Architect Archive

Was giving some thought to this after reading another thread and a few things came to mind which may not have been considered by some players here. I'll start this off by saying I'm not really decided for or against making these matter to architects but wanted to throw out some thoughts.

Pro:Currently we have nothing that this affects, which allows the novice to make items exactly the same as the master with nothing to distinguish it. Allowing experimentation to have an impact on something like harvesters would allow the master some way of distinguishing himself from the average "joe blow" novice architect. Some of the suggestions have included being able to produce more materials or lower costs on each harvester, or lower maintenance fees on houses.

Cons: I'll preface this by saying I have no personal experience in the weapon or armorsmith lines but will use the weaponsmith as an example. I read on one of these posts that the master weaponsmith will generally gather enough materials to build say 100 guns. out of these they then start building components and experimenting on them to get higher stats and they do this again on the final combine to create some of the highend stats they get on guns. They said it is not uncommon to use 30 guns worth of materials to create a schematic that is worth producing in their factory.

Let's put this to the architect line.

1) First off we never use schematics for final combines because of the exorbitant cost of materials so there is little to no likelihood you can guarantee that every unit you produce will carry the high stats like a weaponsmith does.

2) We already risk resources to critical fails many times during the combines we do prior to a final combine. By making experimentation real you now HAVE to experiment to try to keep up. If your experiment fails you arent throwing out 50-100 resources, you're throwing out thousands of resources, and those are AFTER your crit fail loss.

3) We already have a wildly fluctuating price market, with the implementation of various tiers of quality products you will have an even worse situation as people try to dump off their failures for even less to get rid of them.

4) As a master, if your customer requires a certain level of efficiency on all their harvesters (not uncommon for people to purchase 3-6 harvesters at one time) you may have to make double or more in order to get the ones you need for that order, thus costing you even more.

Yes, there are workaround and it would possibly increase the value of our products, but it would have to go up dramatically to make it worthwhile I'd think.

Just some thoughts that have been rattling around my head the last couple days.

That's a very interesting point. Personally, I wouldn't mind the risk involved because I love to gamble. It would be so great to gather some nice materials and then experiment a personal harvester to 95% effeciency. It would harvest at almost 4 kg/hour instead of 2 kg/hour.

That's what is missing from our profession, besides a reason for people to come back to us for business. We need a way to distinguish our product from every other person out there. I know weaponsmiths that I go back too because their Tusken Rifles are 150-195 damage when all the other crap out there goes to a max of 115 damage. They take the time to get the RIGHT materials and experiment.

One other thing I'd like to mention. I don't think decay would help that much. Judging from the weapon and armor forums, people are refusing to pay huge prices for weapons and armor that decays. Also the fact that the condition goes down permanently when you repair an item on top of the fact that you can just destroy the whole durn thing altogether. There has to be something we can do though to get repeat business.

PS: If there is anyone on Kauri with the resources to make 50 heavy harvesters, I have a rich fellow that wants them. I made him 30 personals already, but I just don't have the patience to harvest and make that many heavies. His name is Portly if you're interested. He gave me some nice steel to make the personals with, 999 quality <droooool>

I'm not an architect, but I am a weaponsmith.

A master weaponsmith will have Weapon assembly and experimentation skills of +100. A Master Architect, I believe, it's +50. Experimentation is vitally important to weaponsmiths. It's how we make stuff better than the garbage that you find as loot. It's also the reason why being a novice smith sucks so hard, because there's only 1 point of experimentation, and so what you make isn't any good. And people are generally very discriminating about weapons, so it's very hard to sell as a novice, and you roll around in piles of money as a master.

The only architect thing I can think of where experimentation matters is crafting stations. And to be honest, I'm not sure if the effectiveness modifier of a crafting station does anything. But if it DOES then it would be really important.

Ok here's the thing about the weaponsmith though, they make 100 cpu for a single weapon. It's no big deal to drop 30 guns worth of resources in the "experimentation can" because you can recoup the costs with the first 5 guns you sell. Maybe if architect was comparable, say 25 cpu, then I would agree with a full blown experimentation program, but as it stands now it's just garbage.

Rath, thats kind of where my thoughts are right now, not sure if making experimentation is a good idea for a profession that is already on the low end of the pricing range.

I think the experimentation of Crafting stations and tools helps with critical failures, also possibly allowing better experimentation. That's hard to tell of course without seeing numbers pop up on your screen when you craft something to tell you what's going on exactly.

They did add a "functionality" number to the crafting stations though, so it must do something. My old ones used to have -6 or so, then when I raised them to 95-99% the number went up to 13 or 14.