Fluffy

This would be a compromise I would not take, the natural 20% reduction alone would not compensate for the lack of 55% reduction that a human gets from the specialized armor. Post-battle would be when it's not relevant anymore for the reasons brought forward on why it was proposed for them to be removed, which was their supposed favorable inbalance during the gunfight. The firmer is no more snowflake than the latter, an item with snowflake statistics is yet another item to balance, sprite and whatnot vs two lines of code of the firmer solution, making it even more snowflake by comparison.

That, however, hardly matters on a single sparring, for what I saw both the blood loss and the ticking of the pain effect happens after many, many, many shots are already fired, so that they would be relevant if you hit and run, but not in a hunker-down and keep clicking to magdump fight, which is the type of combat an Industrial would be most useful in, as they do not fare well in more dynamic types of combats, and fighting them in any situation where you have the initiative over them would bring them to their demise, being limited to a single laser rifle charge or 45 bullets total before needing to either go away and recharge the laser rifle or rainsack the crew armory / bother ops for more 5.56 loaders, if you run out of ammo as an Industrial you are essentially condemned to death, a merc can just keep distance and shoot you while you can't neither get close nor get away from it (assuming it's not another Industrial), essentially being a target practice cutout cardboard, the merc on the other hand has a vast amount of bullets (8/9 loaders is common, and you can fit an SMG with another bunch in your backpack) such that you have no problem keeping outside of his view and spray in his direction a wall of bullets, etc. etc. IPCs do not self-heal at all either, all damage you do to them, is yours for essentially forever, until they can get to a machinist to be repaired, or ops order the nanopaste and they go get it. I suppose there's a function that checks if you can use a certain item, if my assumption is correct it's just a matter of checking the antag status and returning true, or false otherwise. Entirely unable on any armor seems excessive to me, I'd be fine with making them unable to wear the specialized ones, leaving them more susceptible to laser fire, which as you say constitutes a fairly significant amount of damage difference, that seems a good compromise?

Not that much slow IMHO: 25 seconds vs 20 I was talking about the voidsuits mechanic, not brainmed, they do not need an EVA suit to go into space, which means they can wear the specialized armor just as well as an Industrial IPC, and also have a nice backpack full of ammos / guns / grenades / a jetpack / whatnot while doing so. If you'd like to have them not revivable back into IPCs, but just borgs instead, that's also something I'd tend to agree with. Through the code almost anything is possible, including not having any restriction if you are an antag, and have it if you are in security. The difference between specialized and not is +5 on what they're specialized against, compared to the heavy one, and a lot less in everything else:

A stunbatoon or maglight is all you need to "bypass" a door, something you have access at essentially roundstart by default, even if not, literally any object can be used to "bypass" a door, if you get the combitool implant you can do it with no external tool at all. Just like Dionas and Varuca Every time I got destroyed, I was never brought back to life even with the machinist aboard, are you sure this is still a mechanic? Pointing out a possible source of bias in a discussion is generally a positive thing, especially given the extremely odd (or unfortunate) timing, and any as such is indeed a concern for either side of any argument; At least, if you want the outcome to be as objective as possible, which I hope all of us do. Me too, the question hinges on if there's a problem to begin with, and what it would be. From the Server Rules: "[...] We expect players to allow traitors some leeway" Only two ablatives are available, and I would agree with you if the proposal was to block Industrials from using the ablative armor, at least with its current balance. So, you'd rather have the same encounter mechanic repeated for every encounter? Because I don't see an alternative, mechanically, to have differentiation of mechanicals during engagements than this, or do you have a proposal in that regard? For how I see it, it would mean you should choose another weapon that isn't hard countered, and blocking them from using the ablative armor, as above, would address this as well. I would also note that EVA hardsuits with great defensive power can be ordered, to negate any EVA fighting rebalance, and does not take long to be built for what I saw, unlike exosuits which takes half a year.

Apart from a difference of opinions or how you would even consider them ignoring a vast majority of mechanics (there's literally hundreds, and I doubt they can ignore a tent of them), or the subjective idea of what is bad play, you are claiming that they are objectively overpowered, objectively would indicate that it's something demonstrable, with a body of evidences, which in turn are facts that everyone can verify to be true and positively indicative of, or exclusively concordant with, one hypothesis over any other; this also implies an objective, or at least intersubjective, clear definition of a set of metrics that differentiate between "stronger than X in Y" and "overpowered"; since your claim directly indicates one and implies the other, I'd like to have them stated, so we can all agree on this, due to the very nature of a claimed objective thing. It seems however rather odd that you have posted this, if the time is correct, right around after your corporate representative was told IC to go pond sand, while saying "I have seen some rather poor industrials in the department lately that reminded me of this thread.", I am more inclined to believe that you simply do not like the RP archetype of beefy and not particularly sharp sec synthetics (of which I have seen another one), which I understand the personal preferences differences, but not their use as a reason to remove what matches other people's preferences, though it could also just be a bias that skews the perception of their general balance (this goes for both of us), but that is of course only my personal suspicion. Given that I play as sec and/or antag for a significant percentage of my playtime, and I have not felt them overpowered on either side of the fence, and that they are playable in said position since literal years for what I can see from the code, I do not see any reason that justify their removal; I see as good to give them more mechanics (see below) that would add to the rounds as a whole, instead of subtracting from the mechanical diversity pool. Generally speaking, everyone in security holds back depending on the time, it is generally cadets that go gun blazing and headgib the antagonists, there's also some sporadic officer that goes gun heavy and kills them, and the ones I remember in recent times are a human, a tajara and a non-industrial IPC, unless all those wild industrial terminators play in times I do not play at? Far more immortal than an industrial is an off-worlder human, as they can easily be estracted, ressed and recommissioned into combat thanks to their brain, IPCs on the contrary once they are down, they're gone forever, you can't repair or ress them (unless all you did to do that was discharge them with an EMP or similar), the investment against them is not to be compared to a disablement investment, but a permanent removal from round one, which is why it's slightly higher. Due to the nature of brainmed, organ damage / pain / oxyloss would tick to disable a mob around after you got magdumped abundantly, at which point the officer would get medically ressed, but the antags do not have that option, so all it really needs to overpower them is to cause an organ damage or break a bone, retreat and wait for them to collapse on the floor (unless you invest in sanasomnum)... But since that is not fun for anyone, that is not usually done (see: holding back), because the main limiting factor of antagonists is, as I said before: the lack of an infrastructure behind to support them, medical especially, not of resistance or firepower. Targeting their arms disable them and, as they do not heal overtime, essentially kneecap their ability to fight until they go to a machinist (or find nanopaste, which by the way you do not usually carry on yourself, as it is generally not made or available and that would be seen as powergaming), that is another counter that stacks ontop of everything else I have listed already in previous posts. I agree having pistons and whatnot would be a more interesting mechanic, and incentive the machinist's presence and gameplay loop. You can counter them with laser rifles, EMP (which has no armor to protect from), and by using your higher speed; Specifically in space, you can counter them even harder with the use of a jetpack that they cannot wear (the cooler takes the slot), making the speed difference even more marked. What melee abilities are we talking about here? As far as I'm aware you don't have any special melee ability? Ripping open a door takes only a little less than punching it down, and requires you to stay still, it almost sounds like a perfect target for a laser rifle shot...

I think we should either resprite or reduce the luminosity of them, at the current brightness they are kind of a punch in the eye

Ckey/BYOND Username: fluffyghost Position Being Applied For: coder Past Experiences/Knowledge: I studied computer science since high school and have (and am) worked/working in IT since the last year of middle school, where I started in an IT shop (of a dad's friend) repairing and assembling computers, over the years I have covered a good amount of subfields including systems , networks, unified communications, security, virtualization and wireless (also as a consultant up to ~3 years ago), I currently work in an oncall/emergency fashion for other engineers in the USA timezone (I am in Europe), I have between a good and a very high grasp of many of the technologies in use (and some archaic ones aswell) in the aforementioned fields. Thankfully, Arrow handles this for us so none of that is or (hopefully) will ever be relevant for this position. I have worked as a backend developer, developing custom website backends in PHP+SQL. I have studied and developed in C (loved it), Java and JavaScript (and hated every moment of it), HTML and CSS (same, and yes, they aren't programming languages). I have developed a custom Discord bot in Python, as well as various helper tools used across many projects. I have developed mods and missions/gamemodes using SQF, an inhouse-built programming language in use in the ArmA series (by Bohemia Interactive). I have also used some other various scripting/programming languages that's probably not even worth mentioning, but feel free to ask, I can list some. I have managed various websites, forums and game servers for different communities of ArmA, Falcon BMS, Insurgency and Red Orchestra, though ArmA is by far the biggest one I have managed; When Arma 3 was released in alpha, we moved over from ArmA 2 (and DLCs), and the gamemode that picked up most of the popularity at the time was Altis Life which we forked and started to work on, at the time we had a TeamSpeak, a forum and the game server, running up to 120 players almost daily, I was the lead developer of the community and the administrator/host of the server, a monster (by the time) ~20 cores 96GB RAM (if memory serves me well) dedicated server with a 1GB symmetric connection and a full flash storage... Yes, fun times, but I don't want to go down the memory lane, though if you have questions, feel free to ask, as usual. Examples of Past Work: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/15519 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/15554 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/15616 https://github.com/Aurorastation/rust-g/pull/11 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/15666 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/16051 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/15952 https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/16065 Additional Comments: I am very much an experimentalist, I like to experiment with new features and changes, as I am of the idea that you can never really gauge how things are going to morph the experience until they are actually there and are used, I also like to make/fix/improve tools that others will use to make other things, as I believe a solid foundation is paramount, and I also like to try to squeeze every performance possible out of things. That also means that my PRs tends to be large projects, and their count lower; the last project PR I could and have atomized ended up creating around 30-ish bugfixing PRs just from it. I have also done some minor mappings, though it's not my strong suit and I still get merge conflict PTSDs flashbacks from those. This means that my additions are at times breaking something, rejected by the mantainers or are polarizing in reception. I see it as a necessary endeavor to push forward the game loop and avoid mechanical stagnation, and I consider the mechanical aspects of the game a necessary point to ensure the day to day enjoyment of the experience and the necessary means to push the narrative/story forward, as things are much more engaging when mechanically represented, and the more mechanical options are available the better the variations and decisions can evolve the narrative. I like to joke around any time I can, code-wise it's especially necessary to avoid burnouts, and as many developers (and IT people in general) would agree, programming is fueled by nihilism, caffeine and swearing. 😆

You can hack a console via a terminal game to get the exact position of any PDA, no matter the owner's suit sensors settings

I would personally rather some additional, advanced diseases that requires different devices to be discovered and treated which are only available in medbay (and finally make any actual use of the third deck area) rather than reducing the availability of something that is already around, something like an ECG to diagnose an imminent heart failure that does not show up on a handheld scanner and simply tell you that your chest hurt for example, or an hemogasanalysis device that identifies sepsis, things like that

This rests on the unlikely premise that real life managed to fill 365+ days to the point the person could not play a single round across all of them, but somehow didn't right at the NBT rollout, which is a very unlikely premise to work with, even in an edge case scenario. It's far more likely that the player preferred to play or do something else, and found renovated interest in checking us out to see if the NBT brings something fun for him on the table, which brings us back to: perhaps we should give them more reasons to stay?

I oppose this, there are fundamental flaws in this idea: Are we to believe that a person that played one round 364days ago is fundamentally different than someone who did it 366 days ago? Command whitelists are not lore checks, as said by Garn in the other thread you linked If the issue is the impact on canon rounds, the proposal should aim to address that specific scenario, an entire stripping is completely unnecessary as you could just aswell check the last time they logged in, check if there's a custom event running, and print a popup that says "oi this is a canon round and we haven't seen you in a year, wait the next round and catch up to the lore information to play in a command position, play any/some round(s) this week and you will be able to play as command in the next event, be sure to catch up to the lore before doing so!" or equivalent If the issue is that people, who put the effort in and got the whitelist, quit and only show up for NBTs, perhaps we should give them more reasons to stay, instead of giving them yet another reason not to? The pool of players isn't infinite, especially on a game of legal age to drink, and even less so in a niche of it; creating quit moments to have temporary "solutions" that creates long term losses is an unfavourable trade; while we can (but shouldnt) retcon (particularly) bad decisions, go getting people interested in the server is between very much more hard and borderline impossible outside of physiological means There are IC methods to deal with commands that makes nonsensical/bad decisions, if those are insufficient to deal with them we should empower those, if the captain makes an objectively bad decision and refuses to hear the rest of command saying it's a bad decision, depose him. If there's enough people playing command, in a canon round, that all agree to what you think is a terrible decision, there's two fundamental options: either it's not a bad decision and you're wrong, or we have a far bigger issue than them having the command whitelist to solve, and masking it with a strip would be from painting over rust and pretend the bridge is safe because you don't see the rust to "fingers in the ears and repeating lalalalalalalala" level, aka masking symptoms instead of curing the illness(es)

Zero pressure does not cause instant death, I've survived zero pressure various times, once almost even came back in from an airlock after being vented into space in this exact scenario, sadly the shields were on and medical didn't seem to have noticed we were dying in space, or I'd have lived it out. I tend to agree to the rest of what you said, regarding new players in particular is spot on. No, is there a ceil of hull-breaching tools for antagonists that we need to keep their access under? Neither, we should give them what they need to create interesting events and diversified scenarios, and they should be challenging to face and fight against if they want to be for the story they want to narrate, they should also have the tools to involve different departments and people, sending people in space can potentially involve engineering, medical, service (priest), security, bridge crew (to turn around and try to locate them, man overboard scenario), and doesn't even need to be as deadly (add to the armory some sort of epoxy grenade that encase the person in a 1-tile vacuum-resistant instant epoxy until they are found, brought back in, and released from the epoxy, just the first idea that came to my mind). This seems contrary to what our glossary states: Powergaming = Also know as 'playing to win'. If you're trying to complete your objectives, kill the antagonists, or 'win', at all costs and ignore RP My interpretation is that it depends on what happened before and why it's being done, venting all the ship just for, without having announced your presence, and ignoring anyone that comes to you? Very likely; after an hour of RP, 3 shootouts, with the antag story being to purge the ship or equivalent? Doesn't really feel like powergaming, at least to me. No single change is likely to significatively change their balance, give them a machinegun? Some hits is all it takes to put them in broken lungs, after which you can go behind a barrier and wait for them to collapse on the floor, give them the strongest armor we have? More annoying to kill, order more ammos or rainsack the crew armory, but not really a fundamental balance change to have Odin running around with a peasy 9mm handgun, and so on... It's through the continuous nerfs and removes that the line goes fundamentally down or up, a single change is unlikely to sway the balance by any significant margin, but that's no reason to do it anyways, and is generally unwise to sway balances significantly overnight as you could have unintended consequences, a slow steady adjustment is generally the suggested approach. Maybe make it so that the tank has to be opened/closed to change between "open a hole" and "high temp high pressure area fire" on explosion would be more acceptable for everyone?

No worries, I'd hate to see some hard work going down the toilet, especially if it can be fixed

This is a reasonable, as well as more soulful, suggestion +1 for me

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/16092 fixed it for you, needs a copy paste of the area as explained in the PR, but it should be an easy fix, after which you should be able to re-PR it without any issue

Yes, if your limbs are damaged you randomly drop what you have in hand, without the need of having broken bones (or bones at all), for what I saw. I don't think flattening the uniqueness of every species is desirable, we could otherwise say that Tajs should not have integrated night vision and deal with dark areas problems like every other species, that Skrells shouldn't be able to be moving sonar-equipped destroyers and locate people like every other species, and so on; it's nice (and more interesting, and engaging) to have different species be different in different aspects, also mechanically, I believe we should make them more distinctive and unique, instead of less, across them all.

I remember messages of bullets rattling inside you, I suppose they damage the limbs/chassis overtime if they are left there? Just like a broken bone would? Maybe we could make it that they short things up and suck even more battery if you move around with them inside? That would be a reasonable mechanical strategy to me too.

The difference in damage modifier of a G2 is 10% less damage than a Unathi, the G1 has the same brute damage modifier of a Unathi, for a way lower movement speed, which is the advantage you have over them and the thing you should play onto against them. Setting up a barricade in the corridor would let you dump an entire magazine on them, probably destroying them, before they manage to get close to you, from the safety of essentially a trench, and when they finally reach that barricade (if they're still functioning) you can just zoom away and redo, sec industrials have no way to counter any tactic that exploit their slowness, because they don't even have access to a grenade (an actual one) to make you run away from the barricade as they slowly try to reach and overcome it. What you usually should do, is rainsack the spawn area as a merc and put every tool and weapon into your ship, this way when you choose to push it into becoming a deathmatch, you can go back to your ship and take the things you need to fight, the merc base has ion rifles there already so they're also free for you, I don't remember of the EMP grenades but they can probably be added likewise if they're not there yet? The only charger that I know of that has free access is on deck one, center-west, and would require to abort the assault just to take the IPC and drag it away, which I don't really see happening, that also means that you are now against a team with less people in, so you can use your superior firepower and numbers to push against them and either robust them or force them to retreat, usually without taking the IPC with them, at which point you can haul it into your newly found bunker or destroy it if you wish, it would also be interesting to think about some sort of virus technology where you could infect their posi brain so that they turn allies to you, I thought of adding an exploitable to mine to accomplish such thing, but something mechanically implemented could work aswell (and would work on every one of them, though I still don't see anyone playing them in sec besides me and some forgotten guy I remember from half a year ago and never saw again). The charge rate of the recharger would take a fair bit more, though you can always suck power from the APCs (assuming you go around and find them charged) to charge faster, the EMP/Ion rifle isn't a nuclear bomb that destroys them, it's meant to disable them, once they are down you can go to them and destroy them if you wish to, but in the end it's not too dissimilar from a non-synthetic officer that gets healed and ressed, if anything it makes it easier for you to take down their energy weapons, the IPCs and probably someone's mechanical lung/heart all with a single grenade (assuming they are all in range and don't run away in time, for the other officers), which is very powerful. My proposal was to block them from using ablative armors, which means ontop of all the other options that you can use against them, you can also just take a single laser rifle and be effective at countering them, hitting them in the legs to slow them down even more, on the arms to deny the firing precision (or outright making them dropping the gun randomly while moving), potentially all of this from behind a door that, unless they have laser rifles too, blocks any and all damage coming your way (and if you have an ablative armor yourself, well, you're essentially in a fortress just by using airlocks with glasses). Let's also not forget, you yourself can have one or more in in your mercenary team, which is also better equipped in raw firepower than any officer could ever be (at least until we start actually using science to build weapons), and I remind fondly when we fought against a merc gimmick with 4 G2s in it, it was a fun time and we disposed of two of them fairly easily (one with the PEAC, the other we simply gunned down). Most of sec would absolutely avoid robusting the antags, often we very much play dumb to let them run away free depending on the round time, and I had fairly positive LOOCs and dsays with people that fought my G2 and found it funny to do so, the mechanical aspect alone is not the full picture, but since it's the focus of this suggestion (and I hope everyone participating already knows it's not the only thing), I am not covering the other considerations that aren't solely mechanical based, but let's not forget they are not only there, but the bigger part of the picture, here; a robust specie that requires 10 roleplay step before being able to be used (an equivalent of the leviathan) and once done so can deliver immense firepower is better (in a healthy amount) than 10 whose role is the same yesterday's soup. For example, I assign "executive privileges" to the HoS/Captain with my G2 and, unless explicitly confirmed (or the situation is egregious), I do not use lethal weapons otherwise; this is just an RP example of how the mechanical part is balanced, we rely on everyone having fun and the RP aspect can, is and should, be used to balance out things, eg. Diona are generally pacifist in RP and lore, otherwise they could robust the entire ship, given their self healing, higher speed than a G2, immunity to the "resonant cascade" of pain etc.

I can see it being a good thing, so it's a +1 for me, however I wonder how would it impact miners/xenoarcheologists/others that use the two available ships to go do their gameplay loop? Aka, if the engineers want to go do this thing, does it mean that the miners/xenoarcheologist/people that want to go do away sites cannot do it? Is it a speedrace to who gets on the ship first? How do you propose to approach this?

Running from one side to the other of a deck with a G2 would more or less set you on fire, actually damaging you, it is not a sustainable mode to use to move around, not even considering that it would halve your battery too to do it, and you're still slower than the walk speed of any other species that I know of (yes, I did race a Diona walking, I was slower or at best on par, and I was running). For the "more industrial in security", I think I only saw one G2 player since I started playing (probably for less than a week, going by memory) over 6 months, myself excluded, and I got robusted around the same amount of times that I robusted, so I am not even sure where this idea that there's a surge of industrial IPCs flooding the department and magdumping anything that moves stems from, the balance point brought forth so far itself seems rather narrow focused, as it only concerns one specific scenario, with one specific type of combat, and ignores everything else in which an industrial would be worse than any other species in doing, which is the balancing factor of them, it even ignores all the other possibilities of gimmicks that do not use 1916 trench warfare tactics in them, as if making that specific scenario harder due to the presence of a G2 automatically deny any antag gimmick that uses anything else to the point that there's a need to immediately skip all the possibilities and outright remove them from the slot (a G2 would absolutely suck in a kidnap gimmick, cult that makes people disappear in the maintenance tunnels, anything non-overt, hit and run, fights in the maintenance tunnels, the use of any environment obstacle to gain initiative over it, hostage situations, bombings, use of grenades to fight it, any peace antag gimmick, any task to follow the suspects around to keep an eye on them, serving arrests, send them to do any kind of expedition escort or anything that requires to move over anything but short distances, and so on). I do not know what is so unreasonable to, in the idea of mantaining the ever-popular 1916 trench warfare tactic, propose to simply block them from using ablative armor, so that the antags can simply buy a laser rifle to counter them. To be clear, it's still worse than using a less brainless approach to fighting them, so that you have to adapt the approach/tactic with, and respond to, what is present against you, but I think it's still a more reasonable suggestion than "remove plz can't fire and brimstone line infrantry engage if there's one present".

This is wrong, also, don't accuse me of misleading, even less intentionally, I believe it's even not only against the subsection rules, but in the forum/general ones aswell. This is what your average merc has in your scenario: It's a 7.62 automatic assault rifle, capable of being loaded with 20-rounds magazines This is what security has access to, at best, ballistic-wise: It's a 5.56 lethal polymers fed rifle, only able to hold a 15-rounds magazine and capable of shooting, at best, 2 bullets per click event We will take our beloved "we took the bridge suck it" average scenario, so it will happen here: Security is at the door, you are inside, as antag; I'll make it even worse for you: you don't have any barricade set up. The G2 officer will start to roll in, at the average speed of 1km per year, from the door, in heavy armor. You have your best armor too. As soon as he opens the door, you're behind the central wall where the plant is, you move sideways and unload (in automatic fire) 3/4 shots, before moving right again and being hidden, assuming he's coming in with the weapon aimed and in hand, you get 1 bullet, 2 bullets at worst, before moving sideway. At this point, you can pull out your esword and, as soon as he does a step into the door, land one or two esword hits before doing the next step, but let's assume you don't have an esword, even worse situation for you. You move to the right and sprint away, outside his view, just as before he disappears from your view, you click in that direction: bang, bang, bang. He just did a step, he cannot move, and doesn't know where you have moved once outside his view (you have moved left of one tile), 50% chance of him shooting into the void, you, on the other hand, have seen him doing his step, he's in cooldown, you manage to land one or two shots without any issue, even before he can move. If you are an Unathi, the sprint has a good chance he would not even be able to retaliate at all, by how fast you disappear. You wait a moment outside his view, move all the way to the left, sprint one tile forward. He can't have gone much away from where you saw him, maybe two tiles if he's lucky, step back and fire another 2/3 rounds in that area, we'll assume you miss him with all but one round. He fires back, you get hit once, move left, his next shot (since with the burst rifle you cannot change where the second shot will go) will hit the wall. If you are skilled, you can even guess where he shot from, and using your automatic assault rifle, which follows wherever you're clicking for each single bullet, spray the 3 tiles with 4/5 shots, at least another one will hit him for sure. You landed, at worst: 5 bullets He landed, at best: 3 bullets So far Since you have nowhere else to move to be outside his view, you retreat into the bridge. He comes forward. You have the control of the situation: peek to see where he is, hide behind the wall, click to open both doors, wield the gun, pick one side, appear, fire 2/3 shots, move back behind the wall. Since it's a super fast reflexes death machine (again, to help your case), he fires back: one bullet, in the timespan you unloaded 2/3 (since your rifle is automatic), before hiding back, the other shot hit nothing. You can probably repeat this at least twice, before he's in any range to even be able to run enough to get a line on you before you can run back right inside the actual bridge. You landed: 9 bullets He landed: 6 bullets (you got both the burst rounds, again, to help your case) He is now at the doors, you are inside, you could do the funny esword again, now either from the central wall between the two doors, from the door on the right, or if he's coming towards the left (so slow, it's unlikely he will move, once entered, from there to the left, just to gain a better view). You could repeat the funny open door, shoot, close door again, from the right of of the bridge too, move in the bar, open the other door and repeat. He does not have an all access, and even if he did, you could repeat it with the BC prep room towards bar door, if he follows you in there. But let's forget about this possibilities for now. Dumb antag mode. You go to the left, where there's the console before the Captain's Quarters, or two tiles right, and wait for him to appear in sight, you know he has to pass from there, it's unlikely he will go back and take a whole different route, he's slow af, and generally sec goes heads on against the intruders anyways, so you already know where he will appear, you will unload another 2/3 shots at him, as soon as he does one step, and he will eat all of those again, because he literally cannot move anywhere even if he wanted to, due to the cooldown. He shoots back, since it's a supersec Miranda #1 soldier, you move one tile up as soon as you get hit, keeping the mouse down on him (no problem with an automatic rifle, as soon as you move it will just turn you back towards it, you don't even need to stop shooting, and the system does not introduce any fire latency on movement), he will miss the second shot, you can repeat it again on the next time he fires, you get another shot, meanwhile he's getting sprayed with bullets, with hardly any misses. You landed: 14 bullets (you had some more bad luck) He landed: 10 (again, you got two again, you was not fast enough to move away once more, this time twice) You can now retreat into the Captain office, sprint once more back, down and then up for engaging him from where the captain sits, you can use the console and the wall to do peek-a-boo more, you have many options, since you're way faster than him. We could go on, but this gives an example of a strategy to robust a G2 His projectiles do: 25 damage Your projectiles do: 35 damage He receive: 14*35 = 525 damage - 20% (.8 modifier) = 392 damage You receive: 250 damage You both have the same health, for what I'm seeing in the code, unless it changes from the config, which I don't know (but doesn't look like) Of course, there's many other things to consider, but I hope this is sufficient to show that it's completely, absolutely possible to destroy a G2, as a merc, using the appropriate approach for a heavily armored but slow target. The strength of the ship, sec in particular here, is given by the backup (mainly medical) they have, since they are playing "at home" so to say, lacking that, with two players with similar "robustness", the mercs would always win out. I played as Merc some days ago, we were against a full security team, with experienced players (HoS was Tokash, other names I recognise in the rest of the slots, there were IIRC all the officers, I believe even the Warden and a detective), we went to free a prisoner as a gimmick, we let them arm up, did some fucky-wuki around the department, then we clashed. My assault rifle, in automatic, killed Tokash on the first encounter I have seen, in a rev round, Tokash robust 3 revs, while hurt and unarmed, using a locker and stealing a shotgun from them, we're talking of a robust player We downed all sec to the point we just went "alright we're not here for you, the EMTs can take you and save you guys", while we suffered no casualties on our side, the only limiting factor to our effectiveness (aside from our unwillingness to execute or deny those in sec that were still alive to be ressed) was the lack of medical support, surely not of firepower. Yes, which is why I am saying, the strength is not in the firepower, nor in resistance (on the sec side), most antag players have less experience in combat than sec players and they do not have medical backup, that is the two main limiting factors, when sec players roll mercs in number, sec gets robusted and the crew armory opens, the presence or lack thereof of a slow G2 is not the balancing factor of an encounter between two similarly skilled players, unless they are doing an hull down and keep clicking encounter, which is both the most classic type of firefight (for various reasons, including avoiding friendly fire because you cut someone else's firing line) and also what you should not do against a G2.

That is the point I was addressing, which is, we don't balance around the lowest possible denominator, we balance around the lowest possible within rules denominator. That is exactly the point of the examples. I don't see how any of this is relevant for the proposal either, as it would not make them any more or less relevant (nor different) than they currently are once they are spawned (?)

Ok? The proposal was to remove them from Sec, not antags, in fact the scenario you've just described would be even worse if this proposal were to go through. You can quite literally (not with a SAW maybe, but most ballistics likely) dodge half of the shots, just thanks to moving. Done, as I said some posts ago, and I died too in some of them, thanks to the sheer slowness that prevents you from having an engagement, even more: A corner, they can poke out, shoot you and go back in, you can do nothing against it, since you cannot really run and flank them Harassment and retreat, similarly to above, basically uncounterable for a G2 It's also kind of strange that we're only focusing on the only aspect in which they are good and ignoring literally every other one: Finding the antags? Good luck, maybe in a year Arresting them? Good luck, they can just move away Any engagement that isn't hunker-down, head to head fight? Good luck Any situation in which you don't have a source of electrical power, or it's not available? You'll not work for long Hostage situation? Might aswell kill the hostage, you'd never reach to tackle the antag before the hostage is shot Avoiding a grenade (EMP or not)? Pray for it Probably other situations that doesn't come to my mind right now To go back to a parallelism, it would be like asking to remove M'sai from First Responders: Not only they do not have any disadvantage compared to other species (unlike industrial frames), they're also the fastest and most effective at reaching where someone got hurt.

The industrial frame can be fought with other weapons too, I myself got killed with one more than some times with simple ballistic weapons, and I was wearing an heavy armor too. Also: different roaster, different strategies, different approaches is the soulful alternative of "let's redo this fight over, and over, and over, and over, and over again", which is why different species have and should have different quirks, things in which they are strong as, and others in which they are weak as. If you have a mobile strategy in which you attack and hide, get ready and attack again, you'd shred an entire security roaster filled with G2s to the brim, with them almost unable to retaliate against. If you put up a fight in a closed location, and all you do is click click click click with a ballistic rifle until one of you goes down, they will shred you to pieces. As in, I am against the proposal Ontop of what I said above, that is simply not true: EMP grenades are wonderful to counter any other IPC that might be in security, their laser rifles, and anyone who has any mechanical organ or implant (so, most of the officers). But even if not, there's other solutions: give them more TCs, give them one or two free EMP grenades, make the industrials unable to wear ablative (so they can buy laser weapons to counter them), and so on. There's a huge list of other things that can be done besides "plz remove", that would make each encounter, each strategy and each toolset you bring to use more unique, that I really don't see how "let's flatter everything to the ground so every possible combination amounts to the same, repetitive encounters that goes as: we roll in, click click click, the encounter has finished, everyone heal up and redo" would ever even sound like an appealing, let alone good, idea.

Those would be wonderful arguments, if we didn't had a way to give antags more tools to fight them, but we do: Mercs can take ion rifles and EMP grenades right now, we can make ablative armors work less on them, we can simply make them unable to wear ablative armors, we can give other antags EMP grenades (to which they have literally no way of escaping against, given how slow they are), and so on and so forth. I will entirely avoid commenting on the argument "I don't like the role most (citation needed) of them are roleplaying and that's one of the reasons they have to go". They are very hard to kill, with the wrong tools, you can use the right tools to beat them: Ion Rifles EMP grenades PEAC-type weapons Literally running away, they won't ever be able to catch up to you A shield, they won't be able to reach you, you can shoot them, they can't hit you If you have a Tajaran antag, they can literally run across the ship 3 times over before a G2 can reach the other side of one deck. Unathi in hand to hand unarmed combat can destroy them, getting close, hitting and getting away 3 times before it can do a single step. Making them unable to wear ablative armors? That is a reasonable balancing I would definitely support (I don't wear ablatives with mine myself). Removing them from the role? That's way beyond what I feel to be a reasonable approach, therefore I oppose it. Keep in mind, I think we should make the antags stronger too, but the way is not by nerfing the other side, and definitely not by barring the slots even more, especially considering that they cannot self repair unlike Dionas.