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+--- Thread: Give every station a prefab meteor shield (/showthread.php?tid=24110)
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Give every station a prefab meteor shield - JohnnyJohn - 05-07-2025
Meteor storms suck. Like, really suck. 5 minutes is just not enough time to set up an elaborate shield system, power it effectively, and keep it running for the entirety of the event. EVERY SINGLE TIME I have been through the event, nobody has ever gotten the shielding up.
So, what if every station had a prefab meteor shield system that just needed to be set up? Like, you'd have to go configure the power and whatnot, but it was mostly set up anyway. That way, you actually have a fucking chance against them.
Or alternatively, remove the meteor shower event. Please.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - UrsulaMejor - 05-07-2025
The meteor shower event is a late-round event meant to help "encourage" the crew to get ready to leave the station. You're not meant to be able to consistently protect the entire station from the entire shower, with the exception of a few maps where a few well-placed meteors could easily de-air the entire station at once due to their density.
Usually when people say they're struggling with meteor shields, I ask them if they know that that can extend the range of the meteor shields to be WAY bigger, and ratchet them to cables to power them off the station grid instead of relying on battery. Did you happen to already know that?
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - JohnnyJohn - 05-07-2025
I did. It's just that the issue is, many rooms don't have great cable placement, and I usually don't have insulated gloves to work on the wires without dying to electrical burns. When I try battery power, it takes too long to charge the batteries. And typically, ordering from cargo is a crapshoot because the QM is AWOL most of the time. Also, I've seen them trigger at 30-ish minutes in, and I cannot possibly imagine how that's supposed to be late-round.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - Lord_earthfire - 05-07-2025
If the crew didnt prepared enough and can't be assed to buy meteor shields directly, they deserve to be meteor'ed.
Besides, evety bought or station spawned meteor shield starts with a charged enough battery.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - AmazingDragons - 05-07-2025
There's been this really weird mindset shift in the past few years where the goal is no longer to have as much fun as possible watching the station slowly go down in flames, to wanting a perfect shift with no antagonists, no negative events, and no problems. And any problems that do come up should be fixed immediately of course because god forbid anything is broken. IMO we need to be moving the other way, MORE chaotic bullshit, which is what this game is founded on, not less. And if you disagree with me, think about your favourite round ever, and picture the station at the end of it. How much of it was depressurized? How many secoffs died? How many airlocks were randomly bolted? How many law changes were there? Constantly nerfing everything that can do any kind of damage "just in case" is silly.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - Lord_earthfire - 05-08-2025
I fully agree. We need more chaos during rounds, not less.
The gameplay on stations got too safe. If everyone survives during extended roubds, we have a problem.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - Kotlol - 05-08-2025
(05-08-2025, 12:19 AM)Lord_earthfire Wrote: I fully agree. We need more chaos during rounds, not less.
The gameplay on stations got too safe. If everyone survives during extended roubds, we have a problem.
On classic sure. Since classic is a fast paced round with minimal RP. So more chaos in Classic is fine. It's what i see it for.
On RP... I'd say Extended rounds there having no death's is fine. It's just a chill RP round.
Anyway.. there was once a station that had a build in meteor shield. We called it Manta, but it had it's own quirks.
Meteors or CYBERSHARK ATTACKS were never an issue on Manta. While Manta is decomissioned.. I do miss it. Had the best bar in my opinion.
But having every other station having this? I'd say.. it makes meteor events BORING. Press buttons and it's done. It turns it from a stressful event to a non convience.
I am fine with how they are.. but what I think it needs more.. is maybe a few meteor shields on the station right away in EVA. Not enough to cover the station but enough to cover the most crucial areas. I'd makes sense for NT to skimp out full meteor shields.. but.. having a few on station is fine.
Maybe also add an alternate use for them so antagonists can use them for something evil, so them being in EVA makes them both good and bad.
But that is all I can think of a decent comprimise. Since if cargo wasted their budget, there is atleast like 4 meteorshields in EVA.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - Lord_earthfire - 05-08-2025
(05-08-2025, 01:49 AM)Kotlol Wrote: On RP... I'd say Extended rounds there having no death's is fine. It's just a chill RP round.
There is no extended on classic afaik, only on RP. So i solely mean RP when i talk about extended.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - JohnnyJohn - 05-08-2025
(05-07-2025, 09:32 PM)AmazingDragons Wrote: There's been this really weird mindset shift in the past few years where the goal is no longer to have as much fun as possible watching the station slowly go down in flames, to wanting a perfect shift with no antagonists, no negative events, and no problems. And any problems that do come up should be fixed immediately of course because god forbid anything is broken. IMO we need to be moving the other way, MORE chaotic bullshit, which is what this game is founded on, not less. And if you disagree with me, think about your favourite round ever, and picture the station at the end of it. How much of it was depressurized? How many secoffs died? How many airlocks were randomly bolted? How many law changes were there? Constantly nerfing everything that can do any kind of damage "just in case" is silly.
The issue is that the game's design conflicts with itself heavily. Nearly everything needs time to really be done, but chaotic destruction cuts that time short. You either sit around and do jack shit as a telesci TTV nerd blows up the station, or kill the antag 20 minutes in so you actually have time to grow omegaweed or do some cool station rennovations. Want to deck out your mining gear and a custom named pod? You need a long time to do it. Want to build a cool secondary bar off the port bow of the station with a teleporter leading to it? You need time to do that. You don't have that time if an antagonist gets the shuttle called 40 minutes in. The only time I have ever seen cool things done with this incredible sandbox code is on long 90 min rounds of severe lowpop where the only antag dies or cryos, and nobody cares. That's just not good. And a lot of cool sandbox stuff (ranching, crazy splice botany, hell soups, debris field rennovations), just aren't fun when you have to stressfully race against the clock, only for your efforts to inevitably fail because the shuttle got called early in, or you got randomly microbombed out of nowhere. The game is trying to have it's cake and eat it too, but failing miserably.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - Lefinch - 05-08-2025
I've been meaning to say this for a little while but I've been trying to find the right words for it. I probably haven't managed here but please understand it's coming from a place where at the end of the day I want you to be having fun with a game you're playing and it seems like right now you're getting frustrated rather than having fun. Please feel free to disregard it if you don't agree with what I'm saying, I'm just another guy playing the game.
I don't actually think the game design here conflicts with itself as much as it conflicts with what you want to be getting from the game. I risk suddenly finding I'm horribly wrong about this but: for the majority of players that basic chaos, risk and danger is what makes achieving those longer task from round to round more fun. It's reflected in the disclaimer we have at the round start too about things going badly for a player at any time and accepting that. Lots of people play a lot of rounds and find the challenge involved with random events mean they actually do not get to achieve what they want on a round. Which hopefully, makes when they do manage all the sweeter. Or maybe they might work with others to make those goals more achievable, which is an important part (at least to me) of this social game.
But that's very different to what it seems like you're looking for I agree. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like your ideal goals here, going by your ideas threads: A game where you can just focus on engaging entirely with the mechanics with no interruption as quickly and efficiently as possible.
If I'm right about that I certainly agree goonstation is definitely doing a lot of things that conflict with that: Player interaction, events, not providing every ability to every job class at once, all things you've brought up get right in the way of that. What I'm suggesting and I fully accept I could be wrong: That's actually very intentional and a part of what helps keeps the game interesting for people.
If that's something you really don't want I understand too, sometimes you just want to enjoy the mechanics of a game without interruption, but I also think to change the game to match what you seem to be looking for in so many areas actually would be quite a shift in the game philosophy. If lots of people piped up with similar suggestions I think that's worth looking into, but as best I can tell and I could be wrong: That's not so much the case. It's good to keep putting up ideas too the culture of this game has changed more than once over the years, but I personally think there's quite a gap between what seems to be what you enjoy and what we have right now.
I think there's solutions available: Either learning to love and accept that obstacles are a general thing that are going to happen while playing (though absolutely still keep putting ideas up, as it's always debatable whether something is a good obstacle or something that might want a QoL change), have a look around at similar SS13 codebases and see if there's something that does what you want a little better, or taking what you like, forking your own repository and working on either a goonstation iteration or another public codebase that's more like what you're aiming for.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - AmazingDragons - 05-08-2025
Strongly agree with what Lefinch said.
Simply put, the challenge of doing complex stuff should be that some asshole is trying to blow your shit up. Then, when you achieve it, it's impressive! You did a hard thing, it took an hour, and you managed to do that DESPITE everything going to shit around you. If you can consistently do it every single round, it's not a challenge, it's just a checklist. Fuck a checklist. There's about a million things that have been made less destructive, less powerful, less round-ending, etc. in recent years. I'm not here to debate those, but the CORE of ss13 is chaos. I'll die on that hill, and I really do not want us to continue making the station LESS chaotic. Absolutely not, never, no way in hell. Would much rather correct in the other direction, with a NITRO 2.0 or some stupid shit that's just chaotic nonsense. If you wanna work on solo projects, open up a developer instance on your computer, it's a little annoying but there's a good somewhere. You can practice making a billion dollars at QM, your omegaweed, and your SUPERHEALNEVERDIECHEMMIX. If you wanna do it with other people at goonstation, in my humble opinion, it should be hard and you should die sometimes. And you should lose power. And you should lose oxygen. And you should get bolted in by the AI. It's more fun that way.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - JohnnyJohn - 05-08-2025
(05-08-2025, 01:51 PM)Lefinch Wrote: I've been meaning to say this for a little while but I've been trying to find the right words for it. I probably haven't managed here but please understand it's coming from a place where at the end of the day I want you to be having fun with a game you're playing and it seems like right now you're getting frustrated rather than having fun. Please feel free to disregard it if you don't agree with what I'm saying, I'm just another guy playing the game.
I don't actually think the game design here conflicts with itself as much as it conflicts with what you want to be getting from the game. I risk suddenly finding I'm horribly wrong about this but: for the majority of players that basic chaos, risk and danger is what makes achieving those longer task from round to round more fun. It's reflected in the disclaimer we have at the round start too about things going badly for a player at any time and accepting that. Lots of people play a lot of rounds and find the challenge involved with random events mean they actually do not get to achieve what they want on a round. Which hopefully, makes when they do manage all the sweeter. Or maybe they might work with others to make those goals more achievable, which is an important part (at least to me) of this social game.
But that's very different to what it seems like you're looking for I agree. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like your ideal goals here, going by your ideas threads: A game where you can just focus on engaging entirely with the mechanics with no interruption as quickly and efficiently as possible.
If I'm right about that I certainly agree goonstation is definitely doing a lot of things that conflict with that: Player interaction, events, not providing every ability to every job class at once, all things you've brought up get right in the way of that. What I'm suggesting and I fully accept I could be wrong: That's actually very intentional and a part of what helps keeps the game interesting for people.
If that's something you really don't want I understand too, sometimes you just want to enjoy the mechanics of a game without interruption, but I also think to change the game to match what you seem to be looking for in so many areas actually would be quite a shift in the game philosophy. If lots of people piped up with similar suggestions I think that's worth looking into, but as best I can tell and I could be wrong: That's not so much the case. It's good to keep putting up ideas too the culture of this game has changed more than once over the years, but I personally think there's quite a gap between what seems to be what you enjoy and what we have right now.
I think there's solutions available: Either learning to love and accept that obstacles are a general thing that are going to happen while playing (though absolutely still keep putting ideas up, as it's always debatable whether something is a good obstacle or something that might want a QoL change), have a look around at similar SS13 codebases and see if there's something that does what you want a little better, or taking what you like, forking your own repository and working on either a goonstation iteration or another public codebase that's more like what you're aiming for.
It just doesn't feel that way to me. I never have a triumphant moment like that. I never see a triumphant moment like that. The only thing I experience is trying to build a sandcastle, and someone knocks it over. Again. And again. And again. Even on the rare occasion I finally manage to start putting the finishing touches on it, it gets kicked over again. And on some level I do understand the chaos thing, but to me that's basically just resigning myself to sitting at a beach and staring off into space doing nothing until I get kicked in the face. That's not very fun.
And forking? I need to emphasize that's beyond me. I don't mean laziness, I don't mean not feeling like doing it, I mean it's simply out of the question. I genuinely do not have the bandwith or sanity in my life to take on a project like that. If that weren't the case, I would have resorted to doing everything myself a long, long time ago.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - Lefinch - 05-09-2025
that's fair man, just trying to think of ways to find what you're looking for. It seems unfun for you that you're not getting those "win" moments out of the game. It also might not be what you're looking for, but have you tried running your own local version of the server? Could be good for at least having that space to work out things you're doing and pare down efficiency, but you also might be doing this already.
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - JohnnyJohn - 05-11-2025
Yeah. It's just not really the same without someone else. Then again, isn't that just a pardox of my own making?
RE: Give every station a prefab meteor shield - kyle2143 - 05-12-2025
Maybe it would be nice if meteor shields pulled power from equipment or environment apc power instead of requiring you to be directly over a wire to tap into the grid.