Another zombies rework

src/en/space-station-14/round-flow/proposals/zeds rework.md

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+# Zombies Game Mode
+
+| Designers | Coders | Implemented | GitHub Links |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| ketufaispikinut (sword_cat on discord), others (todo: put their names here) | idem | :x: No | TBD |
+
+## Overview
+
+The humble zombie is a round start antagonist focused on infecting the station, slowly but surely. The crew should struggle against the infected horde; it should be an experience of strained survival as the whole station collapses under the zombie apocalypse. Zombie antags should almost always cause evacuation away from a now-unlivable station.
+
+## Background
+
+We currently have zombies on Wizden, most downstreams have zombies and a lot of SS13 servers had some sort of implementation of zombies. This game mode has received mostly good player feedback and is rather well liked, but still lacks a design doc, and has some rough edges. This document seeks to describe how zombies should develop in the future: a zombie round should reverse the usual hunter-hunted relationship of antagonists and crew members as the last survivors desperately try to fend off the infected in the best zombie horror movie fashion.
+
+Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of issues and complaints about the Zombies game mode:
+
+ - The Initial Infected’s competence at the game is the sole driver behind the results of an outbreak. This allows one extremely cheesy strategy : a robust II quaffs anti-poison meds and murders everyone without turning while the others IIs take care of the infecting.
+ - It often becomes a slow, boring round (especially as a zombie), since when only a few survivors are left it’s basically impossible to find them.
+ - As a crew member, the best strategy to ensure your survival is to space yourself and return to a pod when evacuation arrives - we don’t want players to intentionally withdraw themselves from the round.
+ - Infection protection is unreliable at best - even riot armors or the supposedly zombie-proof bio suits don’t even come close of 100% protection. A few bites from a zombie shouldn’t always spell certain death - especially when you are as prepared as you can be. Melee should be viable as a last resort against zombies; it currently isn’t.
+
+However, despite these issues, this game mode can still be valuable for the game as a whole. It provides a unique (and sometimes very enjoyable) experience of apocalypse survival which is exactly what this game is about: surviving the disastrous collapse of the universe’s unluckiest station.
+
+## Features
+
+At the beginning of a Zombies round, the infection will be spread to a few random patients zeroes. It should then slowly spread, disrupting station activities, until the remaining survivors must go into hiding, build barricades and arm themselves: the station shouldn’t be able to easily ignore the zombie virus.
+
+The infection spreads through exchange of bodily fluids; of course, this means that infected individuals will pass on the infection through bites (as it should be and is in most zombie media). Due to how combat works in SS14, having a bite infect a player 100% of the time would feel rather bad, since current melee combat guarantees that both parties land hits, whose damage can then be reduced by armor. In "real life", you could reasonably hit a zombie with a baseball bat and then dodge its bite. In SS14, doing this would require *very* good timing & lack of lag. To conclude, despite zombies infecting on bites, the crew should still be somewhat able (either through protection or luck) to fend of zombies using melee weapons.
+
+Once infected, players will be granted a relatively short grace period before displaying symptoms (we should maybe wait for some sort of virology before introducing visible symptoms) and eventually turning. It should be possible for crew members to tell individuals infected with the virus apart from non-infected crew members. The infection should zombify fast enough as for it to be an actual danger during a round.
+
+Upon turning, players lose basic abilities such as talking and operating machinery (their hands become non-functional, although if they had some they get a prying ability). They pretty much get reduced to biting machines who must now roam the halls of the station to infect more individuals.
+
+Newly-infected zombies should still be entertained by the game; we don’t want them ghosting. We should thus introduce classic zombie games tropes such as:
+ - Mutant zombies (fast, pouncer, brute, etc) each with their strengths and weaknesses (brute zombies are way stronger but can’t infect living individuals, fast zombies are extremely weak to brute, etc). Zombies should still work better in hordes, though. We don’t want a magic invincible berserker zombie that can run through crowds of survivors and murder & infect them all. Each mutation should be designed to either assist other zombies or to work well in hordes.
+ - Survivor detection / pinpointer ability to detect remaining survivors when only a few are left. Stragglers hiding in lockers or in secluded areas should not be safe from the infected. Having each and every (player-controlled) zombie suddenly home in on the remaining survivors would prevent round-stalling, aswell as add to the remaining survivors versus horde feeling mentioned before.
+
+One way to implement mutations would be through giving different initial infected different strains of the virus; this would encourage all initial infected to infect the most individuals possible instead of having only one II turn and the other sabotage the station while quaffing dylovene (initial infected should *not* be able to stay unturned for the whole shift, so if this is not enough, then the poison damage from the infection could massively ramp up trough time).
+
+Another way for mutations to function would have them be completely random, and more common as the infection advances. Zombies could get a random mutation after a certain amount of time alive, with it being faster & less rare when more are infected, this would reward zombie players who don't ghost and stay active in the round.
+
+Zombies should also get new objectives to reflect their goals as an ever-expanding apocalyptic force, those mainly being zombies winning once Central Command becomes infected.
+
+The zombie’s objectives should pressure the crew to try to maintain a safe zone (another zombie trope) around Evac, and make zombies try to confront the remaining survivors there.
+
+Zombies should be particularly robust, by being more resistant to non-burn source of damages, and by being able to heal out of crit and to come back to life when dead (having zombies automatically resurrect after some time would lessen the amount of RR that happens during zombies rounds).
+
+Finally, to mirror events such as the end of the game *Death Road to Canada*, military reinforcements (e.g. CBURN) should be dispatched to prevent the infected from reaching the rest of the world (Evac) and provide support to the struggling crew members who made it this far. These ghost roles will also provide entertainment for round-removed players.
+
+## Game Design Rationale
+
+The zombie is the conversion antagonist by excellence; where Nuclear Operatives destroy the station trough infiltration, zombies come from the station itself yet prove to be a threat on the same level (if not more dangerous) as the Operatives. It should challenge the player’s ability to balance between hiding, traversing an infected station without being caught, salvaging armor and weapons and working in a small team to fight against a way bigger undead force.
+
+While revolutionaries are simply replacing the station’s leadership, zombies represent the total collapse of any central organization as most become infected.
+
+A singular zombie should almost always be no match for an armed crew member in one-on-one combat; zombies should have their victory in combat through either horde power or via infecting crew members, and then having them eventually turn after the fight has concluded.
+
+The infection shouldn’t be easily curable, and existing cures should not be too potent: players shouldn’t be able to become fully immune trough medicine (looking at you, ambuzol+) alone, they should need to either return to medbay to get cured or do treatments of dubious quality (when discomed arrives, removing limbs should prevent the spread of the infection). This should foster players trying to salvage better armor from the station (such as bio suit, coats, etc).
+
+## Roundflow & Player interaction
+
+### Early game
+
+On a normal zombie round (one that is not caused by nuclear operative intervention), a few players should be picked as Initial Infecteds (IIs). These patients zeroes start as regular crew members, infected yet asymptomatic. As the round moves forward, they will slowly (slower than normal infected crewmembers) begin to show symptoms before fully turning. Unlike normal zombies, Initial Infecteds should still retain basic abilities (such as garbled speech) to designate themselves as natural zombie leaders.
+
+While in their grace period, initial infected players *could* have methods to infect other players. These methods shouldn’t feel random to infected crew members (we don’t want a random infection chance when near the II, for instance). Finding proper ways for the IIs to spread the infection "naturally » would probably be really hard though.
+
+There should be some ways for crew members to know if another is infected (be it an II or just a normal infected crew member) or not; be it trough description symptoms (such as the character looking feverish) or random coughing, having someone on your team suddenly display those symptoms should give pressure the crew and make it so the zombie virus isn’t just a sudden transformation into a mean green biting machine with little to no symptoms beyond damage.
+
+Initial Infecteds will be encouraged to sabotage the station as to make it easier for them to infect as many as possible and make it harder for the crew to resist. IIs should however *not* be able to stave off the infection forever. They should always eventually turn, and, of course, be immune to any cure to the virus.
+
+### Going into hiding
+
+Zombies should slowly kick in until they eventually overtake the station. Survivor players should then be encouraged to hide, build bases or try to maintain safe zones while trying to equip or assemble a cure as fast as possible, playing a game of deadly hide-and-seek with those playing as the zombie horde. 
+
+The crew could thus build a somewhat zombie-proof zone through things like electrical fences, grids, barricades, etc. Of course, no area should ever be 100% safe from the horde. 
+
+As mentioned before, zombies should also have *some* way to locate survivors when only a few stragglers are left alive; we don’t want them to wander aimlessly trough the station’s halls; while this makes sense from an external point of view, playing as a zombie without someone to bite is extremely boring and thus this should be avoided. They could thus get an innate nukeops-like pointer, basic directions toward survivors, "leader » zombies or something similar.
+
+In general, zombies should get stronger and stronger the more the round advances, to prevent endless stalling by the crew. Mutations should be more common, stronger, zombies should do more damage or the infection could have a shorter incubation period. Of course, this should be balanced around the remaining number of cremwates vs the size of the infected horde. Think of it as rubber banding to constantly keep the round fun for both the zombies and the uninfected.
+
+Crew members should look for armor & clothes such as riot armor, biosuits, winter coats, etc: with enough protection, you should be virtually immune to basic bite infections. You should be able to defend yourself from one zombie with a baseball bat and proper clothing without always getting infected.
+
+### Last stand
+
+Once a certain percentage of station staff is infected, an evacuation shuttle should be automatically called and the round should devolve into a mad rush to secure evac, as both the crew and the infected horde need to make it to central command. This is where the round should climax, as every soul, living or not, on the station tries to make it on the shuttle.
+
+To ensure no one hides behind and to reinforce the "last stand" vibe, the escape pods could be disabled or made harder to access.
+
+At this point, a CBURN squad could be automatically dispatched by centcomm to defend the evacuation shuttle. This would have two benefits: 
+
+ - It would provide interesting ghost roles for the many players who will get round-removed on zombie rounds (think of the poor zombified Pun Pun stuck in space, far from everyone, or the numerous zombies killed with no chance of ever being revived).
+ - The military trying to sort infected individuals from those still healthy would make for great RP occasions (trying to hide the symptoms of the zombie virus as a simple fever, etc).
+
+### Playing against zombies
+
+In the beginning of an outbreak, whether the zombies succeed or not is up to the initial infected players, for it is their actions which directly determines how many players are infected. When the shift advances, non-II zombies far outnumber initial infecteds. Since the zombie horde cannot communicate within itself, it can be assumed that at this point control of the round flow will fall back solely to the survivors, because non-communicating zombies will not be able to draft up plans (Urist McBity is not able to decide between the zombie "blitzops" or "stealthops" equivalents because *it can't speak*). 
+
+After the initial effort of IIs, it will thus be the survivor’s strategy that will make each zombie round feel different. As explained before, survivors will probably center their gameplay around securing safe zones and producing a cure.
+
+In a situation where the zombies are getting wiped out or the round is getting stalled, the zombies should get artificially weakened / strengthened as to allow either the crew to win or to provide a more entertaining experience. For instance, currently, eliminating all zombies is extremely difficult since you will often have a few zombies either in space or hidden in maints, too afraid to go against the armed crew members; giving the zombies buffs in such a situation would ensure that they would make their way to the crew.
+
+A zombie shift where the game stalls can be terribly annoying; it should thus get altered as to either offer a satisfactory victory for survivors or as to let the horde proceed.
+
+### In other game modes
+
+As for the nuclear operative’s romerol bundle (the sole presence of zombies outside its own event), it simply needs to work like a real zombie game mode - it plays fairly well in the zombie apocalypse theme, since a frequent trope of this genra is biological warfare / semi-intentional medical disasters and nukies are pretty much doing exactly that. Nukies would thus bring with them mutated zombies and eventually an automatic shuttle call & a CBURN squad if zombies dominate.
+
+## Administrative & Server Rule Impact (if applicable)
+
+CBURN will need to have a higher level of role-play, and this will need to be enforced by the admin team. We don’t want them to simply kill everyone.
+
+# Technical Considerations
+- Mutations, if any, will be a pain to implement.
+- Other features should be relatively easy to implement, or at worst just tedious (such as going around and rebalancing infection rates).