Right, this will be a short thread start.
Currently, the space dragon’s portal prevents :
Spawning again as carp unless there is backlog
If you spawn twice as a carp, you trigger the “Can’t respawn as a ghost spawner for 300 seconds”.
The first one already sucks because a lot of times a bunch of carps can die out of the horde, and be unable to join back because there needs to be a backlog - i always see full portal with “1 carp left available for spawn”. It needs to either be removed, or changed somehow.
The second one is straight up wrong. This is like preventing respawning multiple times as swarmers, xenos or spore zombies. It needs to be removed, because it makes no sense - by the time of a dragon’s second portal, most of the people willing to spawn are unable to.
Just turn carp spawn into something like xeno spawn ie a giant popup box asking if someone wants to be a carp
or like swarmers where first people to grab it gets to play as it.
Don’t know where else to post this suggestion, hence, forums
Just to be clear, it is 100% intended to be the case for ALL ghost spawns to share a 300 second cooldown from time of death because it discourages throwing your life away and prevents one reckless person from blowing all the spawns, and that is especially true for swarmers which are supposed to avoid direct conflict.
Many ghost roles are just not correctly hooked into the system - I was told to fix this for spiders and did so for a couple of others at the same time.
Edit: Actually, carp were the exact one I was told to fix it for at the same time I was told to for spiders.
I’m supposed to later hook this into the rest of ghost roles, I just kinda forgot about it and nobody else has done it yet because it isn’t exactly a priority feature.
Is 5 minutes a bit too much for some ghost roles? A lot can happen in 2 minutes and as a mare carp there isn’t much you can do about it as a readily available welding tool can fuck you up in 2 hits.
Space dragon carps are not normal space carp, they have substantially more HP.
(They are still overall a fairly weak mob, just wanted to point this out)
That’s… Intensely stupid.
I agree on the “preventing one reckless person from blowing all the spawns” sure, but there are much better ways to do this for antagonists who are meant to swarm a station
One way to do it would be to make swarmers, spiders & carp spawn like xenos - although the notification spam would be bad - but you can assume anyone uninterested would respond with “never notify me again for this round” thus only keeping the people interested able to spawn.
Or, you could lower the respawn timer to like, 10s-30s, for those specific antags
Or, you could just make the backlog work better than what it currently is.
There aren’t enough ghosts willing to fill up the huge role space carps are supposed to fill in for the space dragon - /tg/'s space dragon is balanced around getting a shitton of carp helping the dragon fight.
Again, antagonists who have as a goal to swarm a station need an actual swarm. Each time I see space dragon especially, it runs out of carps within 1.5 portals. This is just the wrong design approach to fix the valid issue you’re bringing up - that is, preventing one guy from killing himself over and over to attempt to “win” ala megabyte
I think, IMO, the “lower the timer down to a reasonable amount so as to give a delay that would allow others to chime in and prevent a guy from hogging all the spawns” is the best solution
Just FYI, I’m not especially strongly for the stance in particular, I’m just relaying that this is the official stance and that your example of exceptions are actually unintended behavior given the current systems and game design intentions.
I do understand the reasoning and support it, just not especially strongly.
One reckless person can still easily burn through all the extra spawns on a 30 second cooldown by repeatedly bum-rushing while the rest of the team is trying to coordinate.
TBH, I’m not really sure this is the intention for any antagonist at all, even Xenos and swarmers despite the latter’s name. Even space carp generate hella slowly, or else the backlogging system you’re talking about would be churning out carp constantly just fine.
Xenos and spiders are supposed to take over the station sure, but neither is supposed to through sheer overwhelming numbers, and Spiders are even explicitly balanced in such a way that they are intended to lose most of the time while being a fun time for both sides regardless.
Swarmers aren’t meant to “swarm” anyone at all - they’re expected to try to avoid combat and their flavor blurb even says this. They’re just supposed to replicate and slowly eat/destroy the station. The swarmers that are actively hunting people and going out of their way to fight the station or trying to take over the evacuation shuttle are directly violating their antagonist conduct.
There’s not a single ghost role that should be playing with suicidal aggression, and this system (if it were working properly) would be a really good system to curb that behavior.
40 HP compared to 25 on normal carp
less of a difference than I thought it was from memory.
3 hits from welder, 2 from lethal lasers, 4 from a handful of other non-weapons that people might use.
That’s not too significant, unless they swarm you as carps should. One or two might die, but 5 minutes is roughly what a normally operating medbay might take to patch you back up.
“Suicidal aggression”
Xenos’ swarm capabilities are directly limited by their capacity to find hosts.
Spider swarm capabilities are directly limited by their ability to lay eggs and defend them
Carp swarm capabilities are directly limited by the limited amount that can spawn through a portal, and at a slow rate.
The fact is, it’s not even suicidal aggression that might make it so you need fast respawning enemies - when your nest is being actively swarmed by 5 secs with lethal shotties, the last thing you want is a 300 sec spawning delay for the 6 ghosts who are the only ones willing to play spider/carp
And that is even more prevalent for carps since their nest is on blast in special announcements everytime it spawns, and the entire goal is to defend it against a geared up crew
Swarmers are a different problem tho. They have no limited ability to respawn as within 10 minutes there will be more swarmer spawners than ghosts actually alive.
They definitely need a rework to make them work like actual swarmers - maybe like spawning a nest ? As it is, they’re just free roaming antags who don’t have anything to do/protect/attack other than random shit. And so a lot of them choose to go “ahah attack others” because there really is no other thing to do besides willfully piss off crew by breaking important machinery
Yeah, but it still is massively better than a 300 sec respawn timer, and makes that specific circumstance much harder to happen
I disagree with your takes and I don’t think further discussion will be fruitful. You’ve got an uphill battle convincing maintainers that shorter cooldowns on ghost spawns are the way to go.
I think all of the antags discussed here function perfectly fine except for swarmers which are generally unfun for the crew to face, and I genuinely think a working cooldown on their spawns might actually improve that issue substantially tbh. Even with space dragon usually losing, and spiders intended to usually lose, both still do a good job of being relatively fun for both sides. Xenos will still be extremely powerful and probably still be round-ending and nearly always win just as intended when the cooldown is implemented for them.
I’ve said all I can say on this really, just know that as things are currently planned that cooldown is gonna be applied to more ghost roles eventually unless you do convince them otherwise.
from firsthand experience as dragon once, carp multiple times, seeing the dragon lose solely because nobody could come through the portal sucked ass and wasn’t fun
dragon, as directly ported from tg, is balanced around having a swarm. we do not have the pop to ensure enough people could take enough carp spawns to assist the dragon reliably
But yeah, maintainers would probably need to read/care about these threads so as to be able to try and convince the people who are directly making the change
We took from TG’s idea for dragons, but what we have isn’t an exact replica of their system. Look at this PR
Dragon is hella strong even by itself with no carp - sure it’s supposed to make and protect portals, but failing to do so isn’t the end of the dragon’s round on Bee like it is on TG, unless they actually die defending it (failing to know when you should fall back is entirely on the dragon - they can definitely retreat if they choose to). Space dragons are fully capable of being an RP antagonist themselves with some effort and at least a partially willing crew, and there’s a lot more to being a good fun space dragon than just ensuring the portals are successful because of the tweaks in the link above.
Honestly the only time it bothered me was when i wanted to be a carp when the round was over and i was trying to kill an ashdrake that was done by bus with some other carps, the dragon had ascended completely, meaning all portals had 999999 carps, i thought that the re-spawn restriction would’ve been disabled because just at that point the dragon is almost immortal and they’re supposed to start flood (which takes quite a bit) but eh, it’s fine, i could see this being a slightly issue if we ever end up porting player controlled maneaters to help the vines be a better midround, though all in all, if no one picks it (either spider, carp or maneater) they can still be controlled and are a regular mob in the mean time
It does good melee damage and the fire attack is pretty good - but two people is enough to fuck it over. The 1 second charge up before being able to actually stun is straight up almost unusable and going to fuck you over more than anything.
one (1) borg or one (1) mech, without carps here to help you, will 100% make you lose. Especially if the mech acquires a gun from sec
How is it not like xeno queen’s tail whip ? It’s genuinely only good for surprising people who are trying to fight you in melee - you have no chance of ever catching any seccie with a shotgun who is more than 2 feet away from you
Apart from that,
They’re not. Carps do not spawn unless someone takes the spawner or the portal turns gold (at which point it only spawns non-sentient carps)
Gold portal is when it’s infinity carps right? If that’s the case you’re misremembering because i was able to spam as 2 carps in a row before being hit with the cooldown.
The dragon needs to play smart, you need to learn when to use the wind up charge into knockdown, with the help of carps you can easily destroy an assailant, it’s not as simple as spewing fire and clicking anymore, you need to be smart in how you’re gonna roleplay, what orders you give to the carps, where to put portals and how, where and when to fight to defend it, it can be mega robust and at the same time killable, if they had the old tail sweep they’ll just go for cheesy kills, with the wind up they need to be smarter, in any case even with a Mecha the carps would get killed easily, it all depends on where you’re fighting and who’s playing
That’s my entire point lol. Having a move that renders you very vulnerable in exchange of a stun is only good if you got cover/help
which, you’re very unlikely to get fully thanks to funny cooldown
A carp and a dragon are enough to force the mech to focus on two different things at once, and get very quickly fucked over, as long as both of them have good placement. Even easier with more carps.
Not to say I would be against a slight HP buff, but if a single carp is strong enough to do anything worthwhile alone, it will go and do worthwhile things alone instead of being glued to the dragon and/or other carp.
They should remain weak because it intuitively encourages them to play as intended - as part of a group, keeping close to the dragon.
Agreed. This is the same reason why blobbers and zombies slowly die if they wander away from the blob core - to incentivise protecting it.
Either keep them weak hp wise, or make them rely on the carp mom for attack buff/health buff/stuff like that
Which is also why currently, having weak carp, requires making them respawn faster. Make them play as a group that doesn’t get instantly blown away by like 6 laser shots without any replacement