Pleione

DU's materials science is a 20 minute placeholder*. Same as so many other things.
 
* By which I mean they spent 20 minutes chucking something together as a placeholder in alpha and haven't done any proper thinking about how it should work to enhance gameplay and worldbuilding since.

Seems to work for support:  Once they "pass on" an issue they close the ticket.  No tracking to see if issues are resolved, just pass it on and close it.
 
Wouldn't it be nice to get an e-mail along the lines of "Dear Pleione - we wanted to let you know that your issues #12345 should be resolved in the patch that goes live this Saturday.  Thank you for reporting issues - it is key to making this a better game".
 
Lets not even start with wild concepts like "Report bug" automatically taking a screen shot, running a dx-diag if the output file is old or missing, grabbing the last 15 minutes of log files, and having all that ready as attachments when the screen requesting a description shows up.
 
Or, how about, and here is a shocker, having the debug option "clear cache" remove the shader cache file while it was at it.
 
You know, its not like they haven't had 6+ years to develop tools to help us help them.
 
Maybe, even, just a small doc that describes how to find an event in the log files?  Just documentation guys... no coding needed.

Seems to work for support:  Once they "pass on" an issue they close the ticket.  No tracking to see if issues are resolved, just pass it on and close it.
 
Wouldn't it be nice to get an e-mail along the lines of "Dear Pleione - we wanted to let you know that your issues #12345 should be resolved in the patch that goes live this Saturday.  Thank you for reporting issues - it is key to making this a better game".
 
Lets not even start with wild concepts like "Report bug" automatically taking a screen shot, running a dx-diag if the output file is old or missing, grabbing the last 15 minutes of log files, and having all that ready as attachments when the screen requesting a description shows up.
 
Or, how about, and here is a shocker, having the debug option "clear cache" remove the shader cache file while it was at it.
 
You know, its not like they haven't had 6+ years to develop tools to help us help them.
 
Maybe, even, just a small doc that describes how to find an event in the log files?  Just documentation guys... no coding needed.

Amen.  I spent 45 years of my life working in Corporate America, fortunately with bosses I mostly liked, but always with Corporate requirements/ambitions/edicts that made life somewhat less pleasant.  No way do I want to spend my retirement reliving that via a game.
 
Started some Uncommon Military L Space Engines today.  They take me a bit over 6 hours to make each.  Felt about right.  Wasn't particularly happy with spend 4+ hours making schematics or paying 75,000 for each pair of them over and beyond the ore, industry, and other associated cost.   Of course, those cost were trivial to the Tier 3 things I'm starting to put together.  8 batches of Tier 3 Product schematics will set you back 450,000 and 25 hours - so that you can, eventually, make the alloys you need.  Why 8 batches?  4 consumers of those schematics, 8 batches will only supply them with 60 runs each....  Given that I easily go through 250 schematics per T1 product per day, I'm not looking forward to keeping those industries going, and am terrified what T4 and T5 will cost.  All this just so I can build a S Roid hunter with a shield...
 
ps.  Please don't tell me about just needing to plan better.  My factory currently has 225 industries (more-or-less) on it - I'll be dammed if I'm going to be building spreadsheets to manage them. Yeah, many of those produce T1 stuff and don't require schematics, but plenty of them do.

Average Highest on Quartz is now around 10, Hematite is down to 15.7.   Coal and Bauxite holding around 20, which is ok.
 
Seems like the deflation on ore is warming up.  Has anyone run the math on breakeven?
 
Hmmm, suppose we could take a pass at it now:
 
Assume 400l/hr from a typical territory.  For now, lets ignore Calibration and talents.  Although those are huge, lets consider those "profit" used to buy items and schematics rather than paying land taxes.  Adjacency bonuses would also fall in the "profit" category.
 
So 400l/hr = 67.200 l/week.  Tax is 500,000.  Divide ore into tax and you get... roughly 7.4 quanta per unit of ore for a tile to pay its own taxes.
 
So not there yet, but Quartz is creeping up on it.  Something to watch out for.  Below that, I predict economic collapse.

Actually... I like it.  An insane AI... Doesn't talk much.  Can't believe anything it says.  Defines the rules as it sees fit...  Just need to change the name from Aphelia to NovaQuark and we are there!

Actually... I like it.  An insane AI... Doesn't talk much.  Can't believe anything it says.  Defines the rules as it sees fit...  Just need to change the name from Aphelia to NovaQuark and we are there!

I'm almost to the point of just wishing they picked a backstory lore that made sense.  Right now its "Earth is going to be destroyed, lets pack 1 million colonist on an arcship, travel for 10,000 years to a new planet, then tax them to death."
 
I mean Earth is GONE!  Corporations are GONE!  Who the hell are we paying taxes too?  Shouldn't the goal be to re-establish civilization, using the knowledge brought along to make that happen as quickly as possible?  Instead we are taxed if we want to improve land, taxed for all but the most basic of technologies used.  Suppressed, not encourage, to build bigger and better things.  And lets not even mention the insanity of encouraging people to kill each other.

Hardly "always".  Note I'm an Alpha Tester.  Prior to 0.23, industry was fun.  You would make progress based on effort expended and could feel good doing so.  Optimizing a layout, using Transfer Units to keep things running - this was fun.  Now it feels like the head banging in the title of this thread.  Oh, not to mention you could take a two week vacation and come back and pick up where you left off.  With luck, might have even raised some quanta via your dispensers.   Now everything is based around paying the tax man.
 
I've invested 4 years of my life in this game, and subscribed myself and 2 alts for a year in hopes it wasn't as bad as I heard.  It is.
 
I really feel bad for anyone coming into this game 6 months down the road, presuming its still running.  Surface ores are going to be the stuff of legends.
 
The balance is simply broke.  We tried for years to discuss this with NQ... but they knew better.  Not.  Most everything I've seen since 0.23 has been implemented to reduce the cost of running the servers - and sold as "performance enhancements", at the expense of players.
 
Its depressing.  I'm too old with too much medical history to every hope to get in the ground floor of another game with this potential.  Sad, just sad.

The game starts out pretty well if you keen on becoming an industrialist.  Biggest early problem is not running out of Tier 1 Pure schematics, but eventually you get over that. 
 
Soon you discover you need more Tier 2 ore and spend days scanning territories - took me about 50 scans to find a tile with T2 and I'm told I was lucky.  An additional 50 scans and no more T2, but I did find a sliver of T3.  Hurray!
 
Doesn't take long to discover you need an Advanced Mining Unit (T3) to mine T3 ore - ok, that makes sense.  Let see what that takes to build... An Uncommon Assembler.  Easy enough, my everyday Assembler's can do that... bit of a sigh that it will take 6hours and 24 minutes to build one, but ok.  Oh, but lets not forget - you need a Tier 2 L element schematic as well, kiss goodbye another 4 hours and 10 minutes.  So call it a day and come back tomorrow.
 
Tomorrow comes, you have the schematic, the Uncommon Assembler is cooking.  Damm that 6 hours and 24 minute cook time, but we were expecting that.  Do some maintenance, run around and calibrate, and hope its a weekend and you started early so that you don't have to wait another day.
 
Uncommon Assembler ready!  yeah!  Plop it down and configure for an Advanced Mining Unit L.  Processing time - 24 hours?!?!  Oh, that is after you fork out the better part of 2 days allowance (187,500 quanta) to make a schematic that will produce all of two of the units.  10 hours, 25 minutes of wait time for those schematics.  Well, at least we have time to go build all the advanced industry we need to feed this production run.
 
Finding it hard to consider this fun.  A game should be engaging, not hurry up and wait.  Plenty of Chinese porn games that have mastered that for cash.
 
I'm frightened to think of what Tier 5 ore is going to take to find and process into something...
 
And for those that will say it, no, I'm not playing solo, although I log more hours than most in my org and am their master builder.  At least for now.
 
 

Hardly "always".  Note I'm an Alpha Tester.  Prior to 0.23, industry was fun.  You would make progress based on effort expended and could feel good doing so.  Optimizing a layout, using Transfer Units to keep things running - this was fun.  Now it feels like the head banging in the title of this thread.  Oh, not to mention you could take a two week vacation and come back and pick up where you left off.  With luck, might have even raised some quanta via your dispensers.   Now everything is based around paying the tax man.
 
I've invested 4 years of my life in this game, and subscribed myself and 2 alts for a year in hopes it wasn't as bad as I heard.  It is.
 
I really feel bad for anyone coming into this game 6 months down the road, presuming its still running.  Surface ores are going to be the stuff of legends.
 
The balance is simply broke.  We tried for years to discuss this with NQ... but they knew better.  Not.  Most everything I've seen since 0.23 has been implemented to reduce the cost of running the servers - and sold as "performance enhancements", at the expense of players.
 
Its depressing.  I'm too old with too much medical history to every hope to get in the ground floor of another game with this potential.  Sad, just sad.

Hardly "always".  Note I'm an Alpha Tester.  Prior to 0.23, industry was fun.  You would make progress based on effort expended and could feel good doing so.  Optimizing a layout, using Transfer Units to keep things running - this was fun.  Now it feels like the head banging in the title of this thread.  Oh, not to mention you could take a two week vacation and come back and pick up where you left off.  With luck, might have even raised some quanta via your dispensers.   Now everything is based around paying the tax man.
 
I've invested 4 years of my life in this game, and subscribed myself and 2 alts for a year in hopes it wasn't as bad as I heard.  It is.
 
I really feel bad for anyone coming into this game 6 months down the road, presuming its still running.  Surface ores are going to be the stuff of legends.
 
The balance is simply broke.  We tried for years to discuss this with NQ... but they knew better.  Not.  Most everything I've seen since 0.23 has been implemented to reduce the cost of running the servers - and sold as "performance enhancements", at the expense of players.
 
Its depressing.  I'm too old with too much medical history to every hope to get in the ground floor of another game with this potential.  Sad, just sad.

Hardly "always".  Note I'm an Alpha Tester.  Prior to 0.23, industry was fun.  You would make progress based on effort expended and could feel good doing so.  Optimizing a layout, using Transfer Units to keep things running - this was fun.  Now it feels like the head banging in the title of this thread.  Oh, not to mention you could take a two week vacation and come back and pick up where you left off.  With luck, might have even raised some quanta via your dispensers.   Now everything is based around paying the tax man.
 
I've invested 4 years of my life in this game, and subscribed myself and 2 alts for a year in hopes it wasn't as bad as I heard.  It is.
 
I really feel bad for anyone coming into this game 6 months down the road, presuming its still running.  Surface ores are going to be the stuff of legends.
 
The balance is simply broke.  We tried for years to discuss this with NQ... but they knew better.  Not.  Most everything I've seen since 0.23 has been implemented to reduce the cost of running the servers - and sold as "performance enhancements", at the expense of players.
 
Its depressing.  I'm too old with too much medical history to every hope to get in the ground floor of another game with this potential.  Sad, just sad.

Yeah, need to set my sights higher... lol (except its not funny)
 

Hardly "always".  Note I'm an Alpha Tester.  Prior to 0.23, industry was fun.  You would make progress based on effort expended and could feel good doing so.  Optimizing a layout, using Transfer Units to keep things running - this was fun.  Now it feels like the head banging in the title of this thread.  Oh, not to mention you could take a two week vacation and come back and pick up where you left off.  With luck, might have even raised some quanta via your dispensers.   Now everything is based around paying the tax man.
 
I've invested 4 years of my life in this game, and subscribed myself and 2 alts for a year in hopes it wasn't as bad as I heard.  It is.
 
I really feel bad for anyone coming into this game 6 months down the road, presuming its still running.  Surface ores are going to be the stuff of legends.
 
The balance is simply broke.  We tried for years to discuss this with NQ... but they knew better.  Not.  Most everything I've seen since 0.23 has been implemented to reduce the cost of running the servers - and sold as "performance enhancements", at the expense of players.
 
Its depressing.  I'm too old with too much medical history to every hope to get in the ground floor of another game with this potential.  Sad, just sad.

Oh, just the game play aspects - like the XL Scanner I've been working on.  Takes 625 Uncommon Power supplies, at 4 minutes each - so 40 hours just for those parts.  That's fine, except I can't tell you how many times I've found it halted in the morning because some sub-component (Al-Fe was the latest) ran out of schematics.  Seems like I spend one hell of a lot of time just feeding Tier 1 product schematics into my factory.  I'm doing 250 at a time now, and still running out.
 
This is suppose to be fun, right?

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.

I'm an addicted player, although very grumpy about it.  I have 6 tiles on Alioth's south pole, within linking distance of the marketplace there.  All 6 are completely mined, and heavily produce Quartz - my main cash ore since my factory uses it the least.  Cash for taxes is not a problem.  Ore for building is.  I'm completely dependent on calibration charges now since I've already raided all the adjoining public tiles and stripped them of ore.  Really throttling me now.
 
So the 500K/week/tile isn't a problem for me, but sure would be if I, god forbid, only wanted to play a few hours a day (or *shudder* a few hours a week).  In that case, Sanctuary (if I was a backer), and Haven otherwise would be my only option. 
 
Whats making me grumpy:  Constantly running out of schematics!  Not particularly fun to finally get my XL assembler up and running just to discover a single run schematic takes 8 hours to build.  Just sucks the fun out of what is suppose to be a creativity game for me.
 
Oh, I've reported it as a bug a week ago, and of course have not heard back, but adjacency bonuses apparently don't apply on Sanctuary.

Well, almost a week into this.  Was really excited, but now it feels like all I do is pay taxes.  Taxes to add territories, Taxes to build anything non-trivial, trivial taxes to sell.  I can't tell you how many times I've run out of Tier 1 Product schematics after leaving for a bit of sleep just to discover I'm out of them again in the morning and nothing happened overnight.
 
Taxes every WEEK to keep what I've built.
 
Not feeling very good about this right now.
 
Update:  By "a week into this", that's after playing for years, disappearing after 0.23, and coming back about a month before launch to refresh the mechanics in my mind.

Oh, just the game play aspects - like the XL Scanner I've been working on.  Takes 625 Uncommon Power supplies, at 4 minutes each - so 40 hours just for those parts.  That's fine, except I can't tell you how many times I've found it halted in the morning because some sub-component (Al-Fe was the latest) ran out of schematics.  Seems like I spend one hell of a lot of time just feeding Tier 1 product schematics into my factory.  I'm doing 250 at a time now, and still running out.
 
This is suppose to be fun, right?

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.

I'm an addicted player, although very grumpy about it.  I have 6 tiles on Alioth's south pole, within linking distance of the marketplace there.  All 6 are completely mined, and heavily produce Quartz - my main cash ore since my factory uses it the least.  Cash for taxes is not a problem.  Ore for building is.  I'm completely dependent on calibration charges now since I've already raided all the adjoining public tiles and stripped them of ore.  Really throttling me now.
 
So the 500K/week/tile isn't a problem for me, but sure would be if I, god forbid, only wanted to play a few hours a day (or *shudder* a few hours a week).  In that case, Sanctuary (if I was a backer), and Haven otherwise would be my only option. 
 
Whats making me grumpy:  Constantly running out of schematics!  Not particularly fun to finally get my XL assembler up and running just to discover a single run schematic takes 8 hours to build.  Just sucks the fun out of what is suppose to be a creativity game for me.
 
Oh, I've reported it as a bug a week ago, and of course have not heard back, but adjacency bonuses apparently don't apply on Sanctuary.

Well, almost a week into this.  Was really excited, but now it feels like all I do is pay taxes.  Taxes to add territories, Taxes to build anything non-trivial, trivial taxes to sell.  I can't tell you how many times I've run out of Tier 1 Product schematics after leaving for a bit of sleep just to discover I'm out of them again in the morning and nothing happened overnight.
 
Taxes every WEEK to keep what I've built.
 
Not feeling very good about this right now.
 
Update:  By "a week into this", that's after playing for years, disappearing after 0.23, and coming back about a month before launch to refresh the mechanics in my mind.

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.

You me both... twas the 0.23 exodus of players.  I was 2 days away from my warp beacon to start cooking and came back to discover a 800,000,000 (yeah, if memory serves, it was 800M, later reduced to 200M) schematic fee to start up the warp beacon factory.  Left the game until a few weeks ago after that point.
 
Only good news:  once you start racking in quanta, just start making 12 hours of schematics before you call it a night.  Those T1 Product smelters will run for awhile is you load them with 500 schematics each.  Still feels its a crappy solution that just adds distraction and worse, frustration, to the game.  e.g.  it makes the game less fun to play, not more.