Special Agent kit (20 TC)

Similarly to the Contract Kit, this is traitoring on Hard Mode. And even moreso than Contract Kit, this is even higher risk/reward. Only for the truly robust.

The idea here is that whilst the Contract Kit rewards stealth, this kit would reward combat skill. Many of the most robust players here never buy the Contract Kit because although they would be able to contract many targets, they’d instead prefer the direct combat experience.

Which is fair enough, but at the same time it creates a negative experience when murderboning for the people who are just trying to learn their jobs, or they don’t want to powergame or their jobs take a good while to get going (Xenobio, Robotics, Botany etc) but they also want to avoid being murdered near roundstart.

Solution? The Special Agent Kit (name TBC).

Idea is you start with next to nothing, you have do timed objectives which earn you large amounts of TC and there are ghost roles spawned whose objective is to hunt you down.

So you might get the kit and your tablet says “Steal the Reactive Teleport Armour within 8 minutes” and payout is 12 TC. Similarly to the Centcom announcement when a ransom is paid to contractors, there is also an announcement when high-value items are stolen which let’s everyone know there is a Special Agent onboard. So you’ll have to deal with Security and validhunters upping their game too.

Starting items in Special Agent Kit box:

  • Agent ID
  • Chameleon Kit
  • Mulligan
  • Special Agent Tablet
  • Syndicate Balloon (for when you truly want to flex)
    (that’s it)

Ghost roles

As for the ghost roles, still undecided on the final version of that. They’d spawn after one objective is completed, then more after every objective ideally. They’re intended to give that combat challenge to the Special Agent, but will scale higher in difficulty to prevent mass accumulation of TC/gear and using it on crew.

There would be a Centcom announcement along the lines of “We’ve detect some items of high-value disappearing in a brief amount of time and our intelligence division has deteremined there is a Syndicate agent onboard. Standby whilst we deploy Centcom operatives to assist.”

Whilst Centcom Interns > ERT green level > amber > red > Death Squad is what first comes to mind, they have lots of valuable gear which can be stolen as well they don’t have a variety of approaches which can be used to fuck over the Special Agent.

On the other hand a progression like Bounty Hunters > Changeling > Slaughter Demon > Space Ninja > Academy Wizard > Legionnaire lavaland elite etc offers a lot more ways they can kill the Special Agent if they’re proving to be particularly resilient. They also have less gear that can be stolen and reused. They can be explained away by the Centcom announcement saying something like “we’ve had to hire in outside help to deal with your Special Agent problem”.

Whatever the ghost role spawn is, they’d have something like the IAA pinpointer which shows the general location of the Special Agent (but with a lower degree of accuracy). This is to make certain that if you want to be a Special Agent you will come into contact with these people hunting you and you can’t just do a stealth murderbone or accumulation of TC.

Thoughts, praise and demands for immediate coding below.

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What about reputation rewards? like contractors what ideas do you have for an agent. A reinforcement sure, but blackouts and other more detrimental things to the station would be very useful. Also the AI on crewsimov would just kill the hunters. heck even on asimov it would do that as the people sent to hunt down the Agent are not human sometimes and definitely not crew and will inevitably cause human/crew harm.

ERT and death-squad are definitely overkill.

Also would the items you steal as they are ransomed back do they appear where they were stolen or in their original place where they spawn at round start.

Reputation rewards I consider as part of things that can be tweaked to achieve optimal balance depending on whether it’s first iteration is seen as under or overpowered. The Contract Kit reputation rewards I’d probably not add in the first testing state because it’s another variable to test for and it would be best to start small.

Other aspects to tweak for balance include:

  • Which ghost roles to appear
  • Which order they appear in
  • How many ghost roles per spawn
  • How often they spawn
  • Accuracy of the ghost role’s pinpointers
  • How much TC per objective
  • How much time per objective
  • Possible access to restricted traitor items e.g. role-restricted, clown ops or nuke ops
    etc

The AI opposing these hunters is expected but I see Security appreciating the reinforcements.

I dunno I’ve seen ERT get dabbed on many times before and Death Squad was called on me and another ling one time so it’s not necessarily overkill if the Special Agent has been so successful that at that point the DS spawns. Say they earn 10 TC per timed objective, they’d have earned 40 extra TC by the time DS squad if you go through every level of ERT + interns.

I was more thinking they’d be kept by the Syndicate rather than ransomed back. Ideally there would be a pod to call in just like Contractor but I don’t want to put too much burden on coders for this to make it work. In it’s first iteration I think just a check that the item appears in the Special Agent’s inventory is sufficient.

I’m not really a fan of this whole idea. Murderbone players aren’t going to use this thing because they don’t really care about their objectives, they want to go unga and watch the station burn. Or, they actually do use this, and then people have even less of a shot killing the guy who combined multiple grenades, a syndie hardsuit, and sleepy carp and north star, all from his PDA. It’s not really a win either way.

I don’t see it ending well. This also has the issue of spawning on multiple antagonists who’s only real obligation is to kill their target, and any one who gets in the way, which just leads to even more chaos as security tries to keep the peace, and gets murdered by the bounty hunters. Contractor kit at least requires you to turn in the person alive to get the maximum TC. This thing encourages leaving no survivors on your warpath.

TL:DR: The murderboners are most likely going to ignore this thing, and it spawns in a ton of antagonists who are likely to cause just as many issues when people try to valid them, and they retaliate, along with giving little actually encouragement not to murderbone.

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as contractor i usually get around 35 to 40 tc from doing my contracts. and so it usually also has some nice low cost items with it too. this usually results in me having Carp, north star, hardsuit, emag. and sleepy pens filled with all the toxins.