Playing Acting Captain as CMO and having to deal with blood brothers, swarmers, the incompetence of my crew, and a comms agent I’ve realized some stuff.
Playing Acting Captain sucks. Playing AC when you are the ONLY command sucks even MORE. You sign up as something and then you are forced to be another thing. So, my proposition is that command roles should get automatically highlighted when there is no command. At least Captain. That way the chances of getting another captain or a command player willing to get AC or above you in the chain of command increases and you don’t have to be managing everything alone.
A counter to comms agent would be nice. Something that allows to mute them, or track them, WHATEVER. I’ve just dealt with a dude spamming on the comms for the ENTIRE shift and I was so tilted because ignoring them didn’t work and there was nothing we could do about it and they kept trying to tilt us and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
I think we should talk about swarmers. They are in the category of “No Roleplay antags”, and I think they are by FAR the worst. When you noticed them it’s too late. They always prioritize bridge and brig to be an as hard of an inconvenience as possible. Also when you notice them a lot of times it’s already too late because there are too many and it’s just IMO stupid to have something like that in the game. It adds nothing! At least other non RP antags make you talk with people and fight them. Swarmers are just annoying and make the existing problems WORSE because now you dont have an ore silo/armory/bridge
Pro tip, assign Acting Heads of Staff. My motto is walkin’ up to the first crew member I see working in their depsrtment or one who is engaged in their job and offer to give them the position.
I’ve suggested removing the force Command when there is no Command. Even if you have one role of Command on low and a ton of stuff on medium and high, you’ll still spawn as that one Command player. It’s encourages people of never having a Command role enabled unless they are 100% up for it.
Also, I suggested that we could instead have a slider to check how many others Heads of Staff you’d want before forcing you onto a Head of Staff position. Say there are 2 others, but you want 3 then you’ll spawn normally. If you get the 3 other Heads of Staff you want then you spawn along with them as a Head of Staff.
Ignore them? I mean, they tend to do little harm. If they are really annoying and you want them gone. Ask the miners to find them and tell Robotics to help the miners attack the place (most likely with a Firefighter mech).
As a HoS once said “Once you see one swarmer, you might as well just call the shuttle already as there is no stopping them.”
If you really want to stop them, spam announcements and over comms telling people to weld all vents and scrubbers, not forgetting airlock vents. Tell R&D to print 10 welders and welding masks and leaving them on their desk, announce this too. Tell Robotics to make one or two Ripley MK1 with a Plasma Cutter and give them Maintenacd access so they can hunt Swarmers. Conatantly preach the anti-swarmer culture. Also, weld everything around the ore silo!! Not just the stuff inside.
You can still rebuild it. If you are lucky the board will still be there, if not, then you can get a spare board from the QMs locker or scramble for some copper and glass to make a new one using the Cargo techfab. Once you make it you should assign a engineering borgo to link all the things to it. Alternstively you or a fellow crewmember can run around adding in all the links using a multitool. Autolathes can print them and they only have a local inventory.