Kudzu Drones are underpowered.

[SlothJustice]

The Kudzu UI is great and has so many features, but they're all almost impossible to use in a round collaboratively.

Not a single Kudzu round I've ever played resulted in kudzu actually spreading to or preventing the departure of the shuttle. I feel this is largely due to the weakness of the individual kudzu player units, those weaknesses include: 

• Bullets can get lodged in drones, causing passive regen to be outstripped by the damage and leaving drones in permanent crit. 
  
• Certain damage over time conditions persist through suicide and re-assimilation, somehow. I haven't conclusively tested which conditions those are, but I've seen rounds where all kudzu drones are constantly falling in and out of consciousness to the point where they can't operate. 
  
• Kudzu drone health regen by standing on kudzu is, in general, way too slow. From -500 damage, it's going to be a prohibitively long time to get back to a state where you can move effectively, to the point where it's faster to intentionally suicide and be reborn than it is to wait for healing if you're significantly injured. 
  
• While established kudzu is hard to remove and I don't think it needs rebalancing, it is very easy for players to incapacitate kudzu players AND destroy encroaching kudzu simultaneously. This is due to kudzu players needing to be within 1 tile of the spot they want to kudzu, which is often going to be a tight hallway, and how prevalent and easy to acquire flamers and various grenades are. 
  

Imagine a 3 tile wide hallway leading to the escape shuttle, with 3 kudzu players collaborating to spread the kudzu (pretty rare in the current game state, but obviously possible). A thrown grenade will certainly hit all of them, if they don't have time to move to safety. If it's incendiary or does brute damage, which is overwhelmingly likely, its likely going to destroy the kudzu on the spot each player was standing on. 

If all 3 players are incapacitated, they are now rapidly losing health from being off kudzu, and unable to heal each other. 

If 2/3 players are incapacitated, 1 player must choose between retreating to a kudzu tile or first healing the 2 incapacitated players off kudzu tile. The player will likely only have enough time and nutrients to heal one of the 2 downed players, who will also be rapidly losing nutrients. 

The situation becomes more favorable if only 1/3 are incapacitated, but whether those players can heal their teammate or not, in all 3 scenarios, the players can now no longer sustainably grow kudzu in the direction they want, if they want to insure the survival of their teammates. 

These problems combined make it very common for players on non-RP to simply AFK if they die on Kudzu, rather than come back and play the game as a pseudo-antag. By buffing kudzu, obviously you would need to consider how many other antags can cause kudzu in order to not overly sway rounds toward always becoming kudzu. 

It's a shame that all the features designed for kudzu players are almost always overlooked and basically never successful at spreading to the shuttle before launch. It has all the tools needed to be a fun blob-type antag, but it is simply too easy for players to massively incapacitate kudzu drones.

Buffs I would suggest: 

• Make Kudzu drones about to heal themselves with their own nutrients at a reduced efficacy (say half the healing of having it applied by another drone), in the event of a player being the only kudzu drone, or isolated from other drones by space tears, player-made obstacles, great distance or other impediments. 
  

      And

• Make Kudzu drones immune or otherwise resistant to knockdown/unconsciousness while on kudzu tiles.
  

      Or

• Increase the rate of knockdown/unconsciousness recovery and health regeneration on kudzu tiles. 
  

Obviously like many, I'm not a developer or a QA tester, but please let me know what you think.

[zjdtmkhzt]

Kudzupeople aren't supposed to be antags or strong. They are supposed to be a neat thing for people who die in a round with kudzu.
Kudzupeople are supposed to be peaceful and only defend themselves or the kudzu, if it is attacked.
Most of the time, there is no reason why you would be getting shot with lethals or have grenades thrown at you.

Also, why should kudzupeople be allowed to heal back from -500 health easily? Most people die long before they got to that point.

[Alphaeus]

I have played maybe 2-3 rounds as a kudzu person where the crew didn't eventually burn/shoot me to death (even though I always point out that the kudzu that kudzupeople produce has fucking benign in its name and doesn't spread naturally) or otherwise destroy all the benign kudzu because its green and covers a floor tile.

The health regen (tbh point gain in general for kudzupeople), even if kudzupeople aren't meant to be durable or antagonistic in any way, is abysmal and only becomes more aggravating when you're in a highly trafficked area watching every kudzu tile you place below yourself get snipped to shreds with some wirecutters as passing crewmembers push you onto unsafe tiles and your health takes a leap off the diving board.

[Filthy Steve]

I think the biggest issue with Kudzu people is persistant illness. Last time I was a kudzulad I had heart failure and it got worse and worse to the point I just kept falling down, blacking out, dying, rebirthing, adn doing it again.

[zjdtmkhzt]

I, on the other hand, have never been attacked by the crew as a kudzuperson, ever.
Also, if your kudzuheart is failing, just get a kudzudoctor to treat it? If you are not in a position to do that and just keep dying over and over, just set dnr, I guess?

[Mouse]

Maybe stop suiciding on kudzu and then trying to cover the entire station with it if you don't want to get killed by people trying to fight a legitimately obnoxious and shuttle-call-worthy traitor item.

[SlothJustice]

1. I never said I was intentionally suiciding on kudzu, its just a way to fight persistent illness as a kudzu-drone, because the health regen isn't anywhere near enough to heal you back from any chronic condition.

2. I feel it's kind of disingenuous to say kudzu people are only supposed to defend existing kudzu when there's an entire UI element dedicated to how many kudzu tiles there are and 3 entire abilities for creating new kudzu tiles, reinforcing existing kudzu tiles, and guiding the direction of kudzu growth. 

The benign kudzu ability even has the description "used to guide kudzu growth" not "used to show you're non-expansionist peaceful baby boys". 

I used the word pseudo-antag, because while the window you get upon spawning as a kudzu drone for the first time explicitly states you're not an antag, kudzu-drones still retain all of these antag-ish features and ability descriptions. There's even unique damage descriptions for being harmed with the kudzu vine. 

It honestly feels like kind of a half-formed idea, and if it's not intended to be even somewhat antagonistic, the ability design certainly doesn't reflect that, in my opinion. 

Also I can't speak to your experience, zjdtmkhzt, and since rounds where kudzu gets established enough to produce kudzu drones don't happen often, I can't speak to whether yours or mine is more common; but that's interesting.

Overall, it seems odd to me at least, that there's this entire group of gameplay features that's roleplayed as a hive-mind of gradually spreading vines, but you're not supposed to try to spread that to the shuttle to establish kudzu on centcom. Which, since kudzu naturally spreads without intervention, would seem to be the logical progression of creating player-controlled active kudzu agents that can move independently of the vines. 

I would love to see it developed more or given its own antag role, maybe starting with some kind of stationary kudzu AI type player as a sort of "competing crew" with the regular crew.