Hello maggot (not you Maggot, but hello anyway), you decided to be a warden huh? Well you have a decent job, get to stay around and smoke cigars and beat down on the shit sec officers. Now during the beginning of the shift, there is a important thing that wardens might want to do to get rid of any weak spots that will cause issues later, as it seems like the brig wasn’t designed by someone who works within security. Now here is a list of things to keep in mind:
Warning, some of these tips require you to ask officers to bring you materials from cargo
Maintenance
The most obvious weak point in any brig, those who wish to harm sec can emag or hack their way inside to attack you or even just put a explosive rubber ducky in the door. The most basic thing to do is to just bolt it close with your door remote, but like any lock their are easy ways around this. The more advanced method is to get plasteel, open the maintance panel, and put some inside it. This shields the wires and require more effort to force it open, if you bolted the door, and will either be very obvious when someone is trying to break in or fully deter the person. A more drastic method is to also use a barrier grenade to block the door, but I don’t suggest doing this unless needed because it will block off any use for your own escape. Also to squeeze in this last thing, barrier grenades are useful for sealing off the cargo delivery door.
The Armory, Perma Brig, and Gulag oh my!
Now these two are common targets by those who wish harm on the station, and have similar defensive strategy’s. A simple strategy is to upgrade your cameras with analyzers: get a screwdriver and a officer to print you those basic yellow analyzers from either cargo’s public lauthe (or if that gets removed in the future, get it at engineering), then open up a camera and put a analyzer inside. This allows the camera’s to have Xray and allow the AI and you to see through walls. This is handy inside Perma or Gulag where prisoners might get the smart idea and destroy them, Gulag typically has one camera that is outside of reach from those prisoners and upgrading it also allows the AI to see outside of the gulag into the prisoner area (I have been saved before after a changling killed me and hid my body in a locker, which the AI was about to seem them do with their camera upgraded). Prisoners don’t know what upgraded camera’s look like so it’s the stealthiest way to monitor them. If you encounter any signs of trouble on the station, it’s a good idea to protect the armory from attacks from the outside. A effective way to do this is using old shield generators that engineering has (it just takes one), making room for it in the middle of the top wall of the armory, and using a wrench to activate it. The only way to counter this wall (without someone from the inside using a wrench on it) is using a EMP, which is semi-obvious and gives you time. This shield method can also be used to protect Perma brig (IF NEEDED) and I believe is strong enough to not being destroyed by prisoners.
Perma 2.0
Fland station has windows can effectively allow perma prisoners to break out and get inside security itself, which is a major oversight. I suggest replacing the standard reinforced windows with plasma glass or anything stronger, only on the inside glass though. Putting it on the outside is useless, as if anyone really wanted to break them out they’d just remove it using tools (and you have that fancy lockdown button anyway)
It’s worth knowing that doing anything to greatly beef up security at roundstart may be viewed as powergaming by admins. It’s one of those edge cases that probably depends on who exactly sees it happening. I know of at least four players that got notes for massively beefing up the brig against attack at roundstart because there has been no established threat yet, but those notes I’m aware of are ancient history at this point.
Other thing worth noting about Fland is that there’s also asteroid perma not too far from the station which is a lot safer than brig perma, and can be accessed through the gulag shuttle.
Something that i really like to do is put a simple prox sensor + signaler in the armory and use it as an alarm.
You will have a lot of false alarms, but you will quickly learn to recognize real ones(lot of repeated beeping).
And you can make turrets (only thing you need from outside the brig is prox sensors) to slow any attackers too (blue alert+, else its powergaming!).
Also I would recommend building a windoor with sec office access rigth behind the shutter if you leave the armory open.
Turrets have always felt like too far of a power gaming move to do and is usually overkill. Sec doesn’t set them up well either and they just end up shooting everyone that isn’t sec. Granted I’ve only seen them set up between the doors of the front entrance of brig, it could be done but I wouldn’t suggest them personally
I know that, which is why I made sure to put in hold the “if needed” for the shields for brig. Looking over it I’ll change the wording for some stuff and add a general warning at the end. I also made sure not to even mention turrets mostly because I personally thing it’s overkill (except for code red), they aren’t customizable enough to be super effective. They’re usually turned on all the time and sec doesn’t even bother turning their ability to target borgs off, and turrets themselves are too dangerous as it takes one rouge AI and the AI has killed and trapped a chunk of security.
Personally the only thing in my guide that I feel like 100% needs a warning about power gaming and requiring something specific to happen is setting up brig shields. Otherwise; bolting maintenance doors is the most basic thing done by most wardens, shielding the wires isn’t too bad as honestly they should be shielded round start, and barrier grenades are used all the time. Though people fail to notice you that if you click the icon on the top left of the screen of the grenade you can change modes between vertical and horizontal, changing it from a single tile to a three tile long wall.
1- I could easily argue this would be powergaming if done early in the round without any threat. Maints are there for a reason, which is to allow easy navigation of the station for anyone with access to them - usually security crew or maintenance crew.
2- The cameras thing, if done early on without any reason to, could ALSO be considered powergaming. THe breach wall are fine if you’ve got reasons to use it, but if your only motive is “it’ll make it much harder to break in” then - yeah.
3- Fland’s perma with windows is a funny visible perma. You’re only supposed to put people who are unimportant there. There’s a shuttle with a direct access to the ACTUAL perma on fland.
Overall, while these are genuine good defensive measures, it’s really easy to call them powergaming for one specific reason :
Intended design flaws. The reason why you can see many weak points around the station, isn’t because of bad design from mappers, but to give avenues for antags to play around/find ways to create their own attack plan/break in. It’s a part of the fun, and why you can count so many of them.
if everything is locked behind 20 layers of reinf walls, breach shields, barrier grenades, no one would have fun as rounds would boil down to “equip the most murderboney gear and break in through the front door for a rampage”. And like, no
I assure you, giving avenues for antags to attack that you may not expect/will catch you by surprise, is what leads to fun events and the chaotic nature of this game we all love. Making everything hyper defensive and boil down to the basic same strats every round is 100% not fun. And that’s why people complain about powergaming, and why i called a fair few of the actions you described as “powergaming”.
You can actually break the emergency shield generator’s walls relatively easily. Not 100% sure on this but i think that they have a similar strength to those wooden barriers you can find around maints