Re: Game economy
Sorry to double post - I've been thinking about autoharvesters.
What if it was something that worked like this.
If:
It is: something that comes in several flavors. 1hr, 2hr, 4hr.
It is: controllable: it can be deactivated early.
It is: set to, on deactivation, revert to a field container which will degrade, as they do, in 10 minutes.
It is: inefficient - does 25% of the work manual harvesting would be.
It is: insecure. Anyone who discovers an autoharvester can control it, which includes deactivating it and emptying the resulting can.
It is: targetable. You can shoot it with a single mech and do not need to catch it in a crossfire (like potatoes).
It is: detectable on radar.People would still place autoharvesters on beta. These autoharvesters can then be: shot, deactivated, emptied out, or camped. Why camped? Well, because if you find a 2hr autoharvester, and can tell it is going to revert in 1hr, then you know someone will liekly be showing up to try and collect the contents.
Seems like a lot of reasons why autoharvesters would be pointless. But if you consider an autoharvester like an incubator, you find that they will not be 'do your job AFK' modules, but possible points of conflict on the map.
Could make things more interesting.