TOO MANY PYLONS

[Filthyfrankster]

 

Cultists have been buffed, madly. and it's frankly a tad overpowered (Even for 'high rp')

They have auto aim turrets that shoot every 0.5 seconds at every non-cultist , even off screen. The damage looks to be like 10 burn per hit and will quickly gun down anyone before they can even draw up a shot.

also it's been reduced to just a tower defense meme and seems a bit ganky

perhaps limit the pylons range? Or limit how many can be on at a time?

[Scheveningen]

The major thing is their window protection. They can fire through glass without any problems and don't expose themselves to ballistic munitions very much. It would take a very long time to breach the tower defense schema going on here. I think it could be better imo, like in an actual tower defense fashion where they are lined up vertically. The ones in the back shoot the ones in front of it and cyclically from thereon to supercharge the front ones, and if anyone proceeds further into the tower defense death trench, they will get nailed by 10 pylons at once per half second.

This makes them hilariously effective but the issue is that we shouldn't permit this to be a thing. Pylons were supposed to give cult defensive utilitarian instead of redesigning how cult should be played altogether. This is literally an uncrackable defense barring throwing a maxcap bomb into the room.

And to indirectly quote what I've heard, Nanako actually wants people to do that. Just throw a bomb into the foyer room where the station gets its power, right? Disconnect the entire power grid from the station in doing so?

Anyway, it is dumb. The dev responsible should've expected this. We can probably expect the pylons to be massively nerfed in the near future to unsuitability though.

[Filthyfrankster]

This reminds me back when the only way to get rid of cultists forting with an invisible wall meme was to siphon the air or drag a welding fuel tank and breach them all to death

no sec officer or scientist or any crew in general is going to want to throw a max cap bomb into a group of players and risk getting banned for causing some serious damage/ruining antag fun by blowing it the fuck up, we've had people banned for bombing antags before

literally no one is going to risk it

[Alberyk]

Done: https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/1962

[LordFowl]

For the sake of clear data;

Pylons will indeed fire every 5 deciseconds, or every 1/2th a second, very rapidly.

Basic pylons deal 4 burn damage, with 10 armour penetration and +4 accuracy. (AP of 10 isn't hugely important, +4 accuracy means they'll pretty much never roll a miss.)

Pylons have an effective range of 10 turfs, which is 3+ the normal range of 7 turfs.

Everytime a pylon is hit by a projectile that deals burn damage, they will become empowered for x amount of shots, x being the projectile's damage x .3. Meaning a regular laser rifle will empower a pylon for 10 shots.

An empowered pylon still fires every 1/2th a second, but will deal 12 damage - 3 times the amount of an unempowered pylon.

I'm not so good at math, but assuming that you're not wearing any laser-resisting armour (Which will be most of the population, except security)

A regular, unempowered pylon will be able to kill you in 50 shots, or in 25 seconds.

An empowered pylon will be able to kill you in 16 shots, in 8 seconds.

Be aware that for half of that time you'll probably be in crit.

Multiply this by all of the pylons spammed in an area (They are cheap to make - only require the sacrifice of a simple mob or a monkey)

Pylons have no definite health - rather everytime you deal damage to them their damagetaken var increments by the damage you deal. It then rolls a probability check of (damagetaken x 0.5) to determine whether it will die. Dead pylons can be repaired with a new soul.

Unlike a player, a pylon will never miss (This is made especially clear with their +4 roll to accuracy.), meaning that for every 1/2th of a second you are in their kill-range, you will be hit.

[sonicgotnuked]

Hi, I am the cat responsible for making these memes and am inside that picture. (I also am the only person who did this) First, I honestly don't think a max-cap bomb will kill station power if thrown there, it does not wire at all through that area. (It wires straight right from the SMES and into maintenance, red wires go into the substations and substations feed power to departments) Anyway, the mistakes I seen people do with this is security rushing the pylons with lasers, only then realizing to switch to guns when one or two gets shot down and soul shard. Second mistake I have seen security do was using the old cult tactics of one or two officers just straight rushing into the room and getting shot down. You also need to remember that you can not move pylons once they get a meme sacrificed to it. The thing about these NERF EM NOW is that they are really, really new.. so people do not really know how to handle them (gotta learn)

Without the glass, a simple crowbar will shatter a pylon so we have to give it protection against that. Just spray ballistics down the hall. Another thing people did not do is call ERT, before we think about a nerf, we need to see how ERT would stand against the memes.

I would also love to point out that you can get away from them if being fired at, it just takes one click of your arrows/WASD keys to get away. The only reason people died was from them rushing the cult (Like they always do) with zero co-ordination of it. You can also use a mech with the crash verb and fuck pylons up.

(People need to learn how to counter this, it is a brand new mechanic... also stop rushing the pylons with lasers)

[Nanako]

Hello everyone. I'm here to tell you how to git gud.

The pylons have a long list of strengths, as lord fowl points out. And they also have several notable weaknesses.

Unless you've been bad enough to power them up with lasers (stop doing that), their damage is 4 per shot. If you wear an ablative vest that becomes pretty negligible.

They are very vulnerable to brute damage and ballistic weapons. A fire axe or a baseball bat will kill one quickly. As will any ballistic guns. And quite importantly bombs. Bombs will devastate the area and wipe them out with ease. A power 2 explosion will always instantly shatter them, power 3 has an extremely high chance to do so as well. Basically cause an explosion anywhere in their general vicinity and you can wipe that room clean. If the cult is going to pack that many turrets into a tiny space, then you should deal with them using AOE tactics.

They are also very vulnerable to exosuits, using crash to stomp on them will almost always smash them instantly, and generally crush any windows in the way too.

But most critically, they cannot move, they only stand in one place and shoot at whatever they can see. This is your advantage and you should exploit it.

As it happens, the engineering lobby is a pretty powerful place to build them, because it has a lot of windows and denies you cover. You are at a major disadvantage trying to assault through the front door. So don't.

There's maintenance tunnels down both sides of engineering. If the cult is hiding deeper in there, you can easily just go around the turrets and never have to deal with them. But if you want to deal with them then use the terrain correctly.

For the picture above, you start by getting the AI to close firelocks and tint the windows of the CE's office. If there's no AI then force an alarm by causing a nearby hull breach. A hull breach has the additional advantage of causing any cultists hiding in there to flee, because cult robes are not EVA capable.

Once the firelocks are down, the pylons can't see you and you can work on destroying them methodically. Sneak down the west maintenance, get voidsuits on, enter CE office from space, and shoot from his front door where you only have to deal with some at a time.

Security also has mobile barricades. Use them. Push them around as cover while you advance. You could even push vendors or lockers around for cover Also SMOKE BOMBS. Cargo often has some, chemistry can make them. Turrets cannot shoot you if they can't see you. blind them and break them.

These pylons are designed for area denial. If you're finding it difficult to assault a cluster of them, i'd say they're doing their job. You need to work on tactics, formulate and coordinate an assault plan. I've seen it done before.

Snipers in space, shock troopers teleporting in nearby, coordinated entry from multiple locations and deploying heavy weapons. The station has all the tools you need to fight even the heaviest cluster of turrets

And most importantly, kill the artificier that built them. Artificiers are extremely weak, if you get one infront of your gun it's essentially dead before it can move. Pylons cannot be built or repaired without an artificier to do that.

We had the same uproar when lordfowl released his blob overhaul, and half the community was crying for it to be nerfed every round. Some still do in fact. But very little rebalancing has been done to those blobs. People simply learned to fight them

Key points to take away:

1. Don't power them up.

2. Cut off their vision, limit how many can fire at you

3. Use ballistic weapons, heavy melee, explosives and exosuits

Some rebalancing will likely be done on the pylons, but they're not going to be nerfed into irrelevance. ill tweak them gradually over coming days

[Scheveningen]

We had the same uproar when lordfowl released his blob overhaul, and half the community was crying for it to be nerfed every round. Some still do in fact. But very little rebalancing has been done to those blobs. People simply learned to fight them

 

They're actually still a massive problem on dead hour and left unchecked for five minutes they cannot be broken down by a single emitter alone. Blob is a 50-50 shot depending on its placement will likely influence on an immediate shuttle call once too much time is spent wasting on it.

Ballistics cannot be used to stop pylons because anyone with a brain will reinforce them with windows. Lasers are out of the question already but now ballistics are completely out of the question especially with a 10 tile range in which they can snipe you from afar. Shotgun spread is absolutely terrible and cannot reasonably take out a pylon from 10 tiles away.

 

+ Recommended tools for combatting pylons:

+ Heavy melee (fireaxe, baseball bat, etc)

+ Sniper rifles

+ Exosuits

+ Explosives

+ Ablative armour

 

This is in the comments of the .dm page for pylons.

Heavy melee: get fucking murdered by pylons that snipe you from afar and will kill you in eight shots if empowered, multiple by amount of pylons in radius.

Sniper rifles: ;CALL ERT, hope to god an AMR spawns in the corporate safe.

Exosuits: Get mech and its modules trashcanned by the fire rate.

Explosives: >>nanako actually wants you to bomb the station

Ablative: Doesn't work. The laser just reflects back at the pylon and empowers it. 80 resistance to laser also does very little to suppress low-damage projectiles from still killing you. 50% of 8 is 4. It just takes slightly more shots to kill someone with ablative gear if RNG isn't about to fuck them.

Good job, Nanako. Great amount of game sense and thought of balance went into this.

[Alberyk]

Unless you've been bad enough to power them up with lasers (stop doing that), their damage is 4 per shot. If you wear an ablative vest that becomes pretty negligible.

 

Nope, both times I had to face them, I saw this being tried, their speed and AP was enough to ignore the ablative armor. Not only I used the full ablative kit, but an energy shield, and that even empowered them more due to reflection.

 

They are very vulnerable to brute damage and ballistic weapons. A fire axe or a baseball bat will kill one quickly. As will any ballistic guns. And quite importantly bombs. Bombs will devastate the area and wipe them out with ease. A power 2 explosion will always instantly shatter them, power 3 has an extremely high chance to do so as well. Basically cause an explosion anywhere in their general vicinity and you can wipe that room clean. If the cult is going to pack that many turrets into a tiny space, then you should deal with them using AOE tactics.

 

Really hard to melee the pylons when they will mostly likely start hurting you even before you can spot them. Also, no, bombs are not really good idea, what is the point of it if you are probably going to cause more damage than the pylons.

 

They are also very vulnerable to exosuits, using crash to stomp on them will almost always smash them instantly, and generally crush any windows in the way too.

 

Cult can easily topple any non combat exosuit with emp or their high damage weapons, besides, I am sure that pylons might even be enough to destroy ripleys.

 

Snipers in space, shock troopers teleporting in nearby, coordinated entry from multiple locations and deploying heavy weapons. The station has all the tools you need to fight even the heaviest cluster of turrets

 

What sniper?

Cargo illegal dragunovs or calling the ert to use their scout rifle.

 

Key points to take away:

1. Don't power them up.

2. Cut off their vision, limit how many can fire at you

3. Use ballistic weapons, heavy melee, explosives and exosuits

 

1. It is not common knowledge they are immune to laser, so, people might likely use them first anyway.

2. Neither you can destroy them

[Nanako]

Without the glass, a simple crowbar will shatter a pylon so we have to give it protection against that. Just spray ballistics down the hall. Another thing people did not do is call ERT, before we think about a nerf, we need to see how ERT would stand against the memes.

 

They seriously didn't even call ERT?

Thats exactly who you're supposed to call when you can't handle a situation. ERT will eat pylon fortresses for breakfast. They have frag grenades, grenade launchers, ballistic sniper rifles, a durand and a dark gygax with a heap of weapons, and hardsuit mounted grenade launchers too.

If you get just one frag grenade into that room, most of those pylons are toast instantly.

[Nanako]

Ballistics cannot be used to stop pylons because anyone with a brain will reinforce them with windows. Lasers are out of the question already but now ballistics are completely out of the question especially with a 10 tile range in which they can snipe you from afar. Shotgun spread is absolutely terrible and cannot reasonably take out a pylon from 10 tiles away.

 

Ballistics are pretty good against windows too you know.

Yes they have a long range, but that's only an issue if you're dumb enough to charge at them down a long corridor. As mentioned, engineering has two side paths through maintenance

 

Heavy melee: get fucking murdered by pylons that snipe you from afar and will kill you in eight shots if empowered, multiple by amount of pylons in radius.

You sneak up on them, or blind them and charge. Smoke bombs + fire axe will work pretty well

Sniper rifles: ;CALL ERT, hope to god an AMR spawns in the corporate safe.

This was my bad, i wasnt aware you couldn't order a ballistic rifle. Alberyk should be fixing that

 

Exosuits: Get mech and its modules trashcanned by the fire rate.

 

Exosuits can literally tunnel through walls now. You can definitely sneak up on them and bombard them with missiles, or automatic fire. And get the ranged armor booster.

 

Explosives: >>nanako actually wants you to bomb the station

Yes. Problem?

If you think its worth throwing away the lives of your men to save on damaging a room with a little explosion, your logic is a bit silly. breaches can be patched.

Theres a whole lab in science dedicated to making bombs. And a chemistry lab that will be desperately happy to make some grenades for you too if you give them a chance.

 

Ablative: Doesn't work. The laser just reflects back at the pylon and empowers it. 80 resistance to laser also does very little to suppress low-damage projectiles from still killing you. 50% of 8 is 4. It just takes slightly more shots to kill someone with ablative gear if RNG isn't about to fuck them.

pylon lasers cannot empower pylons. If they're hit by their own reflected lasers it won't affect them.

[Scheveningen]

ERT rarely deploy to murder crewmembers, nor should that be the expectation. Does not matter if they are cultists, they are still crew. They are corporate asset protection, not a death squad. Expecting them to pack as heavy as possible with frag grenades that have high chance for civilian collateral is stupid.

Yes it has been two days since the update but the pylons are actually stupid in implementation. More thought should've gone into the balance ramifications. The situations they created in murdering a good portion of the crew to be soulstoned and then summon nar'sie without a lick of opposition kinda goes to show how much foresight was put into developing this.

And more than likely the dev team's gonna go over your head about this anyway if they think you went over the line in beefing them up with such unnecessary amounts of power. When are you giving security bazookas to compensate?

Also pylon lasers did just empower themselves as displayed in the previous round. Please playtest your stuff for issues before requesting to have it merged it to master.

[Ornias]

First off, video game. This is a video game. I don't mean to be like a fuckin White Knight™ here, but for real, it's not like these changes were made to ruin the game or ruin your fun. Stop getting antsy about every little change that doesn't go your way - if you don't like it, then say you don't like it, and make a calm statement as to why, but don't treat the coder as some fucking paragon of everything you despise. This isn't aimed at OP, because OP was respectful and put forward the issues he had, and did it the right way with examples, but statements like "Good job, Nanako. Great amount of game sense and thought of balance went into this." - really?

Second, I can definitely see why these issues exist. The main issue is that it can fire through windows and can't be shot back through them. Remove that feature and they'll be pretty balanced - setting up defences which can't be shot back is pretty unfair. Furthermore, we ARE heavy-RP, which means that someone is going to try shooting them with lasers, because why would they know that lasers can't destroy pylons? But I do agree that ERT shouldn't be necessary to deal with a room full of the things, and a single well-armed security officer should be able to make short work of them.

Pylons shouldn't be a threat on their own. They should be area harassment and that's about it.

[Nanako]

ERT rarely deploy to murder crewmembers, nor should that be the expectation. Does not matter if they are cultists, they are still crew. They are corporate asset protection, not a death squad.

Pylons are not crew, they are objects. It's perfectly reasonable to tell ERT to bring ordnance to deal with enemy fortifications.Civilians are expected to evacuate an active combat zone, and cults generally don't take hostages

And if the enemy has taken over and fortified a section of your station, you shouldn't expect to get it back easily or without breaking a lot of things. You may need to be willing to blow up one room to save the rest of the station. Trying to have your cake and eat it too is what got all those people killed.

 

Also pylon lasers did just empower themselves as displayed in the previous round. Please playtest your stuff for issues before requesting to have it merged it to master.

 

I do playtest my work. Ive just gone and tested it again now. Pylons cannot empower themselves or each other. Here is proof

 

 

In any case, i have submitted a small patch to weaken them slightly. We will see how things go after that. If more rebalancing is needed then it will come . For now i suggest working on adapting your tactics

[Kaed]

I didn't see much of a problem with the pylons. I was actually the first person in the round to be shot with them, having been heading back to my office and running into a cult surge out of engineering. Security figured out pretty quick you can't laser them, and got ballistic weapons, so I don't know how they all died.

I'm also not sure why you keep calling these memes. This is the first time cult defense has even been seriously used in a round. A meme takes more than a single incident, and it has to be funny and memorable. This is just a bunch of complaining about needing nerfs due to poor strategy for facing an unfamiliar mechanic, followed by some retweaking by nanako. Tower defense also isn't a meme, it's a genre of gameplay. I think maybe you just like using the word meme too much out of context?

Edited March 22, 2017 by Guest

[Skull132]

Something that might be worth considering is adding some sort of restriction to how many pylons you can spawn in a room. A static one or otherwise. Force some actual strategy in placement, instead of, "lolpylons, go!"

[Scheveningen]

You may be right on a few points Nanako, but telling people to "get gud" and to start toxins bombing areas with a hint of pylon turrets in place is not gonna pan out well the more cult rounds we get where people build pylon defenses. I have no problem with you standing your ground on some issues but you should really listen to what other people have to say before dismissing them. Give the rest of the players the benefit of the doubt and listen to their gripes and level with them fairly on what issues are issues instead of waving their concerns off as "overreaction."

Kaed, this is not the thread to make it all about a personal issue you have with someone else's character. Whatever the hell you're replying to did not even dignify a response to begin with. Kindly go to the complaints subforum if you got a problem and post all about it, don't do that here.

Much of the whole round was tilted in favor of the cult because of the two detectives causing internal havok within the department, getting away with murdering not only a security cadet but also the head of security and two other officers without being directly implicated as the enemy. I was one of those detectives. The pylon death trench absolutely influenced the cult is being able to exert total control over the station and have Nar'Three summoned.

Even though the pylons weren't the only issue, they were still overbearing enough to see from my point of view that there was no logistical way for security to storm the death trench without being hit by a frontal assault from the turrets + the cultists guarding the death trench, and from behind what with myself stunning armed security to drag off into a dark corner to murder or directly into the death trench admist all of the confusion, in addition to myself turning on the security force in a moment where they would've needed someone on their side. The amount of disruption caused in the security force that caused it to fail was no accident, I played my part to help security crash and burn all at once.

So, perhaps Nanako is right, but only in that there's only been one round on this issue of playstyle. If it is the security force solely vs. the cult, the cult would lose in a war of attrition if the cards were played correctly on sec's side. But this is heavy on speculation.

Allowing the turrets to function in the manner of very high fire-rate (especially when energized), able to fire psuedo-lasers through windows and be produced en-masse with dead mice and monkeys leaves a lot to be desired.

[Munks]

Hey, I'm the lizard in the picture and was there to witness most, if not all, of Sec's attempts to take out Engineering. While I admittedly don't play cult often, and haven't much experience playing Sec and having to go up against cult pylons, I have to say this thread (and the sweeping nerfs proposed here) being based off this round is completely ridiculous.

No offense to Security, but, you didn't put any effort into this. You ran straight in, even when the turrets started shooting at them officers just kept trying to bum rush us. In addition, we had plenty of officers wearing full ablative running in and facetanking everything, getting plenty of time to stand around inside the room, and still not retreating ever. In addition, I don't recall ever seeing Security attempt to use anything but laser weaponry (barring, of course, the Detective's .38).

We were never flanked. The doors to maintenance on either side of us were very hastily disabled and could have easily been fixed within seconds, even after the AI quit. The doors leading in from the engineering solars and the airlock near the engineering escape pod weren't touched at all, because I was too busy to ever get around to them. Most of the time, cultists present were either in the break room, which only needs a regular wall teardown to be broken into, or in the rear of engineering taking cover behind the pylons, which made us easy pickings if anyone tried to circle around. We were hostile as fuck and there would have been no reason not to fire on us. An ERT was never called, and a perimeter was never established so we were constantly able to sneak out and steal passersby from the hallway for converts/sharding. No shuttle was called either, only happening once nar-sie was summoned. We didn't have enough people for a summon until Security had fallen, as far as I'm aware, so there was plenty of time to either call in reinforcements and really get things shut down, or to just book it and leave.

Maybe the pylons are overpowered. Maybe in the future they should see some sort of nerf. But from what I can tell, people are wanting the pylons to be nerfed to shit based on a single round where the station fell because Security didn't feel like thinking.

Also, for the record, power was already cut elsewhere via RCON and the grid doesn't run through the lobby as far as I'm aware, so damage to the wiring in the area shouldn't have been a concern. Additionally, the picture in the OP might be a bit misleading based on the amount of pylons present; only 4 or so were active, the rest were just spammed by an inexperienced Artificer and I had to hide a lot of them away before they even killed anyone because they made it so we couldnt move through the room.

[Garnascus]

The blob changes taught me that there is something to be said for the player base needing time to adapt strategies. Although my initial thoughts on the pylons are something along the lines "wtf thats OP" i still think baby steps should be taken in nerfing them. At the very least hitting you from off your screen needs to go. I think once they are properly balanced they will be amazing. Cultists building spooky "no sec allowed" clubs in maint is a personal dream of mine.

[Nanako]

You may be right on a few points Nanako, but telling people to "get gud" and to start toxins bombing areas with a hint of pylon turrets in place is not gonna pan out well the more cult rounds we get where people build pylon defenses.

I don't imply that bombing should be used in all cases - a couple of turrets can easily be handled by lesser means.

Thirteen turrets crammed into a panopticon room is a pretty extreme case and warrants a more extreme response

 

Even though the pylons weren't the only issue, they were still overbearing enough to see from my point of view that there was no logistical way for security to storm the death trench without being hit by a frontal assault from the turrets + the cultists guarding the death trench,

I believe there is actually. Breach from space via the west side, enter the CE's office and tint the windows. You'll have two layers of vision blocking between you and the roomful of turrets, allowing you to poke your head out and pick them off one at a time. Breaching the area will also clear out most of the ground troops defending them, because cult has no inherent EVA capability

Anyways, i have submitted a patch for some subtle reductions in their power, If things persist to be an issue after that, i'll look into options for limiting turret proximity

Right now though, I allowed spamming turrets in a cluster because it's a counterable strategy. AOE weapons make short work of clustered turrets. You can even get science to prepare a carefully crafted weak bomb that won't breach the hull, and it will still devastate any pylons in its radius.

Ask chemistry to make explosive grenades, those are extremely easy to finetune. A couple units each of potassium and water will get you a little explosion that stuns everyone and shatters pylons in its radius, without significant damage to the station

As garn says, the playerbase needs time to adapt. And i want to seee alternate strategies being entertained and alternate tools being used. The station has so many offensive options you can scrounge up, and many of them would be effective. Medical, science and synthetics would be of great help in assaulting this kind of base

Go ask chemistry for help. Many chemistry players lives in eternal readiness for the day security will ask them to make grenades, gas weapons and advanced combat stims

[sonicgotnuked]

Get chemistry to make dermaline nades, lots of dermaline.

[Snoopy11]

This is beginning to seem like we're allowing powercreep in.

"Oh, well, you guys have chemistry. Let them make you healing grenades LOL"

[Scheveningen]

Better known as "min-maxing".

Either no one else here has ever played a competitive video game before or they want to turn this server into a competitive atmosphere.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

I'm genuinely suprised that there is not a hard limit on the number of pylons like there are runes. Surely 5 or 6 is enough.

[Arrow768]

I´d rather not hard limit it, but scale up the cost with increasing turret numbers.