Gideon77

The problem with the buy price being the cost or below is that it removes the player's desire to build factories since the player can buy everything cheaper than they can make it. That in turn removes factory building from the time a player plays the game, which leaves only mining and ship building. And a lot of players buy their ships, which leaves you with only mining and buying left. And mining gets old fast if that is all that you do. It will be very hard for DU to develop player interest in a game where they basically only mine. You want the players to want to build factories, and the only way to do that is to make it worth their while to do it. Nobody will want to pay for the privilege of building a factory, in order to pay even more for the privilege of building the item. If there is no profit in building, then there will be no building, so you might as well remove building from the game.

Problem: Most players that play games like this, play until such time as they have done everything that they want to, and then they get bored and leave. Therefore the amount of time needed to accomplish their tasks, also determines the amount of time that they play the game. Currently it costs me 107k quanta worth of stuff to build a large basic atmospheric engine, but it currently sells in the market for 8,000 quanta. That means that players can buy stuff for 13 times less than what it costs to build it. That also means that players can build whatever they want in 1/13 the amount of time. This in turn means that the game will average 1/13 the number of players. (I grant in advance that some quit immediately, and some will stay forever regardless. I am referring to the main stay players that play the game to completion and then move on.) Solution: Have the game (NPC) be the only thing that you can sell to at the markets, and have it pay a fixed price that produces a profit (perhaps10%) for new players over the cost of the parts that are used to make the item. This is easily calculated with a simple spreadsheet based on ore prices. And also have the game sell all items to the players at the market for twice what it buys them for. This allows anyone to buy anything, and makes building anything more profitable than selling the ore. This in turn encourages all players to build large factories, which takes time to build, which in turn keeps them playing for longer. A side benefit of this is that it also prevents "mega factories" from slaughtering the market by overproducing (which has been threatened by the larger players in the past), because it basically limits players to only building what they can get ore to produce, while still allowing anyone to buy the few items that they need and can't (or don't want to) get for some reason or other. Since they can't make a profit if they buy the ore, they are limited to whatever they get from their mining units plus whatever they choose to mine from asteroids. Thus profit would no longer be basically free to get. Everyone needs to work for any profit that they get. And the market prices become stabilized, just like they are in real life due to the number of people in the market in real life.

Problem: The current adjacency bonus for mining units and container linking distance, causes the best mining profit to come from a 19 territory flower arrangement. And since Market 6 is where the ore is sold the most, this means that the best placement of that arrangement is near Market 6. This reduces the number of players that the game can support before degradation. Solution: One's first thought might be to do away with the adjacency bonus, but this still leaves the flower arrangement as ideal because you can still store all the ore in a single container setup without having to transport it there, thus reducing the ore gathering work. So it wouldn't really solve anything. A more ideal solution would be to allow mining units to be placed on only a limited number of territories per celestial body. This will force the players to spread out in the DU universe. Limiting it to 1 mining territory per celestial body would cause the most spreading out and thus the most traveling, exploring, and having stuff to do. And it would still allow those desiring to remain in the safe zone to get quite a few mining territories going (probably all that they can get). Higher amounts of territories would allow for more convenience at the expense of congestion and reduced player count abilities. A possible way (but certainly not the only way) to limit the number of minable territories could be to have a new type of territory unit that allows mining, and then limit how many of them can be placed per celestial body. This will also still allow any player or organization that wants to build a big base covering several territories to do so.

I'm amazed. My ship that I use both in atmosphere and in space, and travel to other planets with, is only 4T with a full fuel tank. And it easily does 800km/h in atmo and 50km/h in space, and can travel from Alioth to Madis and back again 5 times on a single tank of fuel. IMHO there is absolutely no reason that a "pocket" ship should ever need to be over 5T. A 20T ship or even a 10T ship simply is no longer a "pocket" ship. But that is just my opinion.

Mainly because (for instance) if you crash into a space station and need to go to market 6 to get scrap, you need space engines while in space, and atmo engines to land at market 6. If you have either/or, and you are traveling from Alioth to a space station, which would you bring? If you bring the atmo one, and crash into the space station, it is useless, and if you bring the space one and crash on your return trip, it is useless. Since living at a space station for a while, I have seen the complete uselessness of the current pocket ships in a space environment. And this IS a space game after all. As for "rich people" having a "pocket rocket", they have those now, and they don't need to compact them, nor do they probably care whether or not they can. The whole idea of the pocket ship is to facilitate emergency repairs if you crash, but it fails at that task if it can't get you from your resurrection node to the market and then to your ship. I would rather have pocket ships do their intended tasks, then to prevent "rich people" from compacting their "pocket rockets".

Where we are having to operate in space more and more, may I suggest that the pocket ship (compaction ship) rules be updated accordingly. Namely: - Allow space engines. (Still max of 3 engines total.) - Allow a max of 1 space fuel tank and 1 atmo fuel tank, both max size S. - And perhaps reduce the max size from 20 t to something more reasonable like 5 t or even 10 t. This will make the pocket ship good for use no matter where you happen to be. Regardless whether it is a moon, an asteroid, a space station, or somewhere else.

When I started as a new player using mining units, I was working on the 7 tile flower by day 3, and completing it around day 14. So speaking from firsthand experience, it is very much a thing with new players using mining units. Like it or not, the majority of players that play these types of games play either solo, or solo with acquaintances (friends that don't share resources). And only the minority get together as large groups. This happens for many reasons, like relying on someone else's core slots will burn you sooner or later. And giving a stranger full access to your group's stuff will leave you all poor sooner or later. I have seen the latter happen far more than I would like to have. Most players don't have a close enough relationship with other players to trust them with all their stuff. As the saying goes, "High walls make for good neighbors". So to have no consideration for solo players is to have no consideration for the majority of players, just because they don't play like you like to play.

I had a character reset today so that I could test the new FTUE, and here are some of my observations: The new outposts are great. The new hover ships are great. I like the landscape on Haven and the lack of all those colored rocks. I like that it gives you a VR and resurrection node, and gets you started with a productive base from the get-go. I like everything as far as it went. I will miss the 20 minute intro that Aphelia used to give to introduce you to everything. It was a nice "get acquainted with the game mechanics" session. This was certainly nothing that I would go out of my way to do a second time. It was way too short. Whereas I enjoyed the old one multiple times. And the old one tried to encourage you to continue for the first several hours by giving you tasks to accomplish, where this one leaves you on your own in a matter of a few minutes by doing those first few tasks for you.

I didn't know about the base of 10. All I knew was what the talent told me. If that is the case, then this truly is not important. As for the need of cores starting out, a simply mining unit flower needs 7, 1 for the starting territory, 1 for the starter hover ship, 1 for a pocket ship, 2 for the first 2 real ships. That's 11 and you haven't really done anything yet. So 12 is definitely way too few, but if you start with 10 before talents, then you can easily get 19, and that is enough. But it will still never make sense why you have to pay 1.8 mil talent points for the fifth level of the first set for 3 cores, and then 4800 for the first level of the next set for 5 more cores. The cost should gradually get higher per core, not be a huge saw tooth in cost like that.

I know that the talent tree can eventually give people plenty of core to work with. The problem is that it takes over 2 weeks to go from 12 to 15. This is because of the requirement that you master level 5 of the first set before you can do level 1 of the second set. Can we please allow people to train each set without having to train the previous set fully first? Limiting players to 9 or 12 cores for the first year or two of play (until they can afford to dedicate weeks to nothing but increasing their core counts a tiny bit) makes it hard for them to be able to expand very much to things like giving use of some of their cores for an organization to use, never mind to expand to other planetary bodies much. I'm not asking for the total talent points to be reduced, just that they can train all 3 skills at once, so the top most core counts cost a lot, but the lower counts don't.

I tried restarting my alt without using any mining units at all, but only doing active mining via asteroids. It is actually working very well. A starter ship to mine asteroids costs only about 171k quanta from scratch, uses a lot of the parts that come with the starter ship currently, and is certainly possible for any new player to get right off the bat. My starter ship doesn't have any cargo containers, so it flies at 50kkm/h. I can make an asteroid mining run in just a few minutes, and come back with a full load of ore. Round trip travel only costs about 50L of fuel. Mining asteroids actually gives more ore per hour than the mining units, atleast starting out, and is much more fun. So if DU (or any players individually) ever want to go back to active mining like me, for a much more fun game experience, it is easily done. And thank you to those that have the free DSAT units (like FLEXX13), since they make this possible.

2 suggestions: 1. DU should allow a player to change their subscription without having to let the old one expire. Currently if you start with a 1 month subscription, and then decide you want to stick around, there doesn't appear to be any way to change subscription plans for the next renewal other than to stop auto renewal, let it expire, and then start a new subscription. I would think that having to make their subscription expire would be the last thing that DU would want to make a player have to do. 2. It is in DU's benefit if a player pays for multiple accounts, and uses them on a single PC. Currently though, every time you switch accounts you have to retype email and Password. It would be real nice if DU would remember the email and PW for multiple accounts and then let the user just select which one they wish to log onto this time around.

PROBLEM: You can't play the game without buying your stuff from the market. I am trying to play where I build everything, instead of buying everything, and it is proving to be impossible. Building a Metalwork M currently requires a Basic Mobile Panel M and Basic Reinforced Frame M, both of which require a Metalwork M in order to be built. Because of this you can't build the Metalwork M without first buying a Metalwork M. SOLUTION: Please enable the nanocrafter to build the parts that are needed to build a Metalwork M. Specifically Basic Mobile Panel M and Basic Reinforced Frame M. I don't see this causing any problems for any existing factory lines, nor do I see this causing any potential for circumventing anything. But it will allow people to play the game in a way that they can build everything themselves if they want to, and they only have to buy the schematics.

Whether you say you are "telling them how to spend their time in-game efficiently" because they can't build "efficiently" or some other choice of wording, the result is still the same. You are removing them from the whole building part of the game. CousinSaul said "The ore material reduction seems to cause lots of problems." Perhaps then you would rather limit ore buying, by a person not being able to buy more quanta worth of ore than they sell. Thus if they sell 100 mil quanta worth of ore, then they can only buy upto 100 mil quanta worth of ore. This way the ore is not limited, yet the experienced players are still prevented from turning the new players into their "mining slaves", and prevented from destroying the market mechanics of the game. Because the experienced players will only be able to produce as much in their factories as they themselves mine. We have to fix the problem somehow. If you don't like my suggestions, then please make some of your own. After all, the problem is obvious, and definitely needs to be fixed. So we need to figure out the best way to fix it. We can't just continue to chase new players away from the game.

There are many ways to prevent what you say. But allowing the experienced players to chase away the new players shouldn't be one of them. For instance the game could limit how much ore a single player could buy per day (perhaps 1k or 5k per ore type per day), and have NPC supply enough ore to keep the ore price stable. Whatever is done, the game needs to enable the new players to play it or else it will die for all players. By the way, I totally agree that the 'use less material for manufacture' skills are real bad and are most of what cause this sort of problem. I personally would like to see all those type skills go away. But even if they did, the game would still have to use the NPC to stabilize the market prices to keep the game going. Otherwise no matter what else is done the experienced players will always flood the market with goods. That in itself is not a bad thing, it is a good thing. What is bad is allowing that flood to kill the market mechanics, and with it the ability for new players to play the game. NPC HAVE to stabilize prices, and all prices HAVE to be profitable for ALL players.

I agree about reseeding tiles, but that didn't fly earlier, so I was trying something else.

PROBLEM: Passive mining basically removes the need to actively play the game. Empire building games are about spending time and effort to accomplish a goal, not about letting the game automatically give you whatever you want. SOLUTION: DU already has the ability to "harvest". Instead of having passive mining units that play the game for you, why not have the game place a 5 or 6 large ore rocks on each territory. These large rocks will never change shape, or go away. They act like "mines". When you "harvest" one of these large rocks, then they produce 4 smaller rocks. When harvested. each of these smaller rocks produce the tiny rocks, and harvesting the tiny rocks produce the ore. The size of the tiny rocks can be adjusted to determine the maximum amount of ore a person can gather per hour. Anyone that has ever played other space building games knows that what I am suggesting is similar to the way two other games (I won't name them here) do it, and it works quite well for them. So it is already a tried and proven way of dealing with ore mining. This way the more active the player is, the more ore they get. The ore never runs out. And the game never has to tell other players about any changes in the landscape due to mining. For instance on Alioth every territory could have 1 of each T1 ore, and 1 random T2. And the game could use this to get rid of all the tiny 20L ore rocks scattered everywhere currently.

PROBLEM: This is an empire building game, yet currently all new players are strongly encouraged not to build anything. They are told in general chat and lots of YouTube videos very plainly not to mine because the passive mining will give them all the ore they need, and not to build anything because it is cheaper to sell the ore and buy whatever you want than to build it yourself, and if you want a ship, just buy one instead of learning how to make your own. This removes the new players from all building aspects of this empire building game, from building factories, from building ships, and from mining since it is now passive. And with the current skill and market pricing, since players can't complete in the markets until after they have gained the skills for a couple of years (they need to get mining, piloting, inventory, and other skills first), this also results in the older veterans using the new players as "mining slaves" (their words not mine) by insisting that they don't do anything but mine and sell them the ore. This also tells new players to queue up skill to learn, and then go play some other game for a couple of years until your skills allow you to compete. Telling a player to go find a different game to play is the worse possible message for any game to tell to their new players. SOLUTION: The market should have the NPC buy all products that are priced low enough as to prevent new (unskilled) players from being able to make a profit from their factories while they still have real low skill levels. Picking a number out of the air in order to show an illustration, if with real low skills, refining 100 units of coal produces 100 units of silicon, and coal sells for a minimum of 25 Quanta per unit, then Silicon should sell for a minimum of 30 Quanta (or whatever is decided that still allows the new player enough profit to make it wise for them to refine their ores), and NPC should immediately buy anything that is sold cheaper than that. The same for all levels of the market. This would immediately encourage all new players to start building factories. And as long as they have something that they are encouraged to build, then they have a reason to continue playing this game. This will have the side effect of giving the older veteran players more Quanta, but that shouldn't hurt anything since they are already getting more Quanta than they can spend anyway.