Architect Archive

Maybe someone can shed some light on this issue and concern for me.. I have made small harvesters since artisan and it's very very very easy to get BER's 4 and BER's 3 at the very worse.. I can't remember the last time I messed up and made a small harvester with a BER 2, unless it was a critical failure in experimenting.. So anyways..

I finally dabbled my way into the architect tree, as I have done with chef , merchant and pistoleer.. What I find completely lacking here is the logic to medium harvesters.. Now for argument sake please don't flame me because I used the wrong numbers here, as I'm just trying to pose an example and situation.. I construct a small harvester with a maintainance cost of 30/hr, which will almost always end up being a BER 2-4..An Elite profession Architect constructs a medium harvester which is twice as expensive to operate, but has a BER 3-10.. Given this light, for a medium harvester costing twice as much to run as a small one, it only forces you to produce a medium harvester that has twice the BER rate to be cost effective and equal.. In most cases this requires the medium harvy to have a BER of 6+..... This really can't be done unless you have leveled to Construction 3 to gain the experimental points needed to achieve that..

SO....

Why the huge gap between a low level artisan small harvester >>> mid level elite medium harvester? Wouldn't it of made more logical sense to all Architects with level 2 skill to 90% always make medium harvesters that are better then small ones.. I wouldn't change the BER rate system in place and experiementing it.. BUT.. SOE needs to seriously look at the hourly maintainance cost of medium and large harvesters to make them more cost effective to those that are NOT master architects.. The current system on how things are done is that unless you have a significant level, almost master that allows you to craft and experiment your harvesters, any lower level architect is basically unable to make anything better then a small harvester if you look at the cost per resources extracted..

Small Harvester= 30cr/ 4 ber.. = max. 7.5 credits per ber rating

Medium Harester = 60cr / 10 ber.. = 6.0 credits per ber rating..

Yes granted if you can make the max limit in BER on mediums it becomes more cost effective, but that is only achievable for those that have construction 4 or master.. impossible otherwise..

If you look at your average run of the mill havesters NOT just the max.. Most people can easily make small harvies with a ber of 3. easily.. that turns out to be 10 credits per ber.. Medium harvesters at level 2 will only yeild an average ber of 5 ber,, 6 if you are lucky.. In any case this gives you either 12 or 10 credits per ber... Where is the improvement? Lowering the cost down on medium harvester will make them more appealing for those that are unable to make BER's 7+

Two things:

IN every profession the higher you go the better you are at it. As a Novice BH can't compete with a Master BH it makes sense for master Architects to have an advantage over Novice Architects. Our ability to make more items and make them better is the advantage.

Medium harvesters, even if they aren't more efficient, (e.g. BER 6 medium compared to BER 4 personal) do give you the ability to harvest more resources with the same lot. This is important to many players because our lot allocation is limited at 10.

why not put everything in novice box?

you just sound to me like someone who doesn't want to take on the hard road of levelling archi...

Because that would make the mediums and after that, the larges, less attractive to the average crafter. They would say, as you do, "hell, I can just make my own" and turn Archy into a worthless profession aside from buying your home one-time and 20 torches to make it light enough to see anything.

Oh, and maybe some paint, so that after those 20 torches turn your cieling black you can make it pretty again.

I can agree with allot of the logic behind your post. I see this being very imbalanced, however giving the ability to make high end harvesters to low end Architects would cause even more imbalance. Here are some of those reasons in my opinion. Mind you now that this is not directed toward anyone and is an opinion on this issue.

1. It makes all the work that people did to get to Master Architect a waste of time because dude over here who just climbed the Installations tree makes just as good of a harvester as you at master.

2. It would seriously affect the Master Architects economic integrity as well. As a Master Architect I can tell you that the work put in to making high end housing and city structures is not really worth the time and the resources to make them.

3. With high end resources you can now make BER 5 personals with Master Artisan as I have done it.

One last thing that I think would balance out this issue is to raise the BER cap to 15 for heavies and 16 for Fusion Ion Reactors. Because I can make BER 10 Mediums I don't even use heavies because as you have pointed out *why use them they cost too much to operate* All those extra 6 walls and materials for 3 more BER is not worth it to me.Heck even with BER 5 personals you could get more bang for your buck. Mediums should be changed to have a less maintenance and power consumption as well.