After playing captain during clock cultist rounds a few times now, I have some thoughts I’d like to share.
Command staff and security are assumed to know about antagonist abilities to my knowledge. Space law even implies this IC with how to treat wizards and such as they cannot be contained due to their abilities. Not to mention all the toys made as replicas of real antags or their gear.
With the above in mind, I’ve started going to highest escalation at first sign of a confirmed clock cultist presence, since the shift ultimately culminates in a deathmatch between crew and cult. Nobody even pretends it to be otherwise, with command staff encouraging me to call the shuttle to quote “force their portals”. So I’m arming the crew, distributing access to command and security, mindshielding everyone possible to protect against their magic, cutting power to starve their APC leeches.
But it got me thinking, there’s absolutely no way in hell for clock cultists to succeed when this is done as crew vastly outnumbers them. It seems to be a mechanical problem with shuttle calling, and players know that it exists. Calling EVAC the moment clock cultists are spotted is the logical consequence, and it’s hard to argue against IC with what command is supposed to know.
I think that there should be a feature to automatically recall the shuttle during clock cultists rounds, up until x amount of time to give them a fighting chance. Or something akin to blood cultist shuttle curse. Or clarify IC knowledge of antags to exclude the clock cult team deathmatch part, but that would just increase admin load with enforcing it.
It just feels like a conflict between gameplay and roleplay. If I roleplay it knowing about clock cult, they can’t really do anything. If I purposefully pull punches despite knowing IC it disadvantages the crew, then what kind of captain am I playing. I guess what I’m saying is, I’d like clock cult to have some changes to stand more of a fair chance. It’s most of the rounds a one sided stomp with crew steamrolling through their ark.
I believe, as I stated in my ERT post, that being able call the shuttle is bad for the game. This is exactly one of the reasons. I would much rather have the ability to call an CentCom inspection for an ERT team rather then a shuttle. In fact I might make a suggestion for this.
From an IC perspective it makes sense to call it. Worse from a meta game perspective it also does. I really like the fact that when we have xenos or blob spawn you have to deal with it. I think shuttles should be only called automatically when enough crew die or enough of the station is blown up.
And of course the crew transfer which if it get to that point has about a 95% of ending the round. Which I think is great since 1:30 station time a pretty good length for one round.
It’s the other way around, clockies don’t want an overly long shift because you simply can’t out-powergame a late shift crew. Once the guns, mindshields, mechs, borgo, and xeno reinforcements start flowing en-masse it’s over (save for hard counters like the xeno army/wall of transit tubes/ark-o-doors we saw today, which mostly ignored clockie mechanics for traditional ones).
Clockies want to stay quiet as long as possible while building defenses, smash and grab as much material and crew as possible once they’re outed, and then force the fight ASAP
God its almost like no one ever plays Clockcult because it never rolls. Maybe if we increased its weight it would roll more and people actually fucking learn to play it (And learn to like it.) rather than suicide or going SSD every time they fucking spawn as it so all the good players have to do all the fucking word.
Or alternatively make it so players have to fucking play if they get converted instead of just SSDing.
Clockcult is at a 2% pickrate due to basically everyone agreeing i’ts a shitty, unbalanced gamemode.
We still keep it because Bee is the last server on the hub that runs Clockwork Cult, and it’s still fun in bite size pieces. If the playrate was raised and people “Solved” the gamemode or just got bored of it, it would be quickly removed.
I remember a time when you could freely ghost into a cogslab in any roundtype to get the hang of clockwork interface and such, but I guess it was removed since it stole from the ghost pool