Bottom post of the previous page:
I've been saying for a long time that the shuttle is the primary antagonist of every round. It stifles creativity, because there's no point in trying to make a cool project if it's going to be wiped away a minute after finishing it (assuming you're going at full pace without interruptions), and it looms heavily. An increase to roughly an hour of average gametime would improve the experience overall, I think.I have some suggestions:
- Remove the AI's ability to call the shuttle. The main issue with shuttle calling is that it's so damn easy to do in the vast, vast majority of instances, because most of the crew (humans) can just demand that the AI call the shuttle, and it HAS to do so if it's Asimov. In addition, it's reasonable for an AI to call the shuttle if something goes slightly wrong, because Asimov law 1 dictates that it should try to prevent harm, which removing people from the arguably dangerous station does.
- Increase the recall timer from half to something like 66%-75%. Another response to the ease of calling shuttles, in that recalling them is comparatively much more difficult. The pre-eminent shuttle caller role cannot recall it at all once it's done, only people with access can - and they're frequently too busy to care or notice until it's too late.
- Hard-increase the shuttle fuelling time to about 30 minutes. Making it so that the shuttle just can't be called normally before the 30 minute mark is a bit of a nuclear option, but would prove to be effective. However, I've got some alternative ideas to this.
- Make antagweight in the following round higher depending on the length of the current one. With some diminishing returns, calling the shuttle later will result in more, bigger and/or better antagonists being spawned in the next round, which will encourage people who'll want to go for said antag roles. That said, you're not any more likely to get any one role that becomes available just by participating - it's standard picking, so you'll be in the pool for (insert big antag here), or be more likely to get antag status as several (insert small to medium antags here) will spawn instead.
- Ramp up midround antag spawning during the shuttle call timer if said call happens past a certain time. For example, if the shuttle is called a little before or after the hour mark, smaller antags like swarmers, pirates, lone ops or even wizards have a chance to spawn more often during said timer.
- Encourage "Central Command" to recall shuttles and possibly bop the caller if the reason given is shitty. We have a "reason for calling shuttle" field for a reason - it's so when that reason is "i want to go home" or "honk", centcom can shut them down and tell them to post a better reason. I've so rarely seen this being enforced, and it really needs to be. It's usually not even a case of there not being a legit reason, it's just people seeing the problem and putting irrelevant keyboard slappings in the textbox.
- Add/improve independent station victory conditions, and make shift times a part of said victory conditions. I suggested a while back that there could be minor and major victories during, say, revolutions for marooning your opponents alive (which is harder) instead of killing them; you could have it so that one of the crew's conditions is to survive X amount of time without calling the shuttle, where X is based on the overall number of people in the crew. This is in addition to station building objectives, which could in turn be improved by adding more beeg things to build. Build [a working engine type your station doesn't start with], for example. Unironically, give them some greentext for having a good round and a better station.
- Even better, give some station-sided individuals objectives that help the station with the possibility of greentext. Part of antagrolling is, as someone mentioned earlier, "winning the lottery" - if you've got a station-sided objective, that'll help. Maybe you believe you're the hero. Maybe you know there's traitors onboard somewhere, but can't reveal it for fear of people thinking YOU'RE a syndie. They don't have to come up often, but a little change like this could be gold dust for encouraging people.
- Ruin saving. This one is big, but it's potentially a gamechanger. Imagine a system where you could build something freefloating in space, designate the area of your new spacebar or whatever with a blueprint, and then apply to centcom (current admin) directly to have that room be saved. It can be quickly reviewed by an aghost, approved or denied, and then in the former case, saved to possibly appear freefloating in space or sometimes even crashed into Lavaland. Has some restrictions and will require a touch of curation every so often, but imagine the possibilities - and most relevantly, imagine how people will respond with roundtimes.
- Give antagonists specific means of delaying shuttles. Already done with cultists to good effect, having a traitor item that costs a few telecrystals and delays the shuttle by scrambling its navigation protocols would be cool. Yes, in theory every traitor could pool their crystals and delay the shuttle for nearly an hour, but frankly, if they're sacrificing their crystals to do that, that's hilarious, and they've probably got something planned. Or you could put a hardcap on the amount of time it can delay things, if you need to. You could even change the mechanics, so that traitors could, perhaps, instead get a powersink-like beacon that pauses the shuttle timer by sucking the juice out of the power grid (not enough to get sink levels, maybe a local brownout at most), but can be fairly easily found with some standard searching.
- Disincentivise calling the shuttle because of the mere existence of antagonists. This is a no-brainer - if you don't want to be antagonised, play a game without antagonists, don't join this one and call the shuttle at the first sign of danger. The note about centcom slapping down stupid calls applies here. In addition, you could improve the incentive to conquer certain "round-ending" antagonists - xenomorphs could drop more interesting bodyparts, or possibly even random ones, that are prime for research or implanting usage, swarmers get their swarm-mother-beacon thing boss back which can be fought for goodies, and if a station survives a meteor shower, then those meteors are likely to drop more and more interesting materials and perhaps even unique objects based on the length and intensity of the storm. We don't have rounds where people pick their way through broken stations anymore, struggling to survive against the odds - those stories are dead, but they don't need to be.
- If an antagonist is sufficiently loud, and their presence would prevent the shuttle from leaving, have the shuttle not even be callable under standard circumstances. Confirmed level 5? Can't call the shuttle. Prevent metagaming from this by having false alarms disable shuttle calls for two to six minutes. Give headrevs the option to go loud - in doing so, they gain a small buff of some description and the shuttle can't be called as a side note.
- Paint random shuttle calls as enemy action. This is a fluff thing, but as in the major/minor crew victory suggestion, fluff can be a surprisingly powerful motivator. In this instance, having random shuttle calls could be set up by a little in-universe law tweaking as highly suspicious, since "Syndicate agents are known to ilicit emergency shuttle calls in order to hijack them".
- Change Extended, or add a new mode, Extended-Dynamic. Extended discourages a certain kind of person because it doesn't have antagonists off the bat - having Extended-Dynamic instead would change that. Extended-Dynamic is an idea I've been suggesting for years in some form or another, wherein antags aren't rolled until 20 to 30 minutes or so into the round, allowing for a much, much different dynamic than regular rounds while encouraging people to stick around during "green shifts".
- Encourage admin button pushing during extended, particularly buttons that bring in as many people as possible to an event. This discourages suicides during "green shifts".
- Give crew an in-game excuse and avenue to stop playing if they don't want to continue without ending the round. This is mostly psychological, but some people will, even if they've not done anything in the round, deliberately try to end the round with the shuttle because they're bored and want to leave entirely. It's nonsensical, but it exists - so giving people an option to, say, clock out at a personal "end my round" teleporter would be cool. For normal folks, that frees up slots on the manifest. For syndie agents, their objectives could be completed (assuming they're not hijack objectives, but that doesn't change much), and they'll show up with greentext when the round ends proper. You could even set it so that people can remove themselves this way, and if the round is still happening half an hour later, they can join as a randomname with new memories, if you were inclined. Imagine rolling syndie, achieving your objectives, clocking out, getting some dinner, coming back, joining the round as a fresh person, and eventually getting midround antag. Rare, but isn't that a captivating image?
- Tell the players that calling the shuttle won't suddenly cause a massive rush of people to appear. This seems obvious, but time and time again (on Terry, in particular) I've seen people absolutely boggled at the idea and reality of them ending a round full of things happening and ghostroles made, and then going into the next round and seeing just as many people turn up, not the multitudes of spontaneous people they were expecting. People in bed are not going to just suddenly not be in bed because you called the shuttle.
- Give every roundtype an epilogue. This one's a little strange, but bear with me - when cultists summon Nar-Sie, they have a few minutes to dick around and bring remaining humans to her as Harvesters. Make an equivalent for all roundtypes, it doesn't matter what. If revs win, Centcom could decide to send simplemob death commandos by the dozen from arrivals. Same with blob. If heads win in a rev round, the syndicate has a choice to send an army of simplemob syndie interns instead. With the wizard dead, their magic spews wildly over the station. When the station gets nuked, do what the flavourtext says happens - the captain appears, alive, on centcom in front of three ghostrole interrogators for two minutes before probable summary execution. It's two minutes, but it encourages people to draw out a little more interest and flavour from the round, especially if it's an optional button push by an admin, and all of it adds to the worldbuilding aspect like Nar-Sie's "snuff out the light" animation does.
- Make roundtypes mulligan on a wooly bit of logic if the station wins in a surviving manner early enough (that includes revs). Now the station's survived something, they've got different equipment and some damage, and some people have been given a different antag status. Go hog wild.
- Make an achievement for playing a round for five hours without disconnecting. This one is wild, and could manifest in many ways, including making tension between the occasional "just four more hours" nutter and the crew in general, or "guys it's been an 4 hours and 40 minutes, let's leave :^)" memer and the rest of the crew. Obviously this won't be relevant in most cases, but neither is "win a pulse rifle from the arcade machine", so why not?
Though many of these suggestions are mutually exclusive, all of them are considered for a configuration in which there's always plentiful stuff to do, ghostroles can be freely gained for people to drop into games as golems or cyborgs, etc., and projects that won't necessarily be done in 45 minutes flat can be approached without getting only a minute's worth of enjoyment from them. Roughly an hour is a good place to go for, I think. Of course, they should be taken with a grain of salt, but still.
(I'm seriously considering coding a couple department goals.)