#Potential beacon station improvements

8 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

topaz delta
#

I'm making this post here before bringing it to GitHub, to make sure I didn't miss anything. It's long. I'll put other parts in the comments.
The final version of the post is meant to accompany my PR with reworked vanilla beacons.
(Based on this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3166241648)

Summary of issues

  • Maintenance tasks can be skipped by wiring the reactor directly to the sonar monitor and ignoring all other devices and broken walls. This is partially outlined by A2ur3 here: https://github.com/FakeFishGames/Barotrauma/discussions/16353
  • Beacon combat can be effectively skipped by turning the beacon into Swiss cheese with your turrets, at a low ammo cost.
    These two things combined make the swarm attracted by the enabled beacon act as the only engaging part of the mission.

Device maintenance
In the current beacon system, all devices become invulnerable once the beacon is activated. You also only need to power a single device to activate the beacon. This means that the damaged walls, junction boxes, or anything else that isn't the sonar monitor does not matter.
Suggested changes:

  • Beacon devices don't deteriorate passively, but do take damage from water, even after the beacon is activated. Players must keep the beacon equipment safe by welding the breaches and draining the rooms.
  • Transducer is now mandatory. This adds an extra task to beacon maintenance (check if the transducer is wired to the sonar monitor and powered). It also means that at the minimum, two devices have to be powered to activate the beacon. A direct connection between the reactor and the sonar monitor will no longer work.
  • With the transducer actually playing a role in the mission, the "NO SIGNAL" message which appears on the sonar monitor when the transducer isn't connected or not powered should be made clearer. "NO TRANSDUCER SIGNAL"? "TRANSDUCER OFFLINE"? Something like that.
#

Walls and enemy encounters
Low wall health of beacon stations makes skipping the combat by shooting the beacon from the submarine's turrets a very appealing option. But this is also the most boring way to engage with enemies in a beacon, and incentivizing boring playstyles is not great. We've addressed this with outposts (normal and abandoned) and with alien ruins.
Suggested change:

  • The durability of exterior beacon walls is increased to 400 HP. They don't have to be as durable as outposts, but the proposed value would be enough to make people think twice about punching holes through a beacon. Inside walls can have 100 HP.
#

Bandits and turrets
Bandit encounters are mostly spoiled by the aforementioned dominant strategy of shooting at the beacon from outside. But even beyond that, they have their issues.
Normal bandit groups immediately announce their presence by firing a turret at the submarine. The small turret rarely does enough damage to be a threat and quickly runs out of ammo.
Normal coilguns can for some reason be filled with harpoon ammo when the beacon mission is generated. This is even more useless to bandits than standard coilgun ammo. They drag your submarine close to the beacon and then... nothing happens. It's like a thalamus encounter with none of thalamus' defenses. The only situation when this can be threatening is if you're going up against a "hard" bandit group and the beacon is equipped with a second turret, the range of which overlaps enough with the range of the small turret. But harpoon ammo is not limited to "hard" bandit groups.
Suggested change:

  • Normal bandits don't get a turret, which means they don't announce their presence. Players now have a legitimate chance to be surprised by bandits after entering a beacon.
  • "Hard" bandits are only equipped with a heavy turret with a limited rotation angle. A trap you can fall for when approaching the beacon too quickly, and which will deal serious damage to your submarine. But otherwise it is easily avoidable. Railgun might be a good fit for all encounters of this type.

Loot
Minor nitpick. Different beacon stations in vanilla Barotrauma use different container tags. It'd be better to unify them and just add more loot variety to the two existing tags. Maybe let us find watchman clothes in beacon supply cabinets sometimes?

#

@urban swallow, you've been interested in the topic and might have something to add.

urban swallow
topaz delta
#

Yea, that's a pretty good post. I remember it and will link it.

#

The last two points are especially helpful. The transducer bug would need to be fixed. Though I haven't actually encountered it in my testing.

#

And the point about misconfigured beacon events needs to be addressed. Don't think it has been fixed.