V1.0 Rework research document.

Development Ideaguys
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i produce this document on the base of corbeau proposal on discord.

Issues:

1-Overrialance on IO’s/marines.
After they process their paper and chemical they start with research become entirely reliant on outside input to continue working and to upgrade clearance.

2- Botany is currently useless in getting chemicals with worthwhile properties

3-Poor balancing.
As of now, due to combination of factors such as development cost, product effectiveness, mass production and distribution, only stims and corrupted xenomorphs are worth their price.

Solutions:

1-Instead of waiting for IOs/marines.
Researchers will take a more active role in gaining credits and research clearance by continuously scanning newly created chemicals like the current round start.
It would work as such: at a regular interval, the printer spews out a randomly generated chemical paper, the player would then actively work to recreate the chemical and scan it for credits, etc…

To avoid IO’s/marine effort of bringing to be useless to the department we would separate the generated chemical into two pool:

A-For the randomly generated papers ship-side(including those given to researcher).

B-For Ground-site vials that are recovered by IO.

2-Botany will be turned into a source of produce that you extract chemicals that you use to make the more complex chemicals

3- Avoid streamlining toward a single OP stim.
A-Disabling(change is rarity to disable) of the regulating property.this property remove any possibility of OD effect.

B-Limiting custom created chemicals to 4 properties only as to prevent the development of “Godstims”.

C-Turning MST/NST into legendary properties.

D-Removal of the MST and NST properties in xenomorph blood.(the idea is to remove any guaranty of having them.

Outside of document note:
The aim of the document is only to rework research to have a main game loop that is balance and interesting to work in.
take note that this proposal will require heavy testing and tweaks to get to an acceptable state that’s why i ignored anything outside of the main game play loop to reduce complexity and make it a manageable project.
i prefer if we work on having a solid game loop for research and then expand research with more as options to play with…

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Honestly this is great a idea.

MST and NST are to strong for how easy they are to get. Making them just a random chem property thats legendary would be a fun way to balance them.

Limiting the property ammount would definitly help force people to be a bit more creative, but there should be a way to increase the ammount if people earn it. The stuff proposed for the research rework has some nice ideas for exactly that already, like being abel to use xeno organs to upgrade medical and research equipment. Maybe you need a praet heart to unlock another property slot.

Only two things i think arent that guiccy are the fully disabeling REG. It is dummy OP but it would be fun to somehow keep it. Being abel to make a chem with no OD is very fun after all. Maybe make it so you need to creat it via mixing some incredibly rare propertys. Like XMB and OMB. Maybe even needing three.

But what im not really a fan of is the free papers spat out regularly. It would just make it easier to make a godstim. Everything else is a great idea though

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Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

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I am going to not sugar coat it some of these changes are bad MST does not even help much but make you faster and it makes sense that runners have it in their blood. NST in the same sense that pheromone plasma helps xenos get up faster so that also make since. Yes research relies on ground-side too much. Yes I do believe it needs changes but these two thing I stated here do not make Sence changing as if researchers get out a god chem it is usually not till about 1-2 hours in which at that point they are just trying to end the round.

And to add on to this you have to make sure marines don’t die to aids you have to mass produce it. You are making a new compound basically and you have to mass produce it and get it out there. MST makes you go faster and to even get up to runner speed you have to have level 8-10 which is like 20 points alone then you add NST 5 that is like another 10 points then if you do all basic you get 45 points to make a chem that makes you stand up fast and move fast. The you got to remember have fast is it going to go through there body how big is the OD other things like that and unga brain marines do not look at ODs.

Plus the fact you have to get to level X witch is another 20-49 points

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It’s be nice if the synthesis machine were uncrippled and maybe we got variable metabolisms outside of OMB and HMB back.

Right now it’s very rare that you can use a randomly generated paper for anything. 99% of the time the recipe is too hard, the OD too low or the properties too shit for you to bother. Adding more shit papers that aren’t useful for anything isn’t the move, I think. Being able to actually tweak them without it producing 1u OD garbage would be nice.

Runner blood stimulants are the one thing you can do most rounds that the synthesis machine mafia won’t gatekeep you from doing, removing those would be a crying shame.

Putting NST and MST on legendary adds more pressure to the degenerate strategy of just spending every single point possible on clearance until you’re maxed out. That shit’s boring as hell, you are forced to do nothing for 2 hours, and restricting more ‘good’ properties to legendary will just make it worse.

e: If we’re linking researcher hours, I have almost 700

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One thing i would personally add, is a guaranteed spawn of a DDI chem on “Xeno controlled” territory of the map. So caves on LV, ETA/LAMDA on solaris, Labs on Trijent, etc.

The trait is mostly useless by itself, but it gives research a bunch of points and could be something for IOs to look for by going behind the lines and such.

I’m also a sucker for Goons.

Edit: It would also have to be a chemical you cannot get from the computer, nor get any papers about. It only spawns as a singular vial in a vial case.

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Replies to post above:
thanks for everyone feedback. i am happy that all the reply are constructive. thanks :heart:
@N.H.C
2-The idea behind limiting the properties amount is to go away from a stim that do to much on is own.
increasing it with a cost is possible but out of scope i really want to “balance” the core game play first.
someone else can try adding stuff in the future…
3- disabling of REG is again to avoid making OP stim.

4Free paper is there to generate credits etc… to give something to do if nothing come up for the ground.
and since their is no need to save XX credits to make the ultimate stim you will be able to make more niche stuff…

@DukeofCagliostro
:heart:

@Lukas292001

1-can you elaborate on that?

2-the idea behind randomly generated paper ship-side will be to give researcher a source of credits etc…
outside of marines bringing them xeno corpse and chemicals…

3-i am not very familiar on what the synthetic simulator possibility and limitation are ? is it that bad or are you exaggerating?

4- tell me more about runner blood stimulants please(how are they made and what are they current balance in using them bad effect OD etc…)
maybe their is a way to keep the MST NST effect (unsure…)

5- the idea is to move away from making one big project for the OP stim near round end and push researcher to do more small projects…(so if you have ideas going this way my ears are open…)

@RainbowStalin
thanks but that’s outside of main game-play loop and could be added with a separated PR i think.
as you seem to be talking about a third pool of generated chems that would only appear deep in the maps…

Notes:
i am not a main researcher so take that into account i just took corbeau work and reformulate it…

Concerning MST/NST maybe instead of removing it from xeno blood we could have a maximal level for it…

also remember this is V1.0 of the document i want to present to manager for approval so don’t hesitate to propose change/adjustment for the main game play loop that’s why i open this post…

Also don’t hesitate to tell me if some section need more clarification context justification on why…

main game play loop being separated into two:
1-paper generated ship side giving work and credits to researcher.
2-vials xeno bodies etc… giving more work and credits to researcher.

don’t hesitate to re post if you think i didn’t get what you meant…
stay constructive pretty please. :heart:

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3ABCD is a huge nerf to research and wont fix the core issue of research(at least I believe so), You have to understand that this will only shift the meta until another nerf will be incoming inevitably after few month of overusing it like its currently is or everyone will stop playing research like how it was after transmit got removed before defcon revival. Research design is flawed. really. really damn badly, but we love it (unlike some people) so what can we do about it.

Here are some ideas I drawn up on the board:

CMO office has a paper with A out of X key properties known, the other properties are groundside for IOs to collect. Once all four are found you can mix them together to get ciphering, one of X is a new property for royal plasma, which will be there guaranteed. This is so to swirl up the stale greenos development, researchers can try and guess, or wait.

research computer will now generate points for “itself” at which point researchers can choose to wait for reroll or spend them immediately. They have a choice of picking 3 recipes with varying difficulty and points for the synthesis machine if mixed and scanned. Researchers can see two first parts of the recipe,(maybe hinting at the properties contained either by a description or recipe itself) not third/catalyst. if not picked, it will reroll within 2/3 minutes. if picked it will give a next one in 5. The harder - the better chemical you will get, that means better properties, higher OD, etc. Hardest ones have a big chance to have something from hydro exclusively. and/or groundside or shipside. Points deposited are varying on the difficulty
Lore explanation : “The company nerds cant figure out how to mix this chem, figure it out and gain a permission to use it aswell as a small compensation for your troubles!”

removal of groundside vials. thats it. enough.

legendary property will have the same thing as ciphering, but no hints anymore, everything is groundside. the better the property is, the more/harder. properties required to mix it.

I also thought of removing create mode (and/or relating, probably not though.) and instead add “adding” which genuinely allows you to add onto existing properties(not replacing, adding) at the cost of removing the one from reference paper and absolutely tanking OD levels on reference paper, but Im not sure how that will end up.

Xeno organs surgically extracted from their corpses can be used for physical upgrades like sleeper upgrades, autodoc, surgery items, or to instantly reroll the console.
NST/MST are exclusive to each other, that means they wont function properly and instead will mix to some offbranch property which wont be entirely useless, but still not exactly ideal.

Im not sure what to do with runner blood/phero blood. removing them is meh

keep in mind this whole thing was drawn in paint so I prolly didnt cover all of the things

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