One Man Army event - A spin off of ninja

[paprika]

So this is my new project I've been working on to hopefully make two hour rounds less boring. Also, peaceful ninjas are shit.

One Man Army is a random spawn event much like ninja that players can opt in/out of and can be spawned by admins for easier round-ending deliciousness when those changelings simply won't step the fuck up and get the shuttle called.

In a nutshell, the OMA is a single nuclear operative with the objective to nuke the station and live. Rather than a team of nuclear operatives, a single operative has an easier time being cloaked among the station crew while hunting the nuclear disk, or using his cache of TC to be a deadly antagonist. Much like ninja, the OMA has a few supplemental objectives picked at random that are mostly for flavor and to spice up the play style of the OMA. Remain covert or cause as much damage as possible, you get the idea.

He has a buffed + population scaled amount of TCs over normal nuke ops, as well as normal traitor items (ebows, which nuke ops do not get) to help him if he's tasked to remain covert. With a bundle of TC all to himself, his options are nearly limitless and a variety of implants can make him as deadly as a space ninja. However, he has no backup in the form of syndicate cyborgs or mechs, leaving one of the best options to disguise as a normal traitor to make prison breakouts an easy task if he's ever captured.

My initial idea was to make it a game mode but single-antag game modes have a habit of being extremely shit and due to the nature of this game mode being more or less nuclear operatives with less antags it seems like a kind of unoriginal addition to the normal game mode lineup. Any ideas below would be appreciated as I work with the balancing. It's a rough draft and I have no real actual TC counts or anything to give you at this time.

[Bluespace]

Ahelp during an hour/two hour long sybil round and we can test this.

[Steelpoint]

Generally the reason why solo antags do well, more so the Space Ninja and Wizard, are mobility. Yes they have powerful offensive abilities but the ability to rapidly move accross the station in a uninterrupted way, Wizard with his teleportation abilites and the Ninja with his jaunting abilities, make them very hard to kill and give them great access to the station.

The difference here is that this One Man Army is relying far more on his individual skill and syndicate items to survive and do well. He has an advantage of having a lot of Telecrystals to draw from thus a near unlimited choice of options.

It might work, but it would have to be available along side other game modes or as a random event since placing the entire round on a single high skill ceiling antag will result in a lot of quick rounds.

[lumipharon]

The concept sounds alright, although there will be inevitable idiots who get caught with open pda's and give sec/some random a potentionally hilarious amount of TC's.

[paprika]

The concept sounds alright, although there will be inevitable idiots who get caught with open pda's and give sec/some random a potentionally hilarious amount of TC's.

I can make his uplink mental or only work on the syndicate motherbase.

[AseaHeru]

Give him a number of TC implanters?

[paprika]

Oh lovely, I forgot about those. Could work. Would make permabrigging him awfully hard, so disguising as a normal traitor would be an excellent tactic for escapes.

[Neerti]

It'd be better to make a child of the uplink implant so you don't need to do five emotes to spend all your tc.

-edit- Actually, you could adjust the starting tc dynamically with New().

[Stickymayhem]

This sounds wonderful for a stealthy villain.

I think because it is a single person, some newer abilities that have a higher station-wide impact but are expensive are in order. This person could control the kind of round it will be through high-cost uplinks such as:

-Ordering a single facehugger, perhaps in a grenade or some other protective device that can be safely opened.
-Calling in a bombardment (Meteor Shower)
-Call in a favour from the Wizard federation (One apprentice? Or summon guns?)
-Activate sleeper agents (X number of people become antags. They can now use the nuke OPs communications for organisation)
-Maybe a return of the immovable rod?
-The Swapper (Yoinks an SE from anyone, Draw it from them and inject it into yourself and you too can become them like a badass changeling!)
-Explosive disposals backsurge

Any and all of these could have a place in the round. I think this would be a fantastic way to put some power in the hands of the players to control the round. People like me who won't ever be admin but would love to run events would absolutely love the hell out of this. I know it's scary to give people that power, but worst case scenario is still better than an extendling round and will inject fun and variety into a round even when admins are asleep!

[Cipher3]

-Activate sleeper agents (X number of people become antags. They can now use the nuke OPs communications for organisation)

If they communicate and work together, suuuper overpowered. And a lot of this stuff is arguably over-buffed.

[Stickymayhem]

-Activate sleeper agents (X number of people become antags. They can now use the nuke OPs communications for organisation)

If they communicate and work together, suuuper overpowered. And a lot of this stuff is arguably over-buffed.

Keep in mind that this is a single agent with none of the mobility of a wizard.

Antagonists are there to make things interesting, and ideally they should be disrupting almost everyone on the station every round. Wizards can do this by jaunting extremely quickly across the station and thus one person can affect pretty much everyone on the station who isn't deliberately avoiding them. Nuke OP rampages similarly span the station, and changeling/traitor/cult rounds are high in number so the whole station is affected by them. If you have a single, slow person, not to mention if they are going stealthy, then no one will see any action for the whole shift. This antag should be a game master kind of role in order to create that. They need to have abilities that affect the entire station or it will fall into either an extremely long and stealthy round or a quick and dirty fight that makes science pointless to have done in the first place.

These have to be devastating to the station. Arguably they don't even help the Op that much. Meteors just fuck up the station but don't get you any closer to your goals. A round type that fucks the station without being totally one-sided is a fun one. It would also mean people could disrupt the meta by messing with these. No one knows if it's a meteor shower random event or an op, and that keeps people on their toes about the round type if the OMA is smart. This is something that is sorely lacking in many other roundtypes.

[paprika]

You know that one man army is an event, right? Not a game mode? As in he'll usually be there with other antags?

[Stickymayhem]

You know that one man army is an event, right? Not a game mode? As in he'll usually be there with other antags?

Forget absolutely everything I said then.

Slightly related, I just nuked the station as a solo assistant with no TCs thanks to evil Sawrge. Delicious Blacktext.

[Wizardjenkins66]

Only if they can get An Armored Tank Top and bandanna so I 1980s action movie the station.

[paprika]

Ideally down the road you'll be able to pick from a selection of action hero trope outfits like that when you spawn (kind of like how I wanted to turn ninja into space bounty hunter) but right now I'm focusing on just making a simple one man nuke op to blow up the spess station.

[Stickymayhem]

I think it might actually be too easy.

A single person getting the disk is a lot easier than five. With 70TCs it could be overkill. I managed it with none as an assistant. I think something about this event needs to be changed. Maybe alerting the station a couple of minutes before the syndie arrives to give them just enough time to buckle down and prepare.

[paprika]

Or the standard unidentified life signs warning with the normal delay when he's spawned.

I'm sure you got the disk because of a lack of general competence. You were also an assistant, people react differently to nuke ops.

Plus, this is, again, only for ending rounds that have gone on a long ass time as an alternative to the normal 'spam aliens/meteors'

[Stickymayhem]

Or the standard unidentified life signs warning with the normal delay when he's spawned.

I'm sure you got the disk because of a lack of general competence. You were also an assistant, people react differently to nuke ops.

Plus, this is, again, only for ending rounds that have gone on a long ass time as an alternative to the normal 'spam aliens/meteors'

Yeah everything was plasma at the time I suppose.

[paprika]

I mean you can make a one man army as admin in game really fucking easily if you know what you're doing but most event-challenged admins don't so I'm making this to make their lives easier and to remove the admin element. Still, I never see ninjas that aren't admin spawned so I'll probably up the chances of this happening a little bit comparatively.

[Neerti]

1. Ninjas are made by RNG all the time (maybe you just never see them due to being ninjas). From a player's perspective, you can't tell if an admin did it or not. I rarely see admins actually press the button (fun fact: There's three separate buttons to make a spess ninja).

Also, >People still think ninjas are admin only
>random event
>open source
2. If something is really shitty if an admin does it, why is it okay if the game does it? Anyone remember that whinefest about ninjas being horrible gameplay-wise, and how they should be removed? An admin making a 'overpowered antag goes and murderbones' is the definition of a shitty event (yet wizard is totally fine since it's the game doing it, even if a human coded it) and ends in butthurt. Wiz ends in butthurt often as well.

[paprika]

I never implied ninjas were admin only Neerti please read my posts.

Also what does your post have to do with my gamemode at all I literally never brought up anything you're saying in this discussion so if you'd like to rant about player butthurt do it somewhere else thanks.

[Munchlax]

I'm all in for replacing ninja with this.

[AseaHeru]

I am all for supplementing ninja with this, because ninja is still awesome.
So there is a chance for this, ninja and aliums.

[Stickymayhem]

Originally I read this thread and thought it was an excellent idea and even contributed to it.

Today I came back and thought it was a ridiculous idea that would never be implemented and is just plain silly.

The difference was today I thought Terbs posted it.

[paprika]

terbs is awesome shut up

[Incomptinence]

I'd say go all the way and just give the army a cool down after spawning things (so they don't spam) instead of a hard telecrystal limit.

[paprika]

Or I could give him no TCs and instead every time he deals 100 damage on a crewmember he gets rewarded with a telecrystal killstreak like a minibomb or TACTICAL UAV or syndie attack doge corgi that will seek out and attack people who harm the OMA and also the final killstreak is summoning a meteor strike or a mechsuit and I don't even have to mention about how the TACTICAL NUKE is his objective

Maybe he'll spawn with a deagle and space AK for those sweet 1deag headshots and tactical ak reloads

[Nienhaus]

I liked the idea of change it to a space bounty hunter much better. I don't really like this idea.

[paprika]

Yeah but nobody wants to touch ninja code at all because holy fuck it's a big fat mess.

[Nienhaus]

I never said touch the ninja code. Write new code.

[paprika]

Spoiler:

LOL