The Issue With Station Goals

[Leanfrog]

As the title suggests I am here to discuss the issues with our current station goals. I will be presenting my arguments in a mostly organized list going over each station goal, afterwards I will attempt to provide some potential solutions to the issues I've mentioned, so let's get started then.

General Issues

This section will cover a couple topics that affect multiple station goal, in particular the BSA (Bluespace Artillery), BSH (Bluespace Harvester), and Station Shields.

Lack Of Tangible Impact On The Round

The BSA, BSH, and Station Shields all lack a tangible impact on the round, with all the fanfare and name of "Station Goal" one would think that said goal would have a tangible impact on the round, when in reality the aforementioned station goals have a number of issues unique to themselves which prevent them from being interesting and impactful, I will go into further detail in each of their dedicated segments.

Station Goal? More Like Engineering Goal

Once again the BSA, BSH, and Station Shields fall short in their purpose, this time in the fact that these goals are all essentially limited to just Engineering. The name STATION Goal implies that they'd be a station wide effort, however the 3 mentioned goals outside of ordering from cargo or getting some parts from science have no other departmental aid.

Solutions

In regards to impact on the round I will go over in their own segments. In regards to involvement the three involved departments are currently Engineering, Cargo, and Science, this leaves out Security, and Medbay, these two departments could be implemented easily enough. Security could have interaction with the station goal by giving antags a new objective in the form of sabotaging the station goal in some form (note these would also succeed if the goal was never built in the first place), maybe to their own benefit similar to what happens if you emag the BSH, to implement Medbay involvement perhaps the various station goals could have more intense operational hazards for Medbay to treat.


The Bluespace Artillery

This section will cover my issues with the BSA in particular and some potential fixes, generally the BSA is not that bad of a station goal and can be fixed with some effort

This Thing Is Too Niche

The BSA while interesting on paper has very few actual use cases due to our ruleset, this isn't implying we should change the ruleset and is more so an issue with the BSA itself. Anything off station is either too durable or pointless to target to make actual use of the BSA on, while using it to fire upon a station based target would be a violation of our rules barring a select few niche cases and also requires far more effort to setup than it's worth.

Solutions

The BSA's general use case of "explode stuff" is hard to work with considering our ruleset, a potential implementation I can think of that would at least make the BSA more useable would be to have it produce low power targeting grenades as a secondary function, these would function very similar to what was proposed in PR#16275 albeit with a smaller blast radius than a standard BSA shot. Having the BSA be more useable in particular against mid-rounds would help make it matter in a typical round.
 

Station Shields

Station Shields, oh boy where to start with these things, if I were in a position to say so I'd say to just outright replace these with something else and let you order them through cargo at any time.

The Opposite Of A Station Goal

These things are so detached from being a station goal it's disgusting, unlike every other goal you just slam these things down randomly in space around the station then press a button on a console. How is this a STATION goal when it's literally just Engineering doing some minor EVA they were probably already going to do when wiring the solars.

Extremely Underwhelming Function

Station Shields serve one purpose and no other, blocking meteors, on paper this doesn't sound that bad BUT, meteors are both uncommon and underwhelming as an event, opinion incoming but I personally find that the meteors hitting the station is actually more interesting than just being deleted as it gives engineering something to do on a potentially slow round, okay opinion over. The ONE case where these would actually be useful would be during a Meteor round, funny thing about that? Meteors as a round-type are not in rotation meaning that these things are even less useful than one would think. And you want to know something extra funny? A meteor event isn't even guaranteed when you get the shields as an objective meaning they can be completely and utterly useless based off of pure RnG.


Solutions

As I said above I personally don't think these are salvageable but I'll still try to give some input. Shields could be upgraded to provide a larger coverage area with stock parts, and to give security some interaction perhaps these could either "upgrade" meteors or attack the station itself if sabotaged by an antagonist. And to make them more useful they could perhaps guard against more than just meteors attacking space carp and the like.

DNA Vault

Ah the DNA Vault my personal favorite of the four goals I'd say this one is actually what a station goal should be, it involves multiple departments, is generally accessible, and also has a proper impact on the round. I'll discuss the elephant in the room that is the actual balance of this thing below.

Boy This Thing Is Busted

The actual balance of the vault is at 2 extremes, half the genes are super busted and the other half are basically useless. In particular two egregious genes are Leg Muscle Stimuli (base movement speed increase) and Neural Repathing (halves all stun times) while on the other end of the spectrum we have Toxin Adaptation (no damage from breathing plasma) and Lung Reinforcement (can breathe regardless).

Solution

Simple enough on this one, balance out the various traits you can get, I have nothing in mind myself so if you have an idea leave it down below.

Bluespace Harvester

To be honest, I was very disappointed by this when it finally got in, first it was too hard to get the higher levels which was fine, it was better to be like that than to have it be baby mode where it is now.

An Underwhelming Project

The Harvester is in a bit of a weird spot and I guess this could be more of a critique of our current power system rather than the goal itself but regardless it is both A. Nigh impossible to reach higher levels with the SM due to the very low power output, and B. Far too easy to crank up to a very high level with an easy to make TEG setup.

An Underwhelming Reward

The earnings from this could've been so interesting considering that it's supposed to be tapping into an alternate universe, but in truth the rewards are all already obtainable for the most part barring the scarab eggs, the hat option is just a renamed crate from cargo, pretty much the only unique list of items on the payouts list is from the cultural artifact but even then there's a solid chance you just get some brass which to be fair at the time couldn't be made but is now just as easy as throwing some chems together.

Incredibly Isolated

Due to the nature of the BSH essentially requiring its own private powernet there's very little room to try building it in different places, this results in the BSH only ever being interacted with by Engineering/Atmos, for a Station Goal this is once again missing the point of a station goal.

Solutions

As I said earlier the power criteria on the BSH isn't so much an issue with the harvester itself and moreso the current power generation methods available to the crew, fixing this should be relatively easy, make the SM actually generate power, nerf the TEG or just nerf the TEG and reduce the power threshold on the BSH as the TEG is busted. In regards to making it more rewarding to use. And a way to encourage building it somewhere that isn't just engineering the addition of a remote power input device could solve the issue of it needing its own private powernet.

Conclusions

All in all I love the concept of Station Goals and only want to see them improved, I've had these issues with the station goals for a while and a lot of them leave me lacking any real motivation to do them only further draining the limited amount things that Engineering has to do in the first place.

I'm up for discussion of things and would like to hear your opinion's down below.

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by Leanfrog
Thermal regulation was a bad example of a weak trait as it's pretty good, replaced with what is just nobreathe

[Viz]

My main issue with station goals is that they're all simply just machines to be built. There's just a certain meta that everyone follows for getting it done ASAP, because after you've done each one two times the novelty's gone and you just either want it done, or you just ignore it.

I like the DNA vault the most because it being somewhat small it can be fit into an actual good looking area, but the powers you get from it can be really broken (fucking leg stim).

[Qwertytoforty]

BSA: Perhaps an option to scale the blast, or make it more practical would be good, like said mentioned grenades.

Station shields: Underwhelming, yes, but it actually makes sense as a station goal, and would logically be something NT would want the crew to have on any station. It is simple, but simple isn't necessarily bad. If anything, some improvements could be make more sats needed, and slightly increase the range on them to make them more usefull. It is simple yes, but it does not really need to be complex. Maybe make departments have to work on it, maybe make the sats need quality stock parts / larger cells. Maybe a power relay to power the sats.

DNA vault: A nice hard changeable, multiple departments, but with quite the broken rewards. Some scaling down on stim / arm / stun may be good, while maybe buffing toxin to be something other than plasma and virus immunity.

BSA. Sounds nice, but you almost never get any rewards of it, crew has a habit of cheesing it with belts / disposals, and the only way to power it in a practical method is TEG, which could really use a tweak. In short, it needs to generate more points with less power, but also spawn the portals on station, rather than just in the room it is in perhaps, to prevent cheesing it. The spawn rate should also be tweaked, having 1 point over the limit is a 1% chance to shut it down each cycle, which is admittedly way to common.

[LiberatedWaveMan]

Pretty plain and simple honestly.

DNA Vault: WAY overpowered.
Literally every other station goal? Ridiculously underwhelming.

[Leanfrog]

8 minutes ago, Qwertytoforty said:

Station shields: Underwhelming, yes, but it actually makes sense as a station goal, and would logically be something NT would want the crew to have on any station. It is simple, but simple isn't necessarily bad. If anything, some improvements could be make more sats needed, and slightly increase the range on them to make them more usefull. It is simple yes, but it does not really need to be complex. Maybe make departments have to work on it, maybe make the sats need quality stock parts / larger cells. Maybe a power relay to power the sats.

It being a thing makes actual sense yeah, hence why I suggested just shifting them over to being something cargo can purchase and replace them with something a bit more interesting, having them in cargo would give Engis something else to do on top of the station goal, the station shields are incredibly underwhelming as a whole and feel unfit to be a station goal IMO

Edited August 26, 2021 by Leanfrog

[ItsMarmite]

Everyone talks about leg stims, no one talks about the ridiculousness that is arm stims.

Regardless. I'd much prefer to see some nerfs to DNA Vault powers- more specifically neural (discount CNS), leg stims (blood replaced with meth) and arm stims (gloves of the north star on crack).

BSH? BSA? Shields? Boring as all hell. I actually LIKE shields now, because I can do them in ten minutes and then the department can work on their own projects and actually enjoy the round. God forbid its BSH, and we have to spend the rest of the round being very frustrated and annoyed- unless there's a competent TEG setup, in which the rest of engineering sits around eating snot for about thirty minutes, until one guy finishes his gamer broken engine setup, and then hotwires it.

If I could code I'd definitely try to make a PR for shit like lavaland gas mining and other such goals. People need more departmental interaction. Its the various inter-departmental interactions that drive a lot of rounds, and there is no interaction to standing in front of the ORM reminding the QM that we need more diamonds, or me standing for twenty minutes in front of RND for an arbitrary number of blue raspberry dipping dots that WILL all get deleted when the scientist who decided to man RND after twenty minutes of waiting threw them at me, reasonably thinking that they wouldn't just ALL delete.

Like DNA Vault, each station goal needs to CHANGE the station. As Leanfrog said, it is a STATION goal. Not a 'one atmos tech sitting on his ass' goal, nor 'the CE realising no one else has done shields so he guesses he's doing it goal' or even 'an engiborg having to make a BSA room because no one else wants to do it' goal.

The only real fun people HAVE with the current station goals is doing them in stupid locations, and as much as admins frown on these stupid locations- the fact that people do it is a symptom of the problem with station goals.

Station goals suck ass and the only reason I do them as CE is because I'm expected to take engineers away from projects they actually enjoy and want to spend the round doing, to do these arbitrary tasks they have already done so many times, before a nanite filled pulse pistol man comes down and executes me in front of a live studio audience.

[Pckables]

I really can't think of a way to make BSA more useful to the station. It's just a big gun. It's not gonna have any real use because we don't have anything big to shoot every round. (And making it more effective vs Lavaland mobs would open a bad can of worms). As cool as everything about it is, it's not really practical as a regular station goal.

BSH has potential, but needs more tweaking. Its rewards are lackluster and there arent enough options to power it except for a TEG. If the BSA and Station Shields werent also station goals, BSH would be a nice "Engineering/Atmos" focused goal with some adjustments.

I have nothing new to add to the DNA Vault discussion except to add "Tough Skin" to the list of useless DNA vault powers. You take a little less brute damage, but you're also completely unable to be injected with hyposprays or syringes. Doctors hate him!

 

Having station goals that involved more than just engineering is always nice.
An example:

Station Goal: Neural Education Organism

A station goal that requires the joint efforts of medical. Nanotrasen would like the Cyberiad to experiment with the forefront of their "Education" program. The Neural Education Organism has been pre-loaded with Nanotrasen endorsed knowledge and ideals, and would like you to build a machine that can transfer it directly into another's brain. Unfortunately, ensuring compatibility with both the machine and subject is a violent process. Extensive medical attention will be required for both the preparation and attuning process.

The cargo crate contains a cube containing the test organism, random cybernetic augments/limbs/organs that must be installed, a list of additional organs from randomly selected species to be transplanted, and the machine board.

Once the test organism is set up and machine is built, the attuning process can begin. The organism must be attuned to three different species of sentient humanoids before it is complete.
Unfortunately the attuning process is long and extremely violent. Both the organism and the subject will take large amounts of brute, burn, oxy, and toxin damage throughout the procedure, but must be kept alive for the two minute attuning process to complete. If either dies, the attuning process fails and must be restarted.

Once this is successfully done three times, station goal is complete, and people can enter the machine for a quick blast of education.
NanoTrasen-Educated individuals can understand all humanoid languages, have access to a special crafting menu (what you can craft is yet to be determined), and feel a bit more loyal to NT (just fluff).

The organism must stay alive in the machine for it to continue working. It can be defibbed, but not cloned. If you lose it, you'll have to start from scratch with another one from cargo.

 

Edited August 27, 2021 by Pckables