Siege mode. A Gamemode idea.

[Nanako]

Antagonists usually hit the station unprepared. Either because they start blowing things up really early, or because an extended period of code green gives no legitimate reason to prepare for conflict, we're supposed to RP a normal functioning station where the antags are a rare anomaly

This post by 1138 seems to highlight this mentality. And while i don't think there's anything wrong with this style of play, a little difference once in a while couldn't hurt.

Siege mode is my idea to give us an opportunity to do something different.

How it would work? At the start of the round, or very near the start, there will be a central command update, that unidentified, but probably hostile ships have been seen heading towards the station, and are expected to arrive in about an hour. There would be occasional warnings indicating the ships are closer and giving another ETA. But sometime before arrival (maybe 15 minutes ish) command would issue an update that they've lost track of the ships, and can't tell when they'll arrive, or whether they already have

Therefore, for the first hour of the round, the station is going to be on code blue/ Security will order lots of hardsuits and energy weapons, the roboticist will have legitimate reason to build the rarely-seen gygax and durand mechs, science will work overtime on producing high tech weapons, engineering will setup shield generators, upgrade substations, and make sure every department is prepared to cope with power interruption. Medical will produce large quantities of emergency medications, and make sure several people are driving odysseus suits. Turrets will be setup at strategic locations, ED-209s will roam the halls

Everyone will spend the first hour preparing for war.

After that hour, the antags will arrive. Two, maybe three sets of antagonists will be randomly chosen from the available list, and unleashed upon the station. They might even be enhanced. Cultists could start with a couple of constructs, traitors could be given twice as many points to spend or simply have more traitors, wizards get more spell slots, changelings start with a significant pool of evolution points to spend, etc. Both sides will bring their best, and face off against each other at the peak of their power.

Now some technical details. Who will be the antags? A couple of ideas come to mind.

First and foremost, some time before the antags arrive (maybe 15-30 minutes in advance) newly joining players will be notified of this, and encouraged to wait around as observers instead of joining the crew.

Secondly, in the case of some antags, such as a malfunctioning AI, revolutionaries, changelings, or traitors, those antags would be chosen from people already on the crew, who have opted in to playing that antag during character setup. It can be assumed they've been there all along, but have been waiting for the arriving ship to create an opportunity to get started

If there's not enough of a ghost pool, some people who've opted into appropriate antags will be given an automated suggestion to go to cryo, which will cause them to go into storage immediately and respawn as an antag. Most likely, there would be people doing this already without prompting, who know they can go into cryo near the end of the first hour and reliably respawn as an antag.

Other antags, like wizard, ninja, and raiders, will start off-station and attempt to insert themselves on the station somehow. The cult here i'd envision as a hostile force, so they'd arrive with lots of runes learned, and some constructs already available

Thoughts? Refinements? Improvements?

[Snakebittenn]

I'm about this. It sounds like a pretty damn fun roundtype.

[Zundy]

Sounds fun to me so I'm all for it. Perhaps less time to prepare but that's just my opinion and I wouldn't mind either way.

[afitz]

I think this is a rather good idea. Over time I think much balancing will be required.

I can imagine it now:

Quartermaster hassling their miners to supply the war effort, the hallways being locked down and checkpoints being set up. Barricades ready to deploy and the AI to rule the locks. Everyone has a purpose and no one is left out. During waves or calm moments you have engineering scrambling to fix what they can, sectors being setup to supply shields with power and there is never downtime.

[Garnascus]

This would probably be pretty easy to setup honestly.... Would be easy to build some sort of "staging area" for type antags to spawn from. If we make current crew some of antags however they are gonna have to be beefed up substantially.

Energy axes for everyone ?

[UnknownMurder]

Space Station 13: Siege

"Hey, you Castle! Reinforce that wall!"

"Mute, start setting disrupters!"

"Make sure you set some traps, Kapkan!"

"Doc, keep your stimpack pistol ready!"

"I'll camp here and throw my nitro cell! I'm a recruit."

By the way, one hour seems a bit too long and CT may come a hour later before you know it.

Secondly, it seems like a way or a purpose to murderbone each other without capture. Either ways, there will be one person who has a desire to kill people on either side or both. It's just one of those game modes where you get to kill each other. We already have Colonial Marines that does this. Set up mines, set up barricades, set the turrets; such as that. Just playing devil's advocate here.

Third, I love Rainbow Six Siege, but can't we have chosen a better game mode name rather copying it?

[Feorn]

Shield generators would have to be removed or nerfed for this game mode. Especially with an hour of prep time. You could bump the engine output up high enough to run both a bubble and a hull shield from the middle of the station at max size. Each shield would only individually be at strength 2, but once you got one layer down, you'd still have to beat through the next one, and by that time the first one would probably be back up.

[Nanako]

Shield generators would have to be removed or nerfed for this game mode. Especially with an hour of prep time. You could bump the engine output up high enough to run both a bubble and a hull shield from the middle of the station at max size. Each shield would only individually be at strength 2, but once you got one layer down, you'd still have to beat through the next one, and by that time the first one would probably be back up.

 

I have an idea for that.

Make shield barriers be much weaker, or just nonexistent, at airlocks.

A shield would prevent antags from blowing their way through the hull easily, and force them to enter via an airlock,or a shuttle in from the outpost

or just give some antags access to special anti-shield weapons perhaps

Can you make a bubble shield that size? That's pretty crazy, i'd probably also recommend nerfing the maximum radius of those, they should be for protecting small areas surely, not the whole station. thats what hull shields are for

[Feorn]

Actually, looking at the shield generator code, a decent sized bomb would let you get through pretty quickly, especially if it is well placed.

[Alberyk]

Actually, looking at the shield generator code, a decent sized bomb would let you get through pretty quickly, especially if it is well placed.

 

I am nearly sure that the station wide shield can be easily destroyed by a single bullet or laser.

[Dreamix]

Powergame: the gamemode.

I can already see engineering maxing out the engine and setting up lots of shields. Or every edgy validhunter from security walking around with guns in hands, constantly taunting the intruders. Or medical with their cryo-pods filled with lots of peridoxan, clonexadone and various other chems. Or science mass-producing overpowered mechs, bombs and technology. Or cargo ordering weapons, weapons and more weapons, supplying everyone with overpowered LWAP's. Or command ready to swipe for ERT and emergency shuttle shortly after the first announcement. Not even mentioning that anyone may have stun-gloves, a stun-prod or some chloral hydrate in their backpack, or even a macro /say "; help, they're killing me", so hostages are out of the game, only killing.

And civilian departments just sitting there bored, waiting for the death to come.

Nonetheless, that would be nice as another alien-like murderboner event, but not an everyday gamemode, especially on HRP server we are.

[Feorn]

I am nearly sure that the station wide shield can be easily destroyed by a single bullet or laser.

 

Hull shield can cover the entire station at 3 Renwicks, which requires 30 projectile damage to lower. Two laser hits. Two small pistol hits. One hit for pretty much everything else. The really frustrating part comes from the fact that the shield will come back in ten ticks.

Charge rate for station wide hull shield is pretty slow, but it will charge at .1 Renwicks a second until 1 Renwick when the shield reforms. Bubble shield can cover the entire station at 2 Renwicks, same charge rate.

So, yes, a team could temporarily breach the shield with guns, they'd have to all get through the walls in ten seconds before the shield brought itself back online. A decent bomb could probably bring both shields down at the same time. It could also be much much worse, if the crew decided to bunker up in engineering, they could modify the station to have both shields running at 10 Renwicks at the max charge rate of .5 a tick.

It would be immensely frustrating, and really not fun to have antagonists have to fight through those shields.

[Guest Menown]

Third, I love Rainbow Six Siege, but can't we have chosen a better game mode name rather copying it?

 

Siege. Noun.

1) the act or process of surrounding and attacking a fortified place in such a way as to isolate it from help and supplies, for the purpose of lessening the resistance of the defenders and thereby making capture possible.

If by sharing a gamemode's name with another game's name, by that logic vampire was stolen from various vampire games, cult was stolen from Call of Cthulu/the Democratic National Convention, and extended was stolen from RealityKings. That's not really on-topic at all, UM.

Anyway, back to the suggestion. This seems like something better with the antags being handpicked by admins themselves, since as we know, trusting random people with things leads to bad things.

> Cultists getting starting words

All this will do is lead to them getting Nur'sie quicker. Nine times out of eleven, they'll just do that, instead of any massive RP moment or something, as we've seen in the past.

[Butterrobber202]

Disable Nar'Sie, only allow Kawii Nar'Sie

[Lucychan42]

I think this would honestly be a really cool thing to do for a special event. Maybe plan that one day at a certain time is siege day and there's a round or two where it's played. Some sort of exciting day where the sole purpose is an exciting siege and everyone prepares. The very nature of a siege is kinda breaking IC stuff, but it could definitely be a fun admin event to do every so often.

[UnknownMurder]

Third, I love Rainbow Six Siege, but can't we have chosen a better game mode name rather copying it?

If by sharing a gamemode's name with another game's name, by that logic vampire was stolen from various vampire games, cult was stolen from Call of Cthulu/the Democratic National Convention, and extended was stolen from RealityKings. That's not really on-topic at all, UM.

 

Don't take it as offense, it is on-topic, henceforth; we are discussing the 'game mode idea' which involves everything regarding the game mode involving what it should properly be labeled, how the game mode should go by, and such. We're discussing the oversight of the game mode, it's not that I don't like the name; however I felt that we could have chosen a better name for it yet the idea is still interesting.

[Lord Lag]

I would rather just add a mixed antag mode in than this. This seems like a whoooole lot of effort for something that will get slammed into the ground by every manner meta and power gaming.

[Guest]

I think it would be better designed if it were modelled after the "God-King's Will" game-mode from Lifeweb.

Effectively, the station would be hailed by X organization to donate relief supplies, provide a ransom, acquire materials or some such within 45 minutes. In Lifeweb, this is normally in the form of "4 strange organs, 10 shields and 8 organic manure", for instance, though it's entirely random. For SS13, you could probably do something along the lines of "3 decloners, 150 stacks of plasma, 4 filled advanced first-aid medkits." They would then have to send the supplies via telepad located in the vault, to replace the nuclear device for the round type. You put the supplies in the crate, you put the crate on the telepad, you interface with the telepad and it tells you if you have all of the necessary requirements. If all the checks are passed, it deletes the crate and its contents under the guise of teleporting the crate to its destination, and the station gets a peaceful victory and the rest of the round becomes extended.

Refusal to comply to these demands or generally just being too late within 45 minutes will spawn a mercenary killsquad. Emergency shuttle, ERT and CentComm messages are disabled when the time's up and the squad's deployed from active ghosts.

Round can end in a violent crew victory if the team sent to do their job gets killed off. Round also ends if the killsquad kills/detains everyone within their shuttle zone.

[Nanako]

Or command ready to swipe for ERT and emergency shuttle shortly after the first announcement.

I was thinking that maybe the ERT would be disabled for this mode. If NT is capable of sending an ERT, it doesn't make sense that they'd even let the enemy reach the station. so there'd be a lore justification that there's no friendly ships in the sector, and support won't be available until well after the enemy arrives (like, no ERT before the two hour mark)