Sentient disease is fundementally flawed wat do

Suggestions
1
  • Improve sentient disease to bring it up to modern viro standards, lean into sentient disease being a viro antag
  • Simplify sentient diseases and improve them for the average player. This wont improve the antag’s crew interaction
  • One of the above, with a bandaid “patient zero” solution. This is not a very good idea
  • Remove sentient disease. It can be replaced with something more interesting

0 voters

I wanted to rework sentient disease to be up-to-date with beeviro. However, the antag is fundementally flawed in that… diseases just really arent fun to play against, and most players dont know viro. Sentient disease needs changes, the question is what do i do?

Option A: I rework sentient disease to be more entertaining, but keep its core gameplay mostly unchanged. it’ll still rely on knowing viro mechanics.

Option B: rework sentient disease, but “dumb it down”. this will still be unfun to play against, and wont be as entertaining for viro players, but will be a bit more interesting for other players

Option C: A or B, but sentient disease is linked to a human “patient zero”, who has to try not to get cured. If they get cured, the disease loses. This gives players something tangible to combat

Option D: fucking remove it, it’s fundamentally shit and there’s no practical way to make a sentient disease antagonist interesting. Replace it with something at least marginally more interesting, like borers or smth (if i do this ill probly just remove it myself and not bother too much with a replacement, mind you…)

2 Likes
2

Why is Option C in the poll if you are claiming it is not a good idea?

3

Sometimes when you’re design documenting stuff the thing that sounds like a bad idea to you is what the players really enjoy.

It’s nice to have the option.

2 Likes
4

one of the big problems i remember is that it’s pretty either-or

either it gets validhunted (as if that applies here but im gonna use the term) and the first patient just runs to medbay and gets cured, it’s a friendly sentient virus, or a dude who makes everyone sweat fire. Doesn’t seem like there’s usually much inbetween

although thats midrounds in general i gues slmao

borers are received a lot worse than sentient disease is

only rework that was attempted that im aware of was /vg/s who completely scrapped it as an antag and basically made it a biological pAI (and beemins will rightfully scream if that idea is copied lol)

5

I think sentient disease could definitely benefit a proper rework.

This would be especially good if you add some form of interaction for disease → crew.