Thicc Blob

[Frank_Stein]

Give blob tiles thickness levels, that determine how tough they are to bashing.

A current blob tile is tier 1, and the current thick wall the tier 3. Over time, walls improve to the thicker tougher tiers

When a blob nucleus spawns, all the blob tiles around it are tier 3

The wall upgrade is instead an upgrade that lets you place tier 3 walls immediately, rather than have your wall improve over time

[kyle2143]

I had a similar blob idea a while back. When a blob expands, it starts out on a low density where you can walk over it and over time it would increase the density so it's as thick as normal blob tiles where you couldn't walk.

The tradeoff for being able to walk on blob tiles was that it would slow people and do damage over time to them, burning them like the absorb ability does currently. And then remove the absorb ability making it completely passive. Though I did make the absorb ability slightly passive anyway where it triggers when you spread onto someone.

I'm still interested in the idea but it seemed like a huge change to blob. I think it would be for the better though. Like if mitochondria can make tiles thicken faster in addition to healing tiles. But blob has so many issues I just lost motivation because I didn't really have a comprehensive plan and this would change a lot in terms of how the bloh could be fought, but idk if it would do enough.

[phyvo]

I don't think blobs necessarily need a huge rework. I think it's quite possible to get them into a more balanced state than they are now. Here are the issues as I see them:

Newbie blobs are complete pushovers. Anything we can to do make basic blobbing easier and inform them about how to move the eye around/make best use of hotkeys is good, but this is always going to be a problem given the nature of SS13. You could maybe add blobs somehow to ghost VR with some kind of survival mode but that's about it.

Early on blobs are super vulnerable because crew can rush nerdy things like napalm flamers, telescience, chem bombs, phasers and captain's egun. This is also the only period where smacking things with a fire extinguisher or lit welder is remotely viable.

Later on blobs become unstoppable by normal means. When I've fought experienced blobs it can get extremely frustrating because even *with* a nerdy chem thrower they have the time to spread, reinforce the spread so you can't kill it quickly, and continuing attacking you by spreading even if the reinforced blob tile is literally connected to nothing. Even teleporting in to target blob cores becomes extremely difficult because at this point they have many cores and since the cameras were destroyed the AI can't see most of them.

To make blob more balanceable, here's my proposal:

Nerf all the crew's easiest early nerdy crap. Unreinforced blob tiles should take 2 hits from fire/chem sources from the start and should be able to upgrade later to 3-4 hits. Do something similar with the E-gun. If blobs can more consistently reach their mid/late-game then it will be easier to balance the mid/late-game. This could be partially solved by the change below:

Blob tiles should have a base health that gets a bonus depending on proximity to the nucleus up to, say, 2x. Bonus points if it somehow measures it via connected blob tiles. Blob tiles should also get a multiplier for each neighboring blob tile. Like, 1x for no neighbors should be easy to kill and a complete pushover if it's, say, 20 tiles from a nucleus. 2x for one neighbor, 2.5x for two, 2.75x for 3, and 3x for 4. This should be additive with the aforementioned nucleus bonus, most likely.

Finally, since the nucleus is now much better protected anyways, make it easier to find the nuclei with the AI. Ideally IMO we'd make nuclei detectable through broken camera fuzz, but not fuzz where there aren't any cameras. Then again maybe the geneticists could be useful and actually find x-ray vision or fire resist...

Then from here everything from spreading speed to tile regeneration to nuclei cost (and max number) to attack power will need tweaks. But there's no way to find out what will be needed precisely without more testing and that will mean periods of time where blob sucks or is overpowered. Still I think forcing blob to be a bit more blobular rather than stretchy while increasing its nuclei defense will go a long way to making it feel better to fight. But these are just my ideas.