Various uplink ideas

[Scheveningen]

Just a general suggestion dump of mine for stuff that should be added to the uplink. This mostly just constitutes stuff that doesn't fill a necessary niche at the moment for traitors.

• Niche missing: long-range marksman options, both low power and high power.
  Solution 1: Add the antique sniper rifle in place of the bolt action (because the latter is questionably useful in actual combat due to its low firerate, capacity and middling damage performance). Add its specific magazines to uplink as well as add to be able to be vended via autolathe when hacked.
  Solution 2: Add the AMR back, but tweaked to be magazine-fed 14.5mm HVAP rounds, 4 shot capacity. Huge item, no longer can be holstered on weapon armor, to counteract its power it has to be inconvenient for inventory space. Add its specific magazines to uplink as well as add to be able to be vended via autolathe when hacked.

Niche missing: Portable surgery options for antagonists.
Solution: Purchaseable surgical drone (subtype of maint drones) that either can be occupied by a player through ghost spawner for faster surgery, or left as a utility device that fixes internal problems at a slower, but somewhat automated rate.

Niche missing: Hologram deception device as an actually useful countermeasure in evasion or combat. Would help to inject Elyran tech even more into gameplay.
Solution: Holographic Decoy package, surrounds the user with identical hologram copies indistinguishable from the original source (they will visually hold whatever the user was holding at the time), spawning the decoys at adjacent tiles of N,E,S,W of the user. They do not follow the user's movements, but instead move randomly only as the user does to cause problems with target identification. If attacked, they immediately fade away, but also cause a small smoke effect upon dissipating. They will also dissipate if out of immediate range, roughly sight radius of the user.

Niche missing: More useful grenades.
Solution 1: Adhesive Elyran plasma grenades. They can stick and detonate on you and cause explosive burns as well as briefly setting you on fire, though not enough to be particularly lethal, being stuck will likely require an immediate retreat and a medical bay visit. Unlike other grenades, they are not very aerodynamic and are limited to close range tosses, immediately stopping after they are thrown 4 tiles. If you are not stuck, you will take the same burn damage but will not be set on fire.
Solution 2: Zo'rane spike grenades. They also stick to you, and upon detonation inject a fair deal of shrapnel throughout your body, but only a fraction as much as fragmentation grenades. Again, they are not aerodynamic, and are primarily useful at brutally incapacitating its intended target, though not as much as true frag grenades.
Solution 3: 'Fakeout' grenades. They behave essentially similarly to viscerator grenades, except in the uplink they are far cheaper and come en-masse in a box. These are holographic projectors that spawn hardlight-origin viscerators that act and behave much like real viscerators, attacking and chasing anything in sight that is not a recognized person. They do not deal any real damage, but can be effective diversion tools.

Just spitballing for now, might add more ideas later.

[BunkyB]

Feel like adding AMR ammo to a hacked autolathe would be pretty cringe, instead it could be:

AMR: 15TC

AMR AMMO: 5TC per mag

This way, if you spend all your TC on it, would give you 12 shots to deck 12 people, which I think is more than enough. Limit AMR to Merc Uplinks, too.

Or

AMR: 20TC

Keeping AMR ammo in a hacked autolathe except 3000 metal produces one bullet, in order to hanidcap the antag giving the crew more time to recover from getting decked.

Two rounds in a pile too, like 7.62 piles, still limited to Merc Uplinks.

 

Surgery Drone is a neat idea but it's totally possible that people who know nothing about surgery will just suck the slot up, ruining the purchase or just - not doing surgery at all because they're salty about being gamed. Safer to keep it AI controlled, maybe activated via ID like robotics robots.

 

Something I'd suggest is just some uniforms, Megacorp and Alien both; cham kits take up a little bit too much time and just get dismissed when super cool gamer detective discovers a dial on the jumpsuit.

Having some genuine, quick to buy and equip uniforms would alleviate this, I'm not suggesting to remove the cham kits but, just throw in some basic ass uniforms from all the major factions.

 

Don't have a comment on the other suggestions. 

[Butterrobber202]

6 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

Niche missing: Portable surgery options for antagonists.
Solution: Purchaseable surgical drone (subtype of maint drones) that either can be occupied by a player through ghost spawner for faster surgery, or left as a utility device that fixes internal problems at a slower, but somewhat automated rate.

Plagiarism 

More seriously though, good ideas all around. I was actually thinking about sticky grenades the other day. 

 

6 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

Solution 3: 'Fakeout' grenades. They behave essentially similarly to viscerator grenades, except in the uplink they are far cheaper and come en-masse in a box. These are holographic projectors that spawn hardlight-origin viscerators that act and behave much like real viscerators, attacking and chasing anything in sight that is not a recognized person. They do not deal any real damage, but can be effective diversion tools.

HALOS damage? That can still floor people if they get it enough, though it does dissipate quickly.

[Carver]

7 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

Solution 1: Add the antique sniper rifle in place of the bolt action (because the latter is questionably useful in actual combat due to its low firerate, capacity and middling damage performance). Add its specific magazines to uplink as well as add to be able to be vended via autolathe when hacked.

Can we add things without removing things?

[Sparky_hotdog]

So the gun I have no thoughts on. As someone who, on the occasion I turn traitor on, tends to avoid using guns as much as I can, I don't really have any idea if there's an issue or not, and if this would rectify it.

The surgery-bot, as Butterrobber said, has been brought up on a few threads now, and while I'm an advocate for it, it probably best to leave the discussion surrounding that to the other thread(s).

 The holo-decoy I love. I was thinking about something like this a few weeks ago, and any way to get more lore into the game is great, particularly seeing as Elyran lore items in the uplink seem pretty scarce right now. I also like the idea of having more ways for traitors to escape a fight than: Win or "Run and Hope".

The grenades I find equally interesting. I will say that when I read the plasma grenade being non-aerodynamic and then say "spike" in the name of the next, I was expecting something that was essentially the inverse of plasma. But hey, maybe that's another idea too. As for the fakeout, I think this could be neat, especially if combined with a real vicerator grenade :).

[Scheveningen]

re: the guns, it's mostly just lame that antags have to - for the most part - resort to short/medium range weapons at the moment, it is a large part of them getting decimated by security at present since sec just hugs cover and plinks you with the laser rifle, which is all they really need to do since they are the ones playing defensive and have a stronger safety net.

The surgery bot was mentioned not as an attempt to make the idea mine, but in hopes that it bears enough repeating that someone might think it is indeed a good enough idea and will actually put it into the game.

The holo-decoy was a result of playing through Reach again, as were the grenade ideas.

As for the grenades, 'aerodynamic' was just a silly in-character word to describe that stick grenades shouldn't be able to be tossed a super long distance away. They both use a different damage type respective to their role, for the most part, as two different stick grenades go.

I had thought about the fakeout grenades being similar to the holo-decoy in certain ways, but it seemed better that they would be a non-lethal viscerator grenade variant instead, designed to buy time.