I was playing around with something in free build that I had been curious about ever since I found out how the Mixer worked and made a cure that simultaneously cures Coughing four times. Here are two images of how it looks on the surface.
All looks fine, right? Well, on closer inspection, things are VERY buggy.
(disclaimer, I’m sure I’m not the first to find this, but anyway)
This cure is, technically, 800% effective (4x 200%, anyway). But, only the last of the four cures is credited with curing coughing. Further, every one supplied counts as four uses instead of one, resulting in a vaccine that can cure four people of their coughing symptoms per use. This definitely seems like it shouldn’t work that way (especially when sold in an injectable form). And on top of all of that, the supply & demand goes extremely weird when supplying a drug that heals something more than once. It shows 148 are being supplied, while the tooltip shows that only 37 (exactly 1/4 of the amount supplied) are being sold a month. This also effects the saturation, where 111% and 28% are being shown respectively.
Just thought I’d share this find before I forget entirely.
[size=50]Separate note: Centrifuges are a real pain to work with ><; even my best layout can’t keep a line running at 100% efficiency…[/size]
Ha ha, yes other people have told me about this. I wasn’t sure whether is was something that I should ‘fix’ or it should be left in as a quirk of the game, as I couldn’t see a ‘perfect’ solution. I admit the saturation stuff is a bit silly, it’s like 4 people are cutting a pill into 4 and sharing it out. ><
When I get around to fixing this I’ll probably make it ignore all but the first version of each effect but then add the strengths together for the purpose of calculating successful treatments. Note that only recognising the first of each cure will massively reduce the value of cures like this, essentially reducing them to a silly experimental edge case rather than a viable strategy.
I did have a few ideas on how to address this, but I don’t know exactly how drugs are formatted in the coding, so my ideas would probably result in a full recoding of them if they were to ever be implemented =/ haha. Either way, I’ll list some of my ideas:
The first was that when a drug is put into a product, any duplicate effects are added together into a single “effect” when examined. For example, in this case, the “Soothes Coughing” effects would all be combined into a single “Soothes Coughing X4”. This would, at the very least, deal with the weird effect of having the same benefit listed four times and not credited properly.
The value of the drugs should definitely not increase the actual value of the final product much. Something like 25% value for the second duplicate effect and 0% for the third and fourth would SERIOUSLY nerf their overall usefulness from a financial perspective while still not totally punishing a player for having fun with the quirks of the game’s engine.
Further, the effects would not be able to pass a 1:1 Administration:Healing rate, as that literally makes no sense. So anything that pushes it beyond 1:1 would be a pointless addition, and even if you required four effects to have 100% effectiveness rate in practice, the last two would add no value besides what is gained for upping the drug rating (IF it is increased).
In practice, this would give severely diminishing returns for adding multiple duplicate symptoms (with a literal 0% return for the third and fourth effects), and on top of the already expensive production cost of these drugs, would not make them really WORTH investing in, while still not making 2x drugs totally impractical if you can’t make needles yet.
There are only two ways that make sense to me to handle this, both of them should be fairly easy to implement:
Use the cure with the max strength. This would just be the first cure. It would be an effective deterrent from using this strategy, as additional cures of the same type would be completely wasted.
Combine the cures into one stronger cure that never goes over 100%. This would be akin to having multiple different drugs that each have a separate chances to cure you. So if you have three of the same cure at 75% strength, the final strength would be (1 - (1-.75)^3) = (1 - .25*.25*.25) =~ .984 which would be approx 98% strength.
I don’t know, I guess a case could be made to have them added together to higher than 100%. Maybe you’re not aware of it, but the Syringe injector allows you to increase strength over 100% (to 200% in fact when fully upgraded). So a super-concentrated form isn’t without precedence.
Good potential solutions though.
Yes these are good suggestions. I like the second one, except I think I will just add the strengths together. Even with an 800% strength treatment, only a single person would be treated/cured though.
BUG: Using copy when nothing is selected copies the current line of text where the cursor is. Can this be fixed so that nothing is copied when nothing is selected?
