Architect Archive
Thread: Renewable Revenue
Leave the current system in place, no additional decay for buildings. You already get decay if you don't pay maintenance. Adding more unavoidable decay on top of already expensive decay just looks like a poor economic game model design instead of an intriguing working economy. It also turns home owners into essentially renters. Variable slow decay for furniture & harvesters is acceptable to keep us folks going short term.
City planning already offers several new architectural options, if developed & impleminted well.
Possible Solution: Give Architects thestarship creation capability, and possibly the vehicle creation,as they are added. Houses may never decay, but you can bet folks are going to want both new vehicles and have vehicles repaired. God knows folks will go throughstarships like mad if space combat is an option. If you have seperate skillprofession already planned for these, how about making somecomponents for vehicles and starships only craftable by architects?
Along the same ideas that other bright folks have posted here, maybe give architects some type of architect terminal missions to build various military and government structures (or MoB structures) to carry us over if the expansions are more mid-term thanshort term.
Otherwise, we are living off forced decay as a form of stipend or we will be much rarer in numbers.
Not everyone wants to participate in the GCW though. Some Architects may say having GCW related skill tree is wasting their skill points.
As opposed to the pillar of relevant skill known as the Construction line?
5% of all maintenance fees goto the architect who made the deed for the house. Who best to maintain then the architect. The other 95% for roleplaying's sake could be considered to goto materials for maintenance. That's plausible, gives us a steady income depending on our salesmanship, and we could have that rather then UXP which we don't have anyways and probably wouldnt be enough to make much of a difference to us
not sure if this has been mentioned before but I like it.
5% of all maintenance fees goto the architect who made the deed for the house. Who best to maintain then the architect.
I have sold over 20 heavies, & at least 60 medium harvesters.
108 daily per heavy, 72 daily per medium. That's 6480 credits a day free, and I'm not including all the houses & PA's that I've made. In another 2 weeks, I'll have sold another 40+ heavies. After a month of making structures, an architect will be able to retire with a no work income stream. Because there's no cap on it, I could potentially get to the point where I'm pulling in more money from maintenance kickbacks than I could make from architecture.
Rather than coming up with some complex mechanics I would prefer architect be
1) Give architects new items to build. We already have some of this announced. The urban planner profession could have any architect that plans to become elite/elite busy for months. There is also a ton of NPC furniture I would love to build.
2) Give architects access to military installations. Make it faction based where perhaps you need a certain base level of faction points, say 10000, and you get access to building faction structures (turrets, bunkers, etc). This is IMO preferable to the current system where people "buy" these items using a mystical faction currency. These buildings of course can be destroy and as everyone knows war is good for business. The draw of resources and money that the gcw causes will be a huge sink.
3) Make more electronic type items for architects like crafting stations that can be differentiated by experimentation and that decay from use. In the new Player Cities the bazaar terminals perhaps should wear out. This will create a replacement market. Tracking this may be complex but less so I think that tracking furniture decay since furniture is not really "used".
4) Continue to expand the current trees with more models. Add new (or NPC type) furniture and buildings. This will of course be partially under the urban planner, but should extend to adding more regular architect content.
5) Allow us to color furniture just like clothes and armor. This means we could theoretically sell not one couch but that same couch in several colors.
Where possible existing game meechanics should be used to make implementation easier and hopefully less bug prone.
I love the idea of the architect included in the civil war.
But instead of having all architects do that, why not make an elite-elite profession for turrets, HQs, faction furniture,.. call it war architect. That way, all architects can choose if they want to join the civil war or not.
Also, a rule has to be decided on whether or not a building is destroyable. We could use the overt/covert status but I'm not satisfied with that. I would prefer to only make destroyable the houses in cities that agreed to get that status, providing advantages like faction recruiters, some factionnal buildings, that would be aviable for the major or the urban planer.
When a house is destroyed, I think it's better to make it disappear (with a mail to the owner). But PA halls shall never be destroyed, it's too much of a pain for the guild that looses it's structure.
But I insist on the fact that destroying a house must be very long and difficult, except maybe for the commando profession. Do you imagine a rifleman destroying a house alone ? it would take ages. I believe fighters will love the idea, as there is presently no long term goal for the civil war, this would provide one.
About decay, if we are included in the civil war, we have to find a solution for the damage taken by houses.
I suggest houses get a hit points bar.Houses would auto repair themselfes by using maintenance credits faster. This would make houses invulnerable to some attacks, as it could repair faster than a small group can hit it. But some people in the house can repair it live to increase the regeneration rate. 2 solutions : architects get a repair ability, and therefore get used in the field, or they can make repair kits that repair a certain number of hit points to houses very fast.
I believe this will make credits go out faster, so the devs will like that, it provides us with an everlasting market of houses, and a new market of repair kits or we can be hired to make live repair on the field. I just love the idea !
The idea to date IMO is decay, but I dont believe houses should. "most" players will only ever own 1 house at a time. The solution there is to sell houses at higher prices.
Harvesters.... everyone can have many harvesters. If any structure or item we make needs a decay its harvesters. Miners buy them from us, but once they have 10 then never need any more and make a living off selling resources back to architects.. (that is really not helping us is it)
Furniture. Other than harvesters I believe furniture should decay as well. In real life furniture does not last forever like your house. couches get frayed and worn, and broken, same with many others. Light sources constantly need replacing, chair fall apart etc etc. Now... I would say.. that higher level furniture should decay at a much slower rate than lower.
Houses. IF houses were allowed to decay, it should be very very slowly. Taking months. perhaps a small house would decay faster than a large. It would give players more incentive to buy large houses, because they would last alot longer.
House repair... well... that drag and drop thing seems kinda tacky to me. Current maintenance costs are plenty. No sense in adding more house upkeep IMO. Just let them slowly decay over a long period of time, several months. The rollover would be slow for us architects, albeit, it will be occuring.
We also dont want to make players reluctant to buy a house do we? If it will fall apart in 2 months or less who would want one? I would suggest maybe6 months for the lifespan of a small house, 12 months for a medium, and24 months for a large house. Guild hallsnever.
It has been said that our dev team is a "very good" hard working team. If they are really as good as has been said these things should be possible to accomplish in SWG, albeit "hard work"
That being said, DEV's, get to work.