After several rounds as my Researcher Character Friedrich 'Ink' Taggart, I come to the conclusion that...
...The Researcher is perhaps one of the most boring roles in Colonial Marines you could play as.
I wouldn't even call it a standalone one, either, since after you're done with whatever you were doing at round-start, you're most likely forced to become a hybrid between a doctor and an intelligence officer. And the things you can do during your playthrough? They're pretty limited. In that regard, I'm opening this suggestion thread. The last update to the researcher role is one year behind, and since there are already many changes happening to CM (Kits, Strains...), I believe this is the right time as any to bring this 'lost job' back to life. I will add my personal suggestions into the thread to which people can comment on, criticizing them, or adding their own ideas into the pot. Any respond is gladly appreciated.
The Researcher, and his Problems
Here's a sum up to every round you spend, hoping for NEW REVELATIONS.
1. You plan your first steps.
1.1. You make grenades, destroying glass windows and metal chairs because you (for whatever reason) only have an empty autolathe. This is a hassle, extremely time consuming, but it is perhaps (in my opinion) the most worthwhile thing you can do.
1.2. You make medicine. But then again, that goes to show that you really are only a doctor.
1.3. You make experimental drugs. Synaptizine with Tricord? That's a thing. Or whatever you come up with. It's pretty fine for a couple of rounds, but that's where it ends.
1.4. You play and fiddle with hydroponics! [Brand New Addition, let's see how this goes!...]
2. You think as to what to do with your made products.
2.1.1. You either give those grenades away to the marines before they even launched their dropship, since once they have already dropped, finding a competent marine is going to be a problem. Or...
2.1.2. You keep those grenades locked behind a closet as finished, not-to-use, emergency prototypes. Since you wouldn't see the effect these grenades brought to the battlefield, you would have absolutely no idea whether or not they worked as intended, or if it was even worth making them in the first place. (Evidently, OOCly, you would hope for the Xenomorph to crash into the Almayer so that you could use those grenades yourself. But that's powergaming combined with specks of meta.)
2.2. You give the medicine to medical. That's 'nuff said.
2.3. You give those drugs to the marines, only to watch them accidentally overdose on them, dying miserably, putting you on an execution order by a firing squad. Giving away those nerve stimulants may have not been the brightest idea.
2.4. You accidentally prick yourself with a genetically modified nettle; now filled with the deadliest poisons, you keel over and die miserably.
3. You do absolutely nothing useful in terms of 'research'.
This goes for all the roundstart options. Except maybe the hydroponics one, since it's new!
3. After you're done with whatever you were doing, you wait. For what? For an even more boring job which has absolutely nothing to do with research. Until the marines start killing some aliens, you're an idle, mellow guy - but as soon as they start throwing corpses at you? Back-and-forth, back-and-forth... That's exactly the opposite of a fun role. The system in itself screams boredom. It's a design flaw in every way! And there's absolutely no payoff for you. You could roleplay making autopsies on aliens... You could roleplay doing tests with their blood... But for what? This has zero-to-no impact. I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy doing those things when I started out being a researcher, but once you realize that you can't do anything with the things you uncover? You stop doing it. And then it returns to the back-and-forth mentality of the whole mid-game researcher situation.
And that's it! That's the whole round summarized in its entirety (apart from some snowflakes who decide to go planetside themselves).
Let's get to the chase, the researcher role needs improvements. I'm certain that the developers had it hard coming up with ideas as to how to make this job the tiniest-bit more interesting like it is supposed to be on paper.
Here are my suggestions
We'll start off small since these problems are most likely the easiest to solve.
- Give researchers access to the containment lockdown. This is a given. I have absolutely no idea why we, as researchers, wouldn't be able to open that pesky lockdown in containment. We have to ask the CMO every single round. [This has been solved!]
- Relocate the alien-corpse storage. It's not fun dragging them all the way to the containment cells. Having a separate room for those, which is a lot closer to the hospital ladders, will certainly ease the researcher off the 'dragging' part, and let them concentrate on the 'researching' part. [This issue has been solved!]
- Drop chutes into the containment. Nobody wants to open those containment cells once there are alien eggs planted inside. Or actual, living aliens roaming about in that 3x3 area. Having an item drop chute to throw in things into would make studying the interactions between things and aliens a bit more worth-while. This goes for the poor souls which play aliens inside the containment cells, as well.
- Stop the randomization of tool boxes. Why would they store two electrical tool boxes in the same room? It's a hassle to find the right tools for the researchers to use, hence giving them one standard toolbox and one of the electrical kind. [This has been solved!... As far as I'm aware, that is.]
- Autolathe resources. If you don't want researchers to deconstruct chairs and windows, that's the way to go. [This has been solved!... As far as I'm aware, that is.]
- Change 'Medical Researcher' to simply 'Researcher'. [Or: Allow them to choose that, themselves.]
In the end, three of these changes would make the research role a bit less time-consuming in terms of 'time you spend doing absolutely nothing productive', where-as the drop chute would advocate researchers to interact with their pet aliens more. And the last one? Most of us don't want to play as sub-type doctors. We really don't want to be doing surgeries, if we did, we would've gone doctor from the get-go. We don't want the CMO to yell at us for not coming down and helping with all of those internally, eternally bleeding marines. Because we intellectuals? We want to be special. We want to change things on how the round goes.
Then we have the more impactful things to add, since they would fix how boring this job is.
- More, easily accessible chemistry recipes. With those, experimentation would actually play a bigger role, and would open up more options for experimental grenades, mixes... you get the point. [With the addition of thermite, and different fire-mixes, I find this has been quite a positive change!]
- Alien autopsy. It's great that we always get a truckload of aliens at our doorstep, but we never actually do something with them. Perhaps adding experimental upgrades to armor, weaponry, and utility made out of alien chitin, hides, acids and materials would solve this problem. The Burrower's claws could make for an upgrade to the shovels; the Crusher's armor an upgrade to the tank; the Ravager's claws an upgrade to the machetes; the Boiler's ocular organs an upgrade to scopes/binoculars? All of this would certainly give us something to do, perhaps limited to the Defcon, but on-par with the upgrades the aliens get when they mature. [This has been solved in a neat way by adding new Alien substances and involving them in Chemicals!]
- Protolathe, or something similar. Perhaps connect it to the previous point of Alien autopsy, allowing for those prototypes of weaponry and armor to be made which get sent out to the FOB for those silly marines to try using, blowing themselves up with upgraded versions of C4.
I'm certain that there are even more things to come up with. And I hope these will get implemented, even if that would mean that we'd have to be whitelisted as a researcher only to be able to play (it's very roleplay-intensive, either way), since I believe that this role holds insane potential.
Go ahead and tell me what you think about the current state of research, as well. All replies are welcome.