Doctor Archive
Thread: How do subcomponents factor in?
Take enhancement pack D's for example, they require 3 BECs. My adv BECs are 22 charges, so why doesn't my final product have 66 charges? It comes out with 30-33 usually. Is it even worth it to find good Lokian Wild Wheat and Tat Fiberplast when they don't make a significant impact on the final product? Does anyone know the math on this?
- Breve
Take enhancement pack D's for example, they require 3 BECs. My adv BECs are 22 charges, so why doesn't my final product have 66 charges? It comes out with 30-33 usually.
BECs and LSs don't seem to stack when the schematic requires multiples. So a 22 charge ABEC will add 22 charges to whatever your final resources will allow. You are getting 20 more charges with a 22 charge ABEC than you would get with a 2 charge BEC.
CDRMs do seem to stack. I don't know about SDDs and I don't know if this stacking is schematic dependent or not.
Is it even worth it to find good Lokian Wild Wheat and Tat Fiberplast when they don't make a significant impact on the final product?
I don't necessarily think so in certain situations. With merely "average" resources, you can still get a 17 charge ABEC. Is 5 charges worth it? If you are trying to market the absolute best meds on your server, it probably is. For more typical meds, I'm not sure people will really notice the difference. The one case where it will be noticed is if you break a multiple of 10 on charges. For example, a 40 charge StimB looks much better than a 39 charge StimB despite only having 2.5% more charges. You can get more than a 2.5% premium.
Subcomponents are not supposed to stack. It's just supposed to take however many of them are needed to make higher end products, but only the stats from one of them is ever supposed to apply. (Just like getting two high PE resources doesn't boost PE over using only 1 high PE resources because they are averaged, not added together.)
There are quite a few things about the crafting system that are non-intuitive and the averaging out of everything is probably the biggest one I see from most folks trying to craft. They just start with the wrong assumptions about how things work. Which is why I've listed better documentation on how the crafting system is supposed to work in with our experimentation issues.
Overall, though, there are still quirky. Like CRDMs seeming to stack, but ACRDMs not. That Crit failures cause such a huge negative hit, but Amazing successes don't cause huge increases of a similar level. That the diffculty level often shows 0% when it's quite obvious that since you can still fail that 0% isn't the actual difficulty level. Or that difficutly increases with using a lot of experimentation points at once, over using only 1 at a time, yet that greater risk does not have much in the way of a greater reward.
If it's any consolation the whole and/or parts of the crafting system are all over a lot of different correspondents issues lists. So maybe we'll see the Devs taking a closer look at it for us and giving us some more insights.