So I woke up inspired this morning to an idea for a mod for this wonderful game. What if in research you could cure diseases like malaria and the flu?! I think it should be researched in levels, slowly lowering the chance of infection and death of the researched disease.
For example:
In the research screen:
Develop Cure lvl 1 - Flu
Develop Cure lvl 1 - Plague
Develop Cure lvl 1 - Malaria
When researched it would globally lower infection chance and if they do get sick it would lower chance of death. (I don't know how the code works for disease but it looks like if it goes untreated it has a chance to get worse or kill). Each level would slowly decrease these chances by a small percent. Which makes sense because as your colonists learn more about the diseases they become infected less and if infected they understand how to treat it more effectively.
To balance it I think each level of cure should take 1000-1500 research time and have up to 5-10 stages of research before a cure can be created.
There are two directions this mod can go in: Once research is complete. Either you completely cure it and no more action is necessary or you develop a cure in the form of vaccines. The vaccines could be at a special workbench and made out of a few med packs and different plants like agave fruit.
Lets talk about this in the comments! I would love to hear some feedback on this thought.
I like it, I only have 1 addition/change:
You can only research if someone actually has the disease at the time.
Quote from: skullywag on November 01, 2014, 12:24:01 PM
You can only research if someone actually has the disease at the time.
That could work, but I think that might cause the research times to be way too long. So they would need to be shortened, otherwise it could take forever to research a cure for even one disease. Especially on the later levels when your chance of even becoming infected are lowered.
Also that might cause problems and make the research project stop each time. A player could go 20 minutes and realize that the research project never continued. Ease of use is key with a management game like this one.
Perhaps a better way of doing it would be to lock the research project until a colonist has been infected. That way it stays simple. :D
Or, what about research points required are x10, so 10,000-15,000, but reduced to 10% (i.e. 10x faster) when someone is ill with the disease being researched?
You can research for an inactive illness, but it'll take a long time. When you have someone sick with said illness, research is greatly hastened.
A bit more realistically, 'dissection' of corpses of people who died from an illness adds X amount of research points towards said illness' cure.
How about meet this: research can only be done while someone is ill with it and takes around 3 colonists worth to research, but completely cures your colonists of it for good. You eradicate Malaria for the rest of your colony's duration. Also, you can prolong the time you have to work on it by not giving medicine to the person. They obiviously will have the disease longer and the chance of your colonist dying "for the greater good" goes up, but you also get a cure in less time.
I think I'd prefer a combination between this:
Quote from: KugelBlitz on November 01, 2014, 12:37:07 PMPerhaps a better way of doing it would be to lock the research project until a colonist has been infected. That way it stays simple. :D
and this:
Quote from: StorymasterQ on November 02, 2014, 08:42:11 PM
Or, what about research points required are x10, so 10,000-15,000, but reduced to 10% (i.e. 10x faster) when someone is ill with the disease being researched?
You can research for an inactive illness, but it'll take a long time. When you have someone sick with said illness, research is greatly hastened.
It could still be a significant job to accomplish, but not rely entirely on the malevolent and hateful RNG (Who would undoubtedly make my researcher fall ill right before ambushing my doctor with dozens of rabid boomrats, destroying all of my medical supplies in a raging fire).
I'm not a big fan of particularly fiddly bits or conditions, needing to have a colonist actively sick would just make it require micromanagement. Personally I'd rather have the research cost of everything increased by an order of magnitude than deal with that.
Cool request,one of my colonists just got plague today,luckily we had a lvl 20 doctor :D!
This is a great idea! i very much like the idea of vaccines! ;D