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DEMETER PTS PREVIEW - Discussion Thread


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26 minutes ago, Briggenti said:

When implementing the ore extraction rates and territory taxes, please just start with higher numbers for ore, and lower numbers for taxes. You can always adjust toward stricter later.
A slope, versus a cliff.

TBH, I would start low on both. Players need to explore asteroids. And the market needs to continue to have inflation (driven by the scarcity of ore).

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1 hour ago, space_man said:

....... And the market needs to continue to have inflation (driven by the scarcity of ore).

 

No! Market inflation is the enemy of all economic expansion, it limits growth and development of new markets and severely restricts the entrance of new players into the game.

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14 hours ago, Zarcata said:

Then they calculate exactly how much time they have to invest - and Quanta, to mine the same amount of Meganodes, now with the mini-game or with the mini-units.

In the end, they stretch the time to generate ores in order to be able to build something from them by many times the current values and at the same time take quanta away from us. So the effort to get ores will be considerably higher. But well, if they have so much free time....I wanted to play a game in my free time that is fun and doesn't degenerate into a job. The MininUnits should actually relieve us, not burden us.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

As so many others are doing on Discord, you can paint this as dark as you want. That doesn't make it so.

 

A few clicks, followed by flying away with the ore from the last 5-7 days. That's it. And it never runs out.

 

Compared to finding the rare meganodes (that were running out), spending countless hours mining them, to finally fly away with a huge amount of ore... that is now gone. Never to return. So you have to unclaim the hex, pay a (typically) high amount to claim another, but only after scanning for hours and hours... to maybe find another.

 

Nope. I'm a big fan of the new system. Especially once you figure out the actual yields including adjacency bonuses and proper talents.

 

 

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13 hours ago, atldrab said:

After looking at the territory taxes,  I believe this is untenable.  Based upon the numbers I am seeing so far we are looking at 112M per week for 1 cluster per ore type T1-4.  We will be forced to produce less even with 1 less cluster which reduces the amount of money we can make.  Our warp beacon factory will be shut down since T5's are so scarce and our warp cell production cut to about 1/3 of the 23k per week we can produce now and a good portion of those would be used warping around every few days to maintain the mining bots.  This may very well be the straw that broke the camel's back as far as my future investment in this game.

 

Can I have your stuff?

 

Oh yeah, I can. I just have to wait for the taxes to eat your hexes.

 

Not sure what numbers you're working with, as the numbers you provided have no context, but if you're selling warp beacons and making 23,000 warp cells a week, you can afford 112M a week in taxes.

 

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10 hours ago, DutchEasyGamer said:

I am testing the mining units on Iacobus.
I have three tiles, 1 with 34 ilmenite the 2nd with 30 ilmenite and the 3rd with 16 ilmenite.
My thought was a total of 80 liters of ilmenite per hour.
But no, it's 34 liters and the 20% adiacency and max skills make it only 46.92 liters per hour.
My point is that you cannot put a mining unit on all three tiles and remove the ore from each tile.
I think that the adiacency bonus is a punishment in some cases because you do have to pay the 1 mil taxes, but you get much less value in return.

dualuniverse_2021-10-30_13h29m09s.png

dualuniverse_2021-10-30_13h28m28s.png

 

I think you're doing it wrong. You can absolutely claim 3 hexes, deploy 3 static cores, and deploy 3 mining units. Then calibrate each of them (using charges), and run them. All 3 will get adjacency bonuses, and all 3 will produce ore.

 

This is why we have a test server, so you can test the functionality and see how it works before it goes live.

 

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Hello !

 

One thing about scans results in a tile is that players already knew from start of the game there is going to be mining units in the game resulting in ore in L per hour founded from scans. Some players suggest a new wipe on scans which some other players spend a lot of time . I currently have a lot of scans and i dont want my scans off . Those players arguing about that  should have spend the time (and ingame value - ships - fuel - warp cells - containers - cores etc) needed for that instead of demanding a new scan era. So i think it is better for the game for the already scans to be persistent and continue in the new update, need to continue be associated with the tiles.

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I confess I'm quite disappointed by what I saw in PTS regarding the implementation of mining units. 

 

1- Ridiculously low ore yield. Half an hour of manual mining will yield more ore than I could get from an tile's MU extraction in a week. So why even bother investing the time, quanta and talent points if there's no significant return? It barely covers the cost of fuel to travel between planets just to recalibrate MU's every 4 or 5 days. Tiles should have a far higher yield in order to make it worth the effort.
2- Calibration mini game is based on luck and not the player's actual ability to infer the best place to start extraction - seems pointless.
3- Regenerating calibration charges? Why not just stipulate a total amount of MU's a player can own (affected by talents), just like Core Units?

What to expect when Demeter lands in the live server? 
1- Ore shortages, leading to product shortages in the market. I doubt that MU's will have the capacity to produce an overall equivalent amount of ore as is currently produced by planetary mining.
2- Players actually having to dedicate more time to mining. MU's wont provide enough ore, and with only asteroids to mine, which have smaller ore nodes, mining is less efficient than current planetary mining, so more time spent. I expected the implementation of MU's would actually reduce the amount of time we would need to spend in manual mining, but I guess it's going to be the opposite.

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15 minutes ago, Tional said:

....... Especially once you figure out the actual yields including adjacency bonuses and proper talents.

 

 

 

This has been done, here -> (props and credit to Gottchar for running the numbers for us)

 

and the numbers say that each player character will be able to get only ~150kL of ore total of all tiers per day - and that is after 145days of talent training to all L5, and assuming you 'win' the rng of the calibration mini-game.

This specific limit on ore extraction rate will kill the industrial game and cause such ore market price inflation, as to effectively shut out all small orgs, individuals and new starters.

 

And this completely ignores the effect of keeping scans valid, which allows large orgs to cherry pick the best tiles to TU in the first day of the patch, denying everyone else even a chance at getting a somewhat reasonable tile set to extract from.

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44 minutes ago, Tional said:

 

Atmospheric brakes need to have nothing on top of them, or they're obstructed.

 

 

There should be no brakes AT ALL.

 

We are 10.000 years in the future. We have Anti-gravity, Warp and Teleportation technology, yet somehow we still need engine walls burning fuel and gazillions of "brakes"?

 

We could use a small anti-gravity generator for braking and some electromagnetic engines or such for propulsion both in the atmosphere and in space.

 

But why do sci-fi in a sci-fi game? Instead, for an L-Core we need engine walls with 200 Large Engines, 500 wings per ship,  379 vertical boosters, 498 large atmo brakes and 392 retro rockets. Yay ...

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52 minutes ago, Dracostan said:

 

This has been done, here -> (props and credit to Gottchar for running the numbers for us)

 

and the numbers say that each player character will be able to get only ~150kL of ore total of all tiers per day - and that is after 145days of talent training to all L5, and assuming you 'win' the rng of the calibration mini-game.

This specific limit on ore extraction rate will kill the industrial game and cause such ore market price inflation, as to effectively shut out all small orgs, individuals and new starters.

 

And this completely ignores the effect of keeping scans valid, which allows large orgs to cherry pick the best tiles to TU in the first day of the patch, denying everyone else even a chance at getting a somewhat reasonable tile set to extract from.

 

Ok, so he ran the numbers, and adjusted them a few times after some initial testing. Nice work. The numbers are still subject to change, but let's go with it.

 

1 Million liters of ore per week for 30-60 minutes of work every few days VR'ing around to your territories. Per account. 20M in taxes for the same, give or take.

 

1M liters of ore across all tiers, per account. If you go with 100 quant/liter as an average sale price, which who knows, that's 80M in profit per week, per account, if you live in a world where only cash matters (I'm an industrialist, so I'm not in that world).

 

In the past week on live, I probably mined a little under 1M liters of ore. I probably mined half of that the week before. And I spent dozens of hours to do that. Not 30-60 minutes, dozens of hours. I didn't mine at all for 2-3 weeks before that. We bought our ore, for the most part, before the markets went insane due to lack of miners/players/meganodes/whatever. Along with the mission inflation. And market assassins.

 

Massive improvement. And it's unlimited, it doesn't run out like meganodes do.

 

As for 145 days of training, yeah, whatever, any serious miner will have a huge pool of talent points to spend on some combination of automated mining and asteroid mining, which we all know does not require the same talents as underground mining.

 

My "small" org with 8 accounts can pull in 8M liters of ore a week now, without having to drag all of my members out to whatever_planet to spend 6-8-10-12 hours a day mining. 

 

Huge win. Love it.

 

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You are being myopic.
 

This will result in a significant reduction in ore yield due to the hard cap. Reduced ore means less building and more expensive parts. It is not good for the economy and will also make it more difficult for new players. 

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The mining amount per hour is Too Low, you need to increase it to say 50% what a person can do in 1 hour. So Right now as is, mining a 376kl ore vain at 155l/h will take 101 days to mine with one mining unit. So now On top of Mega factories we will have Mega mining farms, DO you Really want that ???. Players are going to have 40 to 50 mining units Per tile they own. Increase the amount per hour, If you keep it the way it is it will take Months to build anything because it will take Months to get the ore out of the ground in any Decent amount. In the first few months on live the price for everything will go way up because of Shortages of ore , parts , elements.  ok, lets say to compensate for this you Lower the amount of ore you need to make things. lets have some Give and Take here. As far as I can tell all the rest of Demeter is ok. I love the insects flying around on the planets, All the Voids and holes in the ground are Gone.

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6 minutes ago, Doombad said:

You are being myopic.
 

This will result in a significant reduction in ore yield due to the hard cap. Reduced ore means less building and more expensive parts. It is not good for the economy and will also make it more difficult for new players. 

I Agree Totally they need to Increase the Liters per hour.

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1 hour ago, DarkEvader said:

I confess I'm quite disappointed by what I saw in PTS regarding the implementation of mining units. 

 

1- Ridiculously low ore yield. Half an hour of manual mining will yield more ore than I could get from an tile's MU extraction in a week. So why even bother investing the time, quanta and talent points if there's no significant return? It barely covers the cost of fuel to travel between planets just to recalibrate MU's every 4 or 5 days. Tiles should have a far higher yield in order to make it worth the effort.
2- Calibration mini game is based on luck and not the player's actual ability to infer the best place to start extraction - seems pointless.
3- Regenerating calibration charges? Why not just stipulate a total amount of MU's a player can own (affected by talents), just like Core Units?

What to expect when Demeter lands in the live server? 
1- Ore shortages, leading to product shortages in the market. I doubt that MU's will have the capacity to produce an overall equivalent amount of ore as is currently produced by planetary mining.
2- Players actually having to dedicate more time to mining. MU's wont provide enough ore, and with only asteroids to mine, which have smaller ore nodes, mining is less efficient than current planetary mining, so more time spent. I expected the implementation of MU's would actually reduce the amount of time we would need to spend in manual mining, but I guess it's going to be the opposite.

I agree with you Completely. what will happen is mining Farms. Do we Really want More elements running on tiles that already have Mega factories ??? Make the yield per hour, at least Half what a player can do.

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On 10/30/2021 at 11:10 AM, kulkija said:

How long it may take util we get sick of grinding the same minig unit re calibration minigame again, and again and again and...

 

- Call To Action – Say NO to territory taxes - 

Sadly, the answer for me is that I am already sick of the mining mini-game and if I stop and think about how the hell I'd keep track of which miners had been recalibrated and which hadn't it just makes my head spin

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1 hour ago, Lethys said:

Oh and here too. Maybe tax would've been better to be implemented via power systems. Would've made up for MORE gameplay in the long run. And more fun. And, you know, balanced and not Just "hurr durr all have to pay because it's EZ to implement"

Love your idea.

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image.thumb.png.09c9dc10e92bb9ccb13409addfd4de47.png

 

Sone Observation/Comments

 

1) I have 3 miners in this tile all reporting a production rate of 86.34L.x 3 = 259.02. If you look at the pool of 301 then there should still be an available balance for extraction of 41.98L but it says 0 available 0/301.

 

2) Maximum of 10 charges and a rate of 1 charge for per 4.25 hours (with talents) if it was a fresh tile and the person started with 0 charges and a tile needed 15 miners (as an example) that is 63.75 hours to get all the miners going. Degradation of charges starts after 48 hours and we are only looking at 1 tile.

 

3) Ore extraction rates of 100L. There are rocks around me on the ground and they each yield 20L. I'm not going to do the maths but I can pick up a hell of lot of those in an hour in comparison and this even pales compared to the amount minable from an asteroid in an hour or just the current underground mining.

 

4) When MU's were first mentioned I thought they were going to provide a small supplemental supply of ore to just bring in some of those tier 1 items that are needed for manufacturing. I thought they were going to be additional to current underground mining. There are only so many hours in a day and if a higher tier resource is valued at 900q then mining that product for an hour is obviously a better return than an hour spent mining something worth 50q.

 

The market to me suggests the health of a game and it is fair to say there are MASSIVE ore shortages currently with prices gradually creeping up. It wasn't long ago the ship builders who advertised on DU-Creators a badass M core hauler for say 150m and they could turn a profit and prices were stable enough. If you look at what's happened one by one from the smallest solo builder to the largest suppliers the narrative has changed. If you want to go and buy a ship now the response is its going to take days to get the parts AND we aren't sure of the prices. I predict that the amount of ore available to manufacturers will be a LOT lower than is even currently in the system, especially while the replacement to underground mining gets under way. One example of inflation the Alioth price for Warp Cells used to be down around 9k each now they are 32.5k

 

In view of your technical issues with holes in the ground and planets being turned into swiss cheese perhaps a good balance may be to have the holes refill after a month for unowned tiles. That would mean underground bases would remain while also provide a renewing amount of mining resources without the need to store the huge amount of data as is currently the situation.  Scans could remain current for untouched tiles but those that have been mined the scans could be flagged as expired and require rescanning.

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The Evilest Overlord Speaks On the Subject of the Suicide pact known as Demeter.

 

 

 I like to mine.  In fact I am miner 49er (cause football), miner 69er (cause I dig on chicks), and miner 89er(cause gummers)  all wrapped up in one.  When I get home from work, I like to settle down with a beer and mine for a couple hours.  It is relaxing to mine, get my dopamine hit, mine some more, get another dopamine hit, repeat.

 

The video used the excuse that people do not want to mine as a primary reason for the mining change.  Then later it was brought up there is a serious technical issue invoving the growing tunnels from all the minning that the players are doing.    So now we are looking at one of the most important aspects of the game being RADICLY Changed.  

 

Since NQ gave us access to preview, I decided to take them up and set up some auto miners on the PTS.  

 

First, I have to congradulate who ever made the  "mini game".  I have never see a interface that had absolutely NO intuitive controls and added nothing to the over all game.  I think we should rename it from the "mini game" to "Mini Tourture Device".  It is so bad, I think it may have broken the Nuremburg laws.  I know I am keeping a copy to put right next to the pear of discontnent in my personal dungeon.  The MTD does not make autominners anymore entertaining or even worth it.

 

Second,  I have no real objection to the auto miners as a secondary way to mine, or an alternate way for people who do not like mining.  However they need to be able to mine all tiers of ore no mater what tier the auto minner is.  This is to give everyone parity, I can currently go to any planet and mine any tier of ore if I can find it.  That can not be done with the current auto-minner set up.  I do think that one should get a bonus for having higher tier machines.  Say either a quantity bonus, a speed bonus or both.

 

Third, get rid of the max draw for the pool.  Make the quantity mined based on the unit tier and skill levels of the player.

 

Fourth, I never got a surface ore deposit while I was using the AM's.  Unless each rock is several hundred liters, don't bother, If I wanted a day one minning experience, I would walk out and pick up surface rocks for a couple hours.

 

Fifth, While I was using the auto minners I placed links to a single container from three minners each mining different ores and only the first one got deposited in to the container.  The second and third miner both went in to negative time for the next cycle.  It was very weird.  I also had problems making my miners work on top of my mountain base.  When i put it on the snow cap, it would not start since it was not with in 50 meters of the ground.  I would find ores while mining the snow so why does the auto miner work in the same ?   Do I have to dig down to dirt to make these work.  I am happy to mine out a big tunnel to set up my autominners.

 

Lastly, I think you should solve the technical issue instead of changing the mining.  I think if a tunnel has not been used in a week it should "collaps" and refill with what ever material it originally had during maintanence.  Larger ore cavities should take longer and be replaced with ore laiden soil.   So as we mine out the original ore we can set up auto minners to mine the trace ores.  And you reduce the load on the servers all at once.

 

All voxel based games have three pillers, Mining Voxels, building with Voxels, and doing things with the Voxels you built.  Take any part of this a way and the game will fail.

 

 

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34 minutes ago, EvilestOverlord said:

The Evilest Overlord Speaks On the Subject of the Suicide pact known as Demeter.

 

 

First, I have to congradulate who ever made the  "mini game".  I have never see a interface that had absolutely NO intuitive controls and added nothing to the over all game.  I think we should rename it from the "mini game" to "Mini Tourture Device".  It is so bad, I think it may have broken the Nuremburg laws.  I know I am keeping a copy to put right next to the pear of discontnent in my personal dungeon.  The MTD does not make autominners anymore entertaining or even worth it.

 

Fourth, I never got a surface ore deposit while I was using the AM's.  Unless each rock is several hundred liters, don't bother, If I wanted a day one minning experience, I would walk out and pick up surface rocks for a couple hours.

 

 

 

First, entertaining conclusions. Just because you're bad at it, doesn't mean it's the problem. Use the area tool, find the highest spot, pick it as your final spot, have a nice day. Or use the other tools to get closer and closer to the 100% spot. It isn't that hard, but it does take some practice and/or luck. You can try again 2 days later, and you should, because that's how you get to 100% calibration. Which is why it's worth it. It's also required to get more than 0% ore from the miner.

 

Fourth, you're clearly doing something wrong. Here's an example of doing it right (second calibration):

 

image.thumb.png.86e96c9714156bdc6eae6e86337129e0.png

 

 

Have fun testing again next weekend, maybe you'll have more luck.

 

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My 2 pennies:

 

Taxes too high for new players. Don't tailor the game to billionares. Also wasn't the point to have all of these lasting constructs? That will go away.

 

Hexes and mining units too low yield. Again billionares will be fine but new players? If it takes weeks to get off sanc; is that fun?

 

Some of the new obstruction (brakes for example) seems arbitrary and unclear. Brakes obstruct in a different direction than their effect arrows. 

 

Really take a minute to think about the population because the lower it gets, the harder it will be to attract more given this game has nothing without players. No NPCs no events, just players. At this rate, on release when people aren't playing for free, there will not be many

 

 

 

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