Kezzle

I'm starting to think they horribly screwed the pooch on their server architecture. Given that Planetside had massive FPS combats the decade before last, it shouldn't be that hard to get AvA going with modern server tech. They must've made some choices early on that they now can't unpick and which are hard blocking any short distance action. All their precision selections seem 'off' to me, and they've made a rod for their own backs with things like Talents that shave fractions of seconds off the "tick time" of some things, so they are required to have very frequent checks in order to keep things lined up as they "ought" to be. The load on the server is thusly massively inflated over what a "good game" really needs.

It's particularly puzzling when one of the "USP"s of the game is its sophisticated voxel handling (compared to other MMO space 4X games). You have all these tools to make stunning looking ships, but making them look good gimps them...

Personlly, I'd say a resounding "No." The basis of the world simply isn't there. "Every second thing" would require some tortuous gymnastics to explain why it fits the world. Unless your premise is "Aphelia is insane."

That's pretty much not true. You get three HQ tiles that don't need upkeep to stay yours. You should probably "build your legacy" on one of those. Since you can no longer operate MU without paying territory tax, there's no advantage to having your MU on an HQ hex, so your MUs wouldn't be where your architecture is. Same as in the real world: Sagrada Familia is not built on the spoil heaps of a mine. And once you've built something, it's only a small amount of trouble to move it. You have the Bloop, and you have the materials. If you're a serious miner, you've probably got an atmo hauler capable of shifting it. No, shifting ore pools would be only a minor inhibition to the architects.

Aye, fantastic game design, that: turn the money faucet up so high that you need to have a ball-aching money sink to take the Quanta that should never have been in the game back out of it. Brilliant. It's not like they couldn't just reduce the amount of money coming into the game in some way, after all, is it? Sheer genius.

Well they've only given us Space XL engines, not Atmo, so... maybe?

Yeah, you can. It depends on what you liked about the game way back then. If Diggy-diggy-hole was your bag, then the hurdles you have to jump to get that game "experience" nowadays are significantly higher than they were. If casual indy was what you liked to tinker with, Schematics have just shot your game experience in the face. I'm not sure how anyone could fund casual ship design either, these days, since you'd pretty much have to buy all your Elements and Honeycomb off the markets with your "daily stipend", due to the barriers to casual indy that make "diy" more challenging. Maybe you liked the lack of artificial constraints on what you could fit to a ship. It doesn't crash and glitch as much, sure. And having asteroids you can mine is novel. I'm sure there's a bunch of other stuff that's better, too, so it's honestly arguable and subjective whether it's better or worse.

The only conclusion I can come to that makes any sense is that Aphelia is a deranged AI. Anything the "colonists" are told about the reasons or history behind pretty much any subject has as much chance of being a lie/delusion/fantasy on the part of the machine as it has of being near to a truth. If you're familiar with the TTRPG "Paranoia", you'll recognise the reference when I say "Aphelia is your friend. Trust Aphelia." It kinda makes what NQ tell us a bit "meta", in that they're not letting us, the players, know the truth, but if you gotta have "reasons" for things, beyond "It's game mechanics, foo!" it makes more sense than what we've been drip-fed.

Theoretically, the market should provide (so at least you don't have to asteroid mine). Are there T3 skittles (for all ores) available on those outer planets? Enough (for those before you) to "prime the pump" for a market to supply makers with enough T3 so that miners can take the next step up? Is it at least somewhat "credible" that getting at T3 planetside should require "exotic" (as in, "rare, unusual and not-from-round-here", rather than the game rarity level of "Exotic" with a capital E) materials that are easier to find in space than on planets? Could this actually be an attempt by NQ to try and create specialisations such that you will struggle to get to "building T5 everything" on your own?

Lore is a bit pointless when the world is so inconsistently grounded in the first place. We can turn a (smallish) ship into data and reconstitute it into solid matter using power sources in our suits!!! Why the flying frack are we grubbing around in the dirt for poxy ores? We can teleport people between the markets on Alioth, but it's impossible to link containers/transfer units in two different Cores that are touching. Can't even make a mechanical arrangement. Maximum speed of a ship in vacuum is dictated by its mass. When Space Magic behaves so inconsistently, it really doesn't matter what trite nonsense is written about where the "Noveans" came from. Just take it for what it is.

You've piqued my curiosity: what other projects? Also, if they want DU to fund anything, it's got to be profitable, which means a base of paying players. Which means y'know, making a game people want to play. If they don't manage that, any funding aspirations are going to fall short.

Maybe it could be better in theory. But the way it is implemented makes it much worse. A matter of taste, I guess. 0.23 definitely drove a lot of players out of the game instantly, with its instant, up front demands for large quantities of cash to even start processing in a factory. Current implementation is, to my mind, vastly "better", but still "very bad". I'm grudgingly willing, and, importantly able to engage with the schematics system as it stands; that wasn't the case when schematics first appeared. So I agree more with Doombad than with your assessment.

And is all (of the things you've listed) coming not in the "next" update (1.1, a couple of months away) but in the one after that (1.2 - who knows how long that'll be delayed from it's currently-notional March next year, and how many of the "promised" features will actually make it in). 1.1 is only planned to include (and will inevitably miss some of): Kickstarter backer rewards Grid snapping for bloops Steam Achievements Element recycling Schematic Talents And that's it. Zero alterations to any game loops or additions to them. Largely lipstick on pigs. Looks like I'm three DACs and out until they make an actual game to play. At least now I have enough info to save the ones I have left til actual features are released so I can check them out in the real 'Verse without further outlay. I'm okay with that never happening; beta was fun until they shot it in the face and I've had my money's worth.

Grid snapping, and Schematic Talents?

Multiple post... Server barf when the announcement dropped...

Multiple post... Server barf when the announcement dropped...

I expect it to be as late as possible and still conceivably be at the "end of the first month". So maybe 31 days after they started taking game time off our credit. Plus a couple of weeks for "apologies for the delay".

Only inasmuch as it affects what the devs do and how the game runs... I agree with your assessment that there have been some... suboptimal design choices. I'm not privy to their full tech specs and inside thinking, but the "tick time" on Industry seems to be just way too fast. Reducing the frequency they assess the progress of (unobserved) Indy would go a long way to reducing the load the servers have to sustain, for example, but no, they decided that busywork for the player was the way to go.

I have two DACs remaining. If they haven't done something "Good" by the time they run out, I'll not be throwing any more good money after the initial "stake" I put down on my "bet" that NQ could produce something more than the overpolished tech demonstrator they currently have. I'm fairly happy that I've had my money's worth out of my backer package, but as it stands there really isn't anything that's going to persuade me to pay more.

This is true, too. But then the megafactories would kill the servers. If they aren't already.

Someone's done a monitoring suite that's free and includes such info.

Well, the concept of an "energy system" for constructs has been floating around for a long time. Generally such an approach could arguably add interesting design constraints, and be managed by the game designers to produce results that improve the game generally (like making megafactories more challenging to create and therefore rarer, thus reducing server loads). I vehemently disagree with some of the proposals: things that currently consume, erm, consumables (fuel, cells, ammo, to an extent) should still do so, and such systems should not use (much, if any) of the energy budget of a Construct. There is economy game to be had in the production of those commodities, and that shouldn't be struck down. schematics should be obsoleted and removed as a game system entirely by the implementation of Energy budgets for constructs individual Elements should never use "energy currency" directly, they should use the energy budget of the Core of the Construct they're in, once that Core has been energised by delivery of the "energy currency". High energy components like Shields that don't have existing consumables mechanics should use lots of Core Energy, rather than being powered directly by Quanta. For me, the very name of our existing currency implies some connection to energy. How about if Quanta actually are energy, or at least the gateway to it? As a bit of "pseudo-lore" to give a conceptual framework for how the mechanic might work, how about the following? Every Construct has an energy budget provided by its Core. That Core requires the input of Quanta in order to start generating the energy that constitutes its energy budget. Quanta as we currently see them are the "electronic currency" representing the value of the "real, physical Quanta", which are actually some [space magic] special component that allows things less than a metre across to generate enough energy to power high energy weapons, shields and serious Industry. Maybe they're flecks of Antimatter in tiny magnetic bottles. Maybe they're some esoteric trans-dimensional micro-wormhole that allows tapping into the Cosmic Energy Field. Maybe they're flasks of Zero Point Energy Catalyst. These realQuanta (rQ) would need to be fed to every core you want to be active in order for it to run. They'd be physical things that would need moving around. TUs would need feeding with rQ in order to continue to keep your claim. Any construct not being used would, by default, power itself down so as not to consume the rQ that had been fed into it (and once the rQ are in a Core, they can't be gotten back out), but could be set to keep awake and burning rQ to "keep the lights on". Aphelia would (at least to start with, and possibly indefinitely) be the only source of rQ. Maybe the technology to make them exists only in the Arkship. It'd take some serious development by a player Org to get to the point where it might be considered a candidate to begin construction/research into being able to create rQ. I would think it's the kind of thing that should be explicitly beyond the capabilities of solo or even small corp players. Whatever they are, Aphelia will "produce on demand" one physical quanta for every quanta you have in your wallet, and will take any physical quanta you have and keep it safe, while crediting you with one eQuanta in your wallet per rQ you deposit.

Nah, they think that just having it be a batch process that can't feed other processes while you're offline is enough of a nerf.

While this statement is true, it will not change the situation in the Safe Zone, where people will start out. Forcing people into the PvP zone in order to make prospecting "viable" is probably not a great way to encourage population growth.

As a new player, you still have stuff to learn. LUA is part of the in-game economy: a ship with a good HUD is literally worth more than the same elements and voxels with the default piloting interface. Yes, you'd still need to go to each machine anyway, but that isn't what you said. You wanted help checking each machine. Please don't get me wrong: I hate the idea of Schematics. They pretty much only suck, for reasons well-rehashed in many places. I was just offering you a way that you perhaps weren't aware of to ease some of their pain. Take it, or not.