Cult Rework

[Y0SH1M4S73R]

I have created a design document for a potential cult rework, which seeks to provide a gameplay loop that doesn't suffer from many of the pitfalls that make cult unpopular among a significant portion of the playerbase. Read here. You can submit feedback either in this thread or the hackmd page.

[EuSouAFazenda]

I like a lot some of the stuff that is in here, but I also dislike a lot that is here. To start off, Hhw do you go from this

Goals:
1: Incentivize developing familiarity with station mechanics. Many of the cult’s mechanics are tied to or related to station mechanics in one way or another.

2: Have accessible and understandable mechanics.

To making an even more complicated and detached antagonist than old cult?

If I understood Pylon Targeting correctly, if you want to target MetaStation's Bridge, you'd have to have a Pylon in the Library, one in the Warden's Office and one in Hydroponics? I have StrongDMM open rn and even then I have difficulty with this. The only way anyone can use this for any sort of long-range targetting is by looking in a "List of useful Pylon locations for targetting" page Wiki; a single tile off and you could hit the hallway or even worse, the wall.

Actually, now that I think about this a little more... this is hilariously broken with a spacesuit. Put a Pylon in Engineering's Solars, in Medbay's Solars and one in Cargo's Solars and bam. You're in the bridge, easily getting the spare captain's ID. Or even better, you can just teleport to his room so there's no threat of being detected, break his locker and obtain Captain-grade items. And the portal's 2-way, too! You can escape this way.

Wait, wait! There's more. If you're in one of the solars that are on the corner of the map (aka any of them in most maps), you can just make 3 pylons in a curve. If your math is right, you can literally target basically any room between the solar and the centerpoint of the map from a solar. This is rad as hell.

If Pylon targetting wasn't an integral part of the gameplay, I would have loved it. However, because it is, I really cannot say that I liked it.


Other than Pylon Targetting, we also have rune-making. Why. Just, why...
The point of an open crafting system is so you can customize stuff. With this system you have neither the convenience of a closed crafting system or the customization of the open one. Why are you able to fail them? Why do you have to go through that convoluted process?
You said it's OK because there's a menu that tells you how to do it, but why not just... put a button there that makes the rune? Cult is problematic in that it's too hard and complicated for begginers to get. Why not just have a "Start Rune" button there that will automatically make you start making it if you have everything needed, making it more akin to a Syndicate Uplink?


Furthermore, Soul Energy... why is this here? It's listed as "essential to the design goals", but it's only used for stuff that either already have a material cost or shouldn't have one - for example, the Gateway. Setting up Pylon Targetting is already insanely hard, having to get soul energy on top is too much, man. Why is the cult, by design, incentivized to murderbone? I imagine just rats and cockroaches won't do and that they'd eventually be forced to kill the crew to do more stuff.


I like the idea of Pylon Targetting - making structures across the map to do an effect on the middle of the map, or making them around a room to make an ambush. However, the fact it's essential to the Cult gameplay and not a fun side option makes me really reluctant for the idea.
The cultmaking being unecessarely complicated and soul energy useless from a design standpoint are also big yikes from me. The rest is... fine, I suppose. Not much really bats my eye other than the deconstruction analysis reward, wich is weird but I can live with.



Outside of Goal 2 weirdness, there's also Goal 3. You said you "removed another conversion antag from the game", but... you kinda didn't? Why can the cult force someone's ghost into a construct? You kill them, get their soul, put in a construct. Conversion antag. Even more, this is probably one of the shittiest ways to exist; you can only SOMETIMES do something. With Split Personality at least your other half was a player and you could scream at them; here? Not so much.


This rework, ironically, needs A LOT of work. It's not unsalvageable, but it needs a lot of work.
Pylon Targetting, on top of not being so integral to the gameplay, should also have some quality of life components to it - interacting with a Pylon should show you where it's being targeted at currently, for example. Soul Energy is completely useless design-wise and should be cut. Constructs and soul shards should honestly just go; you can't have your cake and eat it too - choose if Cult is a conversion gamemode or not. If it isn't, constructs should go.

This rework isn't all bad, but it's very rough around the edges.

[Y0SH1M4S73R]

I like a lot some of the stuff that is in here, but I also dislike a lot that is here. To start off, Hhw do you go from this

If I understood Pylon Targeting correctly, if you want to target MetaStation's Bridge, you'd have to have a Pylon in the Library, one in the Warden's Office and one in Hydroponics? I have StrongDMM open rn and even then I have difficulty with this. The only way anyone can use this for any sort of long-range targetting is by looking in a "List of useful Pylon locations for targetting" page Wiki; a single tile off and you could hit the hallway or even worse, the wall.

You kind of misunderstood pylon targeting for individual runes. You place the pylons on the inner and outer circles of the rune using the runecrafting UI. Here's a mockup of what pylon targeting actually looks like:
In the above image, the pylons would target a turf quite a ways to the right. Further along in your post, you also mentioned a way to see where the rune will target. I was thinking the exact same thing, with my proposed solution being that mousing over a targeting pylon will show you a shrunken-down visual of a 3x3 area centered around the target turf (though I could have specified that in the description for the geoscope). With respect to Ultimate Pylons, however, the concerns you describe are accurate, but only with regards to the Ultimate Rituals that need to be centered on a specific turf. Those specific ones could be tweaked to not have such specific requirements. Keep in mind - adjustments can be made to the design depending on how it is received by the players.

Other than Pylon Targetting, we also have rune-making. Why. Just, why...
The point of an open crafting system is so you can customize stuff. With this system you have neither the convenience of a closed crafting system or the customization of the open one. Why are you able to fail them? Why do you have to go through that convoluted process?

You have a fair point there. A proposed alternative to the system I described is placing down pre-made inscriptions from a set in order to make specific runes, which I described as similar in functionality to the way cult originally worked, but with access to all rune types from the start rather than unlocking them with sacrifices. One idea I also came up with was making the runes work like a sort of scripting system, with the malformed rune effects corresponding to syntax or execution errors. That would require a lot more brainstorming on my part, but if it makes the runecrafting system more open-ended, it's worth it.

Furthermore, Soul Energy... why is this here? It's listed as "essential to the design goals", but it's only used for stuff that either already have a material cost or shouldn't have one - for example, the Gateway. Setting up Pylon Targetting is already insanely hard, having to get soul energy on top is too much, man. Why is the cult, by design, incentivized to murderbone? I imagine just rats and cockroaches won't do and that they'd eventually be forced to kill the crew to do more stuff.

The example you cite was intended to have an extremely low soul energy cost - so low it only becomes noticable if you're warping halfway across the station or something (0.01 u/s/m). You also don't have to kill the crew for blood - you can use your own blood for soul energy - humans regenerate 1u/s, and soul energy regenerates at the same rate. One potential change I also brought up in the design document was a way for cultists to wirelessly transfer soul energy from their bodies to a plumbing network. Of course, I could also make it so that simplemobs with extractable blood have a small amount of soul energy per unit blood in them, unless they are made sentient, in which case they regenerate soul energy at the same rate humans do.

Outside of Goal 2 weirdness, there's also Goal 3. You said you "removed another conversion antag from the game", but... you kinda didn't? Why can the cult force someone's ghost into a construct? You kill them, get their soul, put in a construct. Conversion antag. Even more, this is probably one of the shittiest ways to exist; you can only SOMETIMES do something. With Split Personality at least your other half was a player and you could scream at them; here? Not so much.

No, sharding someone is akin to debraining them, and putting their shard into a construct offers the construct to observers. The victim, in addition to not being a cultist, can still audibly scream for help and actively sabotage the construct so it can be destroyed more easily by the crew so the shard can be recovered for potential revival. The Awaken Construct rune exists as well in case you don't have or want to use shards for constructs. Basically a ghost role antagonist, but with either a limited range or the ability for a non-cultist to interfere with them, depending on the activation method the cult uses.

Feel free to reply to my reply with any criticisms I didn't address.

[Pandarsenic]

You say it's more hooked into station stuff but I feel like this is going to be prone to a combination of outside targeting utilities (like telescience was) and massive reliance on Wiki stuff to actually figure out what the hell any of your things do.