Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: A small complexity tape experiment
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BlueMorgoth
Sat Jan 24, 2004 5:17 pm
#1
There have, for many months, been a lot of questions about what the droid complexity tapes really do. There have been a lot of questions, but no real answers. It took me forever to actually find a collection of complexity tapes, not to mention bidding against a number of other DEs with deep pockets too, for the good tapes. Finally secured an extra tape which gave me a total of +10 to droid complexity. I wanted to get this number just in case there was some magical point just like there is where +10 to experimentation would give you an extra experimentation point (Cost me 2 million creds just for one experiment!).
So my simple experiment was this: Create two droids of moderate complexity that required both a tool and crafting station to make. For this case, I have chosen Arakyd droids. Since we tend to make these by the thousands, any reduction in factory time will be a huge cost saving for DEs. I made them with exactly the same ingredients (with one exception where I didn't have enough EMMs at the time, so have one hand made item), performed exactly the same experimentation, then made a schematic and looked at the final manufacturing time per droid. At each step I have taken screen shots to show the final effect.
Base conclusion: Complexity tapes have zero effect.
Basic Arakyd
Parts filled
After Experimentation
Creating schematic
With complexity tapes active:
Now the stats with complexity tape
Basic schematic before construction
Constructing the droid
Parts filled in
After experimentation
Factory time for droid without tape
Factory time for droid with tapes
Appologies for the images being slightly blurred. The default images from the screen shots were too big for ImageDump, so had to run them through a filter that cut them down to 75% original size. If anyone wants the originals, i can email, but warning that they are 700K each!
As you can see from the images with or without the tape active, it makes no difference to the construction or factory time of the droid. The slight discrepency in the two complexity numbers after experiementation is due to me being ham-fisted and accidentally using two points per experimentation a couple of times. Ignoring that little stuff up, it's quite clear that the tape makes zero difference in the final complexity of the object. What I have not yet tested is whether the tape will allow me to construct things using tools that I normally don't have - for example, creating a droid that normally needs a private crafting station to be craftable using a public station, or one that needs a crafting station to only need a crafting tool etc. I would be happy for others to pick apart these results or suggest other things to test out that I can solely attribute to the complexity tapes.
So my simple experiment was this: Create two droids of moderate complexity that required both a tool and crafting station to make. For this case, I have chosen Arakyd droids. Since we tend to make these by the thousands, any reduction in factory time will be a huge cost saving for DEs. I made them with exactly the same ingredients (with one exception where I didn't have enough EMMs at the time, so have one hand made item), performed exactly the same experimentation, then made a schematic and looked at the final manufacturing time per droid. At each step I have taken screen shots to show the final effect.
Base conclusion: Complexity tapes have zero effect.
Basic Arakyd
Parts filled
After Experimentation
Creating schematic
With complexity tapes active:
Now the stats with complexity tape
Basic schematic before construction
Constructing the droid
Parts filled in
After experimentation
Factory time for droid without tape
Factory time for droid with tapes
Appologies for the images being slightly blurred. The default images from the screen shots were too big for ImageDump, so had to run them through a filter that cut them down to 75% original size. If anyone wants the originals, i can email, but warning that they are 700K each!
As you can see from the images with or without the tape active, it makes no difference to the construction or factory time of the droid. The slight discrepency in the two complexity numbers after experiementation is due to me being ham-fisted and accidentally using two points per experimentation a couple of times. Ignoring that little stuff up, it's quite clear that the tape makes zero difference in the final complexity of the object. What I have not yet tested is whether the tape will allow me to construct things using tools that I normally don't have - for example, creating a droid that normally needs a private crafting station to be craftable using a public station, or one that needs a crafting station to only need a crafting tool etc. I would be happy for others to pick apart these results or suggest other things to test out that I can solely attribute to the complexity tapes.
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