New Cult Objectives

[liran424]

 

I"ll get right to the point. we need more objectives for special rounds (cult,xeno etc.) to make it less dull when you only "need to get 4 cultist alive and free on the escape shuttle" or if the game feels lucky "assassinate X, ram Ian into a washing machine"

 

Coding wise: I would way a weeks work of coding and debugging [spoiler2]my guess at least... and not including 5,6[/spoiler2]

 

Balance: make it more interesting without sacrificing RP or power balance because we're talking about objectives...

 

NEW OBJECTIVES

 

1) Sacrifice X amount of crew members to the Dark God before he will eat you. (not really... it's just for intimidating)

2) Convert X crew members to serve the Master (just convert... nothing else)

3) Sacrifice @name to the Dark Lord. [insert more sadistic text here]

4) The Dark Master himself is interested in @name convert him to show your loyalty to the Demon of Air and Darkness.

5) The Insidious Evil is in need of a magical artifact a @name of artifact is somewhere on the station, the Unspeakable Evil needs you to find it and retrieve it on the shuttle. (a random item that serves no use to a mere mortal) [Pick an everyday item and put "magic" before its name.. For example: a "magic pen"- just your ordinary pen, nothing special here] {recommending it will have the properties of the nuke disk so it won't be easily destroyed... and spawn it 30+ minutes into the round just to be safe}

6) Port cursed zones from Goonstation Curse 75% of the station. Cursed zones will give a mental debuff (brain damage over time) to non cultists and give a slow heal over time and minor damage resistance to cultists. [spoiler2]Would be every interesting seeing this happen[/spoiler2]

7) We are missing funds for our secret movement. Get X amount of money in The Secret bank account.

8) The One whose Name Shall Not be Spoken need 4 souls for his dark dealing. (4 soul shards with souls inside them)

 

[FalseIncarnate]

 

Couple of things here:

 

1. Porting ANYTHING from Goonstation is incredibly difficult and highly unlikely to occur. They are a closed-source codebase and highly protective of their content. Goonchem was a very big deal to get, and even that was with some serious restrictions on what could be done (since it was effectively a recreation and not a true port).

 

2. There already are objectives in the vein of 2 and 3 of your above suggestion. There is an objective to ensure X number of cultists escape alive (and still in the cult) at round end, and another to sacrifice a specified crew member.

 

3. Having an objective to simply convert (and not need to ensure survival / continued cult loyalty) crew is rather boring, as you are not really at risk of failure if the chaplain starts passing around the holy water.

 

4. Having an objective to steal a special round-specific item ("magic pen") is one of the largest meta red-flags, as the simple existence of such an item would immediately scream "it's a cult round!" to anyone who spots it. It would need to be an existing item or be otherwise indistinguishable to non-cult/non-chaplain players so the Captain/HoS/Sec team can't just lock it away before anyone gets a chance to try and snag it. It should also be something that exists on all round-types (especially if the chaplain can discover it's religious/arcane nature) to avoid becoming the red-flag of the round type. Obviously it would need to be randomized, so that it's not always easy to find.

 

4. Having an objective to capture souls would be an interesting addition, though I would make active constructs count towards the soul collection (since they are captured souls shoved into a shell), so that the captured players aren't removed from the round entirely because the cult is afraid to make more constructs from their soul shards.

 

5. Stealing money is a rather boring objective, given how little people actually use their money. A more interesting/interactive economy system would need to be implemented before a steal money objective could be worth adding.

 

Overall, yes, Cult definitely needs some more variety. It is also one of (if not the absolute) oldest game modes we have on the rotation that has not been kept up to date / overhauled within recent months. Giving it some new objectives would help shake it up a bit, but a real updating/overhaul would be much more effective for breathing new life into the game mode in the long term.

 

[liran424]

Thank you for replying. Take the most useful suggestions from here and try to make them happen.