Remove space dragon on MRP

[TheRex9001]

Title, disable/remove space dragon on MRP until its in a state to be re-enabled. If there is one antagonist I've heard consistent and loud feedback about its this one. So share your thoughts, do you want space dragon to stay or go? viewtopic.php?f=33&t=36207 this is kinda a spin-off from this but a lot less radical.

[DrAmazing343]

Yes, absolutely nuke Space Dragon on MRP. Space Dragon is occasionally an interesting antag to fight when they're not the most robust and the crew bands together with weapons, but this hardly ever happens in my experience. In the hands of a robust player, Space Dragon often becomes a murderboning antag that razes the station to the ground or forces a shuttle call. This does nothing to further many in-round storylines at all, except to offer a "stay away" zone, a distraction for antags, or perhaps a valiant sacrifice if the player is lucky.

[EmpressMaia]

Give 3 assistants crushers ans you can guarantee dragon death

[xzero314]

I like space dragon a lot. It is fun to play as one and its fun to fight them. The concept of an antag showing up and then succeeding, resulting in needing to call the shuttle is not unique to the space dragon. It would be a shame to see it go.

[feaster]

It is not fun fighting space dragons, they are fast and don't suffer slowdown, while having the advantage of being able to retreat as well. Their ability to go in and out of combat at will makes them very frustrating to fight, and near impossible to counter in the right position(icebox lava river for example). Most often dragons die by their own mistake of overextending rather than anything special that the crew did from what I've seen.

I think they also provide the least for the lay crew members to do, since compared to blob, xenos, and spiders, the dragon itself is the majority of the threat rather than the fodder it is creating. With the other midrounds you can help by clearing webs, weeds, blob chunks or killing small enemies like blob zombies and drones, but realistically against dragons if you don't have a jetpack, lasers, EVA and good ping you are risking a lot for very little when you try to fight a dragon. If they were gone I wouldn't miss them.

[AsbestosSniffer]

I think they shouldn't be able to destroy stairs, space dragons are often a nightmare to deal with when there's no way to get own to their level (looking at you Tramstation perma), it's just not fun to fight one in that scenario.

[iwishforducks]

i think we should look at code solutions instead. it’s just not very fun to fight. we talked about this in the other policy thread but we really are just wanting to disable bad antags

[TheRex9001]

i think we should look at code solutions instead. it’s just not very fun to fight. we talked about this in the other policy thread but we really are just wanting to disable bad antags

A code change would be good, but nobody is producing one. I agree with not wanting antags to split too much between servers but blood brothers was mrp exclusive for a while because it didnt work in that enviroment.

[Jacquerel]

Is this an MRP exclusive issue or do you just not like it in general?

[TheRex9001]

Personally I think the issue is more confined to MRP, its usually either kill everyone or teehee friendly dramgon with not a lot of IC anything. Unlike most other threats that are "alien" i.e blob that lead to roleplay disaster situations that disaster from the dragon never arrives until it finishes it last rift and carps start pouring out at which point its too late and you have to call the shuttle, its also more of a single target relying on one "robust" dragon to carry the whole thing unlike say spiders or xenos or even blob were every component of it is individually weak. I don't really think space dragon in its current state functions well on MRP. Its fine on Terry in my experience but that just might be because I mostly play and see it roll at very high pops (like 90) in which it usually serves more of a distraction role. It does fall into the same pitfall though of just ending the round if the crew is dealing with a lot of shit.

[PapaMichael]

not a fan of things being disabled
i'd rather it were just made rarer, even much rarer, than disabled wholesale

[TheRex9001]

not a fan of things being disabled
i'd rather it were just made rarer, even much rarer, than disabled wholesale

Decreasing the weight might be an option, it still doesnt feel good when it rolls but its still there.

[NoxVS]

Is this an MRP exclusive issue or do you just not like it in general?

I've always found it to be a boring enemy to fight in general. Space combat is terrible, fire spam is annoying, depressurizes a large chunk of the station. If you die to it you're probably husked, along with however many people it took down, and it's going to be easier to just call the shuttle than revive them all and fix the damage.

If I played LRP I'd want it gone there too, but I'd be content with seeing it removed from MRP.

[dendydoom]

i sort of wish the portal mechanic was in some way more important than the dragon, because it's a good way to get ghosts into the round and it's fun to fight against the fish tide.

i've had good experiences with dragons, i don't hate them, but they're another one of those "drop everything and deal with this immediately or else we're fucked" type of deals and it's a lot less fun than the other antags of that calibre with how common they appear to be.

[DaydreamIQ]

Removing antags is dumb and doesn't remotely solve the issue. Even MRP needs antags to derail the pace so they aren't sat around twiddling their thumbs all shift

[Diasyl]

I really find any major midround threats too distracting from whatever happened before.

Like you might have a intriguing plot, which suddenly gets derailed as "KILL THE DRAGON OR WE ALL DIE".
Actually that recent PR which added a station trait which allows only outside antags, we should make the opposite where it only spawns the inside antags so we can get an actual Paranoia laden experience and not sudden shift in chaos levels.

[Blacklist897]

KILL IT

[Indie-ana Jones]

Space Dragon's my antag for the most part, and I'd be willing to provide a code solution if you're all willing to work with me here. To begin, just laying down some of the information based on my current understanding:

- Space Dragon's level of strength is viewed pretty differently based on the server. Sybil and Terry don't seem to have any issue dispatching them, Manuel does (Does that mean I should blame Bmon?). This means just nerfing it wouldn't produce good results because it'd also be making it weaker on the servers where the antagonist struggles.
- This doesn't seem like a population thing as much because Manuel and Terry share the same population numbers for the most part. Ideally, higher pop also means more antags and people dying in general, so its not something I'm considering part of the balancing issue that much, unless someone would like to argue otherwise
- Space Dragon's corpse consumption is a problem on MRP because your rounds tend to be longer, and by the time does maybe does die the corpses aren't in good condition to be revived, making it more viable to end the round to get everyone playing again as opposed to reviving the corpses.
- Space Dragon is highly encouraged to space the location of the carp rift, which puts a high barrier of entry to being able to get anywhere near the rift. Blob can also do this, but the downsides tend to be more severe for Blob considering kinetic miner weaponry.
- Space Dragon is mechanically not interesting to fight/some mechanics aren't obvious. SD has three attacks, a basic bite, fire breath and the wing AOE, which isn't much in terms of spectacle and variety. SD also has susceptibility to stun weaponry (stun damage slows it down by quite a decent margin), but players don't think to try it because no other basic mob (except spiders) has this mechanic.
- Space Dragon's only variable when it shows up is where its portal placements are. Unlike blob, there's not permutations of SD which have different abilities or anything like that, its the same thing every time.
- SD's current state of carps leave something to be desired. They're slow and get two-shot by lasers, there's not much for them to do because we also nerfed their ability to damage objects, so they feel kinda shit to play as. There's also not too many spawns available, especially compared to modern Blob whose zombies are player-controlled and can be very plentiful.

Possible thoughts on changes that could be made:

- Slow the dragon down a little, like to 0.1 speed which would make it slightly slower than a normal, healthy human. This means its a little more risky for the dragon to push away from the portal to run off and kill people, and players can get away from it if they don't want to engage. Alternatively, damage slowdown.
- Possibly make the dragon weaker when away from the rift, but stronger when it is closer. This could come in various forms.
- Make the rift provide a form of mitigation to space and cold damage while near it. The rift could be made to produce a breathable atmosphere, and I could put a visual barrier around the rift which blocks atmos from passing it, like those holodoors for atmospherics. The radius would be shared with the gravity field the rift also possesses. I suppose it would still be an issue if there was a hole in the floor, but I'm basically just pitching this as a loose concept, I could talk to some other more atmos-saavy coders about possible solutions.
- Iwishforducks talked about this a while ago on the coderbus channel, perhaps teleport consumed corpses from the dragon to completed carp rifts so they can be re-obtained and revived. These corpses wouldn't be able to be re-eaten until revived. Doesn't make much sense logically, but if it helps the gameplay out then that doesn't matter as much.
- New attacks for the Space Dragon. I was working on this "soccer ball" attack a while back where SD would spit up a ball of metal and be able to use Wing Gust to "kick" it. If it hit someone, it would hurt, but you could "kick" it to a carp, who would then re-direct it in the direction they're facing, and if it was a carp-rebounded ball, it would blow up when it hit someone. Another idea would be that you could swallow a carp alive, and then shoot them into the air and have them come down from above like the Ash Drake's fireballs do, dealing damage on landing and putting the carp in a better position to aggress.
- Add a visual when Space Dragon has taken stamina damage, like jittering a bit or something to show that stamina damage actually affects it.
- Maybe add some selectable options when the dragon first spawns in to shake it up a little bit. A fire breath replacement, a different wing gust, etc...
- Make the playable space carp human speed again. Ideally give them a slightly different sprite to tell them apart from normal space carps since they do have different stats. Maybe increase how many spawns there are, maybe add in Space Sharks as something that spawns from the first spawn of every portal, etc... Basically, make them more enjoyable to play as and more available so dead players can get involved if they so wish. Making more fodder from SD's side would also give other crew something to do if they don't feel up to the task of fighting the dragon itself.

So yeah, those are just some thoughts and ideas I have, let me know if you guys jive with what I've written down or if you have other ideas you'd like to see implemented. I'm very open to feedback, so let me have it.

[xzero314]

I think space dragons tend to get bodied pretty bad on mrp just as bad as sybil and terry. I think they are too weak currently. Typically when one shows up later into a round, there will be a combat mech and the fight is already over. Or a miner that has drake armor. Or borgs. The idea of the portals is to stop an infinitely run away dragon and let you actually get a dragon fight. What often happens is the portal is rushed then the dragon just dies. It would be nice if the portals were something the dragon needs to stay near or be weakened rather than defend or die.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

snop

Corpse issue could be resolved by making eaten corpses be stasis'd until the dragon dies maybe

[GamerAndYeahMick]

didn't space dragon get nerfed quite a bit some time ago? is it really that frequent that it's a problem?

[Indie-ana Jones]

Yeah, it did, but that last nerf came with a health increase (basically just made up for the laser buff before said buff happened), the fire moves faster, and more carp spawns.

Also, apparently SD spawns in more often than the other heavy weight antags, or so I've heard. Not sure why, it has 4 weight like most other heavies and the same requirements. Something something true rng, I can nerf its weight down if how common it is is problematic.

[Higgin]

[....]

Also, apparently SD spawns in more often than the other heavy weight antags, or so I've heard. Not sure why, it has 4 weight like most other heavies and the same requirements. Something something true rng, I can nerf its weight down if how common it is is problematic.

To shed a bit of light on this: the events controller is separate from Dynamic and will spawn dragons on its own.

On Dynamic: it's also a Heavy ruleset with lower cost than other Heavy rulesets, so it gets called in when there isn't enough Threat for other Heavy rulesets - possibly part of why (and I say this anecdotally) you often see dragons appear as the last thing in a round even at lower Threat totals.

The tendency to load Heavy rulesets later is why Dynamic tends to generate more Heavy antags if we get a small number of roundstarts or have to refund threat/remove antags near roundstart.

[Indie-ana Jones]

Ok, seeing as I don't think any more direct feedback is going to come in at this point, I'll start working on a PR implementing some if not all of what I listed above. Feel free to do what you will though.

[RedBaronFlyer]

I thought space dragons were in a pretty good place on manuel but I tend to help out from the back lines so I'm a bit limited in that regard. In my experience the space dragon tends to get bodied by security unless the station is either lowpop or dealing with a dynamic 80 threat spitroast, or the round is in terminal late round fatigue. Honestly the only thing annoying about space dragons is that the space carps always b-line for tcomms and 90% of engineering has no idea how to get it back online again if it gets broken. (Oh and the body slam attack stun but xenos are way worse in that regard)

[kieth4]

I'm not a fan of this;

Tattle doesn't want to increase mechanical differences between mrp and LRP

and dreary doesn't want to config restrict antag availability like this.