Is the station too big?

[Clarks]

I know that there's a server that runs with 40-50 people most of the evening US time. But whenever the population drops to even 30, there is a lot more space than people and you can spend most of a round without coming across anybody.

For all the requests to add more maintenance and areas to build, there are huge parts of the stations that see no use. The market and old arrivals is usually dead, podbay is mostly a parking zone. Nothing ever happens in crew quarters, the courtroom or the journalist room.

Cogmap 2 seems more accessible, with the corridors becoming department lobbies. But this also a matter of scale, the station feels too big when player numbers go down, it's hard to have that kind of forced proximity that makes people work together or fight.

What about having a more compact station, with less dead areas or extra space. If people want to build their fort they can take over crew quarters, or some other place like pathology. Trials can go in the the chapel, or security can lay out chairs in the brig.
Maintenance is always good for chases and stealthy approaches, but a lot of other space is always empty.

If anything, player building could be made easier. What if there was some tool for players to build on space turfs, a bit like buildmode, that didn't cost a fuckton of resources and could make floors, walls, airlocks, windows, light fixtures. You can do everything by hand, but for anything slightly bigger there won't be much round left when you're done.

[Dauntasa]

i say that the actually useful and habitable areas of the station should be a bit smaller but the whole thing should be surrounded by sprawling unpowered and beat up derelict sections for horrible things to happen in

[mozi]

i say that the actually useful and habitable areas of the station should be a bit smaller but the whole thing should be surrounded by sprawling unpowered and beat up derelict sections for horrible things to happen in

yeah I actually like having areas of the station where you're basically risking your life going in unprepared. I hope these areas a distributed a little more evenly in the next map, they're concentrated all on the one north side of the station currently.

[Paineframe]

The problem isn't station size or population, the problem is that people gather in useful areas and avoid useless areas. The only reasons to go to crew quarters are to grab a costume or to set up a conveniently-accessible murderden, so the only people who spend more than thirty seconds there are changelings (which gives everyone else even less reason to hang around). The courtroom and market are pretty much tailor-made for gimmicks and group events, and while they go unused most of the time, I feel like it's better to have easy gimmick zones sitting unused most of the time than it is to take them away and make people go through even more work to set up a gimmick. Trials are difficult enough to set up even with a ready-made courtroom; having to convince engineering to build a makeshift one in some random corner of the station just sounds hellish.

[atomic1fire]

I know tgstation has a smaller station for the less frequinted/popular servers.

The only problem with that is you either have to keep two maps updated, or choose to remove certain things on one map.


If someone was gonna do a tiny map, Biodome would be a good starting point, some of it's rooms are really tiny and the fact that you can use the elevator is really neat.

[Floor_Tile]

If someone was gonna do a tiny map, Biodome would be a good starting point, some of it's rooms are really tiny and the fact that you can use the elevator is really neat.

Biodome would require more furnaces to keep the place powered on the arrival level. It seems that place is short on power generation, and one or two of the APCs isn't connected to the grid. Otherwise I would love as a botanist to move there.