Ideas to fix researcher's midgame

Development Ideaguys
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One of the roles I have played around a decent amount in is research. I like some aspects of the role: RPing to make a toxin for CL, making the immortality drug (thanos, defibulating, heal burn/brute), reaching a top score for god stim, and RPing as the parents/negotiators of greenos. Also turning a researcher into a xeno. Also also getting doctor’s delight banned because I would make 8 PRCs worth that any marine could use. Good times.

Gardening sucks and mid-game sucks though, which is the problem I want to fix. I have ideas, for instance of making a level 4 burn/brute healing 5 OD chem before drop, giving a medic or two the option to “fire and forget” a rapid healing chem on random marines. Or maybe taking a bonemending terrible drug and transforming it into a usable bonemending drug. All of these cost points though. Precious points that I cannot afford to spend. Early game those points need to go into boosting clearance so we can passively get more points by the time we can god stim. Mid game any points spent means slower stim or potentially greenos. Sure we shouldn’t all be min-maxing, but my god does it feel bad knowing I am spending points that won’t be nearly as beneficial as a damn good endgame stim.

Gardening feels like a waste of time. You can find like 6 trash chems with it. Extremely rarely will the chem be good standalone. Which means you only get like 12 research points for the whole venture. Not only that, but a decent IO will have brought all 6 chems from the colony, and one to four of those start in researchers/CMO’s pockets, meaning your efforts in maximizing gardening were all worthless. I don’t think we can just buff gardening by let’s say having a unique set of 6 chems in it, because it will ruin the balance of research points, which means stims get made quicker, and that is not desired. This leaves nothing really for research to do midgame. Best I can think of is extracting catchewhatever plasma from runners/warriors/ravs/lurkers and putting them into injectors as makeshift stims.

One quick idea I had is a separate pool of points that can ONLY be used on shitty drugs (no MST/NST). That way researchers have something early to midgame they can at least spend the points and do stuff, or use points for a balding chem for CL.

I have one main idea which might have promise. It will be an entirely different machine. This machine has energy like the other chem stations, and has one random mid-tier drug in it. Researchers do not know what properties the drug has. The drug has a random OD from 5 to 30. The drug has no recipe either. The only way to get more is through the machine’s energy. Every 5 to 10 minutes, you can change the random drug to a random new one, but there will only be one random drug at a time in the machine.

So how do you figure out if the drug is usable or not? How do you find out its OD? Monkeys of course! You get a monkey and stab 5U of it to see what it does to the monkey. Also while healing can be pretty damn good, those negatives can be REALLY harsh. Did the monkey burn to death? Quick administer KD! filter out the drug and revive it! Leave the heart damage: we can use it to see later if the next drug fixes it.

Hey, do you remember all those useless facts about the toxicity of crit OD of drugs? Which drug causes some lung damage? You might need a refresher because if that monkey doesn’t start with lung damage, you might miss out on your lung curing chem. Also break its bone while your at it, and try not to kill it during the process.

Hey, we found a safe bone fixing chem! 30OD too! I have good news: the energy both allows for no complicated chemistry to make more, AND acts as a limiting factor for balance and infinite production reasons!

The only problem with this idea is that researchers now have a high responsibility with the drugs. They miss out on the fact that the bonemending drug drains your blood and the operation is over. But hey, maybe that’s acceptable. Terrible SADARs, mortars, CAS, OBs, or ungas accidently FFing the specs have caused way more operations to go sideways. POs have failed so bad they got jailed. It would be pretty funny for researchers to “oh shit!” and run from MPs when they realize the crimes they committed. Also why are all the marines now bald?

Honestly I am tempted to be a developer just to make this.

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I’ve thought about something very similar with the unscannable chem before, but I really like your idea of having it be tied to a special machine. Maybe you can unlock higher tier versions of it as you increase clearance?
When I was thinking about this I was thinking the chem generation would guarantee it has 1 positive, 1 neutral and 1 completely random property. Not sure if that would be a good idea though, but I felt like if it uses the usual property generation you’d just end up with garbage all the time.

Also I like the idea of the separate pool of points for shit chems but that feels like kind of a clunky solution. But I definitely think it would be nice if we had a way to experiment with weaker properties that didn’t waste credits. Maybe special pieces of paper IOs can bring, similar to research grants, that let you create a chem for free as long as it’s cost is below a certain amount (eg you can make a 20 credit chem without actually spending 20 credits)

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mmm so close with the 20 or under voucher, so very close. If it was just a voucher that they spawn with or spawns groundside, or just the machine has a button to use 1 freebie, it would probably be easy to implement.

Unfortunately you don’t want to touch the “research meta” of the endgame stim and greenos. besides clearances, greenos has the CIP relate, CIP 2 upgrade, and hyperthrottling speak drug. All three of those can fall under 20.

For the god stim, sometimes it is cheaper and more efficient to have a decent MST/NST/BST, and raise the boost level. They could use the voucher for that.

The voucher would have to have the kind of limitations the 2ndary point system idea would have, which limits in some way the functionality of the machine to avoid being consumed into the research meta endgame.

edit: the OD amounts, good vs bad and strength randomness of the drug, how much is allowed by energy, possibly different drugs cost different energy…all that is balancing fluff. Off the top of my head I would want 1 of 5 drugs to be “meh I suppose it’s better than nothing” quality, and 1 out of 10 cause me to panic and save the monkey. Given every…5 minutes lets say you can change the drug, that would give a workable drug every 20 to 25 minutes. And from there balance around that.

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I think a problem is there’s very little room to actually… experiment. Shocking, but you just can’t dare waste even a few points on an explosive or fire chem when you have to be so careful with banking credits.

I think good stims will absolutely turn a round around, but there should be more room to play around. Maybe chems don’t use credits unless they reach a certain amount of points. Just to make it easier to make random fun stuff and try it out.

I also really dislike the RNG with both traits and finding chems like green blood and thwei. It’s really lame to get bad stuff like fire pen on the clearance 5 paper, there should be a way to get regulating and boosting.

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5u of a godstim lasts for 60 seconds, that’s honestly enough for tactical use (as long as there is MST to provide feedback for when it runs out, or HLG), just drop refill pouches with the injectors and mix em with oxycodone. You’re also using basic/basic/basic which is wrong, instead set OD 3 steps higher than the final drug will have, relate twice and spam relate on a level one property until all reagents are possible. Good starting frame would be:

MST6 NST2 HDN1 ACR5 NGN5 xxx1 20u rare/rare/rare

Then amplify NST to 4 and relate on the xxx from sugar, lithium, cyrox and tricord until recipe is fixed. If you want to be absolutely sure, raise OD by 5 and add another level 1 to relate with. Get REG later? relate it onto the level 1.

There, plenty of points saves for you to mess around with other properties. Oh wait but you’re just going to funnel all those savings into more MST and grief the other researchers by hoarding all the points, oh well, who could have forseen that?

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Not quite Nimiety, you are missing some of the plot on the whole picture.

God stims come first before any and all point usage towards other point sinks. Slightly better flamethrowers? bone fixes? Slightly faster healing? All trash in comparison to the god stim.

At the bare minimal of the stim you need to have acquired MST from somewhere. Unless you got REALLY lucky, that somewhere is clearance X and a dead xeno. All points must go into clearance X before anything else and any points spent elsewhere delays progress towards stims.

All points after clearance X is where you are now talking about. After doing point saves, let’s say the stim costs…I am estimating 25 points. After that point we finally have mass production of god stims.

Now, finally, after god stims are made, you are allowed to use your points into those side projects, congrats. Oh, it is also 1 to 1.5 hours into the match, and groundside is getting cleaned up. Whelp, maybe you can get to other side projects next round!

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You can’t funnel all points into clearance and then surprise pikachu face all over the forums when you can’t do anything til the passive points generation starts rolling in, leaving you 90 minutes staring at the wall.

Clearance 3 is good enough until greenos are possible if you want those, or all the pieces are assembled for the godstim, or IOs deliver all the level 4s and 5s from the colony. You miss out on 2 points per 10 minutes, big deal. Only go over 3 if you’ve done botany and didn’t get any bonemending or anything fun.

skipping raising clearance early saves you 32 points to spend on relating/creating chemicals, that’s enough to do two or three if you keep it cheap.You can earn it back later when xeno corpses get brought up.

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so sling the CL back mechanical leverage for Research Points? im down for this.

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You are still dancing around the issue and not addressing it. You didn’t address the problems I mentioned with my previous post. Let me try to put something out there and see if you at least agree.

We are taking an average round. The goal the researcher has in mind is at least MST 6 or greenos as soon as possible to aid groundside. The researcher may call CIC or listen in on how bad the operation is going to possibly see if there is time to make the stim better, but they really want to hand at least MST 6 when they possibly can if greenos is a no go. Specifically, no matter how they get the points their plan is:

  1. Clearance 3
  2. accumulate points and see if greenos comes through (technically passive mst too but let’s not go there)
  3. if enough points for clearance X and basic stims are reached, contact CIC if they are needed. If they are, make them.

It is somewhat mid-round. They have clearance 3, and 20 points. Some chems are found, but there’s opportunity for more. They have at least a runner’s body. They found something interesting…let’s say fire penetration they would want to play around with. There is still a chance for greenos.

For argument’s sake, MST will only be obtained from xenos. Please don’t make an argument about how MST can be found naturally. It is too niche of a case to care about most of the time.

Scenario 1:
In the case you want to use those 20 points for fire pen testing with OT:
clearance 3, 0 points. But hey, a few flamers scared a rav. A few points after come in passively, some bodies, etc.

In the case you get greenos, you…may or may not have the points to do it when you want. If you got it immediately after spending those 20, you are going to have to wait a bit. Getting greenos though means you probably got a few extra chems for a few extra points, so I think you could safely say maybe a 15 minute delay on greenos.

Now let’s say no greenos came, you get to step 3.

Scenario 2:
If you don’t spend points:

If greenos comes in you probably have enough points.

If no greenos come, once again you get to step 3.

In either case, step 3 has a time. It is some set amount of points after clearance 3. Step 3 is reached at different times, in this case at a difference of 20 points.

Do you agree in this case, with this researcher’s process, assuming no greenos, step 3 aka start of stims is delayed by X time, where X is the time it takes to make up points from scenario 1 to scenario 2 starting from the time when scenario 2 was on step 3? If you cannot agree to this I don’t think we will ever see eye to eye on this, and I will probably leave it at that.

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Greenies would be delayed for sure, there’s no way to decrease the cost with more synthesis machine proficiency, it’ll always cost the same 15 points to relate/amplify ciphering. I think there was a PR to make boosting affect ciphering but I don’t think it was merged, that would have let you do greenos for as low as 2 points if you had the property ready.

You can definitely save 30 points on the stim, however, that’s not delayed. Like I said, just swapping from forcing all basic to doing all rare and amplify/relate spam instead saves around 32 points in cost. You don’t need OD in the thirties either if 5u lasts a minute and you deploy refill pouches for ez injectors, this saves you another 20 points, ish.

Use those points savings to make other chemicals and delay the 5X clearance boost so you can make those other chemicals earlier in the round, the stim rollout won’t be any slower.

Last week I did MST8 HDN1 NTR1 for 12 points, 5u OD. Didn’t hit the marines fast enough, it was a steamroll, but still. Would have cost 9 but I wasted points trying to remove a particular reagent.

MST8 HDN1 BCD1 20u - rare/rare/rare
“” “” CGN1 15u - rare/rare/basic (unstable mutagen)
“” “” TOX1 10u - rare/basic/basic (sulphuric acid)
“” “” NTR1 5u - basic/basic/basic (sugar)

if one relate doesn’t replace a rare reagent, try a different one on the same target chemical.

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Fixing research midgame lays somewhere further than just chemicals and points, IMO.
For example, CAS matrixes. While entirely useless(I need to buff crystallization) I PRed in mind that it will require very little if any manipulation in the machine. Niche thing that pilots will love you for and not useless like Fire penetrating which requires an immense amount of points to be useful. Features like this make up mid-game and make research a less-than-extreme version of stim factory. Jean is making xeno organs. If you think of any cool small feature like matrixes, tell tell, maybe if I like it I will do it too, who knows.

maybe somehow fix hydro? putting one level 3 chem in it sounds rather gamey and stupid, but makes grinding it out VERY worth it if so. Although rebalancing properties levels will be better…

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There should be level threes in hydro, that came with the big rebalance of property RNG to make getting three nutritious chemicals every round less common. They’re half as likely to appear and the other levels iirc.