Goonhub
05-19-2018, 12:42 PM
I get the feeling that if doing genetics wasn't so tedious or luck dependent, people wouldn't stay the whole round on the computer.
Once the computer has a good amount of upgrades it snowballs into becoming almost too easy (yet still luck based), but the most annoying part is to get it going in the first place. You need to stay on the computer for at least half the round because otherwise you can't do what you're trying to do before the round ends, unless luck is on your side.
You constantly keep an eye on cooldowns to try to do things efficiently and get what you want in a reasonable amount of time. You keep an eye on materials. When there's two geneticists it's better but you still share the same materials pool and getting started is just as tedious, as both geneticists deplete their materials in no time.
There's NO incentive for geneticists to go out of their way to clone people.
You can get some neat genes easily, but you don't get to choose them, so if you're aiming for a specific set of genes it's pointless.
There's genes combinations which can help, but you have to keep an eye on every gene you encounter, keep an eye on some list of combinations to make sure you're not discarding any potentially useful gene, keep an eye on materials that the other geneticist just keep draining because he needs them too, and you should keep an eye on whether there are idle doctors available somewhere in medbay to clone dead bodies ?
A few easy quality of life improvements could be made, for instance the gene checker, there's no incentive to use it. Actually, there's a little incentive to use them, just little, the cooldown activator generation, yet it suffer from another cooldown and the fact that you need a few tries to get results. An improvement could be that if some codon pair is say T - A and you check for A - T, the computer displays that they're in reverse order. Just that would make a great improvement and would probably make people use it much more, as they give no rewards like using activators do.
And for placement, the fact that they're semi-isolated from the rest of the station doesn't help. If, say, robotics and genetics were swapped (with some other changes due to the size difference of their rooms), genetic research would more often do something else, as they would get in trouble more often. Robotics would continue to be used as it is right now as it's directly useful to the crew, and genetics would get more trouble/trafic. It would recquire a few quality of life improvements to compensate for the extra trouble.
I feel like putting a slow paced and calm department away from the rest of the station will only make it even less useful than it already is. When people go to medbay for one reason, they sometimes drop by to get a few bonus genes from genetics. Who would even bother getting to, say, where the artlab is, to ask for genes when they're not even sure they'll get something even remotely useful to them ?
Once the computer has a good amount of upgrades it snowballs into becoming almost too easy (yet still luck based), but the most annoying part is to get it going in the first place. You need to stay on the computer for at least half the round because otherwise you can't do what you're trying to do before the round ends, unless luck is on your side.
You constantly keep an eye on cooldowns to try to do things efficiently and get what you want in a reasonable amount of time. You keep an eye on materials. When there's two geneticists it's better but you still share the same materials pool and getting started is just as tedious, as both geneticists deplete their materials in no time.
There's NO incentive for geneticists to go out of their way to clone people.
You can get some neat genes easily, but you don't get to choose them, so if you're aiming for a specific set of genes it's pointless.
There's genes combinations which can help, but you have to keep an eye on every gene you encounter, keep an eye on some list of combinations to make sure you're not discarding any potentially useful gene, keep an eye on materials that the other geneticist just keep draining because he needs them too, and you should keep an eye on whether there are idle doctors available somewhere in medbay to clone dead bodies ?
A few easy quality of life improvements could be made, for instance the gene checker, there's no incentive to use it. Actually, there's a little incentive to use them, just little, the cooldown activator generation, yet it suffer from another cooldown and the fact that you need a few tries to get results. An improvement could be that if some codon pair is say T - A and you check for A - T, the computer displays that they're in reverse order. Just that would make a great improvement and would probably make people use it much more, as they give no rewards like using activators do.
And for placement, the fact that they're semi-isolated from the rest of the station doesn't help. If, say, robotics and genetics were swapped (with some other changes due to the size difference of their rooms), genetic research would more often do something else, as they would get in trouble more often. Robotics would continue to be used as it is right now as it's directly useful to the crew, and genetics would get more trouble/trafic. It would recquire a few quality of life improvements to compensate for the extra trouble.
I feel like putting a slow paced and calm department away from the rest of the station will only make it even less useful than it already is. When people go to medbay for one reason, they sometimes drop by to get a few bonus genes from genetics. Who would even bother getting to, say, where the artlab is, to ask for genes when they're not even sure they'll get something even remotely useful to them ?