Bring back Manufacturing Terminals?

[nas1m]

During the alpha for Bionic there have been manufacturing terminals, similar to the "potion" ones, that could be hacked to reduce the bots manufacturing prowess, i.e. the number of bots they can manufacture during a day.

This stat is otherwise increasing with each passing day of the campaign and shown in the lower info bar on the city map screen. I always found that the terminals provided an interesting strategic option and their removal fairly weird, since manufacturing is now the single core bot stat that I can do nothing about.

What do you think?

[Teal_Blue]

I would agree with Nas1m.

[Aeson]

I voted 'yes,' though I'm not sure if I'd rather have option 1 or option 3, as having the terminals mess with the production numbers while the factories affect the bot levels almost feels backwards.

I also think that if this came back as a terminal, it would need to be a relatively rare positive terminal rather than something you might see on average once per mission. Maybe have it only show up in mission types where there's already a lot of stuff to hack or where there's a lot of risk of just blowing up the terminal 'accidentally.'

[keith.lamothe]

My main concern is that it can lead to a snowball-of-easiness situation, where by the time you get to the end mission it's really easy because you've hamstrung the bot army so thoroughly.

Which is enjoyable in its own way, but not for everyone.

[ScrObot]

In my typical games, I do a couple Lion's Den missions and that's usually enough to get the bot numbers way down, to the point where I pretty much have to go after their command centers to hurry along the final battle. *shrug*

If the do come back, I agree with Aeson, they should be rare. Or perhaps you could only spawn them in a special, out of the way room with a few harder bots in it, so it's actually a challenge to get to the terminal, but easily bypassed.

[nas1m]

If the do come back, I agree with Aeson, they should be rare. Or perhaps you could only spawn them in a special, out of the way room with a few harder bots in it, so it's actually a challenge to get to the terminal, but easily bypassed.

I like this idea!

My main concern is that it can lead to a snowball-of-easiness situation, where by the time you get to the end mission it's really easy because you've hamstrung the bot army so thoroughly.

I see what you mean here. As it is, doing a lot of Lion's Den and Assassination missions already can hamper the robot army significantly. So adding fairly high frequency terminals that allow to hamper the robot army further might be too much.

I would like to see some way to influence manufacturing as an alternative to these missions nonetheless (as they are fairly hard). From the top of my head I see the following options:

• If feasible, ScrObot's idea above sounds cool (rare terminals, special rooms, heavily guarded)
  
  
• As an alternative, only seed a very small number of manufacturing terminals in the complete game and choose a number of missions randomly that got one (ideally marked on the city map) to provide another objective to the player. Potentially up the hacking cost significantly to impose another limitation to the loadout that has to be available/used for the respective mission.
  This could even be combined with 1.
  
  
• Another idea I had was to make Salvage missions that are done while the player HQ is on full health reduce manufacturing instead. This might be an interesting tradeoff and would not be available always especially if things are going downhill (i.e. the HQ already lost health). Would even be slightly in-character since the Salvage missions are about capturing some construction vehicle

Thoughts?

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, having salvage-on-full-health reduce manufacturing would be cool, actually

[nas1m]

Hmm, having salvage-on-full-health reduce manufacturing would be cool, actually

My work is done here ...

OT: Do you still need some feedback on which achievements to add for the official? I might have some ideas .

[keith.lamothe]

OT: Do you still need some feedback on which achievements to add for the official? I might have some ideas .

Bear in mind that I don't get email notifications of edits, or even an entry on the "show unread posts since last visit" if the only activity in a thread since last view is just edits.

That said, I did happen to see this, and yes, a list of the achievements you think would be appropriate would be helpful.  I was planning on one for each non-misery difficulty level for each new conduct (I had been thinking to exclude casual and maybe easy, but at this point the trend is already set).  The less-obvious question is: which combinations of conducts should get achievements?

[nas1m]

OT: Do you still need some feedback on which achievements to add for the official? I might have some ideas .

Bear in mind that I don't get email notifications of edits

Thanks, I already honored this in the other topic .

That said, I did happen to see this, and yes, a list of the achievements you think would be appropriate would be helpful.  I was planning on one for each non-misery difficulty level for each new conduct (I had been thinking to exclude casual and maybe easy, but at this point the trend is already set).  The less-obvious question is: which combinations of conducts should get achievements?

I will turn my head to this task as soon as I can find some time.
For starters you may use this as a starting point (although it does not yet recognize all available conducts I think) .

[a7thson]

This may be a doofusy idea, but what about a chance to 'hack' a normal terminal to get the old manufacturing function?  It should be both a low chance of success and cost a good bit of hacking points to try, but a successful run would activate the effect.  One shot, and if it fails the terminal is unusable.  The player gets to make the trade-off decision, and high probability of failure means basically playing without terminals, since most of them will get blown sky-high, plus the expenditure of hacking points means less loot.  The ability to 'convert' terminal types via hacking points could be fun too but probably unworkable.  Alternate use for virus points maybe?  Just some thoughts with no numbers put behind them.