UltraNumeron

I really like the new sprites, overall its made them feel more like real guns. The old sprites often gave them a plastic-like toy gun look.

This is an idea I've been having for a while. Basically, since most of our antag content is tied to the uplink and technomancers are a solo antagonist thats mechanically highly outdated, this would give them an empty uplink and the ability to spend their points to buy TC and BC. This would both let them see exploitables by default, and let them choose to opt for less spells in exchange for gear, and things like announcements. This should hopefully give them more room to do gimmicks, and let them stand on their own as a solo antag a bit more without needing to rely on degenerate tactics like spamming teleports for survival as much. The ability to announce is also very needed for an antag like them, and several of their abilities synergize with weapons (teleporting behind and striking, locking on) with their usual only option for them involving generic lasers and a silly looking pink staff. While it'd be nice to see them updated more, I think this is the best we can hope for as of now, since there doesn't seem to be much will for making a more comprehensive rework.

Honestly, borers are pretty balanced relying on help from someone else, could just slap them in for around 10 TC, and make uplink borers unable to reproduce. While they can do mind control it's not really a full conversion or even hypnosis, its moreso just telepathy and temporary body hijacking.

Succumbing, at least from how I use it generally happens under a few conditions. Outside of just people stuck in a buggy death state with no help. 1. The round is ending soon, there isn't much time left to have much meaningful roleplay at the pace things tend to go. 2. Done by antags who have already been shot down at the climax of the round, when the story of the round is finished and the outcome is clear. For some characters it can be good to stick around to get some last minute interrogation in, or end with a prisoner being taken. But often I feel its good for the bad guys to die with dignity, and let the end of the round be a breather to have the crew settle with the consequences of whatever has happened. Brigging tends to be slow and messy and can mess up the tone at roundend. As for gameplay, medical is not owed much the same way half our jobs don't really have much gameplay. Although it is bad manners to succumb without good reason.

Yeah as is security tends to go from 0 to 100 on the armory really quickly.

As someone who plays antags quite often, i'll throw my two cents in on this. I like the idea as it seems to be intended, some things just need to be made clear. These should essentially be just checkboxes for what kinds of gimmicks youd encourage your antag to involve you in, with a clear disclaimer by that section that this does not change what you may get involved in within rounds, being just a showcase of what you're most interested in participating in. This kind of thing is mostly a tool for antags to see where they should start their gimmicks because few people have workable exploitables written and many do not necesarilly want to have a gimmick built around them otherwise, so this would be good for showing who wants to be involved in a gimmick around them and what sort of gimmick. This kind of option as I see it would mainly just affect how people start gimmicks rather then the flow of the round. Say if a department gets hijacked or a hostage is needed from there its really irrelevant what tags there are because the gimmick is not about the people involved there. And if someone interferes with that, or is at the wrong place at the wrong time they're still as liable to get pulled into it as anybody else would usually be. And a dessysalta said, an option to just opt into being no-escd works too, either as standalone or along with this sort of system. (Since having people that can be kill without escalation could be quite useful for building up a gimmick and setting stakes.) Overall though, this idea has good potential. Implementation needs to be careful however. Most of the people pro-this on this thread are the ones I see actually playing antags, and the ones against not so much. And it shows. This is a trend because aurora very much does have a history of admins butting in the middle of rounds, often in the middle of active conflicts to interfere. Sometimes for good reason yes, but I have not seen a server even a HRP one which gets admin interference as often as aurora does. (This all has gotten better recently, but still is the case.) Thats why having options people can check is good, because people don't want to be paranoid about upsetting someone and getting ahelped. I don't think many people really want god coming down and changing the flow of the round as the solution to things not going the way they prefer. There are good reasons to ahelp, though I really don't think its the sort of thing that should be used often to deal with things that can be dealt with icly. Having to argue why you did what in the middle of a scene to a random bwoink is not fun or good for the round. So why not just make it clearer who wants their round to go what way? This is a solution to a problem that ideally wouldnt exist, but is one we have and this is much cleaner than the alternative.

Suggestion: If its feasible without messing up much, itd be nice to have an option to toggle your power, and turn off and on your chassis manually when you need to conserve power. Otherwise the only way you can turn it off is by running out of that power. Also currently an issue with discharged ipcs, that when parts are damaged enough, they drain faster then they can be recharged by the recharger making them stuck even with proper equipment. Had a moment last round of draining hundreds per tick but the charger only recharging 13 that was then immediatly drained. Though to be fair, it was also in this state I probably shouldnt have been alive in but kept going even as I was powered down with dementia messages for 10 minutes.

Some bugs: Antags and ghost ships can't change their reactor or cooling unit, the button to change organs does show them but clicking them does nothing and keeps you to the current configuration. (Also had solar power set on the original character that rolled offship, and it didnt seem to work? While it worked as regular crew. Might be an issue with the lights I was at though or something.) Overall still same issue with ghostship/antag configuration in that with IPC appearance being tied to markings, and markings being unavailable in the appearance changer menu, making them impossible to color. Technomancer healing both with mend internals which is meant to work on IPCs and likely mend synthetics too does not seem to work, not healing any visible damage regardless of how many times I use it or where I target. Also the usual lack of antag healing for ipcs, though I do get it somewhat since it is one of the big weaknesses of IPCs to have difficult on the go healing and nonregenerating chip damage. Though some way for solo antags to recover when they have an arm disabled from damage or something would be nice. Overall rework is a solid improvement though.

Should be noted our armor formula is a bit funky and what appears as those few percent do alot more work than they appear to, making those specialized armors significantly better against their respective threat, and that there are only two heavy suits in the armory. Though I do kind of agree that the whole thing of specialized armor is a bit eh, compared to just good all-rounder armor being used, even if they are pretty balanced.

One thing, which I think may be related to the complaints about overheating. Is that having the safeties on seems to shut off running far before youd actually take damage from overheating. Being tripped as soon as you move from uncomfortably cold.

Not sure if having IB passively heal is good, but I do think it'd be good to have more safe medical treatments for it that don't need surgery. Since it is the sort of thing that feels like it should be treatable in this age of technology with internal medicine.

Yeah a killbot squad is kind of boring, theres not much to do with that other than just kill the antags if security fail. Which well, can already be fulfilled and is much more interesting with a crew militia. For this sort of purpose an ERT works best since that has more implications than just killbots, and itd be neat to see them around more. Though well, somewhere like the expanse not having help is part of the charm of the area.