Requisitions are not great, suggestions to improve

[Cleaverwolf]

With the recent changes to the market, players are being encouraged to use requisitions to acquire credits for the budget, however, the current state of requisitions leaves much to be desired.

The bad
Completing requisitions is not a reliable process:

• On-station resources are finite.
  
• Requisitions are procedurally generated and, therefore, suffer from the expected consequences of procedurally generated things. 
  
• Fabricators can run out of material, and paying credits for more material may cost more than the payout.
  
• There is little room for error; requisitions are all or nothing.
  
• There is no foolproof way to tell how close you are to completing a requisition or what you're doing wrong. If you send out what seems to be the correct list of items, and it gets rejected, you are left in the dark to figure out what could be missing or what the requisition actually wants. 
  
• Reagent detection seems buggy.
  
• If you can't figure out why your crate keeps getting sent back, you're out of luck, and you've wasted time you could have been using doing other tasks. TIME IS MONEY!  (Scanning a crate with the cargo scanner that has a label will tell you if the contractor will accept it)
  
• Departments can be empty or ignore you.
  
•  The more of a specific item a requisition requires, the less likely you are to complete it or have reason to. Drop-down menus are not great for counting large amounts of things, reagent amounts can be challenging to track, and acquiring bulk items is pricey. 
  
• The more unique items a requisition has, the less likely you are to complete it because of practicality and profitability.
  

I have grievances with the following requisitions:

•  The pizza requisition is just unreasonable and often unprofitable to complete. Let's do some math. The code for how much pizza is needed to complete the pizza requisition is: Pick 20 or 30, then multiply by 6. Let's go with the best scenario: we have to make 120 slices of pizza. Pizza requires one flour, one tomato, and one block of cheese. One pizza can be cut into 6 slices. 6 slices, therefore, equals one piece of flour. 120/6= 20 flour. The Chef-vendor starts with 20 parts of flour. That means just for ONE base ingredient of pizza, we need to use up the chef's entire stock of that ingredient to complete this requisition. If the chef has made even one meal with flour, you will need to pester botany to get the chef more wheat or order dry ingredients, which will decrease profits. Oh yeah, did I mention the payout for this requisition is either only 2500 to 3600? So if the current price of dry ingredients is 600, and you only net a few pieces of flour per crate (since it's an assortment of items), you have to order a couple, which means you are spending one-third of what you would make from the requisition on buying the items to complete it. That's just for flour.
  
• The blood requisition is also tedious and sometimes unprofitable to complete. The amount of blood needed to complete a requisition is determined by picking 8 or 12 and then multiplying by 100. Let's go with the best scenario; we only need 800 units of blood to complete this. Now, you COULD just use a syringe and a bunch of beakers/containers to complete this requisition. Still, I don't know about you sitting around clicking myself or someone else 3/4 times, then clicking a container 3/4 times, and then grabbing a new container every time I fill one up doesn't sound fun, but to be fair, mass selling on the market is the same type of tedium. You can also ask Medbay for their blood bags, but obviously, they can refuse since it would be a fair portion of their blood. What about ordering blood bags? The blood-bag order gives you 4 blood-bags, each with 250 units of blood. That's enough to complete the order, with 200 units to spare. However, you'll have to cough up 1600(?) credits for that. I can't find in the code how much this req payouts, but I feel like generally it's not worth the effort. Oh yeah I came back to this edit draft before posting, after I had played a round, I literally had a QM come to me asking for blood, and they pointed out that if they bought the blood bags it wouldn't make profit.
  
• The cadaver/organ swap requisition could be better. I've never seen anyone complete it and receive the payout. I would credit this to the fact it requires interdepartmental cooperation or QMs who know surgery. Plus, figuring out what the requisition actually wants you to replace can be difficult when it bugs out and doesn't tell you (the place where it would list the organs that need to be swapped is just blank). 
  
• The chef's requisitions for food can vary in difficulty, from easy peasy to impossible, depending on what foods get picked. I've seen this requisition completed maybe 4 times in all the rounds of chef and QM I've played. 
  
• The spectral requisition is only possible to complete with mining (gemstones, telecrystals), medical/science (cryoxadone ), AND engineering around (Lambda phase-control rod). The payout is only 3300 credits. The difficulty of cooperation is not worth the effort. Especially when raw material may be worth more than the requisition itself.
  
• The botany requisition requires specific values for the plants; if you don't have those, the order is rejected. Given that botany has a fair amount of RNG, even when you know what you are doing, this just sucks. 
  
• The architecture requisition is another case of the raw materials potentially being more valuable to the market than the requisition itself. Also, it requires either chemicals or mat-sci materials. With the recent chemical rework, this is more difficult to complete. Not too bad of a requisition, though since the payout is 5200 credits.
  

General complaints

• It feels like there is not a lot of variety in requisitions.
  
• The special requisitions are the worst, generally.
  
• You have to complete the requisition in the specific way the game wants you to; putting the items in a box and then in the crate, for example, will result in the order being rejected.
  
• There's no way to track the completion progress of requisitions or indicators of what you messed up. (Mentioned before) 
  
• Emergency/aid requisitions Can be exceedingly challenging to complete on time (Printing tools takes time, stuffing them into crates takes time, counting up takes time)
  
• Emergency/aid requisitions are not worth the effort/rush when I could complete other requisitions or use different revenue methods.
  
• Yet Emergency/aid requisitions take up space for other requisitions. 
  
• Forgetting to pin requisitions is so painful.
  

So I complained a lot, but I have some solutions and suggestions.

• Change payouts to be tied to the new pricing system, and payouts should lean towards being generous(Give you more credits than you would expect for the amount of work/items)
  
• Aid requisitions can remain unpinnable but should be able to last two to rarely three market cycles, and the payout should decrease by a percent depending on how fast you complete it. Complete it on the third cycle? Sorry, you only get half the payout now. 
  
• Requisitions requiring cooperation or items from more than two departments should be removed or split into different Requisitions.
  
• Remove specific requirements, if possible, for things like the botany Requisitions. They are buggy and difficult to achieve. 
  
• Add more Requisitions, and give them variety. Take advantage of the items QM has access to in the fabricators. I'd love to see a Requisition that requires you to stuff cyborg parts in a crate or one where you acquire mag boots and pickaxes. 
  
• Decrease the ludicrous requirements for special Requisitions. 
  
• It's okay to have Requisitions that aren't the most efficient or somewhat tedious, just as long as they don't make up the majority of Requisitions.
  
• Some way to check if a crate will be accepted by a contractor, and if not, what is needed. (This is already a thing)
  
• Requisitions that can be completed in a multitude of ways, and dynamic Requisitions. Like for example, a Requisition that can be fulfilled for the chef where every extra piece of food will give bonus credits but only up to a certain amount. 
  

[UrsulaMejor]

Great feedback and great suggestions. I'm not sure what of all this can be done at what pace, but they all seem reasonable

[Cleaverwolf]

Rome wasn't built in a day, but this should give an idea where to start. Also updated the post to cross-out my lack of knowledge on cargo scanners.

[Lord_earthfire]

I like the suggestions in general, but i disagree with the following suggestions:

• Requisitions requiring cooperation or items from more than two departments should be removed or split into different Requisitions.
  
• Remove specific requirements, if possible, for things like the botany Requisitions. They are buggy and difficult to achieve. 
  

1. Botany requisitions are very easy. The stats are very easily achieved by infusions and sonetimes just by baseline seeds out of the dispenser. The problem is just them being bugged at times (i think they do not like fresh seeds out of the fabricator?). If the buggy behaviour is ironed out, they are among the easiest requisitions to complete.


2. I think requisitions requiring multiple departments are awesone and pose interesting challenges to the station. I see that it can pose problems for new players and certain servers, though. Instead of removing/splitting them, we could introduce an option to reroll requisitions.

Like a denied-stamp you push on a requisition and send it back with a 5 minute delay until you receive the new one. That way, beginners or station in less than good conditions can reroll them and farm low value requisitions.

[CalliopeSoups]

Most of this hits the nail on the head for me, requisitions feel very awkward. If I had to give my own thing that I find the most annoying about them it's that you can't quite tell how long you have for one. They don't seem to follow the same market refresh as the rest of cargo so you often don't quite know how long a requisition has been up for and how long it'll be there. Rerolls would be nice too as Heron said.

[glowbold]

It would be nice if there was escalation with requisitions, i.e. the more complex/rewarding ones show up in response to you fulfilling easy ones. QMs can build relationships with departments, and people who are working with cargo reqs know they will get more lucrative jobs if they complete the easy ones. Right now it feels awkward to reward people for helping.  Requisitions give credits, but the shipping budget isn’t (generally) a concern for anyone but QMs - my job is to keep people supplied regardless if they’re helping me or not. With multi-department reqs, I can’t even reasonably let someone tag the outgoing to get half.

Requisitions shouldn’t flat-out vanish with market refreshes, but have a known end time on generation. When someone turns in a requisition after the contract expires, it really sucks to tell the person who devoted a chunk of their game session to helping you “sorry, this is just going to sit here.” It’s especially rough having to pick favorites and only pin one contract when you know most of them require two/three cycles of time by the time someone stops what they’re doing, starts helping, does the thing, and gets it to you. Edited to add: If the RP market shift rate isn’t slower than classic, maybe it should be considered to match the pace of the rounds?

Requisition printouts should be more useful. It needs to say how much the requisition is worth at minimum. I want to be able to give a req printout to someone and have them go “wait, that much, for only THIS STUFF?!” because I want to share the “cheating the system” feeling I get when QMing. The paper itself should be editable and stampable (let me stamp APPROVED and keep track of costs / who helped). It should have a shift time stamp of when it was printed or when it expires. If printers were more common, I’d say you should be able to send it to a department printer.

[Solwra]

FRANK EDIT: Merging this thread into the existing requisitions thread

Introduction
Requisitions in my opinion is one of the most neglected features that rarely gets used in Quartermastery to make any significant amount of money, they are very much unintuitive and obscure to do… Therefore I, an idea Andy am providing an idea for how a possible requisition rework can look.


Requisitions Manager
This could be inbuilt into the packager to create a more seamless system or kept inside the supply console. Requisitions manager gives you all relevant information about all requisition information you will need. This console would require a quartermaster’s access, same with the requisitions packager which will be talked about later.

• Requisition Selection
  

This tab allows you to look up requisitions you can select to work on, selecting a requisition locks it from being refreshed (unless it is a special timed requisition) then it allows you to complete the requisition in your own time. While browsing, you will be able to see the name of the requisition, hinting at its overall requested content with a description and all the items it needs listed as well as the payment for completing it. There are specific requisition categories that go in depth about how each requisition could look in order to get an idea of how this tab would exactly look like.

You get an option to select up to 3 requisitions at the start, with a possibility to gain upgrade cards from certain requisitions to bump it up to a maximum of 5.

• Processing The Order
  

Once you select a requisition, you get a couple of options:

Making the requisition public
This function allows you to toggle whenever you want to use the Public Requisitions Delivery Station for the crew to dump the items for the selected requisition in order to complete it. You can set the price of how much you want to pay out for each item allowing you to pay out people for the requisition (I’d advise a certain credit cap for this, but I can’t think of anything right now).

Cancelling the requisition
Once a requisition gets cancelled, the packager dumps out any items it has collected for the requisition and the requisition gets put back into the requisition selection, where it disappears on next market update.

Checking the requisition
You can check the requisitions status, if it’s in progress it will show that, if it has been completed and is awaiting packaging it will give you an option to package it for a sendoff.

Completing the requisition
Once the requisition has all the item it needs, it will give you the green go to package it and send it to the recipient. Once the packager packages the requisition you can send it off normally as if you were selling any other crate and all the credits will be sent instantly and any additional items will be shipped to you.


Requisition Categories

• Regular Requisitions
  

Generally, regular requisitions can range from dead easy to somewhat challenging but never hard. This means you can complete these requisitions to get a steady income without stressing too hard about getting certain items and often feature items you can just print from fabricators, mostly.

A subcategory for regular requisitions would be the departmental requisition, where it requires a specific set of items from a given department, be it a security, engineering, service, medical or science department. These requisitions would be more rewarded, however requiring a level of cooperation between departments to work.

There must always be 5 regular requisitions available, up to 7.

• Special Requisitions
  

Special requisitions are more difficult and actually require you to put in a lot more effort in order to complete them, be it getting a head of personnel’s equipment or having to run around on timed requisition to get it done as quickly as possible. This is not a requisition you will be ready for and it may be very difficult, but it pays fairly well and can even provide some material goodies if completed.

These must always be 1 special requisition available, up to 3.

• Illegal Requisitions
  

These can very rarely slip into special requisitions, however if you slap a manager with an EMAG it will provide you requisitions to syndicate stations to get more contraband and/or to get stupid amount of money. This can range from piss easy to almost impossible requisition and it may require you to do some evil deeds to complete these.

This is only available if the console has been emagged and there will always be 3 available.


Requisitions Packager
This machine has a simple purpose, you can package completed requisitions to be sent off to the buyer. Upon successful packaging, a crate pops out that is permanently locked, meaning it cannot be tampered with in any way. The only way to open such a crate would be with an EMAG or an explosive. Sending a crate that has been opened yields nothing, not even 10 credits you usually get for crates, because you broke it, duh. All items must be inserted into the packager while having an appropriate requisition selected, otherwise it will be rejected.

Public Requisitions Delivery Station
You’re a staff assistant, you’re low on credits and REALLY need that pack of cigarettes. 

You rifle through your pockets.

“What's that? A space suit? Didn’t that station just there accept a space suit for a requisition in exchange for 120 credits? Wow, that’s enough for a lighter AND a pack of ciggies!”

You can exchange items on public requisitions for money.
The idea is pretty simple, if you have an item that an active requisition requires and need some quick cash you can use the delivery system to quickly exchange that item for money or you can pick up that item if it has been rejected or the requisition has been cancelled/expired.

“Where does the money that ended up in the staff assistants wallet come from?” Well, I provide 2 options.

• A. It comes from the requisitions' earnings.
  

The money that the staff assistant earns from a requisition comes from the actual earnings distributed by the requisition provider, meaning they only get paid if the requisition comes through.

This poses a problem in itself, if the packaged requisition gets intercepted by an antagonist, you’re never seeing that credit go up and you essentially lose both the item and the money. However, if a quartermaster cancels a requisition before it’s packaged you get a refund on your item. This would all be communicated through the person’s PDA, meaning they will be informed that they can pick up their refused item from a delivery station.

• B. It comes from the station budget.
  

A very simple solution, this puts all blame on a quartermaster if a requisition gets cancelled and leaves no poor staff assistant any more poorer. This puts more strain on the station budget though, meaning that if a station has a low budget you will have to collect the items yourself no matter how difficult they are to get by yourself. The items rejected will be spat out from the requisition packager, allowing for usage in other requisitions, selling it on the market or running a garage sale on the items back to the crew.

I favour option B, as it’s more of a quartermaster’s fault for cancelling a requisition and the collateral may get heads involved rather than an angry staff assistant making a ruckus.


Conclusion
Right now this is what I got, I may keep updating/changing this when more ideas come in. Feel free to take this idea and make this a reality. I could come up with a list of requisitions that it can actually do, but this is more of touching on the mechanics on how the overall system should be reworked into rather than providing any new/changing existing requisition orders. 
Any feedback is welcome.

[Kubius]

Hello, it me, requisitions guy, here to respond to your thoughts

@ Cleaverwolf - Attempting to match replies to individual bullet points

• Payout improvements can definitely happen. I don't want prices to be multiple orders of magnitude outside of their regular value, but they should absolutely provide a premium, moreso if the requisition needs multiple departments' cooperation.
  
• Guaranteed 2 minimum cycles for aid requisitions probably makes sense. Variable payout I'm on the fence about, but I wouldn't explicitly object to.
  
• Cooperative requisitions are cool; I think the problem is less that they exist, and more that they don't pay out proportionally / are a bit more common than they perhaps ought to be due to the fairly low pool size in their category.
  
• I'd actually like to have a few more detailed requisitions like the Botany seed one; the goal is that you need to actually cultivate a particular plant strain, not just steal a seed vendor and be fine. That being said, the details shouldn't be annoying - the lifespan genome parameter on the seeds could probably be ditched as a possible target.
  
• More requisitions would be good, yes. If you've got ideas, I made a guide for making your own requisition contracts - or you could toss said ideas my way if the requisition formatting process is a bit much.
  
• Special requisitions were ported mostly as-is from Azrun's earlier special order system; I refrained from touching their balance for that reason, but if there's broad consensus they could do with a tuning-up, no objection on my end.
  
• See 2 bullet points ago.
  
• Dynamic or multi-method requisitions is an interesting idea, but I'm a bit ambivalent about it for two reasons; it feels mismatched to the idea of "someone posted a contract, you deliver the thing that contract requested", and it could be tricky to handle the logic for. If you want someone paying a premium price without a specific contract amount in mind, that's where you use traders, IMO.
  

@ Solwra

I'm not fond of the idea of some sort of fixed loading device that handles item packing - it doesn't seem explicitly *negative* but I'm not sure what it is that it actually brings to the table.

I do like the idea of improvements to requisition pinning, but an upgrade card feels weird. A simpler way to do this would be that after two requisitions are fulfilled, QM is told they're now a "trusted vendor", and there's no longer a cap on how many requisitions can be pinned at all.

Category-wise, requisitions are currently split into Civilian, Aid and Scientific, with at least one of each guaranteed to show up each cycle; this is a more natural split than "normal and epic rarity" requisitions, IMO.

Civilian provides the basic stuff you can print from fabricators or the oddball thing you'll need some outside help for, Scientific is stuff that'll usually need a deeper involvement from specialized disciplines and should have higher payouts, and Aid provides moderately higher payouts typically achievable without too much cooperation but at the cost of urgency.

IMO, the best way to keep the tamer requisitions flowing would be to increase total availability to 6 and bump the Civilian minimum to 2, alongside an increase to Civilian contract options (I'll try and brainstorm some but you're welcome to contribute a few too!)

Lastly, selling your stuff off for money as an individual person is a funny idea, but I think that'd be more interesting in the domain of the traders who show up at the station on shuttles. It makes more sense for them to be willing to take individual oddball items you're pawning off.

[Solwra]

I'm not fond of the idea of some sort of fixed loading device that handles item packing - it doesn't seem explicitly *negative* but I'm not sure what it is that it actually brings to the table.

I do like the idea of improvements to requisition pinning, but an upgrade card feels weird. A simpler way to do this would be that after two requisitions are fulfilled, QM is told they're now a "trusted vendor", and there's no longer a cap on how many requisitions can be pinned at all.

Category-wise, requisitions are currently split into Civilian, Aid and Scientific, with at least one of each guaranteed to show up each cycle; this is a more natural split than "normal and epic rarity" requisitions, IMO.

Civilian provides the basic stuff you can print from fabricators or the oddball thing you'll need some outside help for, Scientific is stuff that'll usually need a deeper involvement from specialized disciplines and should have higher payouts, and Aid provides moderately higher payouts typically achievable without too much cooperation but at the cost of urgency.

IMO, the best way to keep the tamer requisitions flowing would be to increase total availability to 6 and bump the Civilian minimum to 2, alongside an increase to Civilian contract options (I'll try and brainstorm some but you're welcome to contribute a few too!)

Lastly, selling your stuff off for money as an individual person is a funny idea, but I think that'd be more interesting in the domain of the traders who show up at the station on shuttles. It makes more sense for them to be willing to take individual oddball items you're pawning off.

The fixed loading device serves a purpose of storing items you receive from the public requisitions station into the quartermaster's office, I don't think the name of the device really does it any justice but it's partly what it does for a quartermaster. It collects items from public requisition station(s) and stores them inside itself and also allows quartermasters to just store their requisition items neatly rather than leaving it in an unmarked crate. It also serves as a way to check if a requisition has all the parts necessary to be shipped and packs it ready for you to simply just send it off (this means you can't make a mistake of sending it to a market place because you forgot a barcode or you don't get it shipped back if you put a wrong one on).

Categories serves as a way to get a range of difficulty requisition orders and ensuring that you don't roll multiple obscure or frustrating requisitions. Instead you can choose if you'd like a normal requisition or a one that is considerably more harder but in return can grant you much more lucrative rewards. The subcategory ones would be departmental ones, which require a level of department cooperation but could be limited to 2-3 on the regular contract listings. I'm also not sure if you get item rewards for requisitions, but getting some nifty items you normally can't purchase is usually very fun. Also adding an option for traitor requisitions could be a fun way to make money and get items for doing evil deeds (like selling a target's body, getting illicit items, etc).

I do agree that an upgrade card is a bit weird and probably could just add another slot for completing a number of requisitions.

Overall my idea isn't necessarily a quick fix anyone's looking for, but more of something that can be added to make requisition order system more pronounced and be more accessible especially to those who are just starting out quartermaster.