Scheveningen Posted March 2, 2023 Posted March 2, 2023 This is specifically with regard to plate carrier modular armor. Presently, there are a few categories of suits of modular armor that exist within the game, each with their specific roles and statistics. These are: The security officer's vest/generic armor vest set, also found in the crew armory. This is equivalent to a measly tier 3 to tier 4 all-around weapon protection, but is certainly better than nothing. This might block something that does less than 20 damage, but not much more than that. The heavy corporate suit, or the tan heavy armor set. This is equivalent to tier 5-6 protection, and will block small damage attempts, or soften small caliber bullets without issue, but generally cannot compete to rifle caliber weaponry or better. The slowdown is considerable when wearing this armor. This is effectively the "medium armor" tier of available armor. The next category is odd, as they all include the riot suit, the ballistic suit, and the ablative suit. These are all one-trick pony suits that almost completely block incoming damage -- of a specific damage type that they correspond to, roughly tier 7. Riot for melee, ballistic for bullets, ablative for energy and laser projectiles. For damage that they are not specialized for, they do "fuck all" in terms of protection, with a measly tier 1 protection modifier. Interestingly, they have the exact same slowdown as the medium armor already mentioned. This category isn't even necessarily heavy armor -- it's situational heavy armor. If you have ablative armor, you can't peek the hallway that has a 7.62 rifle pointing down it, or you will get clipped and are expected to be mandatorily sent to medbay. --- To me, this division of armor to be specialized rather than generalized is deeply unsatisfying, and does not really make much sense to even mass-produce to be available. Antagonists have no equivalent access that which security possesses to specialized heavy armor. And frankly, the ballistic suits tend to be far more useful anyway, as taking bullets are the most dangerous, due to how easy guns are to shoot, but lasers don't inflict the great risk of internal bleeding, bone breaks or organ damage on the first blow. And even if antags did have their own version of ballistic armor, well, laser rifles exist, regardless of the side, leading to a stupid "rock paper scissors" game loop rather than simply abiding to what is simpler and more satisfying game logic: if you get shot too much, you should probably die. We can extrapolate reasonable responses to this: Either do not be in a position to get shot up too much, or bring heavier armor to soften the blows you take in order to get what you want accomplished. Or have something in-between, why not? Medium armor would still be usable for whoever is left over in the department, or for merc teams. We can do some neat meaningful tradeoffs for armoring up versus armoring down, too. I'll provide a proposal for what I think would actually be better. -- Stab vest: becomes part of the roundstart basic officer, warden, cadet, and investigator kit, replacing the "light" set of armor for the security department. While they possess identical armor values to the light kevlar set, armguards and leg-guards cannot be attached, and no helmet is included. This is just a basic code green kit - and since the old light vest was not mandatory to wear before, this does not have to be either. No slowdown, 3 slots for tools or other small items. Light kevlar plate carrier (formerly the security officer's plate carrier, identical to generic plate carrier also found in the crew armory): Moved to the basic brig armory with 4 carriers, helmets and arm/legguards, resistances stay as generalized as they already are. Has expanded-capacity drop pouches exclusive to light plates, allowing 5 slots for tools. The light kevlar helmet has an integrated GPS and helmet camera to be enabled at will, in addition to an integrated flashlight. It has two slots, perhaps for weapon magazines, or for your debilitating smoking habit. The crew armory generic armor set also share these upgrades, to permit the militia decent utility in a red alert crisis. 0.3 slowdown. The head of security's locker starts with a variant of the light kevlar armor plating, with an easy to pick out helmet and same old special stripes. The warden does as well, albeit as fancy as a standard light kevlar plate carrier. Medium ceramic plate carrier (formerly the heavy [corporate] plate carrier set): 3 vests included in the brig armory. Resistances decreased effectively to tier 4-5. Drop pouches contain 3 slots for anything small, and are exclusive to medium plates. The medium ceramic helmet has one slot for a weapon magazine -- or maybe for a pack of Space Newports? -- and an integrated flashlight/GPS. Slowdown decreased to 0.6 from the old heavy corporate armor. Heavy riot plate carrier: The actual heavy armor suit. Only one is included, ideally for the person expected to take the majority of the punishment for the security team. Effectively tier 6-7 general protection, with an encumbering 1.25 slowdown. Drop pouches may only contain 2 small items, and the heavy riot helmet offers no space for a magazine, given the real estate of the helmet is entirely dedicated to reinforcement and a punishment-immune reinforced glass flip-visor. The helmet still contains a GPS and an integrated flashlight. Riot shields are included with the medium and heavy armor sets, for a total of 4 riot shields. Notice there's still space free in the armory for another suit set? No need for it. Maybe replace the empty space with a sleepy armory owl on a perch that noisily hoots at people that walk in, or something? -- Okay, so, why all this for security? Put simply: people get to have roles now! The head of security, investigators, warden, and cadet generally aren't encouraged to go see combat, and instead provide, during a code red situation, uses for resolving the crisis that don't involve headbutting directly into the threat. They need to stay light on their feet, and most especially should be trying to transmit important information to their major frontliners. Their helmet utilities also provide the most immediate uses for anyone sitting on cameras, they can keep track of who's scouting around and also provide for second-hand accountability if someone does something they shouldn't and there are two witnesses for it. As for the officers, you have effectively three linebackers and one quarterback (pardon the sportsball references). The officers in medium armor have reasonable enough protection to hold any flanks, or the backline, or otherwise go at the adversary from the side like a hammer, while the person in heavy armor is the slowly moving anvil. If the officers don't work as a team, their quarterback will get quickly isolated and iced by a mercenary team that means business. Of course, most of this is best case scenario. Sometimes the HOS (due to a small manifest) is the only person who can take the pressure of frontrunning a serious threat and take most of the pressure. And so on and so forth. Speaking of mercenaries, they should also be limited and beheld to similar lines of logic, with some smaller wrinkles. They get two heavy suits in their armory, two medium suits, and two light suits - as merc teams can only go up to 6. Merc teams have to figure out how to distribute that armor just as much as security does, but they get to have two slow armor tanks instead of the one security has to manage. -- I think the proposal, if implemented, will make shooting each other a bit less stale than it has been currently, as well as make gunfights much more predictable and meaningfully engaging to plan for. In an ideal situation, you could just walk away from the guy in the heavy armor and avoid a confrontation, but you have to deal with the quicker ones, or they'll never give you a break. 1
Confused rock Posted March 2, 2023 Posted March 2, 2023 I don't know about this as a whole, but now that I think about it, the seperate ballistic/ablative armor types really do benefit sec more than other stuff. I wouldn't be sad to see them though, except maybe for how funny ablative armor could be in long past. I do think riot armor should stay, though. As it is now, regular armor is extremely melee resistant to anything the crew might have (as does ballistic and maybe ablative), and regular heavy armor makes you basically immune - and that's pretty damn lame. If current armor was weaker to melee aside from the niche riot set, that'd probably be fine, antags can get around that. I think that should actually be done.
Scheveningen Posted March 3, 2023 Author Posted March 3, 2023 11 hours ago, Evandorf said: How do hardsuits figure into your system? Stays the same. They're extremely powerful packages-at-a-cost as-is, the hazard sec suit being on the lighter side but lets you have pretty wacky offensive and utility packages. The SCC combat suit is much of the same in terms of offering powerful weaponry and utility, but it is up-armored - and a bit slower, to my recollection? No need to change stuff there, their effective armor values make sense for the resource cost they require. Miners have to be doing their jobs -- which is not an overly stimulating job even with the PvE out there -- and research has to be updating the levels for machining to be doing their work. 4 hours ago, Confused rock said: I don't know about this as a whole, but now that I think about it, the seperate ballistic/ablative armor types really do benefit sec more than other stuff. I wouldn't be sad to see them though, except maybe for how funny ablative armor could be in long past. I do think riot armor should stay, though. As it is now, regular armor is extremely melee resistant to anything the crew might have (as does ballistic and maybe ablative), and regular heavy armor makes you basically immune - and that's pretty damn lame. If current armor was weaker to melee aside from the niche riot set, that'd probably be fine, antags can get around that. I think that should actually be done. Ballistics and ablatives in my mind just need to go. Or get reworked into being ablative/ballistic shields as an alternative to riot shields. Lets people use that utility defense while forsaking a two-handed weapon.
Sniblet Posted March 5, 2023 Posted March 5, 2023 (edited) I think part of the reason every antag except for revs gets rolled in every drawn engagement with security always is that the first question asked on sec frequency when xyz bad guy gets reported is "wut kina guns dey got" and then five minutes pass and they're all immune. Antags don't have an armory to go back to, they can't retool and adapt to this. Lings only have the armblade. Mercs only have whatever they brought (it's an assault rifle). So specialized armor doesn't so much enable a dynamic battle of wits like in most games, but rather a means to ensure that security has the unique privilege of always having two (or four for melee) officers who are unfathomably well armored against whatever threat is relevant. Only a few guns really have AP and they're all in the uplink (or sec armory), so that's it, mercs get walled. And did you know, a ballistic carrier is enough to reliably prevent armblades and knives from leaving any cuts? So just slap one on as soon as someone says "help" and the valid only has one viable weapon type: the one that needs an entire magazine to floor any one gamer who's armored with anything, and can only reload in a few specific departmental areas over the course of an entire minute. From there, it's all over but for shouting some flimsy excuse to escalate into shotgun PB to the head. t. antag main Edited March 5, 2023 by Sniblet
Fluffy Posted March 5, 2023 Posted March 5, 2023 45 minutes ago, Sniblet said: I think part of the reason every antag except for revs gets rolled in every drawn engagement with security always is that the first question asked on sec frequency when xyz bad guy gets reported is "wut kina guns dey got" and then five minutes pass and they're all immune. This is literally impossible, there's only two anti-ballistic armors, two anti-laser ones and two anti-knives ones, sec has (at most) 4 officers, 2 investigators, a warden and an hos, so at best you can have 25% of the team protected against the specific weapon type the antag(s) is/are using. 47 minutes ago, Sniblet said: Antags don't have an armory to go back to, they can't retool and adapt to this. Lings only have the armblade. Mercs only have whatever they brought (it's an assault rifle). Mercs have a ship, in which you can rainsack all the centcomm merc base and bring things into, and in which you can retreat onto, additionally protected by two turrets, in which you can retool your kit, but generally speaking, you want the team to be diversified in the type of damage they can do, half laser, half ballistic. 50 minutes ago, Sniblet said: So specialized armor doesn't so much enable a dynamic battle of wits like in most games This is true, I agree we should robust the antags, and that they should have a solid chance of winning against the ship. 51 minutes ago, Sniblet said: a means to ensure that security has the unique privilege of always having two (or four for melee) officers who are unfathomably well armored against whatever threat is relevant. Yes, playing in their homebase, so to say, grants you additional privileges an intruder/assailant do not have: medical support, supplies, tools, knowing the terrain (not applicable here), additional accesses and so on, this is expected to happen when you try to take someone else's place, which is why all else being equal, you should have double their forces, and attacking is far more expensive than defending. 53 minutes ago, Sniblet said: Only a few guns really have AP and they're all in the uplink (or sec armory), so that's it, mercs get walled. Probably time to rebalance the antag toolkits, if it's an issue of weapons not being available and adequate for the job. 55 minutes ago, Sniblet said: And did you know, a ballistic carrier is enough to reliably prevent armblades and knives from leaving any cuts? So just slap one on as soon as someone says "help" and the valid only has one viable weapon type: the one that needs an entire magazine to floor any one gamer who's armored with anything, and can only reload in a few specific departmental areas over the course of an entire minute. From there, it's all over but for shouting some flimsy excuse to escalate into shotgun PB to the head. Yes, we should robust the antags, as I was saying above. Me myself generally try to not steamroll them, rarely if ever shoot first, and often let them run away from an engagement, as I said a bit ago and still think, the engagements are cheapened out if you know at roundstart that the opponent would never be able to win out, which kind of makes the antag interactions duller than they could and should be. It's ok for the Horizon to lose.
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