The Many Problems of Nuclear Operatives

[Rich0rd]

Quick preamble;
these are opinions from somebody who likes playing nukie rounds, both as the crew or as a nukie. I am not a coder and I decided that I never will be after looking into the most basic of basics for just a little bit, so "wyci" is a troll level response. Though I am aware that many of the points I am going to bring up in here will ultimately not be fixable without somebody sitting down and actually tackling them thoroughly.
What I hope to achieve here is maybe raise attention to some issues that I feel like have either been overlooked or ignored and consequently get them addressed at some point in the future. That all aside let's just get to it.

Everybody is too damn fast.
This ties into many of the other issues here and is a general game-feel type thing. But I believe overall people just move too damn fast in this game. There is no sprinting. Stamina is purely there as a soft HP bar against stuns and thus stuns and stamina need to be hard-balanced around that interaction alone. This just causes so many other gameplay issues that I for one see plaguing this game, even if most people are not even aware of this.

Nukies need proper stun resistance.
AFAIK there exists only stun recovery in the game, meaning you have chemical substances which will decrease the amount of time you spend being slowed/stunned on the ground. Stun resistance just has not been coded and implemented by anybody yet. Most non-lethal weapons will either send you to the ground in just a second or two if they land consequential hits or as is the case with the taser they will just immediately send you off. And once you go down you are helpless and in most cases the round is over for you as a nukie. Either you get cuffed immediately (since stims got a very massive nerf recently of having their uptime reduced and due to aforementioned movespeed officers will always be right on top of you in time to cuff you) or you just get shot to death in an instant seeing as you are just like a dead horse on the floor, ready to be beaten. This is an issue that is only further exacerbated by everybody immediately dropping all of the gear held in their hands upon going down to the ground.

Nukies have very few gameplay options available and they cause stale gameplay.
To summarize; you always go in, slaughter as many people as possible and usually the round is purely decided by brute force and robustness. All other paths to nuclear operative victory are marred by easily metagamed methods or just straight up things not working as they should. This causes nukies themselves to be very plain and often boring. Oh, look. A guy in bloodred. He is going to murderhobo his way across the station, towards the nuke disk. What's the station's response? Always the same. You can only arm up and hope you bring more gun to the gunfight than those gun toting gun-buying gunmen in bloodred. Wow.

Nukies are plagued by noob players, not newkies.
To be very clear. Players who play nukies for the first time and are new to that antag role are not the problem. Noob players who barely know how the damn game even works, yet alone how to reload a gun or what the syndicate uplink does? Now those are the problem players. So, every noob player is a newkie but not every newkie is a noob. We need role timers for nukies, simple as. It has to be doable somehow. Play X round as a syndicate agent, accomplish this many objectives, play Y amount of hours in medical to be able to enlist for the nukie agent role. Something at least needs to be implemented to combat the plain and simple issue that we still can have an entire nukie round ruined by some noob player rolling high and getting an antag role they signed up for with no clue what it even entails.

The pendulum of balancing always swings too far one way or the other.
This is one of the things that are most baffling. I get that this is not an esport nor a very mainstream game. Still I think the coderbus should be able to glean from the feedback given by the community both on the forums and the Discord how some changes could impact the game positively and how others would not. I will not go into every example of this that I can give right here but the most recent and again egregious one I can think of is the complete and utter removal of the desword from the nukie uplink. Yes, the desword was extremely popular and you basically saw it in every other round being spammed by an entire nukie squad, with which they'd then proceed to steamroll the station. But instead of just at least attempting to balance the desword further it just got straight up removed. This is exactly what I mean with the pendulum swinging too far.

Inequality of the arms race.
Recently security and the station as a whole have received a stupendous amount of new tools, weapons and gadgets to potentially combat nuclear operatives with. Science is literally a ticking timebomb that will make the station impossible to beat if nukies don't go RUSH B CYKA BLYAT as quickly as possible. Self-charging advanced lasers are hilariously easy to make resource wise and can be rushed by SCI too. All officers of security now come armed with mk53s, with both lethal and rubber ammo (which is hilarious considering that pistols used to only be handed out by the Warden during high alerts). Meanwhile nukies get the desword taken away, the L6 nerfed, the AKMS implemented and taken away in less than roughly 36 hours, the 40 TC crate is gone and stimpacks got their uptime nerfed from 5 minutes down to 30 seconds. 

Every member of the station is a potential hero.
As much as the peanut gallery of ghosts love to cheer on the robust individual civilian casually dismantling half a nukie squad on their own because they got their hands on a random stun baton it is just plainly terrible and should seriously be addressed in a ruling, for at least one of the Wizden servers. There's this weird contradiction of players on one hand cheering for those hero civilians being a major wrench in the plans for nukie squads, yet many of them will also then complain whenever a nukie guns them down, even though they're a freshly arrived civie or greytider. And they're not wrong to complain, they shouldn't be a threat to a nuclear operative. Thing is though, due to many of the above described issues, that any greytider has the potential to just fuck your day up. So what do you get accustomed to doing then? You gun people down left and right, no matter if they even remotely meant to be a threat to you. Why? Because they potentially maybe could. It is that simple. We have community-wise now arrived at a point where it's big standard for nuclear operatives to assume that any single crewmember could be a hidden Sosa-Rambo. So they just gun them all down while they are at it. We need at least ONE server where unarmed and undeputized civilians are supposed to use their healthy human instinct of self preservation and NOT rush a nukie just in the hopes that they succeed with their first random disarm attempt and take the 30 TC expensive L6 Saw away successfully. At least some place where I as a nukie can just leave random unarmed greytiders alone and walk past them in peace and go about murdering anybody with an actual weapon or clearly harmful tools without having to magdump a random tider and run out of ammo in less than 2 minutes of being on the station.

 

Edited July 19 by Rich0rd

[Changeling]

I think combat outcome between crew and nukies is random regardless of power differences when stuns are in play. It doesn't matter how strong a gun is or how good an armor is when one party it stunned and cuffed.

I think introducing alternative paths for nukies would help shake things up.

In SS13 stealth nukies were viable because the stealth items available were 100% look-alikes and nukies had big shiny HUD indicators for their teammates regardless of what they were wearing. In SS14 there's lacking substitutes for PDAs and IDs (with proper coloration), so the operatives can never fit in as they will always have a blank looking passenger ID. Every other crewmember has a PDA color matched with their job- dead giveaway of any imposter if it doesn't match. Even if your teammates are disguised you will most likely mistake them for regular crew because there's no HUD indicator for nukies.

Admin-enforced nukie stealth under ban threats was tried a few times from what I've seen, with nukies getting OOC protection despite everyone knowing that the "centcomm" or "ERT" in gasmasks are nukies. Personally I despise such intervention but it illustrates just how lacking the disguise options are.

[kaishiba]

From my gathering of observation, most of the time the problems with nukies can be answered simply with is skill issue. Nukies who stick together as a team (which is the point) and go with a plan are usually the victor however same can be applied to the opposition and that's fine.

My understanding is that there will be no stun resistances. Someone wrote up a PR for it and it was vetoed. Don't get caught out by yourself.

All the things that were nerfed by nukies were nerfed for a reason. Stims were hilariously overpowered, 5 minutes is waaaaay too much. Desword was, again, hilariously overpowered since everyone bought it and would just rush with pseudo-resistances/ high reflection chance, it was already a balancing nightmare in ss13 (Syndie agents can still get it just not nukies). L6 is still usable and the AKMS was because of an ammo issue being super cheap. 

I've seen plenty of stealth nukies work out especially when the crew doesn't notice it happen. Again most of it depends on your team. You're not gonna win them all.

Security getting a mk58 is not gonna do much to a team of nukies. They're still going to arm themselves properly. Mk58 was mostly for small threats like tarantulas or your local holoparasite enjoyer in maints. Security had no way to deal with situations that required lethal threats without going back to security and HOPING that Warden or HoS were competent enough to hand out guns while people are being killed.

Only one I slightly agree with is the new players getting nukies. That's about it.

If Nukie players stuck together, formulated a plan and followed through with good communication, there'd be more wins on their side.

Edited July 19 by kaishiba

[TurboTracker]

Alot of the "issues" with nuclear ops comes down to play style.

Alot of the time you will see people discuss things like;
"If you are not sec or not ORDERED too, you shouldn't be engaging with syndicate operatives of any nature."
Security exists for a reason, scream on the radio, run away, gear up with improvised if you are brave or foolish, get actual gear if captain/hos/heads call for it.

The amount of times I have been playing as hos on nukie rounds, plan to handout weapon sets and gear to my secoff crew to attempt to actively manage SECURITY of the station and disk. Just for a group of 2-3 over active non-sec roles to tombstone their way into sec, then armory, then dip again. because a single sec stood in the armory door for 4 seconds is disgusting. Sure a passenger with a shotty can make magic happen, but a secoff with actual armor, stuns and other gear can likely do it better. (Robustness arguments will be met with "LRP comment", I don't care that YOU are robust, you are a damn jani with a bucket in tow. let sec do their job)

In regards to the swinging pendulum of Meta.
Alot of stuff has indeed been added to station staff, lots of options for common play which do not fit well into the current playstyle of "GET GEAR HUNT BLOODRED WIN ROUND" but alot of players don't even want that.
Often if I am not sec and I see a nukie round I will just do my best to help as my role can. be that dragging corpses to medical, stealing gear from dead nukies and throwing at secoffs, dying while mopping a single bloodtile.

NukeOps as a gamemode has always had this huge cavity between what is and isn't ok to do.

>NukeOps can't delay the round
But what if my team died and I need to try to stealth in a way that isn't traditional
>nukeops shouldn't murderbone entire stations
but what if the entire station is willing and capable to be combative (see above mentioned playstyles)
>crew metagaming nukeops objectives
This one is a big one to me. Rules say "crew know about syndicates" thats mostly it. The fact that all of this often happens because one person screams "BLOODRED" on radio, especially when bloodred can just mean single tator, shows that there is a hairtrigger in the back of a LOT of players heads about when they can validsalad.
 

Stuncuffin should stay. however maybe the stimulant forces "stamina" regen so it takes 3-4 stuns to actually drop a nukie. Should stop overly eager seccadets from diving into a 4 man nuke ops crew just to stun cuff two of them and win the round freely.

[shadows6]

this is my persnal opnion i don't mind diffrent ideas

honsetly i was gonna say something else but it will end like the rest but i agree with turbotracker and changeling the most nukies are weak in the current state of the game like i have played many rounds with a teamworking nukie crew even when stems and dsword were still a thing and it's just the shear number of people fighting you like everyone will fight you when your spotted even the passgeners which is alot on a full server like what 76 players aginest 4 lik ethe second nukie are radioed everyone rushes their postion some not even armed which forces the nukies to kill everyone cuz everyone is activly hunting them

and i also played another round i was nukie ops the god dam captain was meta gaming just said no one is allowed to wear any masks like BRUH most captains will even do this on a non nukie round around the 30 minute mark or some from the start of the game making the only way in is brute force or making the masks invisble and nukies shuold get better disguise item maybe like   A GOD DAM PDA

the worst part about this even is that nukies don't have any good weapons like it's only the c20 worth buying or china lake those are the only 2 options the rest are as good as gone

now the worset problem random new players how don't even know the basic controls playing nukies hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh i don't need to explain why but can someone add like a requirment for nukies and syndicates like 3 hours not much but just enough 

and thanks for reading
 

[deltanedas]

theres a pr for nukie role timers, its not merged yet sadly

[Sosa]

actually if you look at the settings we are sprinting by default

[Madoka]

On 7/19/2023 at 3:32 PM, Rich0rd said:

Everybody is too damn fast.
This ties into many of the other issues here and is a general game-feel type thing. But I believe overall people just move too damn fast in this game. There is no sprinting. Stamina is purely there as a soft HP bar against stuns and thus stuns and stamina need to be hard-balanced around that interaction alone. This just causes so many other gameplay issues that I for one see plaguing this game, even if most people are not even aware of this.

 

https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/18332

 

 

On 7/19/2023 at 3:32 PM, Rich0rd said:

Stun resistance just has not been coded and implemented by anybody yet.

https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/pull/18041#issuecomment-1636689320
 

 

On 7/19/2023 at 3:32 PM, Rich0rd said:

To be very clear. Players who play nukies for the first time and are new to that antag role are not the problem. Noob players who barely know how the damn game even works, yet alone how to reload a gun or what the syndicate uplink does?

https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/pull/17929
 

On 7/19/2023 at 3:32 PM, Rich0rd said:

All other paths to nuclear operative victory are marred by easily metagamed method

 

On 7/19/2023 at 3:32 PM, Rich0rd said:

the robust individual civilian casually dismantling half a nukie squad on their own because they got their hands on a random stun baton

Admin/culture issue, until meta/powergamers start getting slapped left and right for chasing valids for things they should've either feared IC (bloodred with gun) or didnt know to begin with (chameleon) this problem will persist

 

Edited July 28 by Clairvoyant