Scheveningen

Lasers can be nerfed in various other ways in the fashion that they are oppressively strong in order to fit in the matter of power packs/thermal clips as part of their core mechanics, whichever is more preferable in terms of flavor. The existing attributes of energy weapons can be addressed in dozens of separate ways. As it stands, 3/4ths of the entire roster of energy weapons are not as preferable to use over a ballistic weapon in terms of lethality. The fact you must be forced to retreat after your energy weapon is empty or to immediately dispose of the weapon for a more reliable, ammunition-fed weapon makes energy weapons lose incredibly hard in terms of the versatility factor compared to that of ballistics. Furthermore, most beam-type weapons (which compromise almost the entire scope of energy weapons) require precision clicking on the mob in particular due to their hit-scan nature and the changes that implemented pixel-based shooting. If you click in front or behind someone, you will miss most of the time, regardless of the accuracy buffs I implemented awhile back. Ballistics do not do this due to how bullet-to-object/mob collision works, and therefore you have much less pressure to directly click on someone because it is far less necessary. Energy weapons that don't utilize projectile shooting have immense handicaps, and their lack of ability to conveniently reload on the fly makes the weapon a liability as soon as you're out of charge for it. This isn't EVO or anything, but laser rifles are not competitive with assault rifles for this reason, despite being in roughly the same weight class and having the same amount of shots (roughly). Balancing out inconsistencies with versatility and making every option in the game matter and still be viable is an important part of game design, in my opinion, because it allows for a wider variety of tactics to be used by the wider playerbase without certain weaknesses or strengths cancelling out the strengths of others.

Surprising amount of r-walls surrounding medical now. Suppose it's one more update to further make medical into a potential fortress when it's locked down.

The quality's outstanding, only gripe I have is that it might be a little stranger to implement the holograph imagery for the cyborg, especially if it were to, say, get shot and lose power. I think it needs an unpowered transition so that it loses its holographic image and reveals the actual frame bit, and then it'd be perfect. I love it, it's great.

Is cloning not already in a bad enough state that it's hardly used anymore? Why not just remove it instead of implementing more inverse powercreep?

Least they still have 1 pixel micropeens. in their tongue, he is space-kiin, SPACE-BORN

Would appreciate if people didn't speak on my behalf, for good or ill. I'm more than capable enough to shitpost something stupid enough to get me forumbanned all on my own, thank you. Can't say I can complain about Garn's conduct in handling the aforementioned issues, considering I'm not permabanned and all. Why would I even complain? It's like going to the cops to report the police chief for not immediately arresting you when he just gave you a simple verbal warning and an instruction to put the nearly-stolen candy bar back on the display. Ethics don't matter so much when abstractly talking about people over the internet, so who gives a damn? Sorry, inner pragmatist speaking. But I legitimately don't see the point of pressing this issue, Burger, because Garn thinks in retrospect that the 'right' thing to do on his part is to, theoretically, 'fix everything' he might've done wrong in your eyes by way of just permabanning the both of us from even participating in the community entirely. As like, delayed retribution or whatever. And I don't think Garn actually wants to set that example. Because that would be pretty unfortunate. If he did want to set that example, it would normally be a good idea to, I say this rather cordially; hush up about the subject and just not look the gift horse in the mouth. So... what's the point of this thread besides pointing out what Garn thinks was, in retrospect, a mistake to be as generous as he's been to not erase us from relevance in the community? Because that just feels like a rather pointless venture, really. Yes, and I agree entirely with the reasoning for it. I had a very similar case when I was a mod with a player who was totally irreconcilable and would outright refuse to improve at all as a player despite how much assistance and insight I attempted to impart upon them as to what they were doing wrong and what solutions I gave them to improve. They chose to be an outright rude and defiant person to others instead. My patience ran out with them and it was unreasonable to try and reason with someone who pretty much threw off any willing, helping hands to improve their attitude. We both have history with ups and downs in this community so it should be no big surprise to either of us if the administrators display that they are tired of our crap when we're misbehaving and totally ambivalent if we're not. Garn literally does this for free, so I am not terribly worried about him acting like as if he were paid to tolerate people, or if he didn't. I just don't care anymore. I want to play video games with equally nerdy internet friends, contribute to the video game to make it marginally more enjoyable and maybe enjoy the roleplay I get from the game from time to time.

This is probably the fairest point in the entire thread, in all honesty. Nerfing it by increasing its TC cost will make it a 'single-gimmick' item and then that's all the traitor will be able to do in the round.

I feel like you'll only get killed by a frag grenade if someone cooks the frag grenade for the right amount of time and then hits you with the perfect throw. I've not been killed by a 'perfect throw' for months.

Hey, just letting you know, we do have a skeleton race (and its canon!!), so that isn't so far out there!

Short of not being able to pick up items or do virtually anything while bicaridine is in your system? Dexalin plus having a chance to render you near-sighted with each tick (!!!), which is a very serious disability more-in with the aspect of how important vision radius is in this game? How about when they start affecting inhalers? Peridaxon giving you incredible hallucinations (value of 85 (!!!)) and thus turning most characters into an unstable, screaming nut-case? The two affected painkillers also may create muscle spasm problems when off a dose of either. They become addictive and rather debilitating as the round goes on, ergo, it becomes rather taxing on medical's resources to treat that. Unless medical's then-and-there policy is to throw the would-be junkie out and tell them to just deal with it when the onset dependance starts to take its toll. Then it's that one person's problem. Personally, I'll start slapping people ICly if these changes go through for daring to use those chemicals over the cryo cell mixes which have no such downsides.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/4220 No, actually, this is the way it's been roughly a year now. Smoked reagents are applied periodically rather than instantaneously, meaning you will likely accrue 55 brain damage, pass out and have almost every trauma in the game if you foolishly step into a vacuum with a lit cigarette containing the above chemicals. Stepping into space with a lit cigarette filled with all the three mentioned chemicals will not guarantee your survival. Far from it, in fact, as stepping into space without an oxygen source will give you 55 brain damage, a lot of traumas and otherwise spell death for you, because you will be unconscious within 20 seconds. Inhaling reagents from cigarettes from the syndicate tricordarzine pack appeared to only regenerate roughly a 1/3rd of the typical brute damage it would heal every tick, while also consuming the same amount of reagents! Contrast this to direct injection of tricordrazine, and suddenly we have a problem with efficiency. Given the rule of thirds seems to be applying here, dexalin plus, peridaxon and bicaridine's healrate is only working with 33% efficiency, then slash it down to the fact that it is once again only 1/3rds effective with its material consumption compared to that of raw injections, now we have a statistical effectiveness of only 11%. Ergo, it's 89% stupid of a method compared to that of injections. So... why would you ever smoke medical reagents, compared to just injecting it raw? Well, I don't know. People do suboptimal things all the time. And if you look at it right, it often gets people killed. Here's a video as well of me going through some of the testing as I comprehensively did to hit all the marks mentioned in my post here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KqQsZL8FOI Anyway, with those false assertions disproven and out of the way: I'm going to have to concur with Burger here. Some of the numbers are absolutely overtuned and create such negative consequences that are not only painfully obvious but are tuned in favor of keeping people out of the round or amplifying their vulnerability to get killed even harder (by proxy of weaponizing... beneficial chemicals, ironically enough). I don't think "how can I abuse this to commit traitorous malpractice" was considered in the implementation of the changes in the PR, which is ample cause for alarm. The people who have a tendency to get creative with their chemical mixes on the odd chance they get traitor in R&D (i.e., me, because I'm presently coming up with different min-maxed concoctions all the time and lament not being able to use them) probably do not need more incentive and 'easy' ways to exploit weaknesses in chemicals to seriously murder people. You could mix arithrazine and dermaline with a syringe stab or even with a syringe gun to seriously set-up a two-shot to someone by aiming at their head with a plasteel butterfly knife. Or with a plasteel spear, you could turn a two-shot into a definitive one-shot. If you wanted to carry a spear on your back, I suppose. Some of the other balance issues have already been covered by Burger, but some of this either direly needs to go back to the drawing board or permanently shelved if there can't be reasonable solutions to the matter of medical chemicals being strong. You cannot be equally concerned about medical chemicals being too strong without also considering that people would rather be back in the round without having to spend another hour in medbay having to painRP for the entire slog of the duration as they do nothing and black in and out, the rest of their round hinging entirely on the competency of the players in medbay.

Chemical cigarette synergy was removed entirely. You can't abuse dexalin plus or virtually any other chemical with it anymore.

~immersion~. A refreshing change.

If we were anywhere but Tau Ceti in our current gameplay setting, yes.

The problem with this (and many of the other events in the past) is that the present gameplay setting is centered around a small station within the bounds of Tau Ceti but not in close proximity to Biesel, which makes it very disconnected from the issues that other facets of the Auroraverse has to deal with. It's very uncommon and also expected that most of the external problems to the Aurora won't affect playing the game very substantially, and nor does it end up affecting the state of affairs of what people discuss in-character. The NT relay does not count in regards to this, and nor do particular individuals who all do their own thing in intentionally pushing their background into the matters of a round. This seems rather forced and ham-handed. Biesel itself is already rather disconnected from the problems of Sol (not to mention that the Alliance would reasonably prefer not to screw with a megacorporation with a list of Fleet Security Forces that are hardly exhaustive in themselves, and hires elite commando units to protect their own assets in the worst case scenario: https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Nanotrasen_Corporation#Stations.2C_Merchant_Fleet_and_the_Fleet_Security_Force), considering how it's essentially a liberal stronghold with massive corporate influence and corruption rather neck-deep in the culture. I don't see why Tau Ceti needs to bear the brunt of internal problems the Sol Alliance is facing. Unless the setting changes to that of being inside Alliance territory, it's gonna seem really forced if you try to apply the SA's problems to Tau Ceti short of what's reasonable such as embargos and price hikes.

I'll be honest, I will never write a rev guide. I'm convinced it's worse than changeling now, especially since it gets no special mechanics short of an antagonist status. It's pretty terrible.

Preface: The cult antagonist is one of the most difficult antagonist types in the game whilst still remaining one of the most powerful antagonists, largely due to the large skill floor requirements necessary for any antagonist, and for other mechanical things special to cult. There are also external factors such as active areas of surveillance that will easily get you caught and shut down in the round if you are either foolish enough to operate in those areas or are ignorant of such areas existing. Furthermore, a semi-competent AI player can shut down an early-game cult and thus shut down any roleplay stemming from an early-to-mid-game transition failing to kick off. This guide is being written strictly to give mechanical insight on how Cult works and how to gain the best possible advantages to set yourself up in addition to other cultists. If you don't learn how to be robust as a cultist, you're going to have a very difficult time getting consistent and decent roleplay out of this antagonist type, because it requires very specific demands of knowledge: that being the exclusive strengths that cultists have. Likewise, the intention of the guide is to give basic skills and insight to the fresher players who likely have no idea what they're doing otherwise, but get a better idea of how to play with a proper guide. If you're someone who already knows this information and is gonna attach a reply along the lines of "Well I don't play that way nor do I have to, because I know what I'm doing", good for you, gold star. But this guide isn't for you, and the topic isn't based around being able to improvise. This topic is about being able to play cult at a basic level that doesn't pressure the learner into prioritizing more than they initially should. And let's be honest, I have personal motivations here. I'm tired of facing off against unskilled cultists and hopelessly crushing them because I have more experience with this game on various servers. In the event myself and some others are actively competing for their own roleplay goals and their character's right to survive in a round, I personally want to feel challenged so I can find ways to screw up even with my tried-and-tested efficient methods of cult-busting as security, and likewise I also want better teammates when I play cult so I don't feel pressured like I need to carry the entire cult on my back to make the round interesting. This paragraph could've not made it into the final draft because this post is gonna be riddled with snark more than just on occasion. You, the reader, may have to contend with this anyway. tl;dr I want a challenge, so I want newfriends to grow and be that brick wall I hit. Oh no! I'm a cultist? What is my purpose, what do I do?: Slow down there. Yes, you are a cultist. Specifically, you're a blood cultist that serves a blood god whose demands center around forcible conversion, subjugation of the masses to worship a single eldritch deity who grants their followers immense amounts of power. This is all you need to know lore-wise, but feel free to make crap up if you wish, but it's best to use AOOC to get a consistent idea of who/what Nar'sie is and what their goals are. If nobody in AOOC at the time knows anything to make being a blood cultist sound edgier or deeper, defer to this paragraph. Above all else, you are part of a team. This is the one time where fucking over your team is absolutely a bad and potentially bannable thing in this game. Do not fuck over your cult team. Ever. You are a literal brainwashed cultist. Your prior character relationships do not matter, Nar'sie's will overrides your past motivations. Do not argue this, you will get fucked if you screw with another cultist without good reason (it is, however, okay to execute a cultist who intentionally behaved to the detriment of the cult, such as people who intentionally do nothing after being converted). Your in-game purpose is indeed, to convert people, and once you gain an overwhelming number count, you should go loud with the rest of your cult and start converting others. You can also sacrifice and kill them. It is generally preferred by the consensus of the playerbase that you should try to convert someone if at all possible. You can kill them if this is either not possible or someone resists conversion attempts to try and waste your time. There are other ways you can exploit the corpse of someone who chose to spite you by resisting, by the way. More on this later. Okay, so how do I do that?: Relax, really. A single cultist has many tools at the start of the round, though it does not seem like it. When you are a roundstart cultist... let me just split this down into sections below. The Talisman Your Talisman looks identical to a cult paper. Do not dispose of this under any circumstances, unless you need to hide any proof you're a cultist. In which case, ensure you have this again! Your talisman always has several options of things it can do for you. If you are converted to the cult, you (should) always spawn with one of these in your bag, so this should help mid-round cultists who don't know their responsibilities either. These are listed as follows, you get five charges of the talisman: Spawn Tome imbued paper (Teleport, EMP, conceal, communicate, stun, and armor cultspells; respectively.) Spawn soul stone Spawn construct shell What should I spend my talisman charges on?: Always, always, always, ALWAYS get the tome first. There was a not-so-recent change that allows cultists to have all cult words roundstart. No more do you need to do time-consuming and RNG-based research anymore and you never need to ask for someone's power word again. The tome allows you to write literally any rune anywhere, except the chapel, obviously. Do not get the imbued paper charges. I mean, you can if you want, but there are better methods right now that they are unnecessary, due to the existence of Imbue Paper Spells which render the above redundant. More on this later. Save your last 4 charges for 2 soul stones and 2 construct shells. USE THESE LATER, NOT WHEN YOU SPAWN IN. Always, always, always save them for the mid-game transition when you are going to start creating bodies from people who resist conversion. Or dead cultists if you're too lazy to revive a cultist the proper spell way. How about my tome? How do I do the things?: Now that we're here, we can finally discuss how to do the thing. Cult spells are the LIFEBLOOD (see what I did there) of any decent cultist player. These are ultimately how you get robust at being a cultist. Their mastery can make for a very slippery AND extremely fucking dangerous player. Seriously, it is goddamn scary to go against a cultist who knows what they're doing, and security mains get especially salty when they get taken by surprise by a single cultist, because that is all it takes to flip the entire round on its head. If you're the kind of person who likes to 'carry' in video games, a single cultist has the capacity to do so with relatively flawless play. It's ultimately because of being able to overcome impossible odds that makes cult rounds very interesting to watch and be a part of. In short, you take your tome, write a rune on the ground then you can click the rune to activate its spell effect. Some are consumed upon use, others require more than 1 cultist near it. Anything below tagged with (T) can be put on an imbued paper similar to a talisman, so, onto your Tome Runes; Teleport/Teleport Other (T) - Bread and butter mobility spells. Extremely strong when used correctly, will fuck security's ability to coordinate against you, and as such is a must. Set a teleport rune somewhere and then pick the third word for it, make sure to communicate that word's destination. Any rune with the same word alongside teleport will create a connection. If there are 2, you just TP between the two teleport areas. If there are 4, you cycle through all of them. The Teleport Other variation teleports items and people on the tile of the rune, against their will. They will take a small amount of damage, of course. S tier spell, you can put the basic version on a talisman for a non-rune based escape. Summon Tome (T) - This is like the talisman version, except you need a tome to write a rune somewhere to summon this, so... uhm, this is nice if you lose your tome and a buddy helps you out, but under normal circumstances, you won't use this. B tier spell. Situational usefulness. Convert - Necessary for gameplay. S+ tier spell. You need to drag people over this rune in order to convert them as cultists and otherwise create an additional pair of hands, eyes and ears to help out the cult. Never underestimate the power of a small cult because it can blow up in size real quick if the starter cultists get to work fast enough. It is not gank to stun talisman someone after a brief amount of roleplay as long as you intend to convert them, because you're playing within in-character antag motivations to self propagate. Please try to execute this considerately, though. If they resist, then obviously you kill them. Maybe sacrifice them for a murder scene, if you have friends nearby? Summon Nar'sie - Needs 9 cultists. 1 on the tile where the rune is, 8 surrounding it. One person should occupy every 1x1 of the 3x3 space. This causes an end-game where Nar'sie eats everyone and converts the station into an eldritch brothel. Not really, but still. A tier spell, it's not necessary to be done in a round but it's fun if you want to prevent the round from stretching on too much. This essentially forces a shuttle call and will inevitably end the round. ICly this ends all existence, so, there's that. This is technically the ultimate goal of the cult. Blood Drain - Victim goes on the rune, you stand near it. This is how you heal yourself, but you should have a live subject or it won't help you. You can also use this to quickly kill someone. It drains their life to regen yours. It's pretty good, but situational. A tier spell, does its job. Careful not to use this too much or you may get into a Blood Addicted loop which deals periodic damage to you. See Ghosts - Labelled something else, I'm sure. Use this spell to see ghosts around you until you step off the rune, you usually will, given ghosts are always watching for cultists in deadchat. If they get next to you, slap those ghosts with your tome to bring them into common view for everyone. Has hilarious potential results depending on the image of the spectre. B tier spell, good RP spell, not crucial for gameplay. Although it does have synergy with another spell... Raise Corpse - USEFUL AS HECK. A+ tier spell, it's good. Basically, put a body on the rune, and put another body near the rune. The body to be sacrificed will be used to raise a ghost standing over the body of the person to be raised. That person will be a cultist upon this funky thing happening, working similarly to a conversion. You can also do this to revive previously dead cultists to full health. Hide Runes (T) - Useful for the early game. A+ tier spell. Use this to hide your rune shenanigans if you want to cover your tracks, because the blood on runes can be traced back to the DNA of whoever wrote that rune. The talisman saves you time, as it is an instant use. Astral Journey - This is a riskier version of the scrying orb. You briefly turn into a ghost for a time and then can use ghost verbs to jump to literally anyone to know where they are. Use Re-enter Corpse afterward, and do it quick. If you die, you die. S tier spell, the information this spell gives you is literally so powerful and an excellent trade-off of taking periodic, mild increments of damage for not being in your body. You can seriously dick on people with the information you get from this rune, and they can do nothing to stop you besides kill you before you get the chance. I've been accused of metagaming so many times because of using this rune, it's honestly hilarious when someone who's obviously fuming gets told I used a rune to access information I wouldn't normally have as any other antag short of a wizard. Manifest - This is an awful spell, from my experience. Essentially you raise a ghost in place to do the thing except they spawn naked, feel no pain and while they are slaved to do as you ask, you have to stay over the rune to keep the manifested person alive. They can still use runes, sure, but they're a pain in the ass to maintain and counter-intuitive to the cultist playstyle. C tier spell, has its uses but really counter-intuitive in general. You need mobility and presence to do anything, and I don't find any of the possibilities that Manifest Person can do for you as at all valuable. Sitting in place waiting for the manifested ghost to HOPEFULLY be robust enough to kill or maim someone is not something you should incorporate into your gameplay. Besides, you're missing out on the roleplay they're getting in place of you. Avoid using this as a new cult player, and as an advanced player too. You will never find this useful. Imbue Paper Talisman - This is distinct from the Greater Talisman you spawn with, which is intended to give you early game power. Write another nearby rune that can be written to imbue Lesser Talismans, as I shall christen them from now on. Want 10 hide rune talismans? You also need blank pieces of paper on the same tile as the imbue paper rune. After that, write as many Imbue Talisman runes as you need around the spell you want imbued to a piece of paper. You only need 1 rune of the other spell you want that can be imbued into Lesser Talismans. Carry them in your bag and I suggest labelling each of them so you know what lesser talismans do what. Communicate (T) - Functions as a global announcement to all your fellow cult buddies to learn themselves some information. YMMV, but I'm still gonna rate it S tier. Nice on a talisman too. Sacrifice - Fun to use, not necessary for gameplay. Needs 3 herded cats- I mean, cultists, surrounding the rune, living or dead person or robot on the rune. Kills the victim instantly and gibs them. It dusts robots, do not worry about their brain being left over. B tier spell, not crucial for gameplay but it's great for style points in the late-game transition. Reveal Runes (T) - This is the opposite of hide runes. As it says, it reveals any runes in the vicinity to be used again. A+ tier. Invisible Wall - Write rune on floor, activate rune, impassable wall. Blocks all manner of projectiles and cannot be removed short of a chaplain's null stick, or a re-activation of the rune word. Combine this with Hide Runes and you can literally confuse the shit out of people. Keep in mind you need to use Reveal Runes to undo those walls, because they block you too while they are up. S tier, it's great for cult bases. Free cultist - Needs 3 cultists around a rune. Frees any cultist that is bound by cuffs or buckled into things. This may be useful were it not for how situational it is. Still, it's a free cuffbreaker. Use this in tandem with Astral Journey to bust your cult lads out. A tier. Would be higher if it didn't require 3 cultists and good coordination. Summon cultist - Needs at least 3 cultists to operate. Use this for a LITERAL get-out-of-jail-free card for your pals. This is literally the most hilarious spell in the Cultist's arsenal. Use free cultist first on the person you wish to summon, then use this for an immediate BREAKOUT. Careful, you and the other 2 may be mildly hurt for using this part of the spell. It's better to have four cultists use this second part. S+ tier spell, it's literally so fucking good. Deafen (T) - Gimmicky, useless, even for a rune that deals it in stronger AOE. D is for dogshit. Blind (T) - Good on a talisman. Doesn't blind other cultists. Is actually really strong in the right situation. The rune form is stronger. Use the blind lesser talisman first then write blind rune somewhere in a corner in the same rune to combo this with a heftier blind duration. Use this to win a fight in a crowded room, cus stun talismans only work on single people. A+ tier. Great disruptor. Has 7 range which is roughly within sight. Blood Boil - Oh boy, this rune is so notorious. It holds some risk of gibbing anyone around it and occasionally causing an explosion. But it will often instantly put anyone surrounding the rune who is not a cultist into hardcrit if they are already mildly wounded, or paincrit otherwise. Needs 3 cultists to activate. S tier, but risky. Stun (T) - Put... put this on a talisman. Please. It's awful in the rune form. But anyway, it's great! Almost too great. It will stun all singular humanoids including IPCs, and will also stun silicons. That means borgs are vulnerable to this if they dare get into melee. Still, there's a talisman that does that job better. You need to be in melee range to apply a stun talisman to stun someone. Once you do, though, the victim is stunned for a very long time, cannot speak and cannot resist. Take that what you will. S++ tier, borderline overpowered. Summon Arms (T) - Use a rune or put it on a talisman, does the same job. Make sure to make your hand, feet, and coat slots open. You'll get full cult armor which is robust vs. melee and lasers and tasers, but not that strong versus bullets. You don't get cult gloves for some reason. Odd. You also get a robust claymore that can't be used against you. Anyone who tries gets fucked by eldritch mind games and stunned. A+ tier, but not very subtle. Good for the late game transition phase, however. The armor is nice. Not the only thing Summon Arms does, as a small edit. It also allows cult constructs to use it and immediately pick a new class of Construct and get all their health back. This is S++ tier in that situation. -- About constructs, There are 3 types of constructs; Soul stone dead bodies and put them into construct vessels, then choose any of the below Artificiers - notorious builders of cultbases. The only ones that can heal fellow constructs. They also can spawn more soulstones, walls, and construct vessels. Always make one or two initially if you can. Wraiths - Hit and run cult constructs. These are horrible because they explode to pretty much anything, and require decent melee clicking skills to robust people with. Least you can phase through walls, the mobility is nice and all but god is it frustrating to survive as a wraith. Better off as... THE JUGGANAUT, BITCH - Juggernauts deflect lasers, can drop walls to block projectiles and trap themselv- i mean, others in with the juggernaut. EXTREMELY ROBUST AT MELEE. Their role is to create bodies for cultists to put into the construct budget. They can use rune-based spells and also count towards the cultist requirements. I forgot to mention the end-game one. Nar'sie transforms all cultists into harvesters. Harvesters are suped-up mega constructs that can do a lot of spells. Just about all of them intrinsic to cultists, really, but the requirements for casting some rune spells are mostly the same. The general construct strategy; Use artificiers to set-up a defensive position, dare aggressors to come after you, work with your constructs and your cultists to defend the base and roll over the aggressors, then turn their bodies into more constructs. Make sure no artificiers die, like, please. They are crucial to a cult run. Pylons: Little known fact is that you can drag living small simple mobs (i.e., mice) into pylons to sacrifice them. The pylon then becomes a repeater turret that fires low damage, high fire-rate deathbeams at all non-cultists in range. The pylons can't be moved and get destroyed by ballistics, but become supercharged when shot by energy weapons. I suggest hiding them behind reinforced glass to tank the bullets so they can still get their damage off. Pylon turrets have massive range. You must construct additional pylons. -- The Early Game, Squad Goals 1. Don't get caught. 2. Don't be suspicious. 3. Carry cable-ties or be charismatic. 4. Apply stun talisman to would-be conversion target, or convince them to be converted to the cult. 5. Repeat 3 and 4, but remember... 6. Don't be suspicious. 7. Don't get caught. 8. And don't rat on your fellow cultists. Be a martyr if you have to. -- Early-Mid Game Transition, Squad Goals 1. With a larger cult following (6-8), you should be able to start organizing how to convert outside your department and begin to work in partners or groups to get more conversions. Be bold and aggressive if you must. 2. Utilize synergy between cult talismans and runes, as well as establish a cult base as soon as possible. 3. Maintain discretion if you can, if you can't, just go loud but be smart. Don't take odds you aren't confident you can handle. Start stockpiling talismans of various types, offensive and defensive. Including teleport talismans for an immediate escape. 4. If there is an AI, plan on how to kill it or subvert it. It can ruin your chances otherwise. 5. Keeping command staff unconverted is probably a bad idea, since they can call ERT which may reduce your chances of survival, despite the power of your talismans and rune spells. -- Mid-Late Game Transition, Squad Goals 1. Kill only if you need to, unless you wish to make a point of killing anyone who deliberately stands in your way. "Join or die" is still a viable tactic as long as it's only practiced near the end-game phase. 2. Still, be merciless in dealing with your opposition. You're a blood-worshipping, abomination-praising, spooky eldritch-faith cultist, not a Tele-Tubby. Get those fangs out from time to time. Your time for deception is over by this point. 3. Be creepy, devout and weird. This is more of a roleplay tip above all else. See literally any video game with crazy evil cultists as a reference point for how your character should behave. You should try to behave a bit unhinged, but be as charismatic as you like while doing it. After all, you gotta be convinced what you're doing is right, right? 4. You don't NEED to summon Nar'sie to end the round. It's just an option if you feel like you stomped the round too hard, and it helps roll over to the next one faster. -- The General Don'ts of Cult 1. Don't stealth-rush Nar'sie summon. This isn't fun especially when nobody knows it was ever cult. Don't tryhard like this. Tryhard in accomplishing anything else, but not this. Your role as a cultist is to make the round interesting, not just 'win'. Surviving is a nice perk and mostly is what this guide is all about, to help you succeed in making the round interesting by being robust. 2. This one is more of a guideline, not an actual "Don't". Avoid abusing the stun talisman just to kill people. If at all possible, use the other talismans to give people a fair chance if you're already too good at clicking people horizontally the normal way, because stun talismans end conflict in a single click. Use blind talismans instead if you really want to make a conflict skewed in your favor in a more interesting but more risky way. The stun talisman should ideally only be used to convert people. Obviously if they resist, execute them and turn them into a construct. Failing that, sacrifice their corpse! 3. Try not to get too carried away with having a sword and a bunch of talismans. Just because you have the means to robust a lot of people and hack off their limbs, does not mean you should do that to every non-cultist you happen upon. Generate roleplay and attempt to enable interaction first. You can play to be successful and survive without necessarily shutting others down the moment they appear. 4. Never rat on your teammates or pointlessly oppose them. I'm pretty sure this is an antag-bannable offense and there is no IC excuse to ratting on cultists. It's not fair to them because you're supposed to be ICly more dedicated than that, and one shouldn't promote this sort of thing among other antags. You'll be unpopular fast, if not already antagbanned if you get caught doing it. It's not worth the antag ban just to be petty to someone. 5. If you are a non-cultist and are in the process of being converted, do the person who's converting you a favor and just not waste their time. Be helpful and accept the conversion, who knows, you may make the round better by just cooperating with an overpowering eldritch blood-cult. Even if you don't know what to do... well, if you read this part of the guide, you should have some pointers from above on a general idea on how cult things work by now. Right? Right. 6. Don't be a bell-end as a construct. You have less free-will as a construct than as a cultist. -- Hopefully this rather long primer guide was not as pointless as I feared it might be, but you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Aaand post.

Isn't it ironic we have directive 11 in-game but staff and player-issue transparency is kept as minimally as possible? What's the point of the former existing if the arguably more important side of the coin isn't applicable? I'm not asking you declare openly in OOC who was banned recently as soon as it happens, but rather to tell the people involved how a situation was dealt with. It's weird to get a lackadaisical "It was dealt with" in an adminhelp but in any staff complaint you'll see here, staff members handling the matter will give very detailed explanations as to how discipline is doled out when fault is found in a player or other staff member. Granted, you guys on the admin and dev staff have not been doing this as well recently, making me wonder if this is because dealing with the winter season was tiring and the quality of upholding that standard waned gradually because of the drama we've had this winter, or if policy actually changed in this respect. I'd ask merely as a single member of the community that if I do something wrong and you deal with me in any such manner, that you tell the person who directly witnessed it or was an affected person of the situation how exactly you dealt with it and what I did wrong. And if the situations were switched and I were the affected person, I'd want communication in detail too, because it is only fair. You need to tell people why things are wrong and why you discipline people for it, and you need to let people other than the rule-breaker know that it was dealt with in the fashion that it was. With-holding information and refusing to educate people on what you guys consider right and wrong can only hurt dealing with situations later down the line. Don't with-hold information because you're worried about someone pulling a Xander and getting smug. Because you can bean someone super hard for getting obnoxious and harassing people anyway. On the subject of 'memes': Are they really so harmless sources of humor when the moment that someone who's a subject of a meme hops onto the server and gets chatty, and then several people choose to deride and mock them with the meme subject matter in response to that person's existence? That sounds more like blatant harassment and jeering from the crowd in almost any context, not 'light-hearted humor.' There's a reason why making fun of people only works when it's between good friends who get their humor from that, or if the meme itself is rarely mentioned and thus shouldn't be taken seriously. It's also another thing to mock someone once and remind them of a failure or mistake they made, it's yet another to constantly drill someone in an attempt to bury them. That is harassment and shouldn't be tolerated within that context. Lemme also point out there that the accusations towards Burger from Skull that "he deserves the harassment" and "nothing you did meant anything in the end", that in at least addressing the latter there's plenty of gameplay features throughout the Aurorastation codebase that were both positively and sometimes negatively affected. But overall he made a good impact on the codebase. He's made a lot of PRs. 199 to be exact, not all merged. Did he have attitude problems? Yeah, sure, I'd be lying if I said he didn't deserve the title of coder for some time though. It's an extremely scummy thing to say that someone 'deserves harassment', regardless of the context. Unless you were Hitler. I don't think Burger murdered 11 million people as part of his time as a coder though. Goebbels has said a few things on the subject of repeating certain things to people to give them the impression that something is true. This subject often only relates to propaganda, but we can learn from it that if people repeat something very often, and give no indication they're just joking when challenged on saying what they say, then odds are they're saying it repeatedly just to give the impression that something is true. Aurorastation is not immune to propagandizing. Nor is it immune to inadvertently taking value from people who are trolling for a response. When we have certain people i.e., Ziy who literally told Burger that if he '...killed himself nothing would change...' as a conversation-sealer to an already heated topic, it stops being 'just funny' (I'd argue Ziy is and was never funny, however) and it started becoming a scary resemblance of what the community staff outright promotes through choosing not to hammer down on it and admonish it, and letting everyone know how wrong it is/was. We should not be tolerating suggestions to suicide/a pre-mature death as if they were mere jokes. They are not, and should not be viewed such, because the subject of death is already a complex and very emotionally-charged subject, and it can be easy to influence someone who has troubles in their life if you bring up death as a resolution to someone's problems. For anyone who should treasure life, it should not be something that should be said. We're back around at the subject matter of not knowing whether or not staff even deals with things as appropriate for the offense again, however. Because nobody even knows whether appropriate action was taken short of a view people with exclusive access to staff chat who have invariable takes on that issue. Only posting this here because all this mindset stuff is what I had hammered into me when I was a mod. It's only fair you guys get reminded this is the case, not take it as a personal insult and simply unpack value of criticism that makes sense and improve from here-on. Any issue with staff often rolls uphill, not just downhill. A failure with an auxiliary member of staff can be attributed to a failure to their overseeing staff member for not having oversight over them during their failure, and rinse and repeat for anyone who oversees the guy responsible for oversight. And then it rolls back downhill because there's immense confusion on responsibilities.

Yeah, false alarms shouldn't signal to things that literally are not possible.

Works for me.

Strange, I had something typed up to respond to this thread but it had nothing to do with the tesla. Odd. Can you essentially just surround the entire containment with grounding rods, and you can have as many miniballs as you want, or is that not how it works? In all honesty, this probably needs comprehensive user-based testing after it goes through.

Reporting Personnel: Vira Bolivar Job Title of Reporting Personnel: Head of Security Game ID: bYy-auio Personnel Involved: (Name, Job Title: Offender/Witness/Other) - Fernando Gonzalez (Offender, CMO) - Vira Bolivar (Witness, Head of Security) - Emeal Rikito (Witness, ranking official, Captain) Time of Incident: Real Time: 0300-0600GMT~, 29-jan-2019 Location of Incident: Nature of Incident: [ x ] - Workplace Hazard [ x ] - Accident/Injury [ ] - Destruction of Property [ x ] - Neglect of Duty [ x ] - Harassment [ ] - Assault [ x ] - Misconduct [ ] - Other _____ (Place an x in the box that applies. If other, replace line and specify.) Overview of the Incident: The shift started with an opening comment by the CMO about a newly arrived crewmember's name, 'Saugkst Ekraszt'. Doctor Gonzalez said in full over common communications, '200 credits to whoever can pronounce that name on their first try', to which several members of the crew proceeded to be egged on of the joke of making fun of the name of someone who sounded vaguely ethnic. Shortly afterward, a lab assistant illicitly gave the CMO an energy axe (found via telescience, as the same lab assistant turned in a 9mm pistol to security earlier) rather than choosing to hand it directly over to the ranking security official. Given the nature of how this violated directive 4, I motivated myself to go about securing the weapon to ensure the weapon was either contained in research where it was found or within the confines of the armory, whichever was more preferable. The CMO repeatedly stalled discussing the subject and eventually the ranking captain had to be involved. Given a situation manifested itself in a minor misdemeanor investigation, the captain resolved to task me on focusing on the more relevant issue (despite that I had already tasked my officers on the issue, to which I had absolute confidence they had it handled themselves.) Later, the CMO took matters into their own hands in responding to a security situation directly. I was not informed of an ongoing issue and neither was my security team. By the time the CMO finally elected to use their headset to facilitate an actual degree communication, they were extremely patronizing, toxic and rude in reporting the issue, expecting me to be omniscient of issues happening from across the station. The CMO utilized extremely vague descriptors to tell me what was going on and in turn I calmly and carefully told him that he should have reported it to the appropriate channels earlier. My team was already set to work on the issue by that time and detain the individual involved with the misdemeanor. I then told them based on their previous track record displayed in the very same shift that I did not find them trustworthy and that they had to follow a very specific process for us to be able to take them seriously given their already immediate record of making something out of nothing. Apparently this calm and cautious explanation immediately set off the CMO's temper, flinging certain baseless accusations such as me holding a grudge against them and referring to me as "woman" in order to disparage me and talk down to me. Another notable quote from them was, "Holy shit, how did you get hired?" which did not age well later into the shift. The captain immediately called them on it and the CMO issued a half-hearted apology while throwing out a backhand of accusing me of holding a grudge against them, showing how insincere they were in taking their own toxic behavior seriously, while continuing the harassment of their peers. Later, the CMO apparently injected someone with a vaguely labelled syringe that turned the individual into a simian. I never saw the paperwork regarding who gave what permission, when and where, especially when I asked for it. The CMO had to purchase a protohuman and undergo a very expensive and time-consuming process of returning the crewmember to their normal state. I was informed by the captain and the AI that Gonzalez' medical staff worked extremely hard to prevent this from getting out to the security department and to stifle the matter as an ethical and regulation issue. The Captain eventually called them on this gross negligence matter and I instructed an officer to detain them and enforce the sentence. They were eventually transfered to CC and release as the remaining time of their sentence ran concurrently with arriving on the Odin. Did you report it to a Head of Department or IAA? If so, who?: The captain was reported to in regards of the CMO's gross misconduct over the communications channel, but nothing comprehensive ever came of it. Actions taken: CMO was charged with i221 by the captain's order. Additional Notes: CMO Gonzalez through this shift displayed an extreme disregard for protocol, the concerns of the well-being of other humans and otherwise being a toxic and unhelpful influence as a peer and member of command staff. Their unprofessional attitude led to a lot of wasted time and it substantially not only hurt the productivity of my department, but made way for certain decisions to be made that violated the status of another crewmember as a human being. It did not matter that the damage was eventually reversed, the fact the damage was done in the first place in my eyes was completely unacceptable.

Looks like the rework was discontinued. Anyone want to pick up the pieces or do we have to go through this process again? Cus, lemme reiterate. The ling rework is literally incomplete, because the contributor who took it up chose to drop it after stage 1.

Gonna have to say the third option. Combat cyborgs allows the station to choose total autonomy in dealing with a situation. An ERT call allows for an outside force to clean up the mess.

They have a few strengths ranking in the overpowering status, actually. 1. ERT chem dispenser with a hilariously powerful loadout of pre-made chemicals of any type. Also stocks rezadone, the god-tier chem, second best to adminordrazine. 2. Fully loaded armory with extremely strong weapons. Considered 'late-game' by station standards. 3. Advanced pinpointer's utility is absolutely overpowering in certain situations given the ability to track down individual people just by nature of finding their blood/DNA sample. If compensating ERT for this is a concern, why not permanently delete the shutter to the L6 SAW area? We don't see that fun gun anymore.