Components should have some quality variability associated with them. Even the same make and model should have variability in quality. The range of variability will determine which brands are reliable and good, and which are bad.
Quality is not exposed to the user directly (say as number). They learn about it by trying out parts they've purchased and seeing if they stand up to testing. The idea is that it should be something like "Those Entron-50s are really hit or miss", and "I always buy Guidecappers Gold. They work well and have never let me down"
Quality itself can be realized as a normal distribution around the parameters stated "on the tin". In other words, your power supply may say it provides 70MW, but in reality it may provide anywhere from 65 - 75MW, with the actual value clustering around 70. Lower quality means that range is larger, but it's always centered in the middle of what you'll get. And you're anways more likely to get values closer to the official value than to values far off.
This leads to a system where you have:
A stat
an attribute of the component's class
visible to the consumer in the part's description
example: power output in MW
A quality,
an attribute of the class
value is a standard deviation
not visible to consumer
A "real" stat
an attribute of the component instance
obtained by randomly choosing from a normal distribution centering around the class's stat value and with the standard deviation given by the quality.
Components should have some quality variability associated with them. Even the same make and model should have variability in quality. The range of variability will determine which brands are reliable and good, and which are bad.
Quality is not exposed to the user directly (say as number). They learn about it by trying out parts they've purchased and seeing if they stand up to testing. The idea is that it should be something like "Those Entron-50s are really hit or miss", and "I always buy Guidecappers Gold. They work well and have never let me down"
Quality itself can be realized as a normal distribution around the parameters stated "on the tin". In other words, your power supply may say it provides 70MW, but in reality it may provide anywhere from 65 - 75MW, with the actual value clustering around 70. Lower quality means that range is larger, but it's always centered in the middle of what you'll get. And you're anways more likely to get values closer to the official value than to values far off.
This leads to a system where you have: