Mechanoid expansion: salvaging and repurposing

[mcduff]

Mechanoids are a bit of a weird one. They show up a lot, and early, with massive firepower, and leave behind... a few components and a bit of plasteel.

The risk/reward of mechanoids is a bit unbalanced.

At the same time, I can understand why you wouldn't necessarily want to just give people free miniguns and inferno cannons after their first centipede battle.

What follows is not intended to be an exhaustively balanced system, but a set of ideas which I think would be a good basis for expanding the risk/reward balance.

• 
  Mechanoid Components
  
  
  
  • Not just another kind of component like the "advanced" version, but rather specific sub-parts of mechanoids that can't be used by themselves but can be repurposed.
  • 
    You wouldn't be able to get it straight away, you'd assume most of the components would be damaged, but by salvaging a bunch of them you'd get enough to open up some interesting mechanoid-based things.
  • 
    The simplest thing here is turrets. It's probably OP to let players rebuild a whole centipede, but it's interesting to see how it would play out to let them basically stick a basic turret AI in a machine made out of a couple of centipede corpses as a minigun or inferno cannon turret.
  • 
    Scythers and Lancers could be similarly repurposed into charge lance turrets, or a new kind of trap that basically melee attacks whatever is in the square next to it, but can't move.
    
  • 
    You could also see use in a centipede carcass as a "pack animal". Hollow it out, use it as a high capacity, brainless "truck" to shuttle steel back from LRMS sites.
  • 
    Similarly there was a mod that introduced little robots that did hauling and cleaning. This might be something that mechanoid components could be used for.
  • 
    There are other options as well. The key mechanism involved, though, is getting various different components from mechanoid carcasses that then get stuck together into things that are useful, but not the same as having an army of rewired mechanoids to do your bidding.


• 
  Mechanoid research
  
  • Make some high reward research branches that require mechanoid components, which are consumed/destroyed in the process. Things like advanced medicine, mechanite research etc.
  • 
    You could also have some branches that go quicker if you're researching with a mechanoid component giving a boost. The obvious ones would be charged shot and bionics.
  • 
    I like the new mechanism of making some things rely on multiple skills, so this could be a "crafting/intelligence" double skill task.

I hope that's fairly clear. The aim of the idea is to add to the benefits of being attacked by swarms of advanced, ancient machines, but in a more interesting and involved way than just having them drop more loot when you beat them.