So, I've started playing through FreedroidRPG again, and while I was fighting in
the novice arena, I noticed something a bit broken.

See, after a while, Emergency Shutdown only paralyzes you for five seconds,
while invisibility can work for over 15 seconds. If that was the end of it, that
wouldn't be too terrible of an issue (though that alone means you can
continuously stack Invisibility with Emergency Shutdown to stay invisible
forever), but the truly broken part is that you can start a chain of
invisibility->invisibility->emergency shutdown, to keep on building up more and
more invisibility time. You could potentially do this indefinitely, and there's
a very strong incentive to do so. This is a problem because it breaks the game,
and more so because the way to do it is not very fun (behaviors that are not
very fun should preferably not be rewarded).

I can think of a couple solutions, depending on what sort of design is wanted:

1. You could simply to prevent invisibility times from stacking, as suggested in
issue 608. Instead of adding more invisibility time, the invisibility time could
just be assigned to the value of the current Invisibility level. This way,
players could still game the system for permanent invisibility, but only by
actively doing so.

2. You could design it so that at the end of paralysis, any currently existing
invisibility is immediately lost. This would allow you to be invisible during
emergency cooldown, but force you to reset the invisibility timer afterward.

3.You could design it so that any time paralysis happens, at the start, any
currently existing invisibility is immediately lost. This would *not* allow
Invisibility and Emergency Cooldown to be used at the same time, forcing you to
be vulnerable during Emergency Cooldown (and also Check System Integrity).

One thing of note with these three approaches: #1 would also prevent the use of
cooldown drinks from being used to extend the Invisibility timer, whereas #2 and
#3 would only prevent Emergency Shutdown from being used to do so. This may be
worth considering. Causing these items to end invisibility as well would solve
this, if solving it is desired (which it very well may be, or may not be; I
personally don't have an opinion either way).

This was somewhat inhibited on git version of the game, thanks for the report.


I won't close the issue, but:

In case fluzz decides that no stacking for invisibility is a good idea, he can 
assign this to himself.
If he believes with current git configurations that is not important, he may 
close the issue.
If he decides it is undesirable, he have the right to close both #912 and #608.

Thanks for playing!
Jesus Saves
Game Storyline & Content Team

Note that you don't need "Emergency Shutdown", just assemble enough "Peltier
Element" addons to your armor and you can easily remain invisible.

I can confirm this, flaviojs. With 6 peltiers and invis9 I was able to easily stack 2 and a half hours of invisibility. Even submitted a patch to show hours.

I suggest multiple changes:
1) Make peltiers not so super awesome. Reduce cooling rate increase from 3 to 1 per second.
2) Make invisibility costlier. It should be a mid to late game spell, so e.g.      -    cost = {base = 45, per_level = 10},
+    cost = {base =100, per_level = 20},
3) Make most 600+ class bots see invisible tux. Perhaps with a delay, with the delay depending on bot level.