Nayropux

Is it probably too much? Yeah. Can you fix it now? No. If you fix it now you just close the door behind everyone who already benefitted from it, and you no longer have the option to wipe to remove the divide. The reality is the game now needs to be balanced around this income, and underperforming missions need to be brought up to be similar to the most popular.

Locking shields to core sizes won't even accomplish anything. I can build the exact same S core on an M core and the only difference is a slightly heavier core element. S ships need to be fast to survive; I don't think voxel is out of the question on them but you really need to think about it and, more importantly, judge what other people are flying. If you want to force voxel on ships there would need to be some amount of shield bleed. Scaling the probability of a shot bleeding through a shield based on the current HP of the shield could also add interesting gameplay around venting early to keep the shield in a better state for longer. It would also let you add small passive regeneration to shields without being obnoxious. I do think we should see where the current changes go, however, before something like that is added.

There are two issues I have with the Thoramine event, and the Thoramine itself. 1. While it was bad enough the event was hidden to 99% of players, it is even worse than that. The event was started in alpha, so naturally the alpha players already knew about it before beta launched, and so alpha players were the ones who completed it. 2. A significant portion of the Thoramine was real world traded. In fact, one of the players in this thread who doesn't want it to disappear was involved in that transaction. Hopefully this resource doesn't return in the same fashion. Maybe as some rare spawn in exotic asteroids would be fine, but making it a limited spawn in a hidden event is just asking for it to be found by someone with inside knowledge, and just asking for the reward to be RMT'd.

Cross section should not be removed. It does it's job perfectly. It encourages you to engineer ships correctly, and to fly them correctly, with one mechanic. Removing it would remove a lot of depth from both building and piloting. It is possible to make good looking ships that are optimized for cross section, they just need to be original designs suitable for the game mechanics, and not an .obj file you grabbed off Sketchfab. I think the voxel changes will help with giving some more leeway for design, but it needs to be accompanied by increases to exterior element HP, and perhaps a more gradual decrease to top speed from mass.

FYI, the numbers in your sheets have been completely wrong. I would suggest fixing your old sheets before suggesting improvements.

There is no reason to remove cross section. In encourages engineering tradeoffs. Keep in mind that hit chance scales with the square root of the cross section, but CCS/HP scales with the volume of the ship. That means as you scale up, you gain more EHP in ccs/hp than you lose from increased hit chance. Changing the lock ranges would not be good for the game as it removes options like upsized radars, and makes smaller ships essentially unkillable.

I have not looked at the exact numbers, but increasing honeycomb EHP is something I have been asking for for a while, so I'm excited for this change. That said, please do not forget to increase the health of weapons smaller than L (and some other exterior elements)! They get one shot by the weakest viable weapon, small cannons. As long as this is the case, voxel tanking will not be that popular.

The engineer role wasn't just "hold left click" though. In fact a lot of the PvP players in that time (me included) thought it was the most fun role. You had to actively triage to address the most damaged spots and actively plug holes. I think a point and click repair weapon from another ship will be less fun; gunning is already the most braindead role and this is just the same thing. I do not think we should make the extra players power up the shield. Otherwise I'm just going to dump 10 alts on my solo ship. I think all your suggestions are too focused on shield strength. There are other parts to tanking that are underpowered and need addressed. You say there are only 2 ways to contribute, but that is only the state of the current balance. There needs to be more ways to contribute.

For the first year of the game there were no shields. This actually forced multicrew ships as every person you have repairing is not someone you have in a gunner seat. It was much more efficient to have 4 gunners and 1 engineer on a ship instead of 1 gunner and 1 engineer, so ships tended towards larger sizes. By putting the focus of tanking on shields, you are incentivizing large solo battleships since you still do not want to take voxel/element damage and have an engineer, and you are still in the mindset of one, now super tanky, shield per person. You get multicrew by making roles that are not offensive but also mandatory. This makes you want to increase ship size to increase the ratio of gunners to support. This is one of the biggest reasons I have been continually pushing for a more active shield tanking meta in balance discussions. More voxel HP + more element HP means you are more likely and more willing to tank on voxel, and now you need an engineer to keep your damaged elements healthy. Larger ships naturally follow from this.

I don't like this because it puts all the focus of tanking on the shield. Large ships should be tanking on a combination of their voxel and venting the shield as needed. The main barrier to this is how paper thin voxels are, and how low element HP is. I don't see this suggestion making battleships stronger, but only chunky M cores stronger.

It's not sustainable because it's a video game. If the goal is to have some % of the population work on factories, that means given a fixed number of elements, a single player cannot be able to supply enough to meet demand. Otherwise if there were only 10 elements, then only 10 players could reasonably work on factory whether the population was 100 or 100k. Trying to link this mechanic change to a (lack of a) love for capitalism is hilarious, by the way. A capitalist would realize this change doesn't matter. The cost of the schematic runs only gets passed on to the consumer in the end. If you love capitalism so much, maybe buy the schematics off the market. Complaining your self sufficient commune can no longer be self sufficient, and then talking about how the change is anti-capitalist, is just... yeah. Honestly, I'm not surprised at the reaction this change has received. Half the people in this thread were complaining about how mining units would cause ore shortages because no more mega mining; and talking about how the L/h figures were way too low. It's pretty damn funny in retrospect. Sometimes I do not blame NQ for not interacting as much as they probably should.

Believe it or not, L cores are actually still quite good. In fact, for one part of the game they are still easily "the best": large, coordinated, fleet fights where you need an absolute ton of EHP. L weapons are the only kind that have enough HP to sustain fire. Unfortunately, these are extremely rare, and so the opportunity to use them doesn't really take place. Of course, you have been on the receiving end of some of this recently, so you might understand why exactly L cores are so strong. Personally I think idea 1 will make L cores worse in their role. Idea 2 is interesting and could be quite fun. For idea 3 I don't think this bonus should be only L cores. I really do think all voxel HP needs nearly 10x'd, along with similar improvements in element HP. This is so the meta tends towards active venting gameplay as opposed to dying right after the shield goes down.

There is no way to "compete" in this game when it comes to industry. There is no way to get any kind of differentiation. All ore is the exact same quality, everyone has access to the same talents, every element output is the exact same. People who claim the current system promotes "competition" simply do not understand how business works. Businesses don't just sell the exact same item as each other, they all sell slightly different items. The only place competition on the PvE side really exists is in ship sales (and to a lesser amount, storefronts like Gottmart and SVEA), not on the actual industry side.

I like these changes for the most part. The original implementation of schematics did not solve the core problem of limiting production; it just added a grind before reaching the exact same state the game was already in. These changes will add actual scarcity to factory gameplay; of course that is why so many people are negative about it. The current situation of one player being able to scale up machines until they could completely saturate the market for multiple elements is not sustainable. The new system scales based on accounts, and so no matter the population it should have roughly the same impact. The one thing I dislike about this system is how much it incentivizes alt accounts. It seems like every game mechanic added is easily abusable by alt accounts. Talents, gunning, missions, mining unit calibrations, and now schematic queues. It's completely insane how many accounts the game wants you to buy. Something really needs done about this; someone with 10h to play the game on 1 accounts should be able to accomplish just as much as another person with 10h to play the game on 20 accounts. Basically, the game needs to get rid of all the AFK timers and make things based on active gameplay. If you aren't logged in doing something, you should not be progressing.

You could also force the DU process to only run on your P cores. You can do it with the task manager; although I don't believe it persists after closing the game. I believe there are 3rd party programs that will make this persistent, however.