Pros:
- Lots of cool stuff that's easily accessible
- Basics are easy to understand (Spend point, unlock items)
- Easy to iterate on (Making new techweb nodes is incredibly easy, only a few lines of copy-paste code)
- Practically infinite scaling
- Cool stuff is too accessible, making special things like Durand, particle rifle, portal gun feel much less special
- Requires very little input to work. Practically the only thing you need to influence it is the 50k bomb, which can be made in under twenty minutes
- Causes departmental bullshit
- System is hard to understand in some very odd ways, such as departmental items aren't clearly outlined, every console can research anything without knowing where you can print it
- Heavy disparity between active and passive point generation
So how do we fix it? Here's some ideas I've heard.
- Convert passive to active point generation. I still like this idea, as it requires people to actually do their job, but it doesn't fit with the current system very well - your hard work can be trivialized if another department just steals all the points for their shit, not to mention that point balance is hard as hell to maintain.
- The old "deconstruct for tech levels" system. I also never really hated this, except that it made rounds pretty formulaic and turned things into what we have now where the first fifteen to twenty minutes are a mad dash to get tech as high as possible, then get all the cool shit and fuck off somewhere else.
- Convert all active to passive, flat generation, require unlock 'milestones' that need experiment data or special items. This is an interesting way to look at it and, at least partially, what I'm rolling with here. I'll go more in depth with my plans for this in a moment. This is nice because it's easy to balance and does a better job of gating technology so we don't get the current "Tech is done in thirty minutes, now what" problem we have.
Each department will have access to a research terminal, as they do now, where the head of that department (the actual station heads plus the QM) can purchase upgrades using a departmental balance. Fairly similar to the idea of department budgets, except the method for getting points won't be quite as easy to game. Security will have access to weapons nodes, service will have access to botanical and cooking upgrades, medical will be able to research biotech and surgeries, and so on. The station's heads will decide what is worth spending those points on to actually upgrade their departments, instead of it being the responsibility of a department that won't use half of those upgrades. I'm working on suggestions for how to handle the issue if heads aren't present, but I think something as simple as "decon the console and multitool the board to clear head access requirement" would be okay.
But how will departments gain points? This is something I'm still working out in my head, and suggestions are more than welcome. Some departments are easier to reconcile with this idea than others - Medical can get points through surgeries and chemical bounties, Engineering can get it through Atmos mixing or excess power, Service can get it through botany and food bounties, and Science through Xenobiology research and genetics discoveries. Cargo and Security are a bit less easy to come up with ideas for, so I'm looking for suggestions. It also might be prudent to just have Cargo piggyback off the Service department, as they're technically a part of it anyway.
So how will unlocking nodes work with this rework? Here's a general idea of what the process from starting research to high efficiency parts might look like:
The big change here is the inclusion of node locks - areas where specific items or research will be required to move past them. These will never be explicitly complicated or extensively difficult to get, at least in the case of what we have now in the game. Further, more game-breaking stuff might take some real effort to unlock, but the general idea is this: As long as people are doing their jobs, these will never be a major concern. Orange and Blue cores are pretty easy to get and often are already done by the first split in XB, so this wouldn't be too difficult to get. The requirements would be the same every round, so no RNG is involved, past actually getting the items themselves in some cases. These locks can be anything from a specific item from Lavaland to a moderately rare plant to a certain number of dissection notes in Medical or a specific chemical.
What about lowpop? That's a question I'm still asking myself. I'm wondering how hard it would be to just roll back to the old behavior if there are less than 15 players on, but that might be a pretty big code bloat issue. This might just be as simple as removing the lock behavior and cranking up the passive point generation for lowpop rounds.
Concepts down the line include a full overhaul of the Science department - Scientist as a job will no longer exist. Instead, it will be broken up into Xenobiologist, Researcher, and Geneticist. Which means, yes, Genetics is moving to be a purely Science job in my concept, with the cloner staying in Medical for obvious reasons. Anyone can operate it and it damn near runs itself in late game, so I don't really see the point in leaving them over there.
This is going to require a lot of work, and the more people I get on board for this the better. So, by all means, ask me questions, point out my mistakes, help me forge this into a better general concept.
