Looking through the code now, I can only assume that I was either drunk or being impersonated by a skrull when I revamped the Robotics code. That said, changing the minimum skill level to an average of the stats is a very very bad idea. The highest stat is the most important one- depending on the purpose of the design, the others can matter little or nothing. Imagine: A design with plenty of inbuilt weapons and mounting points with 40 Speed and 3s in everything else. Taking the average, even if stat scores above 15 were penalized, would still leave this a viable design.
If you really want to make things more fair the way to change things is to increase the minimum skill level if the other stats are comparably high; I don't have a good idea for a function to do this, but it should be possible. This reply ignores the obvious issue, that maybe the skill requirement is too high anyhow. The basic skill requirement could be (highest stat - 4) plus another bit depending on how high the other stats are.
I've been thinking about how I'd like Robotics to work, to make it useful without totally unbalancing the game. If you don't mind I'd like to try fiddling the code a bit to see if I can get it working better, then I'll post a series of patches or a git repository or something.
My vision is something like this: A robotics expert's motto is "who needs to be nice to people? just build your own friends!" So they can build robots to serve as mules, weapons platforms, meatshields, skill specialists, and pilots, in roughly that order of difficulty.
Building mules should be possible pretty much as soon as you start. These don't have much in the way of stats, though they should be able to carry lots of stuff. In fact even an all 1s robot with no skills can serve here; who cares if it's so overloaded its speed is decreased, it's one already, and you don't need to wait for it to reach the stairs. The only trick is how to get it to pick up and drop things so you can use them; I guess this requires party mode, which you're then stuck in. Pretty soon, though, you're going to get sick of these guys being blown to pieces by spaceworms and want a higher body and armor rating; no problem, a little more fuel and skill will get you that.
Weapons platforms should be harder. As it stands even with really rotten stats you can arm any robot with a glitter pistol and it'll blow up an enemy now and then (SCATTER makes it easy to hit), so there's no reason not to just build yourself fifteen crappy robots. At the least having a weapon mount should raise the difficulty of the robot somewhat, so that you need to work and raise your Science skill by a level or two before you can build these guys. It might also be nice to require some particular moderately-expensive fuel to allow a weapon mount.
Meatshields in mecha combat are robots that are just barely sentient; crummy skills, crummy stats, these are just enough to be worth loading into a scrap Buru Buru in hopes they will get shot up instead of you. These should require substantial investment in skill points, though the lancemate limit avoids the problem of swarming.
Skill specialists are an idea I like for other reasons (I think players should be able to hire them), but in a robotics context I think the key needed feature is an ability to control skill upgrading. I'd say just give robots the same training feature as other lancemates, so that to get a skill specialist you just keep building robots whose relevant stats are high until by luck you get one with (say) the Medicine skill. Then, since this skill is at level 1, you stick it in a heavily-armored Buru Buru and keep it in the corner for a few fights so that it accumulates experience, which you pour into Medicine. The only drawback of this is that the robot's liable to acquire piloting skills by "use", reducing its special-purpose nature. Perhaps getting the piloting skills should not be automatic?
Building pilots, that is sentient robots that can usefully fight alongside you, should be difficult. You have to build a good robot with decent stats and all the basic piloting skills, then carefully bring it up to useful skill levels by giving it experience.
So, things I'd like to see to make all this work:
- Robot frame addons like weapons mounts, flight jets, hands, and so on cost extra, for some sense of "cost".
- There should maybe be a number-of-pets limit (though it could be reasonably large; five?).
- Specialist robots should be cheaper than generalists with the same maximum stat.
- It should be possible to control robot skill advancement just like lancemate skill advancement.
- It should "cost" something to add the basic piloting/combat skills.
What is the relevant "cost"? Raw materials are currently very cheap; none of the best available ingredients costs more than $10000, which is okay for early-game mules and weapons platforms but effectively free by the time the user is building sentient robots. MP cost is basically irrelevant since users can just wait it out. Difficulty level - minimum skill required to succeed - is a real cost, the kind that forces users to make tough decisions when budgeting XP/money for skill advancement. Unfortunately it's not a per-robot cost, so once a user has enough skill, it's just a matter of patience for them to build the best possible robot at that skill level. PV is a subtle sort of cost, and is probably not really relevant to most players.
I think the way to get "cost" right is to set the difficulty level for a robot appropriately, and to make really good robots require some very expensive fuel. Difficulty level should reflect the stats and the skills, in a way that allows for specialists, and also the body's abilities - robots with weapons mounts should be harder than ones without, and arms or turrets should be harder still. As for expensive fuel, I think I'd introduce some higher-classed and very expensive computers and power supplies and then structure the "points" so that you can't substitute a pile of cheap computers for one expensive one. Perhaps computer points would be the sum of the squares of the classes of the computers, and a lot more would be required (want a sentient robot? Okay, but you have to find and then buy a $100000 class 10 computer to get the required 100 computer points). One could also add cost and complexity by requiring robot control software as fuel. Want your robot to be able to shoot? Build it with Comet Metalworks' Target Analyzer - but it costs $10000. Want a medbot? Just buy MUGL's Surge-o-matic software. Of course this eats up precious fuel slots and is expensive... One might even allow these bits of software to be run in Data Bracelets to help player skills, if that's not too unbalancing. Here the high cost of high-class computers could be made to serve: if Surge-o-matic is 8 ZeG (say) then you need to buy a $50k (say) class 8 computer that will be heavy to run it on. A bit of software for every skill, priced appropriately?
Anyway, I think in spite of the length of this post, most of this can be accomplished with minor tweaks to the robotics code and item lists.
The Multiscanner doesn't affect Robotics since the skill/talent shift a few releases back. I should either add a separate robotics tool or add a robotics tool as a subcomponent of the Multiscanner.
I thought since it raised Science and robotics is based on a Science skill roll this would be automatic.
