Goonhub
01-20-2021, 11:49 AM
I like Pathology. I want it to come back. I'm not going to claim it's perfect at all but I really don't think it is in a "Broken" state at all in it's current state and can easily be added to the current rounds and worked on over-time like most other features. Nothing really exploded - outside of the first few rounds where obviously everyone is messing around with it, but as the week went on I barely saw any disease outbreaks, and even then it was usually relatively mundane like bee-sneezing and just kinda fun. People complaining about it just aren't used to fighting diseases and knowing how to cure them, and trust me curing them is easy as can be.
For improvements - the interface is still kind of a mess. I talked in discord about this so I am sure you already know, but the "known samples" area could really be streamlined if it's supposed to be your little catalogue of symptoms and things. At the very least have it mention if it's good/bad. It'd also be nice to be able to keep track of what symptom each sample causes. I still think the chart itself is a bit of a pain to navigate and a whole interface change of maybe a flow chart or something else would be more appealing to look at - but that's asking for a lot.
The disease gas/sweat looks so much nicer now that it isn't slippy liquid and is more like blood splatters and spore gas. I still think the individual sprites for those could be spruced up a bit but still, looks much better than it did before.
As for people saying it doesn't interact much, I'll say it isn't any more anti-social than genetics. Perhaps a way to speed up your research from volunteers or ordering things from cargo to get better samples. I don't think it should "rely" on any outside department in its current state. Even in an ideal situation of you locking yourself into your room it can take forever to get an interesting disease and having to rely on John QM to constantly sample back crates or whatever would be a pain in the ass.
Also I gotta mention traitor stuff to make it more convenient. So maybe a few tiny ideas.
1. Traitor Disease Codex - (Big list of almost all the symptoms so you can make a custom disease without spending an hour searching, probably big cost.)
2. Disease Box - (Like random poison bottles, but instead it's diseases that are exclusively bad symptoms and go up to T4?)
3. Assassination Pathogen - (A very very deadly T5 Pathogen that can't be manipulated or spliced at all, it has zero spread so mostly used to give an unwitting person a bad disease.)
tl;dr - Make pathology regular again. It isn't broken at all and I enjoyed it, plus more feedback and changes get made when its tested by randoms more.
For improvements - the interface is still kind of a mess. I talked in discord about this so I am sure you already know, but the "known samples" area could really be streamlined if it's supposed to be your little catalogue of symptoms and things. At the very least have it mention if it's good/bad. It'd also be nice to be able to keep track of what symptom each sample causes. I still think the chart itself is a bit of a pain to navigate and a whole interface change of maybe a flow chart or something else would be more appealing to look at - but that's asking for a lot.
The disease gas/sweat looks so much nicer now that it isn't slippy liquid and is more like blood splatters and spore gas. I still think the individual sprites for those could be spruced up a bit but still, looks much better than it did before.
As for people saying it doesn't interact much, I'll say it isn't any more anti-social than genetics. Perhaps a way to speed up your research from volunteers or ordering things from cargo to get better samples. I don't think it should "rely" on any outside department in its current state. Even in an ideal situation of you locking yourself into your room it can take forever to get an interesting disease and having to rely on John QM to constantly sample back crates or whatever would be a pain in the ass.
Also I gotta mention traitor stuff to make it more convenient. So maybe a few tiny ideas.
1. Traitor Disease Codex - (Big list of almost all the symptoms so you can make a custom disease without spending an hour searching, probably big cost.)
2. Disease Box - (Like random poison bottles, but instead it's diseases that are exclusively bad symptoms and go up to T4?)
3. Assassination Pathogen - (A very very deadly T5 Pathogen that can't be manipulated or spliced at all, it has zero spread so mostly used to give an unwitting person a bad disease.)
tl;dr - Make pathology regular again. It isn't broken at all and I enjoyed it, plus more feedback and changes get made when its tested by randoms more.