Break the mega factory meta

[Vasten]

The mega factory meta is what prevents the dream of a specialized economy and cooperative civilization building 

 

To break it the scalability of factory industry needs to be nerfed.. scripting is fun but it just further amplifies industry scalability to riddiculous meta levels

 

Limit based on char (like max active units per char) would be circumvented by alts.

 

Human time is the only thing that will work

 

Make industry units break down and require repair, maintenance and care.. require human grinding play time to keep the factory units operating 

 

Mining,logistics and trade are all grindy and hard to scale

 

Why is industry allowed to scale to such riddiculous levels that it create tychoons and monopolies that have largely passive income.. it actually kills the cooperative specialization that is supposedly the goal of this game.

 

As long as the single human mega factory meta exists it is the only thing worth doing.. it needs to not just be nerfed.. but killed.. otherwise there will never civ building and specialization 

[TheMasterArchitect]

haha.  Trust me they killed the mega factory already.  I don't know anyone who actually makes 100% of everything.

 

Yes T1-2 items are fairly easy to make and sure you can get a mega factory out of those items if you mine up and sell a few mega nodes but T3 and up starts getting expensive for players.

[Vasten]

59 minutes ago, TheMasterArchitect said:

haha.  Trust me they killed the mega factory already.  I don't know anyone who actually makes 100% of everything.

 

Yes T1-2 items are fairly easy to make and sure you can get a mega factory out of those items if you mine up and sell a few mega nodes but T3 and up starts getting expensive for players.

if that were true there would be a market for components, parts, alloys etc

 

And there isnt

 

High level items are made by factories that take ore input and produce finished products, otherwise we would see the intermediary parts being bought and sold.. which they are not

[NQ-Naerais]

On 3/30/2021 at 9:48 AM, Vasten said:

Make industry units break down and require repair, maintenance and care.. require human grinding play time to keep the factory units operating 

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

[Treelover69]

18 minutes ago, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

Imo its just grindy tedium.

I think we had a trial run at that with the bugs where industry would randomly get hung up, or stuck at somewhere between starting and finishing and needed to be rebooted. To me it just ended up being mindless, probably because it didnt really drive any decisions - "have you tried turning it on and off?"

 

For brainstorming, say it's a thing, some possible ways of doing it

- Jams - similar to industry bugs in early beta

- Degradation - the repair tool isn't particularly engaging, but could maybe have it impact speed/efficiency?

- Fuel - essentially just more mining/adding more ore to the base cost of everything, but could maybe change manufacturing speed/efficiency based on fuel type?

 

For me it'd be best if it presented meaningful decisions. To do that it'd have to interact with the system, eg. say there's a maintenance schedule - could make it run less efficiently if it hasn't been upkept - but the cost to repair vs the efficiency loss would need to matter so there was a decision to make about whether you repaired now, or whether it was more efficient to do later. My concern is that this would be a super finicky balance driven by a lot of environmental factors that could easily break any meaningful decisions that need to be made, plus inflation potentially making that cost meaningless again over time.

I think if the safe zone get's reduced (is the beta boundary is permanent now?), the recurring loop would be that other players essentially steal your industry. I guess this comes with territory PvP now that static constructs have to be on land with a TCU. When that happens, you'd have to rebuild a factory elsewhere giving you a fresh take at industrializing again (which is where i get most of the fun from). It's a soft reset and a consequence of a decision made about how many resources you were willing to risk, knowing that someone else would likely try to steal it or destroy then sell it on the market - the larger the factory the bigger that risk. I can't think of a good substitute for this kind of gameplay loop.

[Haunty]

18 hours ago, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

Too grindy, that is a survival game thing not mmorpg. It would be better if we could upgrade industry units instead of deleting them, re-placing the new unit, re-linking it, etc. Also making adjustments to them like more efficiency at the cost of speed, more speed at the cost of efficiency, more of both at the cost of power when we have power mechanics.

[tomasco]

This is a bad idea.

Changing anything in industry require player presence. It couldn't be done via VR. 

Usually you have several types of running industry

- big mega factories, producing stuff with high demand / consumption. Their owners are taking care of them and are present there to solve any issues.

- specialized small shops producing high level stuff with low demand. They could run without human interaction / maintenance for weeks.   

- small factories of people trying to build industries or people who don't know calculate costs.

- small specialized factories doing things for owners, not for market, like fuel factory on mining outpost.

Idea of adding another requirement of human presence and interaction kill the second type of industries. It will actually help big mega factories.

 

[space_man]

I'd rather see a core power system or some bonus to run industry off of Alioth to encourage hauling, which encourages pvp (and ever other part of the game).  If your running a mega factory your keeping the mining crowd busy otherwise what's the point... make a million engines for yourself?

[MoriarTheChosen]

On 3/30/2021 at 9:48 AM, Vasten said:

The mega factory meta is what prevents the dream of a specialized economy and cooperative civilization building 

 

To break it the scalability of factory industry needs to be nerfed.. scripting is fun but it just further amplifies industry scalability to riddiculous meta levels

 

Limit based on char (like max active units per char) would be circumvented by alts.

 

Human time is the only thing that will work

 

Make industry units break down and require repair, maintenance and care.. require human grinding play time to keep the factory units operating 

 

Mining,logistics and trade are all grindy and hard to scale

 

Why is industry allowed to scale to such riddiculous levels that it create tychoons and monopolies that have largely passive income.. it actually kills the cooperative specialization that is supposedly the goal of this game.

 

As long as the single human mega factory meta exists it is the only thing worth doing.. it needs to not just be nerfed.. but killed.. otherwise there will never civ building and specialization 

Passive income?

 

Have you ever truly worked in a mega factory? cause it's quite obvious you dont own one. The day is literally consumed with.. "When is this buy order for 2300kL of Hematite going to get filled", or "Damn this person who is selling X item at far below production costs..." seriously people stop selling your L Containers at below production cost. Literally I spend 10 hours a day just to keep the lights on.. and I am far from being a mega factory.

[Gottchar]

On 3/31/2021 at 9:14 PM, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

I currently have to either turn my factory off, which takes a day, or restart my system without audio (great stream) to do anything in my factory. So if you want me to spend time in there, please fix some of the bugs.

 

I wouldnt mind some kind of general action required to make things, but please dont just add more tedium. Maintaining and expanding a factory is un-fun enough, patch .23 added even more tedium and removed human interaction without any kind of improvement or adding fun.  

The biggest fix for the economy would be NQ stopping to try to fix it with measures which arent thought through. If you want to introduce something to make industry gameplay more active, please introduce something that can also be considered fun, not just extra steps.

[DiamondDog]

I have no doubt the economy is lopsided, but I really don't think tweaking the game as is is a good idea. There is soo much they need to add... Megafactories are fine if there is a great deal of PvP/Wars. Then there would be supply AND Demand.

 

Personally If I can only 'specialize' in one or two things then I'm not even interested at all..  I'll just specialize in screws, put them up for sale and log off. Yippy!   

 

I'm not even interested in PvP, only industry. Some people JUST want to kill things and that's great as long as your buying my engines ? 

 

I ONLY want to make factories and mine, PLEASE don't limit my gameplay because there isn't enough to do in PvP yet. Once WARS pick up the economy will right itself. 

 

[MoriarTheChosen]

On 3/31/2021 at 3:14 PM, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

Hi Naerais,

 

To make industry "a fun thing", lets work on getting the skills that have been broken since beta launch fixed first. The schematics were a necessary evil that the game had to evolve to, but to actively avoid the skills that are broken and yet still allow players to dump months of training into only to find out that they are broken.. well is not fun. It's depressing, here we are with a couple million xp in skills that well.. do absolutely nothing..  

As for the repair of broken factory bits.. no, god no... if the above paragraph remains true.. then I would want absolutely nothing to do with repairs as issues would not be addressed in a timely manner. 

TL:DR : First fix the foundation of Industry, to then be able to build upon it. 

[Knives]

imo mega factory are not a thing anymore as i use to have one because of schematics. a lot of people i know now are only doing a few key items as well.

Quote

why market for components, parts, alloys etc

imo why they are not a thing is most people who i know, who do indy including myself plan out the whole line now with schematics for all of the parts to build the final item.which also reminds me @NQ you need to add batch sizes for information  when you look up a part on the market so we can plan out our lines better.

 

i also dont think we are truly feeling the results of the schematic change as of yet for a few reasons

1.  mega factory people had a lot of backstock of all the things

2. people who had all these parts all put them up at the same time, more or less flooding the market and driving prices down hard.( reason why? cuz they needed capital to buy schematics)

3. right now its hard to even find items that are worth making with skills due to #2 to even make good money, you are better off just selling the ores in a lot of cases right now.this will clear up over time. why is it taking so long? well lets be honest here a lot of people stopped playing so less people are buying things.

 

Quote

High level items are made by factories that take ore input and produce finished products, otherwise we would see the intermediary parts being bought and sold.. which they are not

eh imo no. people i know are teaming up to build high level items but they plan out the whole line. people i know would not setup a line that they cant afford the whole line even if the parts were on the market to supplement the  schematics they cant afford.

why you ask?

1 . it simply just not efficient to do, people who tend to like indy gameplay like efficiency and dont want to rely on the market as well as making it harder with more math and spreadsheets to figure out the total cost of said item. (have to make sure its profitable and that would be annoying to do)

2. if your setting up a high level item the build times are really long, one of the engines that a few people setup a line for cost over 350m( just in schematic cost) for making engines 24/7 but will only make 40 a year.btw @ NQ the assembly handling skills that are supposed to cut down crafting time are ether not working or not displaying it they are still testing it to see which is the case(and yes this is the case even after hitting the start button). also to be honest with NQ i really think you need to go though all the skills one by one cuz i know over 5 that dont work as intended and i know their are more. hell the rate of fire skills and the range skills for weapons do the opposite, rate of fire takes longer if you train it and range goes down instead of up... . lots of skills are broken.but you dont know until you spend the time to train it. some skills compound their percentages and some dont. i have no clue on these which is intended and not sure if one is bugged over the other.

 

imo mega factories are also dead because of the incoming power requirements. most of the people who do indy are also not going crazy like they use to because of this as well . they are building lines that they change after x of a run of an item but building a bit of a stockpile to last a while. so when the power comes into play they will have less issues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[RugesV]

On 3/30/2021 at 9:27 AM, Vasten said:

if that were true there would be a market for components, parts, alloys etc

 

And there isnt

 

High level items are made by factories that take ore input and produce finished products, otherwise we would see the intermediary parts being bought and sold.. which they are not

 

Lets use Steel as an example.  And lets say you could sell the hematite and coal to bots for 22q per L.  That means with max skills 1L of steel is valued at 34.6q and no skills it is valued at 63.4q.  That would mean a player specializing in steel production  would need to sell his steel at 34.6q per L.  else  he would be better off just selling the ore to the bot.  And even then he is probably better off selling the ore to the bot as you need to add in the time and the transportation cost, and the setup cost, plus the tax for making a sell order.  Nore could he sell it over 63.4q per L.  because if he sold it over that price then the industrialist who is using the steel would be better off making it himself with no skills.  And in reality it only takes a single day to get to level 3 on all the required skills. a couple days to get to lvl 4,  which would bring the max price the user industrialist is willing to pay down to ~44q per L. 

 

Now looking at the market right now. there are 0 sell orders between this price.  The majority are over 50q. bulks at 70q.  one is at 20q (should buy those up who ever is living on Talemai).    

 

What does all this mean?  The profit range for all these beginning and middle parts are all small. Almost to the point where its either going to not be profitable for the seller or not profitable for the buyer.  

 

Then you also have to consider. All skills that reduce cost (IE take less resources or make more product) are in the beginning (refining/smelting/ intermediate parts). There are no skills that reduce cost for final products. Thus there is very little point in an industrialist only making final products. 

 

And if your going to invest in the final product schematics your going to invest the the schematics to make these items. 

 

But basically your not going to specialize in components. you should be specializing in a specific line of a final product.  For instance advanced maneuver space engine L's. There is only 6 on the market going for 1,000,000 a piece.  Where you could produce those with max skills at ~500,000 Netting you a much higher profit then just selling the middle stuff.  As the real thing that is stopping megafactories is schematics. 

[CoyoteNZ]

There needs to be hundreds of more industry talents to slow down mega factories.

 

Currently a small group can cover a large bunch of the talents from ore to finished product to easily.

 

Since if you had a person buying ore and selling pure; a person buying pure and selling alloy... etc. up the chain, each step wants to make a profit on their contribution. This would work,if it was hard to become good at each part, but since it isn’t two hard for a small group to cover all the talents from ore to product, they aren’t going to outsource. 

 

If if there were a lot more talents out there, there would be more scope to specialise rather than cover everything.

 

So yes there needs to be more talents further up the chain, all the way which makes it possible to make more profit. And maybe even more than the five levels.

 

Sure you will still get big orgs which are able to cover everything with a bit of good planning, but there will always be that. What needs to be done is limit it; how much to limit it is a balance, but balancing is what beta is for. 

[RugesV]

18 hours ago, CoyoteNZ said:

There needs to be hundreds of more industry talents to slow down mega factories.

 

 

Mega factories will never be stopped by this.  Megafactories will have friends pick up the new skills. and if unavail will create more alts to fill in the gap.  And if you do a major overhual on the skill system your going to have to allow a respec which will then allow megafactories to be setup just as good  as specialized factories.

 

One of the things I can think of that would limit megafactories would be specialized cores. IE a core that gives bonuses to refining. a core that gives bonuses to smelting, a core that gives bonuses to intermediary parts, a core that gives bonuses to space parts, a core that gives bonuses to atmo parts. 

 

And even then that will not even limit megafactories since all that will do is result in several cores being placed next to each other.  Granted you could make these cores deployable in PVP area's only. which would limit them.  Granted that would probably only result in super megafactories that are protected by large orgs. However that would create game content. 

[CoyoteNZ]

You are always going to have mega factories, the question is balance. With balancing you can determine if it is possible with one person vs a small group vs a large org.

 

So the decision they need to make is what level they are willing to accept them and then do balancing; either talents, schematics or a system completely different to achieve this.

 

They just have to make sure they don’t break small factories for small or new players to try and slow down advanced players.

 

As for talent respec, I suspect we will have a few more before we leave beta. They will probably add new skills and balancing which will require them again. Really this is a beta where we are supposed to be testing things, so the fact there isn’t frequent respecs shows they are trying to treat it two much like a live game than a live beta.

[Izon2887]

To reduce the mega factories I think there needs to be a progression system built into the crafting, this is an mmo after all. Have machines produce a part, but only have partial success unless you use a schematic.

 

In order to progress to the next level (basic screw to uncommon screw) you'd have to produce X amount of basic screws without the aid of schematics. As you get closer to the required amount, your success goes up. When the machine fails to make the part it will consume material and produce a failed part that can be recycled in a recycler for fraction of material lost. 

 

The schematics would only be necessary if you wanted to guarantee your success. Success with a schematic would also only be 100% if you're level is basic and you're trying to make another basic, if you try to make an uncommon part you're only 50% success rate, advanced would be 5%.  Using a schematic when you have not reached 100% success without it will consume more material per part and will not count towards required amount to level up. 

 

As you get into the higher tiers when you complete the required amount to have 100% crafting success you get a schematic as a reward.  You can repeat the process (produce without schematics) and make more schematics but the number required will increase (2nd schematic would be 1.5X amount required, next 2X amount, etc). Higher tier levels will also require considerably more successes to reach 100%. 1,000 batches of basic screws, 10,000 uncommon screws, 1,000,000 advanced screws or some other values as you go up.

 

For items that use multiple components to make (engines, etc), the success rate is based on your level for each item. If you're not leveled on one of the items it will reduce success of producing the item. When you succeed on making that part, it'll count towards both the engine and lower component requirements. So there would be a gamble in rapid skilling up by mass producing multi part items. 

 

 

[Taelessael]

On 3/31/2021 at 12:14 PM, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

This would very solidly just be grindy. 

 

Mega-factories require a sizeable chunk of change/work to set up, so most of them are probably in the hands of large groups. Adding some level of grind will slow them down, but it will probably hurt smaller factories more by forcing the small groups or single individuals that own them to set aside a larger portion of their time relative to the time available to larger group in order to keep things going. 

 

If you really want to force such factories to go away in favor of such specialized industrial structures, we'd probably need: 

-A large enough player-base to reasonably support this kind of economy,

-A limit (such as power) placed upon the total number of industrial elements in a given area (not just per core, but per hex or other large unit of space if you don't want just dense strings of smaller factories with someone doing a daily linked-container pass off),

-A method by which to increase the limit of industry elements in an area if they are all producing the same thing so as to allow industry to continue to be a major thing a player can focus on rather than just having a million players going "and here's my token industrial building for the hex"

 

It isn't impossible, or a bad idea, but it works in real life because we have both limitlessly greater complexity, and probably one or more orders of magnitude more people we can have doing everything to squeeze the gains out of spectacularly tiny margins. Implementing something to alter industry/the market in this way without pulling the wrong piece out of the industry-layer of the jenga-tower that is DU is currently risky at best, and would require both great care and finesse.

[CoyoteNZ]

20 hours ago, Taelessael said:

A limit (such as power) placed upon the total number of industrial elements in a given area (not just per core, but per hex or other large unit of space if you don't want just dense strings of smaller factories with someone doing a daily linked-container pass off),

 

 

Don’t really want a hex limit, because they would kill cities which NQ want us to build.

 

Our city has lots of people with their personal factories, sadly mostly not working together for greater efficiency. If there was a limit to industry per hex that would kill our industry district ?

[CoyoteNZ]

On 4/1/2021 at 8:14 AM, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

Don’t we already have this?

 

After maintenance I often have to go through the factories I manage to see which elements have randomly decided to turn themselves off this time ?

[bleakcon]

On 3/31/2021 at 8:14 PM, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

Pure tedium.

Things should be scaled back not through grinds and other boring, repetitive things but through the the activity requiring time and knowledge to specialise.

The issues I see are:

it is so easy to build t2 + items: get the schematic, get the materials, stick some machines together on a grid and click some buttons......then forever more you can build that thing as long as you have the materials.

In my mind schematics shouldn't be infinite run and there should be some kind of mechanic that allows for the creation of limited run t2/3 + schematics.

This mechanic requires more thought that can be applied in a forum post but it needs to be something that isn't a grind but something both challenging, fun and requiring time such that no one person can simply do it for a large number of items.

I would argue 0.23 was not bad in its own right, schematics as a whole were a good idea but their method of creation was extremely ill thought out and contributed to the feeling of a very grindy game as a whole, in reality grind can be exchanged for a time-consuming, effort-based challenge.

[Gottchar]

I wonder if the people who say maintaining a factory is too easy actually maintain a factory.

 

10 hours ago, bleakcon said:

it is so easy to build t2 + items: get the schematic, get the materials, stick some machines together on a grid and click some buttons......then forever more you can build that thing as long as you have the materials.

-It is so easy to get rich with building ships. You place a few elements, copy paste some voxels and place blueprints for 25k in a dispenser selling them for 5M.

-It is so easy to get rich with coding LUA. You just write some lines, make them do something, put it on a ship. Rest as above.

-It is so easy getting rich hauling. Warp to where it is cheap, buy, warp to where it is expensive, sell. Rich

-It is so easy getting rich with pvp. Go to pvp zone, look for pve players. Shoot them, take their stuff. Rich.

-It is so easy getting rich piling dirt into the shape of Denny DeVito’s face. Pile dirt into the shape of Denny DeVito’s face, set up dispenser for donations. Rich.

[Physics]

On 3/31/2021 at 8:14 PM, NQ-Naerais said:

I'm wondering what people think of this? Would having to repair factory bits be a fun thing? or just feel grindy?

That is the exactly opposite to what industry needs. I said it once I’ll say it again, stop thinking about how to gate industry because that is complete rubbish. Think about ways players could manage to buff their industry and quality of items they produce. Either it be through talents or having their industry static part of a city project, or both.

 

Gating industry from producing basic products has not (0.23) nor will ever work. 

[bleakcon]

On 5/11/2021 at 7:50 AM, Gottchar said:

I wonder if the people who say maintaining a factory is too easy actually maintain a factory.

 

-It is so easy to get rich with building ships. You place a few elements, copy paste some voxels and place blueprints for 25k in a dispenser selling them for 5M.

-It is so easy to get rich with coding LUA. You just write some lines, make them do something, put it on a ship. Rest as above.

-It is so easy getting rich hauling. Warp to where it is cheap, buy, warp to where it is expensive, sell. Rich

-It is so easy getting rich with pvp. Go to pvp zone, look for pve players. Shoot them, take their stuff. Rich.

-It is so easy getting rich piling dirt into the shape of Denny DeVito’s face. Pile dirt into the shape of Denny DeVito’s face, set up dispenser for donations. Rich.

Building ships - takes creativity, thought and advertisement, there is actually skill needed to do this

Coding LUA - takes skill, requires you to learn something

Hauling - requires continued effort and has an element of risk if you aren't simply hauling in safe zone.

PvP - You risk an entire ship at the chance you can possibly salvage something from another, I would not call this a way to get rich

Sculpting - takes creativity and effort, having a sculpture on show for donations isn't a guaranteed and steady stream of income compared to what I was talking about.

Even if I took your statements at face value doesn't take away from the argument that production lacks depth and there should be some kind of effort required to keep a chain up and running....something more than sticking resources in a container every now and then.