Build-A-Base Workshop 13

[QP Evergrande]

Like, how hard would it be to have the server just do a simple yes/no check on, "Does the station have a Pathology Lab?" "Does the station have a Pod Manufacturer?" "Does the station have a Brig?" and then for each "yes" it adds in a chance for different Bad Things to happen.

So, at round start, when there's basically nothing built, the only thing that can happen a few times an hour is meteor strikes. Since meteors suck, and you want to try your hand at curing diseases, you build some medical equipment and a Pathology Thingy. (Is it called an incubator? I don't know.) Now there's a 50/50 chance that the next Bad Event will be meteors, or will be an outbreak of a random space disease. Build a podbay, and now drones can spawn. Add a brig, and there's a chance the shuttle can randomly spawn half a dozen angry, robust, rolling-pin-wielding chefs. (They got lost on their way to the Plasma Chef competition, and now they're super pissed at everyone and everything.)

I disagree with this proposal.

Firstly, I think that we should start with a couple pods that come with the survey shuttle. And that there should be a number of small drones on the map to begin with. But other than that, for the first hour or so there should be no enemy or disaster events, and after that, maybe only every half hour, plus or minus ten minutes randomly. That's to give us a chance to establish the station before things go wrong, so we have something worth defending.

But for what disasters spawn, it should be determined by how far into the round we are. It would be bad to create a system where the only thing you need to do to avoid certain types of situations is to deliberately leave the station incomplete. It would be far more interesting to let us run the risk of possibly encountering a problem we're not equipped to deal with, when deciding what we spend our time on building. So, a pathogen won't show up immediately, but maybe by the 3 hour mark it will. And an early enemy spawn might be a single meteor that hits the station and bursts open to reveal a few ice spiders, where as a later one would be full of syndicate NPCs.

And as for enemy drone spawns, it occurs to me that though drones can be quite dangerous to people and pods, I can't seem to recall any of them having weapons that would be dangerous to the station. Like, there's no artillery drone or anything like that.

Also, I keep saying survey shuttle, survey shuttle. While we could do this by starting with just a cargo bay, I like the idea of having a starting shuttle with lots of supplies and some equipment in addition to that. The reason is twofold. At a certain point, the survey shuttle could leave. At that point, we'd be expected to have an arrivals shuttle set up and ready to receive new personnel as needed. But alternatively, the survey shuttle could be destroyed by enemy attack. In which case, we'd really have something we need to defend. More on that later.