifices give more points on the altar?
-Remove create soul stone and summon shell, these are now rune abilities
*Shades
-Make them not solid so they can run through walls.

*constructs drop their soul stone on death
-Chaplain can hit the stone with their bible to purify to the soul
--This will ghost the shade and cause massive point loss to the cult.

*Add some kind of feedback to indicate shell rune requires plasteel when used
*Add info on shell rune to the read tome screen


-------------------------------------------------------------
Tiered rune system:
(Very much up for debate)

First Tier
-Hide runes
-Reveal Runes
-Communicate
-Deafen
-Blind
-Sacrifice
-Summon Shell

Second Tier
-Convert
-Wall
-See Invisible
-Ghostself
-Teleport self
-EMP
-Imbue


Third Tier
-Manifest ghost
-Stun
-Free cultist
-Armor
-Summon Cultist
-Teleport other


Forth Tier
-Blood boil
-Raise dead
-Blood drain


Fifth Tier
-Summon Narsie

[Malkevin]

To be honest, unless someone wants to finish off sacrifice cult, you'd be best off reverting back to two word cult - and impliment sadbutt's tome UI changes and my holy water deconversion thing, and reduce the starting numbers back to three

[Incomptinence]

I don't like construct cult. It's too easy to gun someone into crit and soulstone them in a very short period of time. It's worse than convert cult because it takes more people out of the round. You get constructed, gibbed, and then lasered down by one of the few security members in the game? You're gone forever now.

Other than the risk of being double dead constructs are pretty inclusive, sec etc can become constructs just like everyone else. Soul stones don't enable murder, the cultist probably would have killed that non cultist anyway. That is like saying the cloning machine enables murder.

[Aranclanos]

(really late response, sorry)
Malk, those changes look more like balance changes than anything else, what I'm worried is about the playstile than anything else. I'm seeing a lot of people just hiding in maint, pick up a few people to make them constructs and then steamroll on the station killing everything. The counterplay that generates is awful too, people being permabrigged at roundstart for having a paper or a tome, when they haven't done a single thing, security just ordering implants non-stop and rapting the chaplain to act as a deconverter for them. They kinda HAVE to do this if they don't want to horribly get swarmed by basically revs.

[Malkevin]

They mostly are, I had a few ideas for Phase Three (which is where the more significant changes would be) but never got to the point of writing them down and fleshing them out.

The key change of Phase Two (that PR btw was basically Phase 1.5 - it was to address some major balancing faults) is changing the runes from a word system to a cult power/points system.
As it currently stands it only takes a few human sacrifices to get all the words, even less if they're still alive when you do it.
Its very hard to balance around that, especially given the random nature of it, so changing to a points system would give the codebase more control over how the round would play out.
A power point system is also a lot more flexible and we can do a lot more with it, like conversion could cost cult points after the cult is a certain number of cultists in size.
Cultists would also be incentivised to build bases as cult floors, walls, other cult constructions (a couple of ideas I had were: An Altar, which would allow a conversion ritual which required only one cultist but took time to do or increased the rewards for a sacrifice; a torture device which would torment a captive to death over a period of time until the captive died (their lasting time would depend on how healthy they are, so an incentive to take people alive) - would give a steady income of cult points, as in small amounts each burst that would total out to be much more a simple sacrifice rune) would increase the level of Dark Power


One of the main problems with Sac Cult at the moment is that because everyone hates dieing oh so much I had to implement the stoning on sacrifice system, so it has almost as much of a steam rolling problem as Convert Cult - but atleast constructs are easier to identify than sleeper cultists, so atleast Sec isn't suiciding from panic attacks all the time.
The other problem of course is that constructs are far far too powerful at the moment, they're still at the power level I buffed them to back when we still had One Word Cult - at the time they were intentionally made OP for those "Oh shit, my other starting cultists are painting huffing mongs" moments, so failed cult starts could at least make the round go out in a blaze of gory glory.

[bandit]

On the one hand I have more than a little sympathy because how the cult changes were implemented and received was a fucking clusterfuck (thanks Sabbat).

On the other hand, this is pretty much exactly why you don't implement a big new idea in increments. (It isn't just you. See: gang mode, Hand of God, etc.)

Honestly at this point my biggest suggestion for cult (and ling, and DA) is "rip it up and start over." Either revert everything to how it used to be, or come up with a completely new mechanic.

[Malkevin]

I agree completely, if I were to redo this again I would've branched off the changes as a new mode.
To be honest, the only reason I didn't is because I knew I'd end up with Giacom or another maintainer bitching about Copypasta Code.

[QuartzCrystal]

Reading the OP and skimming the rest of this thread, I just have one thing to say:

There's too many god damn cultists. A cult should be able to win the round with 3 people who stay hidden in maintenance tunnels. This "you need 9 for nar'sie" or "make sure 18 cultists survive on the shuttle" is lame. Make it so cult has to find and sacrifice someone, and only after sacrificing that someone they can summon nar'sie. Then, cult is considered to have won the round after they do the proper research, etc. Then the shuttle is automatically called and people try to not get eaten by the lord of darkness.

EDIT: In a nutshell, cult should be nuke ops 2.0, not rev 2.0 if anything. (converting people should still be a thing, but the benefit of it should be nerfed)

[srifenbyxp]

Cult needs to have a paper item that "enhances the tome" (stackable) allowing the player to reduce the number of people needed to convert at the expense of actively holding it in hand and losing more HP drawing runes/using them/drawing rune time increased by a few ticks to balance it out. Just yesterday a new player fucked all no more than 10/15 minutes into the round and a domino effect happened. When one retard decides to go rouge and everybody else decides to fuck all and the few competent players cant summon that meat sack it makes a comeback very hard.

[adrix89]

I can take a shot at it again.

Basically currently cult is too spammy with constructs?
One place the cult can hide is in space with the addition of cult space suits and constructs being space worthy.
Add some more stealthy options and making cult more visible in other cases can also be added.
Also rehaul the cult objectives to make more sense.

Suggestion on how to fight cult as security or the crew are welcomed.

[iyaerP]

Having juggs not be absolutely immune to all basic sec weapons would help.

My thoughts on playing sec during cult round tend to be: Did RnD give us laser cannons/SMGs? Yes: We have a chance, but RNG reflected shots are just as likely to kill us as the enemy. No: GG, we lose.

[cedarbridge]

Having juggs not be absolutely immune to all basic sec weapons would help.

My thoughts on playing sec during cult round tend to be: Did RnD give us laser cannons/SMGs? Yes: We have a chance, but RNG reflected shots are just as likely to kill us as the enemy. No: GG, we lose.

Shotgun slugs shrek constructs. 60 brute is enough to make a jugg sad and ruin an artificer. Combat shotguns have huge capacity and the sawed off is mobile as shit. It does kinda suck not being able to baton them like any other antag, but 10 damage as a pure threshold makes them immune to half the weaponry on the station or more really.

[adrix89]

Having juggs not be absolutely immune to all basic sec weapons would help.

My thoughts on playing sec during cult round tend to be: Did RnD give us laser cannons/SMGs? Yes: We have a chance, but RNG reflected shots are just as likely to kill us as the enemy. No: GG, we lose.

How about if I make reflected shots go in random directions? Say 180 degrees(so they can still function as tanks)?
If you has mass fire your group could still get hit but it will not be as bad.

Shotgun slugs shrek constructs. 60 brute is enough to make a jugg sad and ruin an artificer. Combat shotguns have huge capacity and the sawed off is mobile as shit. It does kinda suck not being able to baton them like any other antag, but 10 damage as a pure threshold makes them immune to half the weaponry on the station or more really.

If you want to get close to juggs, that is a bug. I am going to buff their damage back to what it was.