Architect Archive

After architecting for a while, there are a group of improvements, added abilities Id love to see in the profession. THey hit me as doable, reasonably balanced, adding value to the profession and the economy and very useful for gameplay. Most of these also hit me as almost essential ways of differentiating the work of higher level architects from someone like myself who hit installations 4 immediately and bought a set of schematics for the various drilling units. Most of these are mining related, so Im sure there's a great list for houses and other architecture aspects as well.

#1 Remote management. maybe this gets done in conjunction with a droid engineer (like buying components for a crafting station), but I would love to be able to equip a miner with remote management capability - check status, switch resource, add power/money. This would be a huge benefit, could become a great bonus to higher level architects, maybe different of these abilities get added at diff levels, or, one has to buy harder and harder to make droid components so the price goes up.

#2 Experimentation to reduce footprint size. Having a heavy miner that hit in a much smaller space would make the master's miners much more valuable. It could be ina couple of discreet steps, so its not chaos of 1-100% of the size.

#3 THis is one of my favorites, terrain footings, that allow a miner to be placed in varying types of terrain. It sucks finding a great concentration only not to find any spot flat enough to place a miner. Again, this could reasonably fit as a bonus for construction 4, and require building a new piece, footings that could be as expensive and difficult to make as played well.

#4 Along the lines of #1, having miners with component slots, a miner with a built in solar power plant or wind power plant. It could messwith the power industry, but it could be a very expensive/costly addition or the conversion rate could be low enough to not make it way too powerful. Or maybe adding a component requires using a lower level mining unit that mines less to balance it out?

#5 Miner retrofitting. A master architect ability to "retool" an old miner with an upgraded storage bin or upgraded mining capacity. It could cost as much as was needed, have a chance of ruining the old miner, but rather than having a disposable economy, its too reasonable not to be able to do this.

#6 Sleep mode. Either another of the intelligent components that a miner could have or just a new setting that one can select from the radial menu, a miner in sleep mode uses just a tiny bit of power/money, but still takes up the same lot.

#7 Sample Instead of having to extract one unit of a material to see its stats, a miner could simply report the stats of the various materials in can see. Again, this could be a droid component piece as well.

#8 A surveying droid. it could extend range, or maybe the droid has the ability to display stats for any material in can locate. A potential incredibly high level component (exceedingly rare and expensive and hard to make) would be a vein following component that could tell you rough direction of highest concentration and maybe the highest concentration level. While I enjoy the challenge of finding resources, it sure gets old, and I would pay an unbelievable amount of money for something like that.

#9 Ive heard folks talk about this one, but improved speed on factories. The manufacturing mechanism could easily have a speed coefficent.

#10 Advanced resource vending. I would love to be able to put a 100k block of a resource in my vendor, set the cpu and have people be able to buy as much as possible in any block size they want.

Nerf - Installation Designer, Scylla

Goes back to a point I've been making all along. Drop classes like Image Designer (please! This is a skill!) and make minig it's own elite profession. We have enough power uber classes and P.O.K.E.M.O.N. players in the game as it is (my dig at the current "changes" in CH that will only make the MORE powerful than anyone else!).

A miner/surveyor class would play DRASTICALLY into the game mechanics AND economics of this game. Kinda a mix of of the exploration line of scout and the surveying line of artisan.

The above comments are great! Can you image a class that does nothing but survey to make money!?! What an economy!

I like most of your ideas here, but #1 in particular. There are so many options here. I've been thinking about this idea, as have many others, for a while now, and here's a few things I've come up with.

#1 The Data terminals could actually have a use! Have the data terminals be used for remote management. There are so many possibilities for functionality here. About the only thing I could see not doing from these is adding power, because power is a physical resource, but I'll get to my idea for that in a sec. But there would be no reason why you couldnt do everything else remotely. You could even put in an option to have the terminal email you atplayerdesignated limits, i.e. 80% of capacity, 12 hours of maint left, 12 hours of power left, etc.

#2 The extra component on the harvester side could have a few options as well. Either an upgrade kit, which would need to be installed by a master arch to have a lower chance of failure/destruction, or as an optional component on the harvs themselves. Im leaning toward the first option personally. And there could be multiple options for the upgrade kits themselves. A cheaper unit may have only pay maintenance and resource switching, while a more expensive(and perhaps more risky to install) unit would allow resource diagnostics(reporting the stats). Or yet another option here would be to split them, and make the resource diagnostics a design-time component(so that people could see the stats of resources when using the change resource option at the harvester), and have the remote management upgrade as an addon.

#3 Now to the power issue. Here is where the DEs could come in. Allow binary load lifters to be programmed to run a designated route, fill each harvester toa designated capacity of power and retrieve any resources. The player would be required to go to each harv the first time in order to program the droid, but after that, you could tell the droid to "run program", and it go on its way. So a typical program would look like this:

Power Level: 2 days

Starting location: 0,0

Harvester A: 2000, 1000

Harvester B: 2010, 1030

Harvester C: 1000, 500

Ending location: 0.0

Yes, there are many other details to be worked out with this idea, but the idea itself I believe is sound. And no, this would not make resource collection completely mindless. Limits could be set on how far these droids can travel between steps(i.e. you could send a droid 10000m across the planet to a harv), and they cannot use shuttle/starports on their own. Intelligence options could include # of programmable steps, capacity, etc.

Just some thoughts, but like I said, I've been brainstorming on this for a while, and would love to see something like this be implemented. But I also dont expect to see it for quite some time.