Architect Archive

My thoughts on the decay issue have come together from my observations over the last couple months of playing.

First and foremost, houses themselves should not 'decay' past normal maintenance. People need a home that they can do what they want with and not have to worry about getting it repaired or replaced once a month or whatever.

Harvesters on the other hand don't decay fast enough and this is where my idea comes in to focus. I think it's safe to say that for most architects that aside from a handful of housing sales here and there that harvesters probably account for the bulk of their income at this point. Most of the people who want a house already have one and now its mostly people upgrading or needing extra storage space.

On any given day I can walk within 200-300m of my home and come upon fields of harvesters that are burning. Quite simply people are not taking care of their machinery properly.

I was recently struck by that annoying 0 count bug with a small that I was planning on destroying anyway and was shocked to see it take almost a full work week for it to self-destruct. This is rediculous and so was the price tag to repair it. Honestly, who is going to pay 5k credits to repair and 1.5k to redeed a small harvester? No one unless you accidentally dumped 10k power into it, which I did once long before power was 'saved'.

One option could be adding an Integrity value to the deed itself. Functioning similar to vitality on pets and droids. Each and every time that the structure goes into disrepair, a couple hours grace would be needed,it subtracts from the Integrity of the deed/structure. A full real day of non payment damaging the structure 10-20 or more.

Another idea has everything functioning normally until the structure is out of maintenance. Normal decay rates apply up until the 75% mark and at this point accelerated decay would kick in. Decaying from 75%-50% would takeonly a couple hours. Once a structure reaches the 50% mark it would be considered Abandoned. The owner would still be able to return, claim any materials harvested or destroy the structure but re-deeding wouldno longer be possible. Decay from 50% to 0% would be at the same accelerated pace.

I'm originally a Master Tailor and I know the problem with the lack of decay. I've also been running harvesters since the first week that I've been playing and I can honestly say that I've never let my harvesters run dry like I've seen scores of people do. It isn't that hard to properly pay your machinery and the only time I consistently had a problem was a while back when I had a pair of chem harvesters that were eating their maintpool every 3-4 hours or so but that's a bug long fixed.

Either of these would help clear the landscape a bit, add a substantial money sink into the game and give a bit more business to the local architects.

My apologies if these ideas have already been presented and/or discussed to death, I don't frequent this board too often.