November DevBlog 4: Rebalancing the Universe

[NQ-Naunet]

 

 

Hello Noveans,

With the latest release (0.23), we are introducing some pretty radical changes to the industry gameplay. We would like to take the time here to explain the rationale behind those decisions. 
 

First, let us start by reminding everyone that we are still in Beta, which is a place where core balancing is supposed to happen in order to prepare a game that will stand the test of time at release. We understand that some changes will impact the current game style of many players, but keep in mind that everything is done for a good reason, which we will try to explain below.

Industry Recipes as Items

The central idea behind the industrial gameplay is that an Industry Unit (Assembly, Chemical Reactor or others) is a sort of mini factory. It should come with an initial and substantial cost you have to invest before starting to commit yourself to mass producing the goods that this unit allows to produce. 

Mass production is a key element here. If you need just one or two items it should not make sense to build a factory to produce such small quantities. You should instead go on the markets and buy it from a specialized producer. This is the basis on which we can hope to see a healthy economy strive in the game.

It follows then that the initial cost to build a factory must be much higher than the cost of production of one unit, and by a very large margin. This has not been the case so far. The price of an industry unit was often on par (or even far below) the unit cost of products it could output. 

As a result, buying on markets made little sense. Markets overall were not being used as much as they were intended to, and players built omni-factories to produce anything they needed even if they only needed it in small quantities. This would be a great design for a single player game or a hosted-server game but not for a civilization-building game with a single-shard approach where player specialization is central and paramount.

This is what the “Schematics as Items'' modification is intended to fix. (We renamed “recipes” to “schematics” because even if we are a French company, we don’t want to bring cooking too much into the factory!) We don’t intend to touch the price of existing Industry Units, but instead we have added a schematic item that you must load individually into a single Industry Unit (there is now a small schematic bank container integrated).

Having the schematic item in the Industry Unit schematic bank is needed to run a particular schematic, so you will need several instances of the same schematic item if you want to produce the same item on several Industry Units at the same time. Those schematic items are sold by bots on markets, and they are much more expensive than the Industry Unit they run on. Each factory needs a schematic associated with it. This is why you need to buy several of them if you want to run production on several lines simultaneously.
 

Adding a line of production for a new item will come with a steep initial cost investment. This makes total sense if you plan to mass produce the item, but is suboptimal if you just need a small quantity of this item. You would be better off going to the market to buy at minimal cost from specialized producers competing against each other. If you're only planning to produce a couple of decorative plants to customize your underground lair, it’s probably going to be more cost-effective for you to buy them from a market than buying a schematic for it or else the cost of this couple of plants would be excessive.

What does this mean for industrial players? If you already have a giga factory, you will still have it, but it will now need a significant starting investment to buy the schematics needed for production and a commitment to mass produce and sell in order to make economic sense. You could specialize it to improve its returns or you could even consider reselling part of it on the markets to revert to another strategy. You could perhaps take it as a new challenge, a reboot of the game goal where the balancing between initial setup cost and cost of a single item will be central to your success.

Something else to note is the fact that the introduction of items for schematics means that we may later be able to introduce a Research gameplay feature where players can improve schematics to get an edge not only in productivity but also in the quality of the product they create. This could additionally open the possibility of selling schematics, an option we may consider for the future (though it will not be anytime soon).

New Talents

Before the 0.23 update, there was no barrier to use any advanced Industry Unit or advanced weapon. If you had it, you knew how to use it. This was both counter-intuitive in general (before you buy new gear, it’s normal that you learn how to use them) and went against the idea of character progression as intended in the game. 

We have now introduced new talents to unlock access to basic industry (very easy) and also the more advanced versions or the larger versions, which are more advanced talents. This will contribute to player specialization, which is a central idea in the design of Dual Universe.

That’s it for now. Thank you again for your support and your constant help along the path. See you soon in Dual Universe!

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