[WIP] Reaper Reworked, Again Again

[TheKillfish]

About the pull request

A revival of PR #6610 with much rewriting and reworking. Though much has changed, the core goal remains the same: to rework @Geevies' original Reaper PR #1899 and @ThePiachu's Reaper Re-up #2234 to be better balanced and not end up being Carrier but better, along with some related miscellaneous changes that could be atomized into their own PRs but fuck it, done here instead.

In this state, the Reaper is a frontline support attacker, able to fufil both Carrier-esque duties such as planting eggs, carrying huggers, planting weeds, ordering special constructions and using pheremones, but also able to put on some hurt if need be, mainly being oriented around debilitating damage in the form of toxin rather than directly mulching marines like Praetorian, Crusher or Ravager can. My goal here has been trying to make Reaper fufil a niche that either no other xeno does or is being done in an appreciably different way compared to other xenos without either infringing on the niches of other xenos nor being too blatantly overpowered or utilizing features people generally don't like. Oh, and going hard on morbid, horrific vibes for the RP lovers. Whether I have succeeded at that or not is up to the judgement of everyone else who reviews this and comes with feedback of which I'd appreciate getting via Discord or mentioned here (even if at risk of being labled as off-topic by maintainers).

For the specifics regarding what I've given Reaper, please read this HackMD writeup, although the following are TLDR-ish notes:

• Evolves only from Carrier.
• Stats are same as Carrier except for speed (Tier 3 instead of Tier 4), damage (Tier 3 - Tier 3 instead of Tier 2 - Tier 4), plasma (600 instead of 400) and tackling (uses Ravager's tackle stats).
• You can process unrevivable corpses into Flesh Plasma for your main source of marine debilitating. You can also carry up to 4 burst corpses around, useful for replenishing Flesh Plasma reserves if you run out!
• You may have the means for attacking on the frontline, but you are NOT a frontliner like Ravager, Crusher or Praetorian: you have no armor, you have no stuns, you have no mobility tools. You will die quickly if you try to pretend you are one of the aforementioned three. You are meant to weaken marines for others to kill or capture, not play Doom music and slash them at their cadeline.
• Though you don't have storage for bulk transport of either, you can carry eggs in one hand and huggers are nurtured while you hold them, much like Carrier. If you cannot be useful in a fight, you can cooperate with Carriers to build up your backline.

Some miscellaneous inclusions

• Plasma cost for pheremones is now a tweakable variable called aura_plasma_cost.
• Most single letter variables on trap.dm have been nuked.

Explain why it's good for the game

The Drone line lacks any form of T3 and it'd be cool if they had at least one (for now), and T3 as a whole is pretty offensively biased; while I have ended up doing no better, at least Reaper does so in a way different than "move forward and slash the shit out of people" and isn't meant to be getting the kills itself. Wei's sprites for Reaper look sick and they deserve a more permanent spot in the game.

Pheremone costs being modular is useful and opens up interesting future ideas. Single letter variables suck.

Testing Photographs and Procedure

Vidyas will be provided once I get my new PC set up.

Screenshots & Videos

Put screenshots and videos here with an empty line between the screenshots and the <details> tags.

Changelog

🆑 Killfish, credit to Geeves, sleepynecrons, ThePiachu
add: Adds new T3 Xenomorph called the Reaper, evolving from Carrier. It is a supportive attacker oriented around wearing down marines faster through use of toxin damage caused via reagent which itself is applied through a slash ability, a smoke emanation ability and smoke traps.. Also oriented around being a horrifying, morbid creature perfect for RP.
add: Passive: Flesh Plasma. Resource Reaper generates both passively and actively. Starts at 1 per tick, can be temporarily increased by normal slashes, max of 5.
add: 1st Ability: Haul Corpse. Target burst corpses to store them, target self to recover one. Can store up to 4 corpses. Number of stored corpses can be examined by others, and corpses are dropped on death.
add: 2nd Ability: Flesh Harvest. Target bodyparts on unrevivable corpses to harvest: targeting head does nothing, targeting arms and legs rip them off, targeting chest or groin chestbursts unbursted corpses. Generates 30 Flesh Plasma from limbs and 60 Flesh Plasma from bursting chests. Pauses decay on bonus passive generation for 5 seconds.
add: 3rd Ability: Reap. REPLACES TAILSTAB. Simple spriteclick melee with 2-tile range. Hitting humanoid targets injects small amounts of Sepsicine; a simple toxin that causes pain and toxin damage. Additionally increases bonus passive generation and pauses its decay for 5 seconds.
add: 4th Ability: Emit Mist. Consume 150 Flesh Plasma to create a small cloud of toxic mist that applies Sepsicine to humanoid targets, as well as slowing them and unallied xeno targets down.
add: Passive: Mist Mine. Consume 100 Flesh Plasma to charge an empty resin hole with toxic mist. Functions like Boiler neurogas traps.
code: Most single letter vars in trap.dm have been killed.
imageadd: Reaper and Reaper-related sprites.
/:cl:

[Zenith00000]

If you're pretty much making this Carrier ++ then perhaps I can convince Wei to add huggers to the sprite, since originally it was supposed to be this.

This is what it was originally supposed

to be - the huggers:

Either way can't wait, keep it up. Looking forward to it.

[deathrobotpunch]

Can’t view the hackMD

[TheKillfish]

HackMD link should be working now, my potato brain forgot the "let everyone view it" option

[Red-byte3D]

Can you write tldrs of abilities in the cl? some people like reading those instead of opening prs and going into hackmd

[Red-byte3D]

I think you created a very well xenomorph aesthetic, but i feel like this is going to be less favorable, gameplay wise. I understand that the main point is that you can carry huggers, bodies and eggs but majority of the time two of these three is useless,

you can carry eggs yes but two per hand as opposed to just carriers being able to store them kinda makes this nearly moot as an evolution. Same with carrying huggers. Since carrying burst bodies are also now useless other then giving you plasma regen

Not to put pressure on you but xenomorph side hasnt had a new caste in what i belive is 3-5 years~~? Not counting king since its not in the normal gameplay loop.

I understand that you wanted to mainly go "support" but as it stands i think you are scared to add abilities that people are supposed to fear, im not sure what you are actually supporting as reaper, helping...drones build? Making carriers more lethal by allowing them to make more traps? This caste currently seems like its just going to be wandering around aimlessly. Not being a frontliner doesnt mean you arent deadly. The entire casteline up is very heavy on this, yes you dont have much to fear about a drone when you're far away and theyre usually easy kills, but if they know what they are doing they can instantly just two tap you and win the fight. With its speed and massive size most people will be able to just shoot you to death before you can even two tap them.

I think you should look more into making this an actual support instead of just a xenomorph whos never supposed to show its face, hivelord and drones can make walls while not showing their face, burrowers are usually sneaky because theyre backlining or making traps. carriers dont show themselves because theyre probably just planting eggs and making traps because they have the storage to do so, you've removed everything from this caste and gave it basically nothing that would reinforce staying behind.

I think the first step is to make all tier 2 drone's be able to evolve into this so nobody feels the "im locked to this tier 2" effect anymore, and can opt out to tier 3 tier or tier 1 as they wish since you hold your bonus and people dont waste another 200 going hive > drone > carrier

The trap filling is good but im not seeing why anyone would ever choose these traps over the burrower traps, as it stuns people and does good damage INSTANTLY same goes for spitter. While the damage from the toxin is pretty decent, it takes way too long for it to matter as if its in the heat of the battle, it wont matter at all because most people will instantly retreat once it goes off (which is a good way for scaring away people who doesnt know how the ability works, more average players will push whatever they were pushing regardless because the damage takes a good while to rack up.) and most people can probably already counter this with tricord, and dylovene if theres a medic which doesnt stop them from pushing. (The difference between this and burrower trap is that the burrower traps can work aggressively and defensively, either stunning people so the xenos can do alot of damage to the person or letting the xeno escape, this doesnt really achieve either of them)

The gas shares the same problem with above.

Why did you remove the old flesh construct abilities? I feel like they were pretty cool, i had a few ideas while working on the pr myself that i just didnt have time to finish due to real life stuff. Dm me on discord, i'd love to talk to you more about this caste if you want and i think it has more potential. (i am banned from the discord)

[cm13-github]

This pull request has conflicts, please resolve those before we can evaluate the pull request.

[cm13-github]

Conflicts have been resolved. A maintainer will review the pull request shortly.

[TheKillfish]

for fucks sake, git and vsc, why do you insist on making conflict resolving so fucking backwards. closing this and making yet another fucking branch it seems