Architect Archive
Thread: Degrading Harvesters
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giltirn
Wed May 12, 2004 2:21 pm
#1
Very bad idea. People like me who regularly pull up their harvestors will be the ones who get done over by this. Those who have arranged fields of static harvestors will gain another massive boon over those who dont. Also,even ifeach harvestor grabs about 1 million credits over its life, with the cost of manufactureof a harvestor only being considered,this would effectively mean a 10% drop in profits across the board! With the current tight margins of architects, (most resource and therefore harvestor dependent profession) changes like this would only serve to make people like meretire and perhaps leave the game.
YDI-Inc
Thu May 13, 2004 12:59 am
#2
I'm not referring to yelling at them, "Bad Havester! What's wrong with you? Are you stupid? You can't pull up ore like your sister can! You...fatty!!!" 
Instead what I'm referring toare Harvesters that decay...WAIT!!!! Don't start screaming yet, I know we've had this conversation before WAY back we first started talking about return business. Scream after you hear my idea....
A Harvester is a huge platform with many moving parts that serves a very demanding purpose. It bores into the planet's crust, or processes the atmosphere, or Isolates and hydroponically greenhouses the resources that it is trying to produce for it's owner. Whatever it does, it's pretty intensive and hard on the equipment. Now I've been a Master Architect since a bit before Cities went live. I'm not a "since inception" architect, but I've been around for a while and I've trained quite a few others up through the ranks so I've got some experience beneath me.
What I'd like to see happen with our Harvesters, and any architect deed for that matter, is a "repair check" made upon each re-deeding. Each time that machine is torn down to be moved to a new location a "repair check" should be performed on it to see how well it weathered the disassembly.
Now like a Master Weaponsmith has a bonus to repairing weapons, so should we - Master Architects - get a bonus to re-deeding equipment. This would save us a little bit in the long run as our equipment would tend to last longer, although not indefinitely. Others however, without the knowledge of the intricate details involved in setting up and tearing down machines of this nature, should suffer the penalty of their ineptitude.
Thus would we start to see return business as harvesters and houses simply wear out from repeated disassembly. Keep in mind, this would only happen as the structure is redeeded. Houses would be pretty safe as people tend to redeed homes with a lot less frequency as harvesters.
This idea was engendered upon visiting one of the many malls and seeing row upon row of resource vendors selling the very resources that I use, at prices FAR higher than my completed products sell for on a CPU comparison. Yes, I know, "Architects brought it upon themselves" in regard to the pricing. I don't see that changing any time in near future. I'm not looking for a way to raise my prices, but I am looking for a way to have repeat business.
Let's look at long term. Assume that a Harvester can be safely redeeded on average 7 times before it's useless. Let's further assume that the person using it knows about resources, how they spawn, how to find a good spot, etc....
A BER13 on an 80% Vein of resource X (obviously not talking about ORE huh?) will generate 14,976 resources per day, or 74,880 after a 5 day run.
13 (BER) x 1440(DailyDraw)= 18,720(Max)* .80 (80% Vein) = 14,976(Daily Yield) * 5(Days) = 74,880 Units.
No, I'm not factoring in daily or unexpected down time for the server, if you really must, you can adjust accordingly.
This means that this one harvester will yield 524,160 Units of resources during it's life. That's over 1mil Credits at 2:1 sale prices and most people sell higher than that. 2:1 on Naritus is a Going out of business sale on the crappiest resource in the game.
If the owner of the structure was able to place the structure everyday for a 5 day run each time, this is still 35 days of life on average. Architects would get a longer life due to our affinity with themachinery. Sounds like a much better deal to me than a candle that never goes out.
Repeat business on an almost monthly basis? Hmmm....I'll take it.
To make it a bit more tolerable to the masses, the redeed check could be based upon the higher of either your Survey SKill or Structure Assembly Bonus, whichever is higher.
Anyway...there's the idea. Thanks for reading it all to the end.Feel free to scream at me now if you must.
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