Just my 2 cents:
I stopped playing about the time 0.23 came out. However it had nothing to do with schematics and I really don't understand why people are so obsessed with them.
The reason for me why I stopped playing was that my inital sub expired and after the initial start to build some ships and a bit of a factory the game got really boring.
Actually I pretty much stopped playing about 1-2 weeks before 0.23. I even logged in after 0.23 hit (because you could still login if your sub had already expired). I bought some schematics but then again the game got really boring and I stopped.
Longterm this game is mostly interesting for people who like to build pretty things which have no actual use. There are no real gameloops and in my opinion it is just a bad game except the first few months in its current state. Building is simply not enough to keep me interested longterm.
I also play this other "oldschool spaceship game" and if I compare both of them I really don't know why I should come back to DU.
Investing something (time/Quanta) to unlock the ability to craft things is really key to the game's economy functioning. We need that.
But i think unlocking a schematic should be a one time purchase, and you should be able to unlock them with Talents or Quanta. But once you unlock a schematic you should be able to create the item on as many machines as you want. I don't think the schematics should be physical items at all. Just let us purchase/unlock them from a menu.
The process of managing which schematics you have, and which ones you need, is just too complicated.
You shouldn't have to pay in blood and tears to start up a factory. Just Quanta or Talents.
The schematics are not the problem. In many ways they make sense actually. It is the way NQ introduced and implemented them which is what is the issue here.
Schematics was never a bad idea, just the time and way they was implemented was TERRIBLE. However now that the backlash has come and gone and dust is settling with the missions and other economy injectors finally coming in to play schematics are finally making sense. My only change would be to have schematic injection happen through a more variety of ways and different exclusivity rather than just checking them on market bots.
Exotic sheild schems only found on wrecks in pvp space? or RNG chance from doing a certain alphelia mission? etc etc
But I am also in favor of making changes. When we could press TAB to open the shop for buying production licenses .. (schematics) and just like in the nanopack we select a product and instead of the production button, it would be to activate the license (buy) .. production license.
Let them be purchased in the same way (material) every time, but remotely and without running to the market to the bots, because formally Aphelia can simply withdraw money from the account and issue a production license for each purchased license (schematic).
After purchasing from the nanopack, put not in the machine specifically, but in some kind of general bank of schematics, which is connected to the core of the plant and all machines can have access there. That is, if we have 10 schemes of the same in the bank of schematics, then within this core we can launch 10 machines with the production of one and the same. Need to increase? We also buy a license for production remotely again, immediately into the nanopack .. then we put it in the necessary bank of schematics and that's it .. now we have the opportunity to reproduce the product in 11 lines.
I'd be happier with schematics if there were bot buy orders for, say, 80% of the sale price to match the bot sell orders. So it's a capital investment rather than an expense.
Schematics should stay now with how easy quanta is to get compared to before, whether you mine, haul, build etc, quanta is much easier then ever before which means so are schematics. Maybe a slight adjustments to prices though could be helpful, warp beacons are like 2.5 Billion to start a line on atm.
? I am interested in your definition of soon. Because eventhough things started moving again and in a good way it seems, I think it is still quite a stretch before I would call it a release quality game.
Shhh!!! Don't expose that that the entire galaxy system is just a racketeering scheme to make Aphelia filthy rich. Keep quiet or maybe next time you fly there will be some strange problems with your construct..
So you think that nobody will ever notice that and set up T3-4 engine lines? Not even the people buying them at sky-high prices? And that when they do and make a load of money they won't set up more of those lines? And that eventually more than one person will do this and then they will saturate the market and drive the prices down?
Well you got a point ...
But maybe .... maybe it is too early to say since we are in beta ?
I mean look at the t3 -t4 engines ... Supply is short and prices went up which means lack of ore which means lack of production .
Which is different for t1 and t2 where oversupply is there indeed .
Now, before I start, I made a mention of this at the end of my post called "Quality of Life and beyond", however, to NQ directly: If able, I highly recommend employing 1 or more (coding) developers to permanently play test the game, and to fix any various bugs, and/or quality of life features thought up, because that would allow for better polish within the game for everyone, while also taking the least amount of time from the base development team. Additionally, just having some sort of board to post various small quality of life features internally from devs to devs, in case anyone has suggestions on such features and bug fixes, would also be highly productive.
UI changes
In build mode, the game doesn't really tell the player much about what elements are destroyed. It just says either "there are no elements damaged", or "there is at least 1 element damaged". The funny part about this, is there's literally LUA scripting that can detect damaged elements, and those specific elements (and their names) can be put on a screen, to tell the player what needs repairing. Of course, while this is great for LUA scripting, it is important to realize that the game cannot rely primarily on community made tools (unless you think Elite Dangerous is a perfectly designed game), and such, my suggestion is as follows:
Under the construct tab in the build helper, put a list of all damaged elements (if there is any). When they are double-clicked, highlight them (through everything) with a unique color that is distinct from the repairing tool's highlights (such as orange). This would persist when you get out of build mode, and would time out after a minute. Should the player start to repair the element damaged, it will persist till the element is fully repaired.
Another reference to my Quality of Life and beyond post, but better layout, and more dense information for item descriptions is sorely needed. Of course, you can find that post here. To build this, as well as upon other ideas under "Better Item/element descriptions", having better ways to judge element sizes without actually having to buy that element would be a great addition, for blueprinting, and visualizing ship builds. This of course can use pre-existing assets, with not too much effort (I hope?).
This feature would require its own tool most likely, named the "blueprint tool". Similar to the "element" tool, it allows players to place elements, but in this case, very differently. On the right side, where the selection for elements for placement occurs, a button above all of the elements in the list (named the "selection menu"), when opened will create an inventory-like menu which will house any and all elements that exist within the game (assuming polish exists), excludes elements that the player cannot access naturally. It would have a search function similar to a container menu, as well as filtering functions, and so on. The list would be alphabetical, to make it easier to find elements manually as well. Lastly, the right-click function would not work on any of the elements inside the menu, as well as any form of moving the elements around. All of their information (just like a container window) will appear on the right side of the inventory panel.
When it comes to actually using these items, it functions very similarly to the element placement tool. Firstly, you select elements the same way you select them with the element tool, however, of course only using the "element selection", menu, or (hypothetically), dragging elements into the bar as well from the player's inventory. When placing the element (with the same criteria as normal), instead of the actual element placing, a hologram-highlight would appear, in either light blue, or yellow. This hologram would only appear in build mode, and the player cannot collide with it either. Lastly, it of course would not be right clickable, and would be ignored with right-click. Lastly, alt-clicking the element with either the element tool, OR, the blueprint tool in hand would remove the hologram.
In markets, simple changes such as improvements to how linked containers interact with the market container UI, as well as simple changes such as removing the "instant buy" and "instant sell" buttons when there is no stock, as well as creating more search filters, such as "has stock at X market", or "tier X", etc. would also be great. Additionally, improvements to how items can be selected and moved (select multiple, and drag), as well as being able to select multiple items, and then click "move to inventory" and have all items move, instead of just that slot.
Finally, for the search function itself in all uses and forms, a better algorithm to include the sub-strings that match, not only just the search input string, would be greatly appreciated to find items that you don't know the precise name of, especially considering just how inconsistent the naming scheme is. In this, also having tags associated with item types, such as "Thruster" for all engines, or "alloy" to search for all alloys, etc. would make searching a lot easier and quicker.
Ship piloting improvements
Moving on to the default UI (and controlling) for construct controllers (cockpits, really), major improvements to both the UI, and functionality, would be a great idea. Of course, DU prides itself on community-made tools, and scripts, however, a development team should not sacrifice good quality of life for that "quirk". Additionally, a feature change would also allow the developers to clean up the LUA functions themselves, which is also a good thing.
To the first suggestion, major changes to the way that omni-directional thrust works would be a great idea for ships that use this feature. At the moment, the movement is very lack-luster, with literally just hover function included to make the ship float against gravity, and literally the rest is the same compared to normal throttle-design. There is no auto-dampening, such as many other games, and there is no "tap w to move forward slightly", like games such as Empyrion, and Space Engineers, which, while having more basic flight models, can be credited for it being very intuitive and smooth. The current version of this is nothing like this, and has a mish-mash of that feature, in every direction but forward and backward, but for those directions, uses throttle for acceleration. This of course ruins the primary perk of omni-directional thrust, which is the fine tuned aspect of piloting. Additionally, smaller features like having keybinds for specific throttle amounts would also be great to see.
To change both of these issues, I suggest the following. First, for auto-dampeners, have a button that auto-toggles between 3 different modes (identical to Empyrion, btw). No dampening, gravity-dampening, and full dampening. These different modes are self explanatory, just observe the mechanics in those games.
For the actual movement changes, to counteract the issue of not having a throttle slider, having a key bind once again that locks the current state of acceleration from the thrusters would be the solution here. To clarify acceleration, I mean what the thrusters are currently doing/outputting. changing any movement manually would cancel this, as well as pressing the button again.
If you wanted to get more fancy with these two features, to make them not clash, having a distinction between what the dampeners are doing, compared to what the player has inputted would be my solution to this. The auto-dampeners would work separately to the thruster-lock, and in this would allow the ship to still stay airborne without constant adjustment.
Moving onto the UI itself (assuming that the features above have indicators within the UI), decluttering the different UI boxes to be more clean, and take up less of the screen would be preferable. Currently, when attaching a weapon of some form to a flight seat, the amount of UI that it introduces clutters the screen so bad, that in my experience makes it nearly unusable for piloting. I do not have a suggestion really to fix this, however, the issue is still persistent, and bugs me greatly.
Secondly, there is literally a scroll bar for a cockpit that uses mouse wheel for the throttle. Due to this, the information hidden by this is lost due to this issue.
Additionally, some tiny improvements to fuel tanks within the piloting UI, adding a number to indicate the fraction of fuel compared to the total would be helpful for fuel usage calculations on the fly. An example as simple as this would suffice in my opinion.
Tank relays/Tank hubs
I'm sure this feature has been suggested basically everywhere, but the amount of flexibility this feature would provide for ship designs makes it a great suggestion for this post. My take on this is as follows. Similar to a container hub, it connects tanks. While this is cool and all, there are 3 different types of tanks in the game, of which are not compatible. In this, my suggestion to solve this is to color code a tank hub (change its coloration of the texture itself) when it connects to a type of tank. Light-blue for Nitron, yellow for Kergon, and white for Xeron. While a type is active, when attempting to connect a tank of different type to it, an error message will appear, stating that different tank types cannot connect to a tank hub at once. Lastly, when there are no connections to the tank hub, it reverts to the original state (and texture).
Gameplay Balance
While at this rate you could probably claim I'm sponsored by Empyrion Galactic Survival or something, I just really like the game. In this, a lot of survival-oriented features in that game I find quite compatible and important for this game to exhibit in some manner as well. Starting with the biggest issue in my opinion, ore distribution and the tech tree.
Currently, limestone and malachite are only present on the same body on Alioth, where they are used to craft tier 2 components. This issue with this is the following: You cannot craft tier 2 components without a static core, and therefore by extension a territory unit, which that territory unit requires tier 2 components. Due to this, it is physically IMPOSSIBLE to start from scratch on any celestial body in the star system in almost any manner, therefore breaking a core gameplay pillar (in my opinion) of any progression-based game, something Empyrion (for example) does incredibly well. In that game, you can get to the end game in almost any situation from scratch (no matter if it's extremely difficult), due to the nature of the progression.
To fix this major issue, excluding of course the need for Malachite and Limestone to exist on all celestial bodies (in my opinion), allowing territory units to be crafted using tier 1 components, AND in a nanocrafter I see as a necessity for this game. Of course, it would have to be highly expensive in that regard, and additionally take a long time to craft (example being 6-12 hours).
Switching to a similar topic, brought up in the previous feature mention, a change of ore distribution and planet revamp is sorely in need. While of course a planet revamp is not a quality of life feature that is simple to answer (and solve), the ore distribution, which of course requires a planet revamp, is highly important to the current progression of the game. Without good level design, a game will most likely suffer for that issue. I do plan on making a post about the planet revamp though, so ill link it here when it happens. Anyways.
Take this situation: Currently, you can get stranded on a moon. These moons do not exhibit atmosphere, and a lot of them do not contain tier 2 ore either. Due to this issue, it is physically impossible to progress without a market, and to even move a ship starting with no fuel. Because of this chicken and egg issue, the player physically cannot get off of a celestial body without any tier 2's, due to space engines (and technically rocket engines) being impossible to fuel without them, and being required to move in space properly.
Funnily enough, the player can craft space engines (and tanks) in their nanocrafter, but of course cannot fuel them, making that feature quite questionable.
Lastly, any major changes to progression can be linked here. This post is about player movement, as well as ship diversity, engineering, and piloting.
This post will be updated over time, and in that, any major changes will have a call-back post which will link back to this page. Thanks for reading!
IMO the biggest problem with DUs economy is unlimited production. Consumption is always going to be limited (unless we put in bot buy orders for everything, which would be worse). But people can set up as much production as they want just by making more and bigger factories. It is inevitable that with limited consumption and unlimited production the production rate will grow until it is a bit bigger than the consumption rate, at which point the market will be full of very low priced stacks of things which aren't selling fast enough. That's about where we were until very recently, when consumption increased and suddenly the markets became a bit more fluid again. But production will definitely increase as a result of this (people probably turned factories off and will now turn them on again).
Increasing consumption would help, but unless you make consumption unlimited (and bot buy orders are the only way I can think of to do that) production will always grow to outstrip it and we will inevitably end up back where we were recently with massive oversupply of the market.
The only way to make the in-game economy work properly is to limit the amount of production capability that each player can have. Convince me I'm wrong ...
Cabana reacted to CptLoRes in PERMANENT REMOVE SCHEMATICS FROM THE GAME
Cabana got a reaction from Zeddrick in The problem with DU's economy