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Nanites unit for repair and construction


ATLANT

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You repair a construct by actively repairing it with your nanoformer.

 

You construct and build something with your nanoformer or elements with the 3D printers.

 

You just don't press a button and your ship magically seals all breaches.

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DU is an MMO so its mechanics should encourage group play while not completely squashing a lone wolf style of game play.  This is tough to balance since adding a simple thing like repair nanites could marginalize the group play aspect at least from a repair perspective.  But if repairing a massive ship adds no value to group play, nanites might be a good solution, freeing up those players to feed resources into the nanite machines.

 

Balancing ideas:

  • Repair using nanites would necessarily be a slow process where as manual fixing is very fast at least in the nano-formers location.  So the one is general slow repair while the other is for pin point quick fixing.
  • The nanites element is bulky, fragile and costs quite a bit of power to use.  So this will lend itself to repair stations rather than on board every ship except the largest ones

Will it happen? Probably not. But rather than outright dismissing ideas, lets see if there is a way to make them workable (even if NQ will never implement them)

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DU is an MMO so its mechanics should encourage group play while not completely squashing a lone wolf style of game play. This is tough to balance since adding a simple thing like repair nanites could marginalize the group play aspect at least from a repair perspective. But if repairing a massive ship adds no value to group play, nanites might be a good solution, freeing up those players to feed resources into the nanite machines.

 

Balancing ideas:

  • Repair using nanites would necessarily be a slow process where as manual fixing is very fast at least in the nano-formers location. So the one is general slow repair while the other is for pin point quick fixing.
  • The nanites element is bulky, fragile and costs quite a bit of power to use. So this will lend itself to repair stations rather than on board every ship except the largest ones
Will it happen? Probably not. But rather than outright dismissing ideas, lets see if there is a way to make them workable (even if NQ will never implement them)

I'm all in for good ideas. But I don't see any good in such an idea when there are just 2 lines of text with no pros/contra, no description, no explanation and no deep thinking about such an idea.

 

Your points are well written and I can see such a thing happen on stations probably, but to me it still is against gameplay and the implications that come with a mmo.

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Problem with "nanite magic" like that, is that it works in a game like EVE, where each ship is predfeind as of HP and manual targeting is not a thing.

I build a ship that its armor is made out of the toughest material composition. I rig it to have a lot of Capacitors, CPUs and a lot of supply of ammunition and nanites.

I win every time. In fact, battles are fought AFK, since there's no need to be there. AFK auto-repairs, AFK dps (you have a common theme man, change the automation tune already).

Get into socialisaing, find engineers to repair your ship. What? You have no social skilsl to build a crew you can rely on? Tough luck, fly a smaller ship, or a single-seater starfighter.

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  • 1 year later...

I agree with Twerkmotor that it shouldn't happen like EVE; a big part of the fun of the game will be trying to keep fighting when people start blowing holes in your ship, and some parts go down.  An EVE style system works in EVE only because there are specific limitations on what you can equip to which ship.  With a free-form design system like DU, those limitations are hard to implement effectively, and you could break the game with fast armor repair.

 

That said, I think you still need nanite repair in some form.  Here's why: A ship in EVE frequently takes a minute or less to pop, and then the player that died goes to the market and buys a new ship.  Costs some ISK, but if you are well funded, you are back in the game almost immediately, playing at the same level you were before (and if you aren't well funded, you shouldn't be doing EVE PvP). 

 

Contrast that with what I understand to be the case in DU: You build a ship from scratch, piece by piece, using materials you gather, over the course of hours, or days, or for large ships and bases, weeks or months.  That ship cost a great deal of actively invested player time; an EVE ship is made by a factory while the player is AFK, very little actively invested player time.  

 

In the case of a lost ship, there is a simple solution to this: Implement shipbuilding factories that automate building from blueprints.  In combination with a robust economy for raw materials, this allows you to rebuild lost ships as long as you saved a blueprint and have the funds to buy the materials.  You might lose some custom tweaks you made after saving blueprints, but that's not too bad.

 

Where it falls apart is when you escape, or win, but with substantial damage.  Say you got your huge battleship into a fight, and killed the other guy, but your ship lost 40% of its systems and structure.  Everything is damaged, and you are barely able to limp back to your base.  If you don't have some sort of home-base nanite repair factory, are you going to repair every element by hand, at a cost of maybe a dozen hours of game time before your battleship is back to fighting fit?  Or are you going to scrap your ship and build a new one from scratch?  What about the 60% that is still good?  Is that just wasted?  Do you disassemble it?  Is the disassembly done by hand too?  How long will that take?

 

This problem is why PvP is Space Engineers always sucked: even if you win a fight, you still feel like you lost, because you have to fix the damage you took, in a painful, boring repair process.  Without some easy way to fix ships, people will fight less, the fights will hurt more, and even the winners are likely to get bored because victory is rewarded with dull, repetitive repair work.  Eventually, people will just start to leave.  This leaves a smaller community, and a weaker economy, making the whole game less awesome even for those with the determination to keep rebuilding every time.  

 

Basically, the faster you can fix or replace your ship after a fight, the more fighting people will do.  So, if you like fighting, you should probably hope for some kind of nanite repair system.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/20/2017 at 3:05 PM, Lethys said:

You repair a construct by actively repairing it with your nanoformer.

 

You construct and build something with your nanoformer or elements with the 3D printers.

 

You just don't press a button and your ship magically seals all breaches.

What about automating the process with late game skills? However if you do you should balance it better than eve however as mentioned above

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10 minutes ago, unown006 said:

What about automating the process with late game skills? However if you do you should balance it better than eve however as mentioned above

Script the pets, as in train them. Or build a repair bot. Even so, it's likely that any such thing can only do so much. The human element is a requirement. 

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3 hours ago, virtuozzo said:

Script the pets, as in train them. Or build a repair bot. Even so, it's likely that any such thing can only do so much. The human element is a requirement. 

True but I think it would at least be a nice feature 

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Just as much as automatic factories, which are confirmed by NQ.

 

So I see no reason not to allow putting wreck into factory unit, feed it with blueprint and missing parts, and receiving repaired ship. Or use factory unit to scrap it (100% parts return) then build it again.

In both cases you need blueprint (may be flagged as "only for repairs"), so ship builder can denny you the right to do so.

 

Yes, it's mmo. But it doesn't mean that tedious meaningless tasks should be forced to be done manually.

 

But combat repair should be fully manual. That would encourage building maintenance corridors and having multi-crewed ships. 

Preferably with option to use small crafts to repair those really huge. Still manually.

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18 hours ago, Lethys said:

No it wouldn't, just eliminates human interaction

It makes task easier (which can be justified with progression from the skill tree) I can also see A company acting as a car wash but instead a repair hub using nanites (just a example)  So I could argue it would make more business which would increase player interaction

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5 hours ago, unown006 said:

It makes task easier (which can be justified with progression from the skill tree) I can also see A company acting as a car wash but instead a repair hub using nanites (just a example)  So I could argue it would make more business which would increase player interaction

You get the same result with manual repair instead of an iwin button

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5 hours ago, Lethys said:

You get the same result with manual repair instead of an iwin button

It has to be balanced which has been stated above (there example was in eve ships being to op) 

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