I got this idea in the space cruisers thread and suggested it there but really it belongs in its own thread.
Nanaotrasen and the syndicate each have a similar space station and a fleet of spaceships (pods and cruisers.) Each station would have its own z level.
The syndicate station is fully functional and has its own botanists, assistants, clowns, etc. The crew does regular crew things until someone locates the enemy station.
once an enemy station is located you can use the observatory to spy on them (or at least get an alert if they call the shuttle.)
After the crews locate eachother's stations, the first station to evacuate loses. Half the fun is finding creative/griefy ways to destroy the enemy station (telescience, kiting drones to the other station, hacking their AI's laws, etc etc etc)
The escape shuttle is now a cruiser with autopilot, shields, and turrets. You get a bonus if you destroy the enemy shuttle. If both stations are evacuating and one station's shuttle gets shot down, that team loses.
While this is going on there could be random traitors and changelings shitting up both stations. With a little creativity this mode could replace gang, nuke, and secret rounds!
The only downsides are the you would need ~80 players to crew both stations and their cruisers (might I suggest unbanning a bunch of people under the condition that they play assistant and only grief the other station?) and that if you die on the enemy station you're probably getting gibbed.
I think in a mode like this, the pre-built stations should be optimized for combat with the other station, and down scaled for a smaller team.
So, while a medbay and a brig might make sense, some of the more flavorful aspects like botany, the bar, pool and gym, etc would be superfluous to the mode.
As far as other traitors, I think spawning as an undercover spy with no gear on the other stations would be alright, but things like wizards and changelings might just be too much going on, and could easily wipe out one of the stations before they even got to tangle.
I've long thought about adding a game mode that would be like the old science and industry mod.
I think it could be fun but we'll have to solve the logistical problems first.
It sounds pretty cool but I am not sure if there would be enough players to make this viable but if someone could make it possible it would be pretty awesome.
Frank_Stein Wrote:So, while a medbay and a brig might make sense, some of the more flavorful aspects like botany, the bar, pool and gym, etc would be superfluous to the mode.
Superfluous = good places for boarding parties to hide/teleport into (or land pods in if it's the catering hangar)
Actually some of those areas would be good for random side objectives like stealing a bunch of weed or something.
Or you could kill the enemy janitor, steal his uniform and run around spacelubing everything.
Anyway, if population is an issue then what about recycling mushroom station? That was on the small side and still had all the departments (I think it had an owlery too.)
Don't get me wrong, Janitor and and Chef and all that can be fun jobs, but judging how often everyone just abandons their post to fight syndies in the current game, I can't see people sticking to them during a mode like this where you have a whole other station to fight at all times. People aren't gonna wanna mop floors when they can be bashing skulls in instead.
Another issue though that needs to be considered is how to handle things like death. If we stick to standard cloning procedures, there's gonna be a lot of people who aren't coming back.
I'm thinking, maybe change up cloning for this mode where clones are just pumped out at a steady rate, with a few cloners around the station that can be attacked to cripple the enemy station?
Or, have a regular new recruitment phase where dead players can rejoin.
E.g Pilot who has access to the podbay, Explosives technician who has access to places like botany, plasma research and chemistry, maybe include one doctor on hand with a portable surgery table.
Rather then have a bunch of rambo's running around trying to kill dudes in the other station, you could have one person dedicate themselves to making canister bombs or firebombs, and another to fly into the other station's airspace and deliver the payloads.
Syndicate style cooperation.
It would probably speed up rounds if you had jobs entirely dedicated to patching up rambos and spreading chaos. Especially if this is gonna be a two station map.
E.g Pilot who has access to the podbay, Explosives technician who has access to places like botany, plasma research and chemistry, maybe include one doctor on hand with a portable surgery table.
Rather then have a bunch of rambo's running around trying to kill dudes in the other station, you could have one person dedicate themselves to making canister bombs or firebombs, and another to fly into the other station's airspace and deliver the payloads.
Syndicate style cooperation.
It would probably speed up rounds if you had jobs entirely dedicated to patching up rambos and spreading chaos. Especially if this is gonna be a two station map.
Right. I can see it being a bit like an RTS, with specialized roles for managing and adding to the base, some for defense/offense, and some for resource gathering on a possible third Z level. I think maybe a mining field with some useful abandoned structures that could be contested over might be nice for something like this.
By default, I think a station should have to gather resources a bit, and manufacture them into armament before they can take on the other station.
Frank_Stein Wrote:People aren't gonna wanna mop floors when they can be bashing skulls in instead.
This is the main issue inherent with some of the other game modes, and it's the primary reason why gang, rev, and spy all failed catastrophically: If you give a Goonstation player license to murder dudes, they're almost certainly gonna take whatever opportunities they can to murder those dudes. In essence, a mode like this would basically be a station vs. station team deathmatch; a nuke ops round on a much larger scale.
And that isn't inherently a bad thing! I find the idea of station-to-station combat where each group of players is armed with the same relative amount of equipment and weapons an extremely interesting idea, but I personally don't think that it would mesh very nicely with the rest of how Goonstation functions.
First and foremost, you'd have a lot of people that would immediately abandon their post and start gunning straight for the other station, which is to be expected. This would result in space combat being a lot more widespread, and consequentially, pod weaponry and general space gear would need to be far more abundant. This would also mean that you'd have very few people actually doing their jobs, because as mentioned before, why do your job when you can just go and murder the other guys instead? There's only really one job that's actually strictly NECESSARY, and that's engineering, which can be set up and promptly forgotten about with the right engine burn, or if you just configure the solars.
There's also the matter of the objective. A lot of people, myself included, have put forth a myriad of different reasons why a shuttle call shouldn't be necessary after a nuke ops/wizard round: lack of people capable of calling the shuttle, it being a needless formality as the shuttle will invariably be called by the time the fighting ceases, putting the station at an unfair disadvantage to latejoining antagonists or vice versa, and so on. Pretty much all of those are applicable here, as it entails a similar level of destruction and general action.
Then there's also the simple fact that Goonstation bases a lot of its gameplay and rules by its secrecy and tendency to err on the side of the mysterious and uncertain. There's a reason why nuke ops and wizard rounds are fairly uncommon, as the whole game would lose its appeal if they were the most common round types. A dedicated server to this kind of thing just doesn't strike me as something that would be successful, and this seems like a needlessly large and complex project for a normal round type that probably wouldn't even be played very frequently, or even at all barring admin intervention. So while this is a good idea and definitely has its merits, I really don't see it as something that would likely get implemented here.
15-30 minute grace period before the opposing station's z level is accessible (alothugh both crews could have access to the mining z level and fight small skirmishes there)
Lots of defenses on both stations so you have to plan every attack. Combine this with the engineers building even more defenses and upgrading the ships. Hopefully this would make it so the crew has to plan every attack carefully so that it isn't just all mayhem all the time.
Instead it would be more like:
-Crew knows there's a syndicate station nearby but doesn't know where. The various departments spend the downtime calibrating the teleporter, making tank transfer bombs, growing exploding tomatoes, and thinking up other creative ways to wreck the other station.
-4 syndicate assistants with improvised weapons teleport into the owlery. They manage to bomb a noncritical part of the station before being massacred by a 30 man lynch mob.
-A brave a assistant kites the Y drone to the syndicate station, then escapes back to friendly territory while the syndie pods are distracted.
-Telescience starts teleporting medical supplies with mousetrap pipe bombs in them. Also a medibot full of spider eggs. They syndicate station starts tearing itslef apart from the inside
-A syndicate finds a nanotrasen spacesuit on the derelict, uses it and the strelka to infiltrate the nanotrasen station, emags his way to the AI upload, and uploads a law saying that humans can only breathe plasma fires, particularly near the airbridge.
and so on. Basically there has to be a way to make it hard to just murderbone so the crews have to find funny/stealthy ways to kill eachother (or at least build hellmix flamethrowers first)
BaneOfGiygas Wrote:Then there's also the simple fact that Goonstation bases a lot of its gameplay and rules by its secrecy and tendency to err on the side of the mysterious and uncertain. There's a reason why nuke ops and wizard rounds are fairly uncommon, as the whole game would lose its appeal if they were the most common round types. A dedicated server to this kind of thing just doesn't strike me as something that would be successful, and this seems like a needlessly large and complex project for a normal round type that probably wouldn't even be played very frequently, or even at all barring admin intervention. So while this is a good idea and definitely has its merits, I really don't see it as something that would likely get implemented here.
I dunno. I think this mode has potential, especially if there was a server in the future dedicated to running alternate maps, modes, and admin gimmicks considering the success of things of things like Ur's dungeons. I also think it sounds more appealing than the standard build mode server.
Goonhub
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