Kezzle

I'm aware this is a somewhat rhetorical question, to which the obvious answer is "planetary warfare", but I'd like to further assert that we are also missing any kind of vision as to what it might look like, and any firm idea of what sort of priority it has or that it's even still on whatever passes for a roadmap in NQ central these days. Currently, it's so MIA, it's the acme of vapourware.

I got the impression from somewhere that they'd always intended MU skills to be available when telepresent. Of course it makes no more sense than for any other skill for MU Talents to be active via robot, but hey, maybe it's another Universe...

They did what, now? Isn't that exactly what the safe zone is? Have they said "for certain" that everywhere is going to be FFA PvP in the fullness of time? I missed that one. Also, I don't believe in AvA, Atmo CvC or Territorial Warfare any more (at least, I don't believe this game will survive long enough for the anaemic development effort it has available to achieve such features), so it's effectively not something I think you need worry about. I think the argument is "that of Kings"... in that, if players are the sole "regulatory agency", the only regulatory mechanism is PvP/destruction, so there ought not to be any "artificial" safe havens where anti-social types can go and lick their wounds and rebuild to reinvade Ukraine again and again and again. It's not so much vital to the economy as vital to the society. Not saying the argument necessarily stands up as an absolute, and for sure Haven is going to be, well, a Haven away from PvP, for all eternity, I believe (and therefore, it's not a stretch to think there'd be a safe area in space around it too, and if you have any 100% inviolable haven, you might as well have half the game be PvP-negative).

If you get rid of the Q-Faucets, you have to get rid of the sinks, too, or there won't be any currency available to keep an economy flowing. So Taxes and Schematic costs will have to go. Both of those have other-than-economic reasons to exist, so you need to solve those problems too. Just making resources easier to get doesn't make an economy flow better, it just means that more people can go and get their own mats to make their own things.

Well, we could hope that NQ recognise that pulling the safezone rug out from under people on established tiles (even if the rug in question is only there because of the game's incomplete state) wouldn't be... very popular. But that probably also means no Territory Warfare until a second system opens up, which realistically means it's never going to happen. I mean, they could open up a new-new planet (cos the reinstatement of the ones that are currently MIA is going to happen before TerrWar is even in some testing phase) in the current system with no safe-zone once they've got some sort of mechanic hashed out, but then they'd have to put something worth fighting over on it... And that is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Aye, that's pretty much the same as "no timeline", since the one given is obviously invalidated and the haven't even mentioned it in the 1.1/1.2 release prospectuses.

That's possibly a contributing factor. They really need to get a native English speaker to fiddle with the changes and write the patch notes a bit more comprehensively, if that's the case. In this particular instance, I think it was more an overstriving for brevity that left out the details. Perhaps they simply relied on faulty assumptions about how people would encounter the new implementation in-game as well; it's better explained when you first deploy an MU, but people who were just maintaining a running setup wouldn't get the full story until they changed what they were doing.

I like the idea of making the environment the NPC challenge. Much more "hard scifi" than "Precursor Aliens"... I don't like the idea of "fiat annihilation" events. I think it should be possible, if not practicable to design and build Constructs which can survive such apocalyptica. Static camps are a player convenience that I think should at least be considered. But periodic random radical shifts of where [whateveritis we're there for] is located would mitigate enduring advantages from having such bases: while they're closer to the lucre than Alioth, they can't be reliably built right on top of the "deposits", because the deposits move. Having an "apocalypse zone", where it is well understood by everyone who even thinks about going there "for serious" that nothing will be the same next week, or tomorrow, certainly could give opportunity to aspirant newcomers. If the requirements for exploiting the resource zone are not too onerous. The idea would be significantly enhanced by the implementation of a less simplistic scanning/radar model. If it's possible to use the environmental features as "cover or concealment", ambushes and evasion and actual tactics start to become relevant in operations.

Nope. Only on asteroids. Everywhere else is MU-tastic. Asteroids are the theoretical replacement for the scan-dig game, aye. There are problems, though: there aren't very many of them in safe-space, so they tend to be swarmed the moment they spawn by crowds of miners. Get there an hour late, and you have a worm-eaten potato. They also don't have anything over T2. the PvP 'roids (where the higher Tier ores are available) tend to be magnets for (let's be generous) raiders who'd rather core your ship and tow it away than core an asteroid out for ore. Currently, light, voxel-less slices of S-core with autocannon are the meta, since CSA makes such a big difference to hit resolution. So not Cubes Of Gold any more, but an equally unsatisfying meta. Schematics were made into consumables because the cost-of-entry when schems were buy-once was prohibitive. That's what made me set the game aside in 0.23 when it was introduced. The elimination of on-planet mining was because they preserved every single terrain change, both above and below surface, and the tunnel-riddled crust of all the planets was proving impossible to manage in the servers. So they chose to get rid of planetary mining entirely, and have asteroids (which are much smaller and despawn periodically, so their variations in morphology don't need to be constantly tracked and updated) instead. I hope your aspirations are realised, but I fear they will not be. Higher tier resources are difficult to come by just with MUs. Sure you don't need to spend time digging; the time taken to run the calibrations to keep your mining rigs efficient is probably less than you'd need to gather the same amount of ore. But it's a ceiling. Before, you could mine all day and come home with many tens of kL. Now you'll take rather longer to accumulate the same amount of paydirt. If you can find it, claim the territory and put a high enough Tier of MU down to extract it. Far from it. The machines are entirely there to make the devs'/server admins' lives easier. MUs are a boring minigame. Some of what people are complaining about might be a little bit hyperbolic, but there's a strong basis there in fact. The game is showing little sign of growing. It still (after how many years) lacks any PvP other than Space Construct v Space Construct. There is no way to make effective player markets. There aren't any significant developments announced. Yes, we lost a bunch of planets. Can't remember why; they redid the surfaces IIRC before launch, and presumably didn't have the time to give all the planets the TLC they felt was required. Currently, we don't have a timeline for their reintroduction, only nebulous promises that they'll be back.

Well, if you ask me, the fact that there is an "end game" is one of their original design flaws. Taking the concept of Tiers from MMOs like WoW was a numbnuts mistake to begin with.

Very true, that. All that us DAC players are doing is persuading whatever investment company is supporting DU in the hopes of turning a profit that there's a playerbase there that might start actually spending some more cash once their free time has run out. So I guess there's a step-wise pressure that'll grow: People who bought a month or two with launch stop their subs and people with only 1 DAC don't spend their cash like they're "expected to". Each month, some people who've been paying drop their subscription. People with 3 DACs don't extend their playtime with money. Players with 6 DACs leave the game having expended their free time And so on... Each step/stage will have the effect of increasing the pressure on the endeavour's finances. At the moment, I don't see any of those stages increasing the number of active, paying subs... I hope I'm wrong and I can come back in a couple of years after my DACs are used up and pay a sub with a realistic expectation of getting my money's worth.

Most of the people who have been around during that time bought a package (aka placed a bet) early on and might not have spent another red cent, and won't need to until the DACs they bought (way back when) run out. People have stayed because it doesn't cost them anything more, and out of morbid curiosity to see whether it'll turn out how it was first pitched to them. We'll see once DACs run out whether they can continue to keep the lights on.

Anyone with any sense who gave money pre-launch did the sums and decided whether they'd get their money's worth in the "free" time and DACs period. I certainly did. I've had some fun, largely down to who I'm playing alongside, and don't feel cheated. Not going to spend any more though. The current experience is emphatically not worth the prices they're charging. One more DAC after this one, and I'm in two minds as to whether to save that for a "revisit" when someone tells me the game's better, or whether to use it for what fun I can currently. Backing an EA game is a bet you make. It doesn't take much brains to run a long con. It takes a lot more, evidently to make a game with any longevity.

In reality (or at least "industry parlance", the game never made it out of Alpha. It still lacks features that are core to the experience (AvA, atmo CvC, Territorial Warfare, player markets to name but 4), and much of the rest is just placeholders for actual development. All they've done is make it a very polished Alpha. For two years they've hunted bugs, and it now mostly runs okay. Sure, they've polished off some of the surface detail, in the process, but what's there works way better than most alpha products. That doesn't make it ready for release though. I think the problem is that they don't have the capacity (whether that's vision or actual code-cutting or both) to do much more than polish. New major features? None promised in the first 6 months post reset.

They may have been talking about the MU changes in the most recent patch. Since then, you may not calibrate another MU on an ore type that has zero remaining potential hourly output. You also may not remove MU for 24 hours after you calibrate them (you have to Start them collecting before you can calibrate, and can't Stop them for a day, and you can't pick them up if they're running) so yo can't "let go" of some of the capacity in order to calibrate another MU. This limits the number of calibrations per ore type on a given territory in a 24 hour period. If you have more calibration potential than territory, you might get more mileage nowadays out of small MUs, since each "eats" less of the potential hourly output when you put it down, so you can get more calibrations per day done. Or maybe that doesn't work; haven't systematically tested it.

Thanks for the detail Msoul. Answers some questions I had, from just reading the patch notes. Why NQ couldn't phrase it this clearly, I don't know. It's like they expected everyone to be deploying MUs...

Which would conveniently also do away with any need to create a territory wafare system, since there would be no permanent resources to fight over control of. Win-win!

Spamming something to several threads isn't really very good practice on Forums... Certainly doesn't make it any more true.

I think it says something about the delay in issuing Sanc TUs, too. I've got one of those sat in my nanopack, and zero motivation to fly over there and plant it. I'm sure I'm not the only one, given the comments in the "Where STU, NQ?" threads. But all those peeps who have the chance to claim a Sanc tile have already paid for the privilege of being here for this first period, at least, so are not adding to NQ's money pile at all.

Again, no way of testing myself til probably Saturday evening now, so I'm asking...: When does that "0L remaining" reset if you remove the MUs that are "pointing" at that ore? Say I set up 2 MUs on an 80L Coal tile to suck all the Coal out of a territory (say one does 60, the other clears up the last 20), if I pick those MUs up, when does the "ore remaining" go back up? Is it that number that's associated with the cooldown?

Also, reading just wot dey rote, it doesn't fix the "chain calibration" problem (if it is one). It just means you can't keep using the same MU to calibrate, so you need as many MUs available as you have charges. Now, they might have attached cooldowns to the ore pool rather than the specific MU, I've not tested it. But the patch notes suggest the CDs are based on the MU.

Ah, that's a little bit less worrying, but you're right that a bit more breadth and experience of other environments and ways of approaching solutions would be advantageous...

Holy amateur hour, Batman! CTO, as in "Chief Technical Officer"? The mind boggles.

One bit of inconsistency that catches me out every time is that the different categories of things you can build aren't ordered the same in every place they appear. Without logging on, I can't be certain, but I'm pretty certain that they're differently presented between schematics and machines/nanocrafter.

It'd be nice if it distinguished between pilot and placement bonuses, too, where they're both relevant.