Ideas for improving Rev

[Superlagg]

How about adding some kind of re-education clamps in the brig as how the implants are implanted. Take a suspected rev, brig em, hook em up to the clamps, and some time later they get an implant and some sweet threads to show off that they live free in the NT. Along with some AI-style laws to always display some sort of NT loyalty outfit or get the clamps again, and to weed out the disloyal and get em clamped. Something like so the heads and sec have roughly the same mission as the revs, but less murdery I guess?

[KikiMofo]

Just normal pinpointers is fine. If rev has already gone on for 30-40 minutes its time to end it.

[Zamujasa]

Just as an update to this thread, apparently Loyalty implants have been updated to now show a "L" icon, much like revolutionaries' Rs.

[Roomba]

Can we remove the thing where the shuttle can't be called and the round only ends if either the revs/heads win or the timer runs out? Nobody really likes it and it just leads to situations where everyone is sitting around waiting while the loyalists/revs fruitlessly scour the station for the last braindead rev head/head hiding in a locker somewhere in maint. Just have the end-round text adjust based on how many rev heads/heads remain alive once the shuttle reaches Centcomm.

[Xeram]

Best way I can think to describe the issue inherent in Rev that everyone points at (Stalemates) is to look at how another game/gamemode elsewhere handles this.

So lets look at Vs Saxton Hale from Team Fortress 2.

Simple concept, one super buff, fast, instakilling Australian man punches an entire servers worth of the mercs to a red mist.

Except situations arise where the best move for both sides is to wait for the enemy, because Hale has only a small amount of health left and the last few players are still vulnerable to being swatted like flies and losing.

In the end however, the rounds end up ending fairly soon without a timer anyway due to a few things:

If Hale has played well and has enough health, he can simply tank the damage, use his ability to stun the final player and win.
If Hale played poorly, the final players can go on the offensive with increasing damage buffs as it reaches the final 3 players with relatively little fear.
If neither side wants to make a move, either side can immediately force the other into a "Fight or Lose" scenario by moving to the capture point, which unlocks after a set period of time (+ an amount of player deaths in some servers) forcing a confrontation to decide the game.

Quite simply, Rev mode needs its own "Capture Point" in order to force a final, climatic (or anti) confrontation. The equivalent of the phenomena you see in a nuke round once the alert goes out that The Bomb Has Been Planted. Everyone drops everything and moves to the conflict zone. Because it's either do something or lose and get blasted to fine space dust.

You know what'd be a great place to have a massive conflict that starts off at or on the way that starts off fairly neutral? An escape shuttle that has been announced is en route and won't leave until it's been occupied for an amount of time by either NT or revolutionary heads.

[Prichard]

In the future:

After while into the round, NT centcom will give the orders and make the station self destruct to “Eliminate the rebellion at all costs”

The emergency shuttle will be sent to rescue the heads of staff and be coded to be synced with the SD so that it departs 10 seconds before the explosion. Everyone left on the station dies.

It’s like a control point. The shuttle is IC meant for the heads but realistically the revs can occupy the shuttle and force the heads to fight for them over the right to not explode

If the revs make it to centcom then the IC rebellion continues post-credits and revs win

[twoski]

I think that fundamentally, Rev just doesn't work. It needs changing from the ground up.

I think it would be more interesting if instead of making it station heads versus the peasants it should be a split down the middle. First you gotta assign point values to each role in terms of what they have access to and what makes them an asset.

So for example

Captain - 10 points - has access to every door on the damn station.
HoS - 7 points - has access to a bunch of useful riot gear and such.
RD - 7 points - has access to everything in the science wing, which is nothing to sneeze at.
Barman - 1 point - no special access to anything particularly useful in a rev scenario.

etc.

Next you assign the heads of both teams. You have red and blue teams and each should have like 15 points worth of people on it. So you could end up with one team that has the captain and 5 lowly peasants (chaplain, etc) and one team that has HoS, RD and a peasant on it.

Both teams have to start converting people to their side using implanters. 2 players on both teams are given an implanter with infinite charges and a scanner they can use when next to a player to determine their team. I know old school rev used to be "flash someone and they become your teammate" but that was kind of lazy imo. You should have to restrain and implant someone in order to make them your teammate, which means that early on the station becomes a hotbed of abductions. Keep in mind many players won't be on a team yet, and players who are not assigned to a team should have an incentive to resist implanting. For example, a player that makes it to the shuttle not being on red or blue team is considered to have succeeded.

As the round goes on, the red and blue team will have grown (if they are abducting and implanting players). The goal of both teams is to  have a greater number of players on the evac shuttle than the other team. Once a player is implanted, that isn't the end of it. If they get captured by the other team they can have their implant reversed so they swap teams.  So there's a fair bit of intrigue and treachery in that regard.

[Dauntasa]

One rev head at the start. Victory condition for revs is all Heads dead or off the station z-level. Everyone other than Heads of Staff/Security start as part of the revolution but are not given antag status until the head rev starts the revolution by spawning a guillotine where he chooses to. All revs have a shared "Fervor" value which increases as non-revolutionaries are guillotined. Increasing fervor grants all revs bonuses and abilities, but it falls over time. The head rev can, for whatever reason, declare anyone a traitor to the revolution, at which point they are removed from the revolution and can be guillotined for fervor. The revolutionaries can also, at any time, turn on the head rev and guillotine him, which grants a huge amount of fervor and turns whoever activated the guillotine into the new head rev. If the head rev dies for non-guillotine reasons, then the next person to guillotine anyone becomes the new head rev. The guillotine can be smashed, but the head rev can spawn a new one after a few minutes. Head victory conditions are: Fervor falls to 0, Head Rev is dead and Guillotine is broken, or Head/Security manage to guillotine the head rev.

edit: also the head bucket is actually a microsingularity, because otherwise you could just sew someone's head back on and guillotine them again, it's a space guillotine

[Studenterhue]

Not gonna lie, but when I saw list of abstract point values, I kinda lost it there, and when I read all the talk about generic red and blue teams, I really lost it. Maybe it's just a working name that'll be replaced with something interesting, maybe I'm too adverse to complete mode remakes, but I know I don't like it. It just doesn't seem exciting, and I'm just not seeing any "intrigue and treachery". Aside from some nebulous win condition and collecting jobs like some sort of bastard corporate recruiter, what's the point in converting people? Like, you convert peeps in Rev because you need their help to murder the Heads, so why do you what do here?

Not trying to demean you; I think you may be on to something interesting, but the proper ideas haven't come on yet.

One rev head at the start. Victory condition for revs is all Heads dead or off the station z-level. Everyone other than Heads of Staff/Security start as part of the revolution but are not given antag status until the head rev starts the revolution by spawning a guillotine where he chooses to. All revs have a shared "Fervor" value which increases as non-revolutionaries are guillotined. Increasing fervor grants all revs bonuses and abilities, but it falls over time. The head rev can, for whatever reason, declare anyone a traitor to the revolution, at which point they are removed from the revolution and can be guillotined for fervor. The revolutionaries can also, at any time, turn on the head rev and guillotine him, which grants a huge amount of fervor and turns whoever activated the guillotine into the new head rev. If the head rev dies for non-guillotine reasons, then the next person to guillotine anyone becomes the new head rev. The guillotine can be smashed, but the head rev can spawn a new one after a few minutes. Head victory conditions are: Fervor falls to 0, Head Rev is dead and Guillotine is broken, or Head/Security manage to guillotine the head rev.

I've always wanted to take the joke I pulled out of my ass for Rev's description on the Jobs page too far and enact a real reign of terror, but I always felt that the usual execution methods of lethal injections, electric chairs, etc. just didn't feel right. Now I know why, and it's because we didn't have the blade they actually used! Plus, we can boast that we have a better game about the French Revolution than Ubisoft did.

Seriously though, as somewhat tongue-in-cheek as it is/seems, I like this. It adds a unique and, personally for me, amusing element of infighting that other modes don't intentionally have, where Revs are just as dangerous to themselves as to other Heads. Plus, because the Revs are more fractured and bickering amongst themselves, it gives the Heads a leg up too. Please, make this a new thread.

[twoski]

Well there would be a win condition based on who has more of their team in the evac shuttle. I think most importantly, rev needs to incentivize people actually getting on the shuttle alive instead of just going on a murder spree and wiping out the enemy.

[Frank_Stein]

Idea: 
Give the Rev Head support abilities that help Revs that stay in close proximity to the Rev Head. 
Things like boosts to damage on a target the Rev Head selects, or increased stamina regen. Like the wizards spells, the Rev Head would shout out commands, a charismatic leader boosting the morale of their comrades and rallying a victory. 

In exchange for the power the Revs would get from these boosts, they would be encouraged to stick close to the Rev Head, acting as their sword and shield, while also giving Sec a way to try to pick out t

[Zamujasa]

Make Revolution like Gang. Give the rev heads a poster generator that slowly generates posters allowing people to join the revolution without being flashed. Command and Security (and regular crewmembers) can tear them down.

After some point, a rev head (upon death, manually, or automatically after XX minutes) could activate the climactic "Storm the bridge" mode! The Command and Security staff have to defend the bridge while the revolutionaries must capture it and overthrow the rulers.

Storm the Bridge mode would have a 10 minute timer:
- If the revolutionaries control the bridge strongly enough, they win - and progress towards winning goes faster with more people (to a point)
- Any Command or Security staff member blocks progress towards capturing, as long as they are alive and within the bridge
- If no revolutionaries are within the bridge, capture progress decays depending on how many Command and Security staff are within it
- After ten minutes, or when all the head revolutionaries are dead, the game goes into overtime and will immediately end if, at any point, there are no revolutionaries occupying the bridge. But they still must stay there long enough to capture it!

I'm being inspired a bit by Nuclear Emergency and TF2 rules in that forcing the two to clash over a single point would bring the most action while discouraging a stalemate.

The goal would be to gather enough revolutionaires and get prepared enough to take on the Bridge. There needs to be some balance in that outright murdering Revs (or heads!) before "Storm the Bridge!" would penalize the killer's side by giving the other some advantage -- killing a revolutionary would only fuel the mutiny, while killing a head before officially declaring would mean the Command/Security staff is now fully justified in murdering revs.

[OMJ]

Loyalty implants immediately working are a little overpowered because you can immediately turn the tides of a fight with two clicks/immediately ID rev heads. It should take a half second like the rev flash does.

[aft2001]

As a little note, can there be a +1 trait that starts you out loyally implanted? +1 since you'll be unable to participate as a rev. Or just no cost/gain in terms of trait points.

I'd personally like an 'opt-out' from being a rev. Heck, even just making it so that you can't be turned into a rev if you have an NT beret on would be cool.

Perhaps also make reagents that remove rev status? Maybe anti-psychotics would do the trick? That way the Heads have some way to fight back, as haloperidol tranquilizers are available to both the MD and HoS.

Also, as a way for the RD to help out, the Buddies could be set to a new mode: "Panic". Essentially, anyone who is not a Head or is loyally implanted will be detained by the buddies. Additionally, it'd also be neat if you could make a buddy which loyalty implants people, with the caveat that they have a limited reserve of implants that must be manually refilled.

Could also have a panic button in the HoS's office which makes contraband scanners go off if someone doesn't have an implant or is not a Head.

[Frank_Stein]

Loyalty implants immediately working are a little overpowered because you can immediately turn the tides of a fight with two clicks/immediately ID rev heads. It should take a half second like the rev flash does.

Eh, considering that the Sec and the Heads are kinda working with their hands tied behind their back the whole time, I think they can have instant implanting as a bonus