- It's too expensive for a single player to make it a "Job" within science.
- The rewards for failure or minor successes are so minor you wish you got a refund instead.
- When I originally mapped the BEPIS, it was meant to sit side by side with the experimentor, and then like 2 weeks later, someone thought to remap the experimentor, and shoved the BEPIS in some random holes in the wall on nearly every map.
- Specifically you, delta. You're just sitting in the hall by Robotics. What the fuck.
- Lastly, some of the reward techs are so exceptionally minuscule that they really should be merged together, like the Mauna mug and the rolling table. Both neat, but they each cost 6000+ credits each.
SO! Here's what I want to keep and salvage out of the ideas presented:
- It should have an economy interaction. Having scientists dedicate their time to earning research grants is both interesting and places crew in interesting situations.
- The existing items within the technodes should stay, as on their own they're fun.
- Possibly hold on to something with the gaussian normal formula I worked out but I could easily see that whole thing being yeeted.
Potential thoughts and Ideas I've been workshopping:
YOMI.
Idea to be stolen wholesale from a little browser game called universal paperclips. It's a cookie clicker style game, but instead of getting things that just made more things to make more things (etc etc etc), the game is focused around Sidegrades. One of which is to obtain a currency called YOMI, you have to play a 2x2 grid game based around a prisoner's dilemma style minigames. You pick a strategy, the Ais all go against each other with specific preference on how to play the game, and you bet on the one who should win the hardest. Since there was a large emphasis on gambing and random chance in the first one, this sounds like a unique middle ground between "Roulette with extra steps" and "Playing Tetris to unlock techs". Would be an ordeal to figure out how to integrate it with economy however, but perhaps you could play it in reverse then? Instead of betting on a horse to win, you're provided a horse, and need to build a board that will hopefully cause your horse to win. Some Strategies are more random than others however, so there's distinct strategy involved.
But please god no more mini-currencies.
But please god more mini-currencies
In the radical opposite direction, INVESTING. We bring back the stock market. Stock market value is purely simulated, but the money you put in is real. Part of the Flavor of the BEPIS was originally that you were Micro-investing your cash in a simulation of the game economy to find products worth investing in, and then if successful, it would be produced as a full tech, ALA shark tank (Or dragons den for the british). instead, lets cut out the middleman. Now YOU have to invest your real money in order to buy the technodes themselves.You would not get money back from this, just some unnamed bungopoint currency for completion, and upon reaching milestones would let you restart while being rewarded a BEPIS tech as a reward.
...Actually now that I think about it this idea's kinda coming together.
Throw out some ideas or implementation thoughts below