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.