Draft Design: Research

This was a real nail-biter for a while, but it looks like research has pulled ahead to victory!

The goal of this update will be to make progression and building more interesting. That means adding more flexibility in the station view, more options to unlock over time, and more benefit from conquest.

To that end, it will add a ton of new structures and tools, and restrict most behind research. Research will be acquired both by having slaves assigned to it on your station, and by having developed planets in your empire. These will multiply with each-other, so having both will be important to get endgame technologies in a reasonable amount of time.

This is a pretty big update, and I might end up releasing it in stages depending on how quickly it goes.

Science:

• Conquered worlds will now produce research, in addition to money. This will depend on their stats and the upgrades you give to them.

• Slaves assigned to research will do their own work, and boost their efforts. The smarter, the better.

• You will be able to choose the direction of your research with the new Research screen, which will have the tree of available technologies.

Structures:

If all goes according to plan, this update will add about eighty new structures, so I'm not going to list them all here. Most follow the pattern of:

• Starter version: A basic structure, more often small and placed directly on the deck (like the brothel room from SM1, or the prayer mat)

• Upgraded version: A more space-efficient or effective version, in the style of the existing buildings (like the arcade, or the pod hotel).

• Super version: Either has a different demographic (like the Free-Use Lounge, which is a version of the brothel that caters to the wealthy), or is even more efficient (like the Neural Uploader, which is faster than the University, but carries a risk of madness)

Not all of them though. A few stand-outs are:

• Fighting Pits (lethal and nonlethal)

• Slave Apartments: An alternative to bunks, which build obedience over time (assignable in the inspection screen or RA).

• Porn Studio

Deck Facelifts:

• The pleasure deck is ugly, because it was designed around a maze that doesn't exist anymore. This update will include a visual redesign to make it feel more like space-Vegas.

• The rest of the decks will be getting little improvements as well.

Other Changes:

• Buffing rich/middle citizens to make them worth having.

• Making appeal system more transparent and fully-baked so you can understand and control the class of tourists who come to your station.

• Random events will reflect a clearer progression from pirate to God-Emperor over time (and be a bit more frequent).

• Construction animation and deck building aesthetic tweaks.

• Reputation and influence will change star obedience and fear over time.

• A star's obedience dropping to 0 will result in losing the system.

• Reworking star upgrades to be more meaningful and rewarding.

• Star inspection and list will show the rate at which stats are changing.

• Probably a lot of other stuff that will be needed to make everything feel right.

• All the bug fixes I can manage (special thanks to everyone who reports them).