remove the specialized security armor from the armory, replace with additional suits of heavy corporate armor

[Scheveningen]

"Hard-counter one damage type but be weak to everything else" is very coinflippy of a design philosophy, and besides the heavy corporate armor is reasonably competent at dealing with the majority of damage types, at the cost of slowing the wearer down. Replacing the specialized security armor with more suits of heavy corporate armor would simply be a good decision in terms of removing from the armory.

Also, additional heavy corporate armor can't be bought from cargo at the moment, I believe. This should change too. If security really needs to gamer, the tactical armor is an even bigger improvement on the heavy corporate armor.

[MattAtlas]

You said it's coinflippy but you haven't explained why that's bad at all. In fact, one might argue that's the point.

[Scheveningen]

It's coinflippy because security is able to very easily analyze what weapon the round antagonist is using, so they pick the armor type that hard counters them. On the other hand, the armor is hard-countered by a different damage type, but the game balance shouldn't have "hard counters" in it, because it's uninteresting and doesn't lead to different outcomes everytime, the outcome is always one of two.

Antagonists, on the other hand, have no such luxury, and often it isn't feasible to acquire different weapon types when the laser rifle is capable of 3-5 shot critting with an insane fire-rate. There's actually nothing in the uplinks, the game mechanics, etc, that can be regarded as a "hard counter" to security's offense that they can reasonable acquire without armory raiding to deprive them of those means.

The current pattern is, if the antagonist isn't doing a wacky peace gimmick, security arms and armors up with the hard counter defense equipment, shoots the antagonist to death with lasers or .45s, security all survives because they take way less damage, and then the round is extended - not that this is always a bad thing, but the way it works now is that anyone who flicks antagonist on has a death wish, and will likely not survive the round if they do anything. May as well not have antagonists if they can all be bowled over like a pile of feathers - but it would be much better to not have every round with antagonists in it actually centered around whether or not security opens the armory.

Edited April 28, 2021 by Scheveningen

[Cnaym]

7 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

but the game balance shouldn't have "hard counters" in it, because it's uninteresting and doesn't lead to different outcomes everytime, the outcome is always one of two.

There is little to no game balance and it should be rather obvious that this is not a goal at all.

7 hours ago, Scheveningen said:

Antagonists, on the other hand, have no such luxury, and often it isn't feasible to acquire different weapon types when the laser rifle is capable of 3-5 shot critting with an insane fire-rate.

This leads to either killing the officers early and rushing the armory for your easy green text or security rushing you as soon as they got armored up.

I'd say that the only thing currently balancing it is the fact that both sides rope skip with the rules until either does an oopsie or gets trigger happy, then it depends on which staff member handles the situation.

The result would be a loss of any sane antags which we hopefully never... Oh...

In all seriousness though. This is a good suggestion to fix one of the big issues. I don't want to fight the master chief tag team with explosives every time I allow security to grab a suit. Make all of security wear a cozy armor which makes them harder to kill instead of mirror meme suits.

8 hours ago, MattAtlas said:

You said it's coinflippy but you haven't explained why that's bad at all. In fact, one might argue that's the point.

2 sets of 2 specialized armor sets for four officers is like throwing a coin on a glass table on looking from below if you don't like the result on top. If there was another option to counter them this topic would not exist. But someone figured it would be a great idea to make melee the least useful damage type against anything wearing a T-shirt or more.

Got to use explosives on master chiefs. Fun for nobody involved. Armory power ranger suits should not outmatch any other armor (including most hardsuits).

[Triogenix]

The other option I see is just throwing specialized armors in the uplink for the same price as the normal heavy armor, and giving mercs two sets of each for two of their heavy armor sets in their little pre-deployment area(this is what security gets to my knowledge). This really doesn't fix the issue of how they're coinflippy or a bunch of the other issues raised, but it just gives both "sides" in a potential conflict the ability to get the same level of gear, instead of locking certain pieces to one "side", like the how the Laser Rifle is now in the uplink.

 

I'd still prefer to see them removed from the armory in favor of two new heavy armor suits, as it takes away all the underlying problems.