Scott wrote:So you're saying it's okay to relax the tech requirements a bit to unlock the implants?
It won't change anything, since most use minerals, which ALWAYS takes around 30 minutes to acquire, if they come at all. Most miners come with one large batch of minerals anyway, they don't grab some low-tier minerals and come back, ever, so it's kind of irrelevant when that is the major bottleneck for R&D (every time I have to wait around ~5 minutes for minerals because I've done everything I could without them).
The main problem with implants is the removal of self surgery, flat out. It's why hardly anyone uses them, it relies on so many volatile time-sensitive factors, meaning you exhaust around 70% of the round just acquiring them
as an antagonist, and there's no guarantee you won't be killed by your implanter, putting all your hard work to shame, when you could instead just go with something less volatile [BoHs, SMG/carbines/etc., NVs]. For a scale of the time required for R&D, the time to research to cap without minerals or upload boards + the wait for minerals is around 20-30 minutes, possibly resulting in fucknothing because mining doesn't mine, followed by another 10+ minutes of R&D, then finding someone to do surgery on you and counting on them not to kill you / to actually do it, which is going to take another 10 minutes at least). Relaxing tech requirements won't change how often they're used at all, hell, even the welding implant is barely ever used, despite being very good and cheap generally.
And no, the traitor surgery chair that was proposed is not an adequate fix, since it only grants one antag type with a 15%~ occurance rate the benefit of having viable implants. I do not find, given all these obstacles and the time expenditure, all the implants may be powerful, but they are balanced. 40 minutes of preptime in 60-70 minute rounds is a hugely risky move, and it SHOULD be proportionally rewarding. That said, they will never be used if self-surgery isn't re-added, and I honestly don't think that's too severe of a buff that every asshole in science will suddenly have a trillion implants, even when we HAD self-surgery, self-augs in Robotics were rare.
Singuloth could be released at any time, the shuttle can be called early, you could be randomly murdered in R&D, etc. More likely than not, the shuttle will be called at least once before you're even done R&D. It's what justifies as-is getting a bag that can carry anything, an SMG with the same damage potential as a revolver, with the sole penalty of having damage distributed across a chain of bullets, an ion carbine, a stun revolver, and NVs. On top of it all, most of this is even gated behind an emag or cocksucking cargo or the HoS for them on top of everything else instead of just an ID, because lolfiringpins.
