Creature Handler Archive
Thread: Corral Plan: A Rough Draft 1
Vertexon wrote:
Really well done conceptualization there, Pluto.I guess the hardest selling point for this idea would be actually implementing it. Setting up new buildings, complex and highly specialized harvesting rules, special case pet "storage" rules, etc seems like it would indeed be equivalent to the amount of workthat would gointo a complete profession revamp.
Pluto,
Great job, well thought out, and really beyond the original thread. I'm a little concerned about operating costs being too high, but I know those are just some prelim numbers.
Vert,
Yes, the implementation isn't necessarily easy, but this is innovative and creates a better gameplay experience for a lot of the player base. I think it would be a fun thing to develop from the dev point of view. Sell it to em! Or at least get em to comment on the ideas.
Nice Work!
Pluto
/APPLAUD!!
Vert,
Please see if we can't get this done. I mean as previously stated, CH is in desperate need of a profession revamp since we have been combat squashed. SOOOO I think you owe it to us to take this idea to the developers and get a yes or no answer. I also believe it is important that if the answer is no, we have concise reasoning for no, not well it will be hard work, that my friend is not acceptable right now in any way shape or form in the CH community. And if it is yes, we need a specific timeline as to when this could be implemented.
I believe it could be introduced in stages, since it is not SOE's way to do things carefully and do small changes I think we deserve a little speed and action on this since we have been COMBAT Nerfed for now almost 5 months and counting. Personally this is the first light at the end of the tunnel that does not appear to be a train.
OH and VERT tell TH to get his act together or QPO and get over here and read this ASAP.
Pluto outstanding job, and Robo etc. good.
Lastly, Pluto can you please post this in the forums that would also be affected by this profession adjustment. I believe there is enough in here for scouts, Rangers, doctors, BE's, Architects, and CH to really help that whole spectrum.
I like the ability to gain something useful as a CH again, but I am not sure I like the idea of being a glorified sheep shearer.
Now given how #&$)(@&$ hard it is for docs to get Avian meat (due to that most birds drop meat in 4-50 units) I think meat would be a better choice.
#1 docs would love it cause getting herb and avian meat would be easier (medics too)
#2 BE's could come to us for meat.
I don't relish the idea of becomming a Psuedo artisan class, but I don't absolutely hate it either.
Oh and incase you read what I had to say but didn't catch what I said at the beginning...Note: I didn't read all the posts in this thread, only the one posted in our forum so there's a decent chance I missed any updates/changes you've made.
Instead of modules, perhaps actual droids? similar to the Protocol chassis needed for shuttleports, you might need to add a chassis from an LE repair or something, maybe other components such as droid brains, sensor packages, etc etc.
I can see zipping past a ranch on dantooine, pikets (or what have you) milling about in a corral, CH,BE, Ranger,(whoever)busy inside working with the animals, an LE Repair puttering about randomly, looking busy with menial labour animations....fixing a fence, shoveling manure, etc etc
maybe have the option of adding more droids of different sorts in order to reduce power use, maintenance costs, add a surgical droid to reduce the chance of a disease spreading (reduce, not eliminate, keeping doctors involved is a swanky Idea), a power droid to keep the power bill down, Probots to chase off predators (or decrease predatory losses.....there's something you could add in)Maybea BLL for no reason other than they're big...maybe pushing animals around 
I'm not saying that should be the setup for all of them, but If someone wanted to go really gung-ho on the ranching, they could upgrade from a basic pen filled with grazing animals to a full out automated ranch...
I don't know if it would be workable to add droids to a structure after it's completed, but it would be a nice option to have. Then we would have opportunity to supply parts to an architect during the construction phase, and added opportunity to have some sort of involvement later on in the life of the structure, at that time dealing with the owner of the structure.It's good to be involved in the construction phase, as with shuttleports and the required Protocol chassis, but how much repeat business has any DE gotten from that? once a shuttleport is up, it's up, and that town or city will never need another one.
Wouldn't this make an excellent skill line in a new profession?
Base it on Artisan/Survey IV and Master Scout, and give it your suggestion, Advanced Mining (placement and use of Medium and above harvesters), Materials Science (ability to experiment on a resource's stats to try and shift from high but useless ratings to lower but more important ratings), and Geological Science (advanced surveying, including the ability to find the closest local maximum of a given resource on the planet).
Either way, to play devil's advocate:
I'm not really comfortable with the shearing module, though. I really don't see how you can shrug off the fact that only Wooly Hide could even be considered to be sheared, rather than most definitely flayed off a carcass: Leathery, Scaley, and Bristley are all very much skins. So, if you are actually killing the creatures, you should be able to gather ALL the resources of the creatures, and with better yields than field work: automated butchery is very, VERY efficient.
At that point, you basically require the ability to breed the animals. Without that, the time spent in obtaining and butchering a creature would probably be better spent in killing one lair's worth of the creatures in the wild. This introduces some irritating questions about rate of breeding and growth, sexual maturity, litter sizes and the room to keep all these creatures. In the most abstract, you can say creatures have five stages of growth, I to V. They are sexually mature in stages III, IV and V. They are fully grown in stage V. You can then have four generations of equal size in stages I to IV, and as long as your stage III and IV creatures can produce at least half their own number of new creatures, you've achieved steady state if you butcher all the adult creatures every day. With a corral size of 20, that's five harvests per day. Given a base harvest yield of 50 on a creature, and a 2x bonus for machine efficiency, you'd get 500 units of each resource per day. Even 1500 units per day on a corral of sixty (!) creatures is pretty paltry, and sixty creatures is far more than I've seen in one place in SWG thus far. These corrals would be MASSIVE structures!
So, it seems pretty impractical to allow for breeding/butchery as a steady-state kind of operation. Given shearing is such a far fetched idea, even for Wooly hide, I don't think this is a workable way to automate harvesting of creature resources.
I do, however, like two adaptions of the idea. First, the ability to 'deed up' pets and drop them as statues, or sell them via vendors or bazaar, is long overdue for CHs. Wild creatures can't compete with BE creatures on features, but they can compete on learned commands and mount training! I'd much rather buy a pet that's already trained than buy a pet and have a CH train it for me, if only for the security of it.
Next, providing the ability to place an Architect crafted structure around Management IV that lets you store creatures as actual creatures that wander around inside the fenced off structure. They should be unattackble but visible from outside the structure. Ideally, they should still interact with each other: placing a Rancor and an Ikopi in the same enclosed space should have pretty predictable results. It'd be pretty cool to wander past some guy's Ranch and see a bunch of half grown Cu Pas waiting to be trained as mounts, and a few that have reached maturity and are all saddled up and ready for sale.
But sorry, I just don't think the resource harvesting side of it has any practical merit.