More Ideas for DU

[Nosomu]

Element and Quanta Sinks

• Introduce new content via salvaging and a quanta sink via NPC vendors: ship modifications. Each ship can have a limited number of slots on the core unit - possibly based on core size. Add some rare ship mods that can only be obtained through salvaging or events. A subset of these mods (basic to advanced) can be made available through NPC vendors for quanta. Examples of ship mods: Space engines consume 10% more fuel and provide 15% more thrust, Shield health is increased by 10% but resistances fall by 5%, atmo engines consume 5% less fuel and engine weight is reduced by 5%.

 

• Quanta sink: Skills/Buffs that are not available via skill points that can be purchased from NPC vendors. Each player can have a limited number of slots for these permanent buffs. Access to these buffs can be unlocked by by completing in-game events and tasks. These can be purchased for a significant amount of quanta to act as a limited quanta sink. I.e. a player can purchase a permanent buff that provides x% reduced ship weight for x million quanta. Other examples of buffs: 5% less materials required to produce goods via industry, 20% reduction in taxes for tiles owned, 10% boost in radar range, etc.

 

• Sink: Element decay/destruction. Repair units that use scrap or new elements/parts to repair an entire ship. To make these easier to use, perhaps they can auto purchase elements/parts from the market remotely as needed with a cap set on the purchase price based on the cost to produce an element/part times 2 or whatever variable the user sets.

 

• Quanta sink: increased sales taxes for buyers.

 

• Quanta sink: A NPC service that will transport your damaged/destroyed ship in a safe zone location to one of your cores for a fee.

 

• Element sink/ quanta generation: Aphelia/NPC mega projects that require elements to be delivered before the project can be completed. I.e. warp gates, space stations, markets in new locations, NPC fleets for an upcoming event, etc. These projects can pay out a generous amount of quanta per element.

 

• Element sink/repurposing: The ability to upgrade multiple basic elements to a higher tier at 140% of the production cost of the higher tier element. I.e. 3-6 basic engines can be upgraded to an uncommon engine at current market prices.

 

• Element recycling that breaks elements down into pure metals.

 

 

Fun

• Introduce items that can only be found by doing events.
• Introduce events similar to the Thoramine hunt.
• Create industry events that offer limited-edition rewards to players who participate (these could be integrated into the mega projects mentioned above).
• Create PVP events where the victorious org/group receives exclusive skins and rewards (king of the hill events around an aphelia ship or something).
• Create puzzles that award the location of an unclaimed high-value T5 tile location, the location of a valuable deep space wreck, etc.
• New-player ship building competitions that award exclusive items, honeycomb, skins, or whatever reward you can think of.
• Explorer events and rewards. Perhaps rogue planets (or large asteroids) that pass through the system for a short time with artifacts on them.
• Make ship lasers that allow players to mine asteroids from the comfort of their ships.
• Give orgs passive benefits that can be unlocked through tasks or leveling up the org. These benefits should have the dual purpose of encouraging players to join larger active orgs. I.e. Reduced warp cell costs when traveling to org-owned warp beacons, a slight increase in the amount of ore that MUs extract on org-owned hexes/constructs, 10% reduced fuel consumption on all org dynamics, reduced market taxes at the closest market to the org HQ, etc.

 

 

Quality of life changes

• Fuel hubs
• Increase element link limits.
• Eliminate Kergon X1-4 and create a recipe that produces kergon using any tier 2 ore and hydrogen/oxygen.
• Reduce the weight of safe engines that scales with each tier. This should scale faster than the freight engines as the tradeoff for reduced thrust is pretty steep. Alternatively, find another way to make safe engines meaningful.
• Reduce the amount of fuel that rocket engines consume and increase their thrust to make them more relevant.
• Create a destructor element for industry that deletes excess materials (such as hydrogen/ oxygen).
• Make it easier to align multiple cores when deploying from blueprints.
• Add a "remove all elements, schematics, and honeycomb" option for cores.
• Add an option to include schematics when saving/deploying static blueprints.
• Make honeycomb types optional when creating blueprints. Put the honeycomb that the builder recommends as the default option, but allow players to select honeycomb on hand when deploying a blueprint.
• Remove the restriction that disables mining unit talents in VR. I don’t have enough time to travel to a different planet every day just to utilize the skills I unlocked. At this point I just VR everywhere to save time.
• Reduce territory scan times to a few minutes.
• Reduce the travel time required to reach asteroids by forcing them to spawn closer to planetary bodies. If it takes 10-15 minutes to travel to an asteroid this is great. 20-40 mins+ is not so great.

Edited January 22, 2022 by Sostraphaios

[Feriniya]

+1.. so many things can be make it here.. and not all of them so diff or get many time.. many idea have not hard for make it.. 

Not only here on your post.. but so many ppl talking about it.. 

 

For example market and auto-clean system.. over 2 yeart ppl talking about .. and finally we only now have this things in panacea. Serisoly? i dont think so it so difficult make script \ code part for auto delete some core by id after get timer done.. But 2 year. 

 

So i dont think so we some day get any of your idea in game.. or maybe after 5-10 year

 

I hope thay start do something for CONTENT and GAME..  

[Gottchar]

Very nice post. I have to go through it one by one:

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Introduce new content via salvaging and a quanta sink via NPC vendors: ship modifications

Instead of NPC offering to modify your ship for quanta, i think the already existing different elements should be more balanced. You already mention the safe engines below. I wish each of the 4 types, and both space and atmo of them, actually had a role to play and was used. When there are 4 types, and they are used to like 90%, 8%, 2% and 0%, you should question if maybe a rebalancing is in order. Also, especially seeing how higher tier ores cost almost as much as t1, it would be nice if there where higher tier parts for other things as well. 
Currently there are only guns, radars and engines where you can chose the rarity. By litres of ore required to build it, practical ships are to like 90%-100% made of t1. 
So for modification I would rather see t2-4 wings (increased lift at high speed or at low speed, different stall angles), adjustors (more strength but warm up time) etc, just like engines have different tiers and properties. 

 

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Quanta sink: Skills/Buffs that are not available via skill points that can be purchased from NPC vendors

Similar to above, other elements could have different properties, too. Be it faster transfer units that are t2, container with more storage volume but same element size, or less storage volume but weight reduction etc.
Generally about this and the point above is to add, some people made vast amounts of money with exploits, some with (legit) mission running with plenty of accounts, I do not think people should be given that much of an advantage to spend it at the NPC. If those exploits had not happened, and the mission system was not paying out those ridiculous amounts, I would agree.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Sink: Element decay/destruction

Yes please, use scrap for something more of a "field repair" after a crash, but require elements to get some amount of maintenance from time to time. Meaning elements get a second health bar, "maintenance bar", which is replenished via a repair unit, which in turns requires fresh elements. Not 1 to 1, but you need eg 1 Wing M to get the 40 wings on your ship back to 100%, every few weeks. On one hand it solves the same issues that lifes lost on destruction tries to fix, but support does not get overwhelmed because people will contact them every time their ship is destroyed due to a bug.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

increased sales taxes for buyers

Hell no, the sales taxes are a big reason why there is pretty much only one market, and why people don’t sell things on Alioth. If my items don’t sell, not only do I obviously not get the money, but I also waste the fee. Instead the storage tax should be abolished and buy and sell orders stay in the market with no time restraint, or the value tax for unfilled orders be returned. The current fee system just leads to less items being available.
Additionally, it leads to more players wanting to bypass markets and their fees, without the ability to properly advertise in a non-intrusive ways. So we just get an increase of messages in the general chat "WTS Basic engines L for a good price, message me for more info", and more signs and screens and dispensers at public places.

If there were proper player markets, or if you could see dispenser sales in the market interface (optional), and players selling things was actually integrated more in the game, I would totally be for higher market taxes.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

A NPC service that will transport your damaged/destroyed ship

If NPC missions didn’t pay so much, so reliable and with so little collateral, player missions to do the same thing would actually work well.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Aphelia/NPC mega projects that require elements

Similar to the ore bots, and before that the HC bots, bot kill the economy. Just like t1 ore is now down to close to 25 (and soon, at least on alioth, below), other elements would be artificially more or less expensive. A bot that buys any number of t2 military atmo engines for 180k or even more? I bring it 200 per day. If it pays 160k or less, I don’t care about the bloody thing. So the devs would have to exactly know the current value of things, which, historically speaking they are bad at, the players without industry skills can not partake, or doing so would be at a loss, and, depending on the items, some people win the lottery. NPC pays 10M for Bonsais, some few people are suddenly rich, If instead it was Exotic agile Cannons XS, nobody cares, because nobody builds them. There is just no way to properly balance this, and even if it was balanced, it would just introduce another artificial NPC price stabilisation. And when the event is over, any overproduced stock is worthless.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

The ability to upgrade multiple basic elements to a higher tier at 140% of the production cost of the higher tier element.

This would bypass schematic costs and talents and be hard to balance, and would need constant rebalancing, or it would by itself just be another artificial stabiliser. 
Make it so that I upgrade 3 t1 engines into one t2, that would currently not be worth it. But if other items are introduced (like t2 wings  )suddenly the t2 ore price rises and it might be worth it, so far so good. The ability to upgrade now artificially keeps the t2 price lower, because if it climbs too high, people stop using t2 ore and just make t2 engines with t1 ore. But if you can make t2 items with t1 ore, the t2 refining and smelting talents become worth less. So do the schematics. So some people who trained this and bought that, now find their stuff made obsolete.
What I am all for though is the ability to swap elements, like engines, without the need to remove, place anew in the same position (and re-buff)

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Element recycling that breaks elements down into pure metals

Would have to be at a rate of 35% or less of the ore needed for the original item without talents, otherwise I am all for it.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Fun

I wish there were better tools for players to do these. 
Only the last one, for orgs is imho a bad idea, orgs should really be a social feature, or we should have a different tool to use for grouping. 

I am not part of an org to have a group chat with people I often interact with, because I use my limited org slots for beacon sharing and to have more construct slot.

 

On 1/22/2022 at 2:44 AM, Sostraphaios said:

Quality of life changes

Almost all of them please!

Link limit increase maybe for fuel tanks, but not for industry please. There should be a limit, and I think the limit is just right currently.
I am all for other industry related QoL though, like faster transfer units, or talents to build something faster are also applied to transfer time. Rebalancing item volumes and batch sizes. There is lots to be done.

 

Nothing to add to the rest, they are all very good ideas.



I wrote more about the stuff I disagreed with, I hope you understand.