if youve played any of the games mentioned in the topic this will hopefully make more sense
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- no good way to get decent credits without relying on other departments
- selling plasma is wholly reliant on miners; cargo gets no reward for doing well and no consequence for not doing their job past loading crates in the first 2 mins of round
- cargo tech is often considered the first job a player should take, but it can be boring as fuck unless they decide to do a gimmick (ie barcargo, singulocargo, guncargo) (new players need direction!)
- techs don't really have something to actually "do" (doesn't take more than one person to man the console/take requests) other than "steal shit to make money" even though selling plasma is easier. as such, cargotechs will often fuck off and just tide around the station
- there is nothing really worth spending money on other than guns/meme items, once you get past fulfilling any requests the station has (which in a typical round never really exceeds 10K credits worth of stuff total)
- stocks are handy, but only one person can do them, they're only good for passive point generation, they're clumsy for new players, and they're boring
- cargo has an asston of space that isn't really used
- i mean it only ever gets used if you buy a fuckton of shit but that isn't really feasible now that techdisk exports are gone
- i could probably write more but you get it
we
- use up cargos space
- give cargotechs something to do
- give something to spend excess points on that isnt guns/meme items
- and most importantly, give cargo a decent/intuitive way to make credits that is reliant on their own ability rather than other department roles.
fuck get to the point:
ive been coding a system that would rely pretty heavily on cargo's conveyor belts and buy-able machines that can be used to create crates that can be sold.
Cargo would be able to import tiny crates or something(from a portal or some shit) which they can then upgrade and sell at a profit
- ratios such as, say, two tiny crates -> one big crate can be used to promote big factory designs focused on efficiency
- a cargo tech might think: "we get 1 small crate every 5 seconds, and this machine takes 3 crates and 10 seconds to combine them into a larger, more profitable crate"
- things like the input rate of tiny crates/sec could be upgraded with research or just randomized per round to prevent a single perfect factory design working every round
- note: input rate cant be too high cus byond is ass with object creation/deletion
- crates could potentially be upgraded into department crates (eg sec crates), where demand for these specific crates changes according to stock market
- example: stock market says ResearchCorp's prices are goin way up; that means we should combine plasma + crates (with a dedicated combiner machine) to form science crates, which will sell for much more than regular crates!
- the major issue would probably be balance/making sure byond doesnt shit the bed with object creation
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so yeah waddya think