/tg/Station 13

I have always felt the Singularity and Tesla engines are too destructive for how little effort it takes to release them. There is no warning and no way to prevent it being loosed once it has been successfully sabotaged. Can’t even repair it either, the only solution it just to call the shuttle. It’s a round end button compared to the Supermatter that requires uninterrupted sabotage and gives off several warnings prior to it destroying everything. I feel this is extremely detrimental to the direction of longer rounds that I have seen lately. In my opinion the largest problem is how it can’t be reversed. With the Supermatter you could potentially repair damage caused by the delamination and build a new engine or just use solars. In contrast, the instant you hear lightning or notice the floor tiles being ripped away you just have to red alert call the shuttle and hope it doesn’t hit escape. So why not just make it so a tesloose or singulose isn’t round ending and can actually be fixed if you want to while still being devastating enough to be an actual threat?

Singularity - If it breaks out of containment, it will remain stationary as it consumes everything around it until it runs out of material to consume. After running out of fuel to consume, it implodes EMPimg the station and irradiating the crew depending on the stage it imploded at

Tesla - If it breaks out of containment, it travels along wires shocking any crew standing next to machinery within its range, blowing up the machinery in the process with damage and range depending on how many energy balls.

Hugbox

Or just remove them already and replace them on every map with an SM. You can still cause Tesla and SM delams but it can't be done with zero effort almost instantly.

Make the special delams easier so it's important to stop but actually possible unlike singuloose

Imagine having an entire security team intended to track and stop any threats from coming to the station and having them consistently fail to attempt to protect the largest threat to come to the station

I mean, it's not exactly rare for there to be no security team.

Can’t blame them considering engineering is on the other end of the station as sec and there is no warning that sabotage is happening

NoxVS wrote:Can’t blame them considering engineering is on the other end of the station as sec and there is no warning that sabotage is happening

This is the real issue, rather than that engine failure is too destructive or disruptive to a round. It happens quickly and without much warning, and the Singularity and Tesla differ from the SM in that there's no way to undo the process of engineering failure once it's already begun (since usually there isn't a process). And you'll never face repercussions or downsides to an engine sabotage as a traitor unless you fuck up and die to it, since unless the AI catches you in the act it's basically impossible to be caught - there's often enough working parts that what caused the failure exactly can't be pinned down unless someone saw it happen, and anything that you could use a forensic scanner on is either not sufficient evidence, destroyed by a singulo/tesla, or won't have any prints or recognizable fibers since you unwrenched and ate a pipe in space or changed a number on an air alarm with gloves on. It leaves you in the regime of "well there's only one atmos tech on the manifest so it MUST be him" or "uh I saw an assistant look at the gravgen funny a while ago", which as an officer/detective/anyone interested in fixing the problem or finding its source is just a horrible feeling of "well I'm glad there was something I could have feasibly done differently to prevent this". Rather than the sheer destructiveness I think it's worth considering that this destructiveness has little counterplay, no downsides, and no intermediate state between zero and station-is-space-and-explosions now.

In my opinion the SM isn't destructive enough. Usually when it fails, I'm just like "eh OK whatever"; unless I'm eating the blast directly there probably aren't going to be consequences to my round other than a shuttle call within the next few minutes, which I don't really think is an acceptable overall state. But it's still better than the other engines gameplay-wise since it's not a binary state of "engine stable" and "station destroyed". Its failure state is telegraphed, controllable, still somewhat diagnosable even if you can't always pin down a root cause or culprit, and has interesting consequences. I'd be interested in seeing what kinds of ideas could bring this gameplay to the Singulo and Tesla, because I'd very much like to see them return to major stations or in some sort of rotation/choice system.

I used to be so nostalgic for singulo/tesla engines when they were fully swapped for sm. But I’m not gonna lie, now that singulo is back on donut, I remember just how boring and easy to sabotage they were.

Solution isn’t to make them weak, its to make all engines sm.

Idea: have sm roundstart on everything (except maybe donut) but make it always singulo/tesla delam

wesoda25 wrote:I used to be so nostalgic for singulo/tesla engines when they were fully swapped for sm. But I’m not gonna lie, now that singulo is back on donut, I remember just how boring and easy to sabotage they were.

Solution isn’t to make them weak, its to make all engines sm.

I told Mmmiracles it was a bad idea to use the singulo but no one listened.

Its a pity because Donutstation is the perfect station for the SM. The central location makes SM explosions very effective at causing significant station damage. This makes controlling the engine much more important, and because SM sabotage can be fixed it also makes for more interesting stories for non-antags than "lol singulo out again".

Honestly if actually knew how to do anything with git I would try to make versions of deltastation and metastation with more central SMs just to replicate that kind of importance.

People probably miss how the singulo releasing caused enough damage to basically make the round only about survival, which is a very interesting narrative to play in, but forget about the ease and frequency of singulo releases that got the engine changed to the SM in the first place.

If people really want to, we could fix the singulo. Seems like there's no appetite for it though, which is fair enough.

The SM is perfect as is and should not be changed. Making it delam into singulo/tesla always would be super lame and suck the fun right out of it.

wesoda25 wrote:The SM is perfect as is and should not be changed. Making it delam into singulo/tesla always would be super lame and suck the fun right out of it.

Currently delamming doesn't pose a threat besides the shuttle being called

You can get a large boom which destroys engineering and everything around it. The reward for doing difficult delaminations is the tesla or singulo. Its perfectly balanced as is, if we were to do your suggestion then anyone who forgot to set a certain pipe on could accidentally delam it if they didn't know what they were doing. It would mean there would be no reward or value in doing high-stakes delaminations, putting disabling one pipe on par with pumping tons of co2 or gas into the engine for tesla and singulo delams respectively.

MisterPerson wrote:If people really want to, we could fix the singulo. Seems like there's no appetite for it though, which is fair enough.

I myself am quite a fan of fleeing from a hungry singulo. Some of my best rounds on pubby were when I formed a ragtag bunch of refugees trying to survive in the monastery while the singulo chewed up more and more of the station.

Seems like what people hate about the singulo and like about SM is how much of a warning there is before shit goes wrong. We could copy those warnings as the singulo approaches stage 5. Also possible would be expanding the size of the singulo's effect on stage 4 (large enough to be felt from outside engineering, possibly along with some remapping). Or possibly increase the station gravity at stage 4, which slows everyone down.

I would like it if the standard delamination explosion radius was much larger. Right now it doesn't pose a threat unless you're in a very specific area of the station.

Atticat wrote:I would like it if the standard delamination explosion radius was much larger. Right now it doesn't pose a threat unless you're in a very specific area of the station.

That was the point of that change. SM fuckups are only supposed to destroy engineering so that incompetence doesnt end rounds like it did with the singulo.

If you want to destroy the station with an SM delam, you delam it into a singulo or tesla. the fact that those two things require actual game knowledge to do is a good thing