Obviously, one of the problems with the Architect profession is that we can only experiment with harvesters, and that with harvesters, there's only a need to experiment on one of the stats. Because there is basically no difference between Architect item A made by Architect A, and Architect item A made by Architect B, it all comes down to who can sell things the cheapest, rather than who can make the best quality items. That severely hurts our profession. Consider for a second the other professions. Would armorsmiths be able to charge 400,000 credits for a suit of 80% composite if all composite was 80% regardless of the resources used? Of course not. Like us, they would be plagued with people saying "well, it only costs me 3600 resources to make a suit, and I can make it with any resources I want. I'll sell mine for 50,000 a suit"and so on, until you started seeing 80% composite for sale on the bazaar. Part of the reason armorsmiths can charge so much... in fact, the main reason they can charge so much, is that they rely on 4 primary stats for their armor, and effectiveness isn't the only important stat. In fact effectiveness, special protection, and HAM costs are all very important. Thus, while many master armorsmiths may have 80% composite for sale, there's still room for armorsmiths to make their products even better by finding ways to reduce the HAM costs as well. I've seen players on the armorsmith boards that were making 80% composite with less than 600 total HAM cost, and selling it for 1.2 million, because basically, it's almost impossible to make unless you're *really* good, and have a lot of really good resources.
We need this for architects as well. Sure, our harvesters have effectiveness and storage... but who really needs a harvester with extra storage? I mean, when a medium holds 50,000 units, it's not going to fill up. The resource will expire long before that happens. And a heavy with 140,000 units? If I could fill that up on one resource spot, I wouldn't need so many harvesters.
So, here's what I suggest...
Changes:
1. Change schematics to require one storage module per lot. Make storage modules, and small storage modules experimentable. The better the storage module, the higher the base amount of storage per lot. A base small storage module with no experimentation would give around20 items or 10000 units. With experimentation, that could be increased to 40 items or 20,000 units, and experimenting on the finished product could increase that to 80 items or 40,000 units. Regular storage modules could support up to 120 items per module or 100,000 units after experimenting on the final product. Small structure modules and Regular Structure modules would work the way armor segments do, in that anything that requires small structure modules could accept normal structure modules instead, but things that require normal structure modules could not accept small structure modules.
2. Change structure durability. Structures would have anywhere from 100 to 1000 durability points, and each 1% that a structure degrades would permenantly damage the structure by 1 point. Thus, with a 990 durability structure, letting the structure degrade to 1% 10 times would destroy the structure. Also, letting it degrade to 99% 990 times would destroy the structure. Letting a structure decay to 0% would, just as it does now, destroy the structure regardless of durability points.
3. Allow players to retrofit existing structures using deeds for that structure type. This would allow players to use a deed for a building to fully repair the lost durability of that building. Once retrofitted, the new building would assume the stats of the deed used to repair it. Thus, it's basically the same as if you built a new structure in the exact same spot, only you didn't have to redecorate it.
Additions:
1. Add Efficiency, Lot Usage, and Durability experimentation. Lot usage would apply to houses and cantinas.Lot usage would, of course, reduce the number of lots a structure uses. Efficiency would lower the maintenance and power usage of the structure. Durability would increase the durability points that a structure has.
2. Allow customization of Furniture. This will create a higher demand for all types of furniture, since players will no longer be forced to only buy certain types if they want to coordinate the look of their houses. Also, add the missing plant and lamp styles that exist in the game, similarly to the way you did fountains and statues (with an option to pick a style in the final crafting screen).
3. Give some usefulness to certain furniture.
- Houses would have a base healing effectiveness of .50, guild halls .75, and cantinas 1.0. Beds would increase the effectiveness by 10%- 25% depending on the type of bed used. Only one bed would count, and it would be the highest bed placed in the house (and you would have to "install" it once you had it positioned the way you want it, which would work like initializing a vendor).
- Toolchests would increase your assembly and experimentation skill. The style one toolchest would increase your assembly and experimentation by 10 points, and the style 2 by 20 points. The style 2 would be moved to master, and both would be given specific resource requirements. Also, you would have to choose which profession this applied to at creation, so to increase assembly and experimentation for all trade and medical skills, you would need to buy 10 toolchests. Perhaps each profession could have a different look to it as well, and the toolchests could be renamed "Small Toolchest" and "Large Toolchest".
- Give some usefulness to Datapads. I'm creative and all... but I admit, I have no idea how to make these useful in the current game.
4. Allow players to experiment on municipal buildings. Clone centers would allow architects to reduce Cloning costs, Insurance costs, maintenance rates, or faction (faction would be a binary value, requiring 50% experimentation to make it a factional cloning center. A factioned clone center denies entry to members of the opposite faction, and allows players to respawn as overts). Medical centers would allow experimentation on auto-heal rate, heal effectiveness, maintenance rates, or faction (as above, but without the respawning obviously). Banks would allow experimentation on maintenance rates, as well as having a binary value for faction. City Halls would have experimentation on maintenance rates, service capacity (increasing the caps on the number of trainers, mission terminals, etc), and radius (increasing the amount thecity radius increases per city level). As mentioned above, all existing structures could be retrofitted to take on these new stats.
I think this would add a lot to the architect profession, obviously. Most importantly, it would give us architects ways to distinguish ourselves from one another, as well as (possibly more importantly to some people) giving us a way to justify charging some serious money for our services. I mean... if I made a city hall that gave a metropolis a radius of 700... that would be worth a lot of money.