Hey guys, I’m thinking of lowering the process times of the UV Curer, Sequencer, Centrifuge and Sachet Maker down to 2 from 3.
The idea is to make the UV Curer and Sequencer more usable for their concentration changing facility, as well as their upgrade facility. I also want to increase the utility of the Centrifuge and Sachet Maker.
One of the things that I underestimated when designing the game was how much space would be at a premium. Due to their size these particular machines take up a tremendous amount of space when you have to put three in parallel which seems to far outweigh their benefits (except in the case of upgrading a Cure). I’m hoping that bringing them down to a process time of 2 will make them more usable and make the late game more interesting.
I’m also on the fence about bringing the Hadron Collider down to process time of 3.
Makes sense to me. They take a lot of space because of the requirements for many of them. I think in particular for the Chromatograph, there’s one process that I’d need 9 of them for it (3 sets of three). Reducing the timing to 2 would significantly reduce the space needs.
Currently their size is just too big for the processing cost. I mean, a 1:1 belt using any of those 3 takes up half the building, and if you have to use them more than once, it’s virtually impossible to make a 1:1 belt. And even if you can, it’s just not profitable because you could probably fit 2-3 other belts inside the building instead and make more money.
Making them 2 cost instead of 3 would certainly make them more viable for 1:1 belts.
The main benefit I see with this is the Centrifuge. That can have a very complicated belt setup to get that working on a 1:1 ratio, but dropping it to 2 would simplify it immensely.
It could be particularly rewarding if you make the reduced processing time the Level 5 research upgrade for them; as is, by the time I would be using any of those for anything other than upgrading, reduced processing cost (or increased per cure value) is negligible relative to the sale value of most of the drugs I’m making, but reduced processing time would give me an excuse to completely refactor my factory.
I suggest having the ability to lower process times with a tech buried deep down the tree. Each level of the tech could lower specific equipment process time by 1, until max level where everything have PT 1.