More incentive for artifact research

[Sam Guivene]

Whoops, pressed wrong button.

-artifact lab is ignored for the rest of the round.

It seems most large artifacts are better off left unactivated, considering how the beneficial types (healing) are far less common than the inconvenient (darkness, forcewall, noisemaker etc.) or dangerous (pain, bomb, borging etc.) types. Nobody likes prodding at a clammy pile for twenty minutes just to find out it injects you with initro when you poke it.

One thing I'd like to see is a system for changing the effects of activated artifacts, so you could do more than just activate them and then space them/leave them lying around. A dedicated artifact scientist might be able to turn a light-emitting one into a darkness artifact, or crank up the power of a gravity artifact to maximum before activatinv it in front of sec, or tweaking an injector artifact so it injects people with medicine/drugs, for instance.

A simpler solution might be to have a conveyor system that allows you to buy artifacts with the research budget from Vurdalak, and sell back activated ones for profit. A bit more incentive than just artifact research for its own sake.

This already exists, theres a mass driver in artlab hanger explicitly for spacing dangerous artifacts. And half of the point of artifacts are that we don't know how to manipulate them, although, a few more flavors of artifact would be nice, like an increase in superpower granting ones, random ones that will monkey you or otherwise polymorph you, and maybe include a bunch of other random effects, like causing space madness or spawning a wave of X enemy.