as title says, add cultists to rotation, it you have problems with them you could restrict their ability to pull marines or fire guns or whatever. Could also have a blurb about what you’re allowed to do as a warning in text when you roll it. Cultist could either be pulled from the antagonist survivor pool, or be a random chance in the marines, or another seperate ERT like roll entirely. I think they add flavor to the game, especially if we got some sprites to make them appear like the ones in aliens dark descent.
Would be cool to add a set of “Goals” for the cultist to do.
If they complete them all they “prove” their faith and can become a cult leader (of course only 1 for the entire round)
It is a fun idea, but you have to essentialy strip cultist from any ability to the point they become a lesser drone equivalent that doesn’t respawn.
They can’t be shooting much. They can’t be overkilling corpses. They can’t be dragging corpses. They can’t meaningfully sabotage anything. They can’t do much shipside (remember agents? All they could do was plaster posters, feed CIC poisoned pizza and some other stuff, yet it was also deemed bad enough to remove).
Don’t get me wrong, it would be fun to capture one of them as a marine and use that room in the maintenance behind autolathe for a little bit of RP interrogation and torture, but other than that, human character working with xenos is OP. Even one.
Solid point. They would need to be nerfed and IIRC the code for them is very old and clunky.
Dont forget IB is a death sentence
Adding xenocultists could be really fun, especially since it would add more RP to the xenos and survivors as well. Of course they need restrictions, like being able to drag away all of the reviveable corpses to the hive is incredibly OP. I am currently thinking maybe force them to sit at hive and RP with xenos until T2 xenos appear(9 minutes since roundstart), just so that they cant steal loot from survs, and only then allow them to roam the colony to find weapons or to… recruit survs.
Yes, I think cultists should be able to convince some survivors to join their side, with huge emphasis on SOME because having 7 cultists would be so incredibly OP, and then being able to ascend to the status of Cult Leader whenever one of the two is true: Number of cultists among survivors is 2+ and most of the living survivors are cultists, OR there’s at least one cultist survivor and all non-cultist survivors are dead or infected. First one is generally for high-pop, and the second one applies to both but works really only to low-pop.
If a cultist manages to ascend into cult leader status they can start recruiting marines as usual, the system itself should probably be improved because I remember it being buggy in an actual round last time xenocult event was ran, and probably the cultists should have a vote on which ORIGINAL cultist gets to be the leader. But if cultists fail to invite even one survivor into their fold - they will not have any access to cult leader and his superior skills plus recruiting, but maybe give them immunity to fracs and IB for that just so they wont die due to RNG after the first battle.
Have them be this sorta choice between quality vs quantity??
Either way, marines having something else to shoot at other than xenos might just spice up the rounds more. CLF usually get eaten by xenos or shot by marines whenever they get a couple frags out, mostly because CLF gets no safe space and must balance between dodging snipers with scouts, actual marines and xenos.
Xeno cultist are pretty awsome from an RP point of view.
Who doesnt love roleplaying a fanatic cultist? And having them adjusted for regular gameplay isnt the hardest in the world.
Although i dont know if you should make them unable to pull marines. Being that they are just surv with fancy abilitys really. Making them unable to pull would just cause a lot of problems. They need to pull each other after all.
I think having them gear restricted would be better.
- would fit RP them not wearing armor and just cult robes and shit.
- would restrict them from metagaming to gear out in colony armory.
Then just add to that horrible gun skills and such. If you want to be very extra, you could give em a skill that makes them worse at using guns or just unable to use em at all. That migth be a ton of work though.
Or other stuff. Point is, there are a LOT of ways to balance cultists and make em work.
That’s what they do in-game already. All cult are forced to robes, no armor. Just put a faction restriction on them like in HvH. They can pull their own, but not enemy faction that are dead.
I’m guessing the limit would be around 2 cultists, any cultist who’s gonna be helping with fighting will perish to IB, because they don’t have a surgery skill!!
maybe they can put themself in a xeno nest to heal organ and bone damage