Dakanmer

I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.
 
We need:
XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons  
It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.
 
These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

Dear Noveans,

With the launch behind us, it’s time we give you better insight into our direction of development for Dual Universe.

Before the release, our Creative Director gave an overview of many upcoming game features, and we want to expand on his letter by giving you a more precise look at what we’re working on specifically in our upcoming updates.

We are currently continuing to focus our work on the initial stabilization and resolution of issues following the launch, and we are also working on update 1.1 which we are aiming to release in December.
 
What’s Coming in Update 1.1?
 
Kickstarter Rewards: Part Two

We want to take this opportunity to thank you once again for your incredible support and patience. Kickstarter backers are the supporters that helped start Dual Universe. We’re working hard to deliver your rewards.
 
In update 1.1, you can look forward to the following:

- Two versions of pets, with a total of eight variations.
 
Automata Tier 1: Automata Nora-SP pet_agnes_tier1.mp4
 
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!
 
Automata Tier 2: Automata Nieve Automata Tier 3: Automata Spud-7 Automata Tier 4: Automata Max-E  Automata Tier 5: Automata Elite  
Anicham Tier 1: Anicham Scrap pet_alex_tier1.mp4
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!
 
Anicham Tier 2: Anicham Comp Anicham Tier 3: Anicham Max 
- Avatar skins for both body types:
 
(Gold/Sapphire/Ruby/Emerald/Diamond/Kyrium Kickstarter and Founder packs)
Alpha Team outfit
 
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!

(Silver+ / Contributors / Sponsors / Patrons)
Arkship Passenger outfit (Bronze) Military outfit (Gold+ / Sponsors / Patrons)
Arkship Passenger outfit (Silver) Earth Legacy outfit (Silver)     (Ruby+ / Patrons)
Arkship Passenger outfit (Black) Earth Legacy outfit (Black)
- New emotes:
(Gold+ / Sponsors / Patrons)
Dance
Cry
Thumbs down
 
Follow us on our social media to see the others in the coming days!
 
Thumbs up Just DU it  
(Ruby+ / Patrons)
Victory Threat Facepalm Silly dance Salute  
- In-game titles
 
Features
 
- Grid Snapping: with this feature, when deploying a blueprint, you can snap to the grid of another already placed core, like when placing a Space Core Unit. This feature will help you to align cores perfectly with one another while deploying blueprints.

- Steam Achievements

- Element recycling : dismantling elements back into a portion of their components.

- Eight new talents linked with schematic creation.
 
Looking further into the future, What’s in the 1.2 Update?

- Tactical Map: a visual display providing a tactical view of surrounding constructs detected by your active radar.

- New tools for finding wrecks and a minor revamp of the radar system.
 
- Changes to the Deep Space Asteroid Tracker and the asteroid system.
 
- Adding the ability for repair units to use scrap.
 
- New Orbital Delivery Challenge.
 
----------------------------------------------------------
 
We still have a lot of development planned in the longer term which you can read more about in the letter from our Creative Director, and we hope that we’ve given you a clearer picture of our immediate direction for Dual Universe. We will update you should this planning change significantly, and look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback in this forum thread.

It’s been an incredible month since launching Dual Universe. We’ve worked hard to address issues, and though we always want to do better, we hope you’ve enjoyed the game so far. All across Helios, wonders are already taking shape as you bring the game to life. We can’t wait to see what you’ll build in the coming months and years. From all of us here at Novaquark, thank you for being a part of our game.

The point is to stop this sort of thing from being necessary, NOT to make fighter jet/hauler hybrids.
 
It's nothing but a shell made out of 128 L space brakes, 144 atmo brakes, 176 L adjustors, 16 XL basic space engines, 34 L basic atmo engines, 20 L basic vertical boosters, , 12 L stabilizers (because there aren't any L wings or ailerons), 18 M wings, 10 L space tanks, 8 L atmo tanks, 24 L containers, and a few other things. It's a heavy hauler that needs far too much crap to haul, and even without any cargo turns really slowly. The voxels are mostly just a wire frame to mark where elements go for symmetry, with a very small amount for "looking cool." Tiered engines and the like are too expensive in time/resources (worse because of the schematics) at this point, especially since T2+ deposits have become more rare than in beta (a guy scanned a large number of contiguous tiles and found none at all. On Thades), and getting asteroids is a pretty big competition, so we have to work with what we can.
 
This is why bigger elements are necessary. Tiered brakes/adjustors/airfoils would be nice, but those are more "tweaks" to the basics than realistic replacements for larger sizes. And yes, sadly, NQ will probably just continue to limit everything. From day 1, creativity in anything but voxel work has been stifled by NQ constantly saying "that doesn't fit the direction we want to go" even as they advertise the whole game as "player-driven" etc. That whole approach to development is ridiculous, and it's seriously making me think I wasted the money I spent on 13 months worth of subscriptions.

I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.
 
We need:
XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons  
It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.
 
These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

Oh, absolutely. The quanta faucet needs to get turned right down. But that's fine, too, since one of the purposes of schematics is as a "Quanta sink".
 
Again, couldn't agree more. NQ really need (they should have done this ab initio, but it looks more like a string of kneejerk reactions and poorly-considered transitions between game test modes have led us to the current pass) to put some thought and work into how the economics system is going to run. In the end, Quanta exist solely as a means of allowing us players to exchange goods without having to figure out whether a T3 Space Engine L is worth 0.3, 0.4, 3, or 4 or 4.5 or 50 T4 Shield S Elements. The fact of NPC interactions involving Quanta is purely there as a pump-primer, but some of those aspects have gotten out-of-hand, so a sink is necessary.
 
But that's not going to happen, or if it does, I have little confidence NQ will produce anything more than a half-assed, fouled-up mess any more. And, to be honest, I'd rather they actually developed something new rather than rehashing Industry again. If they did, it might be some indication that the team could, if given the schedule space, come up with a decent economy.

Oh @DannyUK. The surprises are much deeper.
A prime example is fuel tanks. Atmospheric tanks T1 scheme. And space tanks, consisting of T1 components, for some reason have a T2 scheme (naturally with a different cost and a different time).
And now the cherry on the cake. There are such things as Zone detectors. They range in size from XS to L. But they are all made with the same T3 recipe and on the same machine. With the same amount of time. Only here is the detector L. It has a schematic T3 L. Again, with a corresponding cost and time commitment.
As a result, we get an absurdity that the cost of components for a detector is a hundred times less than the cost of a schematic for it. Why is this? What is the deeper meaning besides the lack of testing and banal common sense? To make it clear, the circuit for the L detector will cost as much as the circuit is valid for a military advanced space engine.
P.S. I stopped playing on the beta because of the schemes.
If you want to get money out of the production workers, just make a tax on the machines.
And if the production "loads" the server for you - increase the number of batches of especially small elements with an increase in the production time of the batch.

I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.
 
We need:
XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons  
It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.
 
These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.
 
We need:
XL atmospheric engines XL atmospheric brakes XL retro-rocket brakes XL adjustors XL hover engines XL vertical boosters Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors L and XL wings L and XL ailerons  
It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.
 
These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

I get that NQ thought they were doing a good thing by changing how schematics were done, because it got more money out of the system more consistently and time gated industry for anyone without a fortune and a zillion alts, but...well, they do a lot of things that run 180 away from the whole "player driven" etc concept, and reject the most sane solutions and ideas in favor of the dumbest. That's kind of expected at this point (the mass exoduses from the game didn't happen for no reason, and a lot of people are still waiting for serious improvements and NQ to make good on their promises before coming back), so all anyone can hope for is mitigation. So mitigation. Schematics are trash, but it's what we have.
 
Get rid of schematics for pure, product and fuel production, regardless of tier. You DO NOT need all that much complexity in production to melt stuff, which is exactly what pure/product production is, nor do you need much complexity in fuel production, since the machines aren't doing much beyond catalyzing a reaction or distilling a substance. You need more complexity to produce a screw, a pipe, an injector, a power system, or any number of parts, yet there are no schematics for those things. There should be some sanity and consistency to how a system is implemented, even if it's blatantly to slow people down and get money out of the system. For the schematics that remain, balance their costs so that what they ultimately produce isn't so expensive that people will intentionally avoid all PVP just to protect their huge investment. The costs associated with T2+ voxels alone makes them a luxury for bling, rather than viable armor for PVP. The pure ore schematics cost too much for what they produce (especially at higher tiers); the product schematics cost too much for both the inputs and outputs; and the cost to output ratio of voxels is just sickening. If you want T5 armor plating (like pure titanium), you will end up with a cost of ~148,000,000 quanta for 10m^3 of voxels if you do buy the raw ore on the MP (because we're all supposed to specialize so that the economy functions as NQ wants). Most ships require a LOT more than 10m^3 of voxels, even if we're just looking at armor plating and not all the interior work (which will also probably be really expensive). Now put that into perspective: you're not just taking a voxel shell out into combat, but expensive elements. A ship designed for combat, with the best armor plating, will likely use higher-tiered elements, which themselves can run from hundreds to around 1.2 million quanta (space radar L is no joke, and you only need one of those), bringing the total element cost into the hundreds of millions (cost of schematics to make pure + product + element + the cost of the ores themselves). And that doesn't even look at ammo costs from schematics + ore. How often does NQ think that PVP will happen? On what scale do they want it to happen? Any org that invests that kind of time and money into a combat ship, only to lose a fortune every time their voxels get evaporated, would have to be ludicrously rich...which means that the only viable PVP for PVPers is to either a) get that apex ship and only hunt helpless people, or b) make a bunch of weaker ships that only cost a tiny fortune. PVP battles (not counting pirate activity, because that's not battle) will be predictably rare to the point of being an event, if at all. Because you need a fortune to do it, and throwing all of that money (and time) away for a spectacle is just insane. The time required to produce schematics is just bonkers, so reduce their production times drastically. If you don't have a large org or a zillion alts, you'll be stuck with a small factory. If you do have those things, you'll be stuck with constantly feeding schematics into each unit, because there's no system to distribute them via a central hub.  
There have been a ton of good alternatives to the schematic system suggested, even before the schematic system was decided on. NQ, as usual, ignored all of those more reasonable ideas proposed by people who still believed that NQ intended to keep its promises about "player-driven" etc, and instead went with this craptastic system. So these are my balancing suggestions to a system that never should have been implemented in a player-driven game. Especially not since we're talking about digital schematics being essentially uploaded into machines that, for some unknown reason the machine's developers decided would delete its database every time produced something, and then load the next digital schematic to be used and deleted. @NQ, tell us how often you load a function in your coding, and then delete it from your computer after every time it gets called, forcing you to re-write it and re-load it into the computer. Seriously, that's how stupid this system is. You would fire anyone who came up with that method for coding, and you would be right to do it. Using time gating and draining resources as an excuse to implement it, when you would fire someone for exactly those reasons, says that you don't respect the community just as loudly as ignoring the many alternatives that were more reasonable (like requiring regular industry maintenance because of machine degradation from use, or player-created schematics that don't get deleted but require talents to "research," or any number of others).

Because the concept has changed several times since the alpha. It looks like there will be no promised pets, other systems, and in general much of what we initially liked about past ideas and roadmaps. In fact, I have no understanding of what the game is going to...

The whole premise of “entirely player driven and built” is a laughing stock.  This was actually a reply deep in a thread somewhere so I just thought I’d dig it out and post it here. Sorry if you’ve read this already. 
 
bots control our hex-rent. Bots control our schematics. Bots control our sales taxes. Bots hand out and receive missions. Bots sell pretty much everything anyone needs. Bots buy stupid almost unlimited amounts of ore and bots hand out a daily stipend. And bots control whether or not we can fire weapons. 
 
what is there actually left to play and strive for other than building?
 
why is there no energy required to run anything? Why is there no oxygen requirements for our habitats?
why is there no food or farming? 
 
why are there no threatening box life forms that raid our camps?
 
why are there no mysteries beyond a few lowest possible effort alien cores?
 


 
what an absolute joke. 

The person who came up with all the schematics thing can be credited for almost, if not truly, killing this game.
 
The way it was implemented was the worst possible way and a big eff you to all. 
 
All big streamers left after .23 and the game lost all it's relevance on YouTube and twitch. 

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.

Yup. 'Tis a pitiful and inelegant mechanic. Better than "You have to pay upmty million Quanta to start your machine" that was the first iteration of schematics that drove me instantly out of Beta. But "making players do busywork" isn't adding to the USPs of the game that might raise it above the competition.
 
Yeah. Scaling doesn't seem to have been a consideration in the implementation of the "stop the servers dying from overwork" mechanic. I guess a thousand facs of 100 elements each is just as server-killing as 10 facs of 10000 elements.

Yep, that's the other thing. Keeping the machines loaded with schematics is tedious in the extreme, even for a small factory. I've got 8 assmeblers right now, and I can never keep them (and the machines that supply them with parts) all happily fed!

If the idea is to discourage mega factories, then they should have done something where the difficulty started lower, but scaled exponentially - so it was easy for small setups and much harder for large ones. This feels like the balance might be a bit off. In order to stock all the machines for a long time, I'd need a hell of a lot of money, to make a hell of a lot of schematics.

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.

Reinstalled the game there for a week - completely unplayable to a casual solo player. Uninstalled again 😕
 
I don't say this to be smug, I'm genuinely saddened by it. I really wanted this game to be good, it looked amazing in the early promos, alpha was great, had tons of fun, but I prefer being a solo player and I am not the only one. But the game is not targeted at us anymore.
 
At least alpha was a great experience, well worth the 15 euro kickstarter fee - if other players find the game good still, then all the better, at least it wasn't wasted. But it's not for me anymore.

I haven't delved very far, but one small thing that bugs me are lights.  Lights are uncommon (Long light, S - L), and the schematics are expensive for what you get, how much you produce.  I think cost on a long light is like 4700 per (not counting ore - not playing rn, just going off memory)?  To me that's dumb. I'm sure there's other examples.
 
Probably down the road when people are richer, it won't be a thing, but I wish some elements would have more common sense.  Especially lower tier items that aren't game balance changing.