I was not sure if this qualifies as enough of a bug for the tracker so I am posting it here. I have the following problem:
I like to drive around in my heavily modified flatbed (don’t we all), and sometimes it gets damaged, so I repair it. I found a bionic called “enhanced memory banks”. I was overjoyed and installed it immediately.
Now I have 37 mechanics skill (which I think is about enough to build a space ship from scratch in a couple of hours), and my bionic power is draining so fast that I can’t use it for anything other than powering the memory banks.
There appears to be no way to reduce this skill to a realistic and manageable level, so I am forced to workaround this by simply turning off skill rust.
There are actually several balance issues involved in this.
- I should not be able to become the worlds greatest engineer by welding spikes onto a truck chassis. Nor should I be able to become the worlds greatest chef/chemist by boiling 100 litres of water.
- Skills should not be able to reach a level 4x the maximum realistic human ability, this is a meaningless level, like having a bajilion skill. It has no effect on gameplay that I know of other than not playing well with this bionic.
- Memory electronics do not have unlimited capacity, and simply use more power the more information they store. I believe computer RAM uses more energy to store more information, but it has a very limited capacity, and most other electronic information storage media simply use a set amount of power and have a set amount of storage capacity.
I propose the following changes to remedy these issues:
- An action should no longer increase your skill after it reaches a level of *<skill_level>. skill level is the required skill level of the action (or 1 if the skill level required is 0), and 1 is a multiplier we can work out according to balance. I think 2 would be a good multiplier. This means boiling water can get my cooking skill level to 2, but no further. Repairing solar panels could get my skill in mechanics to 16.
- This is already partially solved by the solution to 1 above, a further cap could be added but should not be necessary.
- Tweaking the mechanics of this module is of tertiary importance, and the difference it would make to gameplay is minimal given the rarity of the item and the other suggested changes above. Nevertheless it is a little but silly and I would suggest one or more of the following options be considered. The module holds a max number of total skill points after which skills rust as though the level protected by the module was level 0. The module can only cover a limited number of skills. The player can choose which skills the module protects and turn some on/off. The player can delete skill levels from the module. The module only stops skill rust up to a certain level. The module only reduces skill rust frequency.
Boiling water and repairing things are something the I have to do, not something I am grinding for skill. I don’t want these skill increases, and I do not see any justifiable reason for receiving them.
It should be noted as well that even without the memory bionic boiling enough water to fill a vehicle water tank will get you to about 16 cooking, and driving around repairing whenever necessary and living off cooked meat and boiled water give a stable skill level of well over ten even with skill rust on.
For the record I play with int based rust and have high int. I dread to think of the level my mechanics will reach after I turn rust off.
