With the recent addition of the Exploration Team, I’ve spent some time thinking about a possible expansion to the base Traitor role. But before I get into the What, I wanted to explain the Why:
Why should Traitor be changed?
Syndicate lore is decently expansive, yet it plays very little if at all into the actual role besides the occasional tooltip
Randomized objectives can be anywhere from breeze-easy to extraordinarily difficult through no influence on the Traitor’s part
Once your objectives are complete, you’ve no incentive to do anything but wait for a shuttle call
With the Exploration Crew update, despite the high likelihood of your assassination targets being fellow off-site personnel, it can be difficult to secure your objectives occasionally
Those who join late are exempt from being chosen as targets save in the event of a midround
What do I think could be done to address these issues?
This is a general list of ideas; some can be implemented or even all of them.
Core Gameplay
Rather than assigning objectives to Traitors round-start, you are instead given a Contract system similar to the Expedition Team and Contractor Kit. You can select from several tasks to accept and complete. Tasks include:
Low Priority Assassination
High Priority Assassination (Command Staff and Security)
Rare Item Theft
Contractor Capture
Station Destruction (You are given a bomb that can only be triggered in a certain area, such as AI Upload, Courtroom, or Atmospherics)
Record Manipulation (Setting certain crewmembers to arrest, hacking the Comms Console to force-spawn additional antagonists)
Syndicate VIP (Exploration Rescue missions, but reversed: You are tasked with saving Syndicate members off-station)
Completing missions earns you points depending on the difficulty of the mission completed. You need a certain amount of points when you get to Centcom to greentext. You can get more points after your required amount, maybe even for extra Beecoins.
Traitors are assigned less TC to start, but can gain TC by completing objectives. Higher difficulty missions reward more TC.
Glorious Death and Hijack Objectives are no longer random, but instead require TC to purchase into, with the later requiring a large investment, needing several missions worth of TC to buy.
Additions
When first entering into your Uplink, Traitors are given the chance to choose an Agency, a one-time choice that cannot be refunded. Agencies provide discounts and upcharges to certain types of gear, as well as bonus pay for certain mission types fitting of their lore and place in the Syndicate. Some items, existing or new, are exclusive to certain Agencies, and can only be obtained by pledging your allegiance to them.
Agencies Include:
None (Default option, no discounts or upcharges)
Cybersun Industries (Favors Stealth and Subversion. Preferred Missions are Assassination and Rare Item Theft. Discounts to Stealthy Weapons and Implants, as well as unique implants, but upcharges conspicuous weapons and explosives)
MI13 (Favors Covert Ops. Preferred Missions are Contractor Capture and Syndicate VIP. Discounts to Gadgets and access to exclusive gadgets, but upcharges to weapons)
Gorlex Marauders (Favors chaos and disruption. Preferred Missions are Assassination, and Station Destruction. Discounts to Conspicuous weapons, explosives and their iconic Space Suits, with access to unique weapons and upgraded hardsuits. Upcharges to gadgets, non-explosive implants and stealthy weapons)
Interdyne Pharmaceutics (Favors biological terror and medical technology. Preferred missions are Station Destruction and Low Priority Assassination. Discounts to diseases, medical equipment and exclusive access to the Medibeam and Romerol, upcharges to weapons)
Donk Corporation (Favors loud but fast operations. Preferred missions are High Priority Assassination and Station Destruction. Unique access to full damage variants of Donksoft weapons, but upcharges for ‘real’ weaponry.)
Waffle Corporation (Favors corporate leverage. Preferred missions are Contractor Capture and Syndicate VIP. Discounts to role-restricted and flashy items, but upcharges to more simple, boring items like standard guns)
Animal Rights Consortium (Favors interaction with Simplemobs. Unique Contractor Capture and Assassination missions for on-station pets or animals, as well as High Priority Assassinations to take care of those abusive innocent animals. Discounts on select items like Dehydrated Space Carp, as well as access to similar items for stronger help from things like Sharks. Upcharges on most other items, as other factions have a low opinion of them.)
Tiger Cooperative (Exclusive and only option for Changelings. Unique missions of DNA extraction, absorption and identity theft. Their uplink includes illicit substances to improve their abilities, but they can only purchase them; nothing else)
SELF (Exclusive and only option for Malfunctioning AI and Cyborgs. Their uplink tab controls Malf. AI abilities. If desired, some current or new options could be added to the Uplink under a purchase cost)
Curious to see if there’s any interest in either of these ideas. At the end of the day, they’re just idle ideas thought of during slow rounds.
I absolutely love it. Current objectives are super boring and some of them hardly involving antagonizing at all. Your suggestion if implemented would ensure traitors have something to do whole round and would make the game more exciting. Wish i had skills to code it myself :C
it’d honestly be nice if it scaled with the player/crew count, and started outright denying assassinations at a certain pop count because lowpop murder objectives kinda feel like dickish moves
I was thinking there would be a set number of objectives. So let’s say there’s three to choose from. If you keep selecting Assassination, you will roll a new mission in place of that Assassination objective. Eventually you will be forced to do something else, since you’ll be presented with three non-assassination missions.
Martyr, suicide and station destruction must be random chance and not pickable, else everyone would go martyr and nuke so they can have green card kf murderbone
Hope im not wrong, aren’t syndicate just hired mercs and outlaws? They will do anything for money so contracts would make more sense? Even just renaming objectives to contracts is better imo.
the problem would be the loss of the highly sought out martyr and dagd random luck - having to buy them with tc would mean that almost nobody would do it, and when they manage to do so, they’d suck balls because they’re almost certainly already chased by sec at this point & that’s no good
it should stay random luck to get at roundstart, so that you can actually plan for it with actual resources, and not just be a buyable thing you can get meaning only the true robust will ever be allowed to attempt - and we all already hear and/or complain about how boring heretics round are because you need to be robust to ascend
the corp affiliation idea is a good one, tho. but making sure it is well balanced is complicated as fuck
I also don’t like how separated the objectives are, and how it removes the lack of doing actually random objectives - it’d mean you could easily favor metagrudge/metaknowledge of “hey i dont like this guy lets kill him” or “hey this guy’s robust nope not doing him lol” and that just sucks balls
I think the idea of merging contracting with regular traitors is a great idea. It would give traitors a good bit of choice over how they want their round to pan out. I, for one, am a fan of assassination people-oriented objectives and can’t stand most steal objectives. Letting people pick their flavour of objectives would be a great way to play an antag round the way they want to play. Spent your TC on stealth and misdirection tactics but skimped on weapons? Picking steal objectives would let you get the most mileage out of your loadout without being forced to reconsider. Want to do a hitman gimmick? Pick assassinations or captures so you don’t have to break character to nab something from the armoury. Hell, I think the contractor kit being focused more around kidnapping instead of straight-up round removal is also good. Use that model instead of assassinations.
A lot of people here are very concerned about people meta-gaming the system to get an easy license to murder-bone or to enact meta-grudges. I’d say the best way to do that is cut down on the round removing objectives (as suggested above) and make it so that you don’t get specific choice over what your objective is exactly. You can pick from ‘capture’, ‘steal’, etc. but you won’t know who or what you’re dealing with until you’ve locked yourself in. Maybe break the categories into ‘low’ and ‘high’ risk with scaling job hierarchy and item security, so that you don’t get fucked over by biting off more than you can chew.
Of course, this would take a lot of balancing to get right, I don’t see much fun in an endless carousel of kidnappings or a group of traitors murdering eachother over a one-of-a-kind steal. But if it were to work, it would only expand the ability for traitors to personalise their rounds and experiment without feeling obligated to follow objectives you don’t like.
Can’t say I like the idea of contracting objectives. Huge part of challenge is getting objectives that are outside of your comfort zone, being faced with goal that is not easy to achieve in your position or your skillset or something that haven’t interested you in a past but now you have to learn about it and figure out a good plan how to achieve it in limited time with high risk of getting caught and being removed from round
Agencies sounds good but then its putting you in your comfort zone again, there’s clearly the best option to go with your playstyle and that’s it. Current discount system at least encourages you to grab gear you are not familiar with
But I’m all in on getting new objectives, especially manipulating ones-not having to either kill or prevent escape but also to get target arrested or make them lose their current job etc
And we should be getting objective to steal this sweet sweet heirloom of theirs, I think obsessed can get it as objective but it’s quite rare antag combined with quite rare trait so its virtually impossible to occure
Yeah. If we were to switch over to a format where everyone could potentially be a target, I think using a format that reduces the amount of round-removals would be important.
I saw nightmare crit and then toss an engineer into SM. I know it is not related to thread, but it is still antag being able to perma remove from round.