Well, we don’t have such an important topic yet.
I had two ideas, first one was growing cotton or doing some sort of synthetics to produce clothes and spacesuits.
The second one was energy, but it’s already mentioned in the features list. I would be excited to see radioactive materials here.
And if you want to do all kind of materials, maybe there is room for smelting sand to glass.
The ability to scrap a portion of a base made in mistake or complete change. The scraps then have to be put in a smelter for the raw metals to come out in a reduced portion.
I would also like to be able to radioactive fuel for the ship that last alot longer but also takes longer to get. Planets that have radioactive material also cannot grow anything and the population also slowly dies off
Radioactive Planets, well, you could need some protective plating instead of InsuFoam to establish a base, or both when the temperature is too hot or cold.
@Prosac We will add some kind of fabrics to the game eventually!
@firefighter4x4 Scraps are a good idea! Haven’t thought about that yet, but we are currently not happy with buildings just disappearing when destroyed.
Right now there are five environmental conditions for planets of which two are properly implemented: no surface (aka gas giants), low/high pressure, low/high temperature. Each of these requires a different set of building materials when constructing buildings, like insulations, aerostat foundations and so on. Right now there are no plans for radioactive planets, but we’re not ruling them out.
No pure water planets? 
Maybe you give this quite sophisitcated material tree a look.
Naming other games is usually a bit of a delicate matter and i already done it in chat once, that should be enough. Prefab just reminded me so much of this game.
As my thoughts wander as usual, different planets came into my mind, like jungle, desert or arctic/ice, think i just have to imagine this high temperature, being a desert one.
Besides radioactivity different kind of hazards are possible, like toxicity or volcanic/seismic activity, just take a look at Mercury or Venus.
What about low or high gravity planets, the last ones should slow production.
What about planets without a breathable air atmosphere, do you have to produce air for your settlers to breathe?
Will there be a possibility to split H20 into H and O2 in the chem plant? As for now i got a ton of H20 lying around.
Maybe i’m exaggerating a bit with details, maybe not.
We generate quite a few planetary data points, gravity, atmospheric pressure are among them. Not all of them have effects on workforce and production effectivity yet, but they might one day.
I’m missing a shortcut to commodity exchanges on the left sidebar.
Making the extractor times standard with the output being the variable. For example all extractors run for 11 hours at 100% efficiency no matter the resource, but the output is related to the abundance of the material on the planet.
Right now these are the times i know
Iron 11h38m for 17FEO and 6 SIO
Limestone: 12h53m for 17LST
Aluminium: 12h20m for 9 ALO
Cooper: 12h18m for 9 CUO
I think the same should hold true for the rigs and collectors.
Thoughts???
I disagree, because higher gravity planets should prolong the times.
And i have to add Limestone with 12h 16m for 17 units.
I guess @martin can explain it in more detail than I can, but here is why we don’t have standardized extraction times:
Extractors (and rigs and collectors) can extract more than one resource at a time. How much of a resource is extracted depends on its concentration value (0 to 1). Imagine a standard extractor run takes 10 hours and results in 5 units. We have a resource 1 with concentration 0.01 and one resource 2 with 0.99.
If we want to calculate the yield for resource 2 it is: 5 * 0.99 = 4.95 units e.g. 4 units after rounding down
The yield for resource 1 is: 5 * 0.01 = 0.05 units, e.g. 0 units after rounding.
So, resource 1 gets never extracted if the extractor runs for one cycle. To mitigate this the minimum cycle times are adjusted so that at least 1 unit of every resource is extracted.
this makes some kind of sense to me. We know that every machine runs for a certain period of time. It seems all the times are very close with 12h32m being the average of all known times.
The reasoning behind this is so that everyone can calculate out production rates and therefore figure out the production rates.
For example :
it takes 38 mins to smelt 1 ALO into AL. It takes 82 mins to mine 1 ALO. Therefore it takes 2.15 extractors to feed 1 AL smelter on a non stop basis.
it takes 45 mins to smelt 1 FEO into FO. It takes 41 mins to mine 1 FEO. Therefore it takes 1.09 extractors to feed 1 FO smelter on a non stop basis.
if there was a consistent timer it would make the calculations much easier to define
But it should be a trading game, so odd times encourage trading, either selling a surplus or buying lacking resources.
I think a good way to combat self sufficiency
and encourage trade would be to give players a 50% buff to production of their type and a 25% nerf to all other production types, with perhaps some way to change it once a week. That way, self sufficiency would maybe be less enticing compared to trading goods as people are more incentivized to specialize their production.
Good point @Drinthap. Martin and I have been discussing a similar mechanism the other day. Maybe we should implement this mechanism very roughly for the next test, see if it works and then modify it to “fit” the setting.
That mechanism could also be done with research, because i see a long-term goal in it.
Give different profiles, different already mastered researches and while writing this, Civilization came to my mind, where are different faction-specific bonuses and also different researches, with which you begin, IIRC.
I would also like to see more stuff in the next test, IMHO working FTL and role bonuses are just minor changes and i would be more excited to start from scratch, if there were more possibilties, otherwise it would feel very repetitive, so i wouldn’t mind to take a break and wait some weeks.
This way you could also start balancing the game as a whole, or at least a more developed state, than the rough skeleton that it is now.
If you start balancing the early phase and add content later, maybe it wouldn’t match with the already balanced state and you start over to balance it again.
And now i’m anticipating on my conclusion of the test, i’ve gone through all kind of emotions, from being frustrated, because of worthless consumables in relation to SS, to being pleased, after venturing into tech 2, with a Chem Plant and Hydroponics, to being bored, because of the lack of AL and unable to venture further into tech 3, to getting exhausted, because my brother and i extended our tech 1 buildings and now i operate 9 Farms and 7 FP to feed his (he also got about 8 Smelters, 3 PP1 and 3 extractors) and my people.
So, if that test hadn’t gone so long, you would have increased the food consumption, which will be a pain in the ass later. I still think the consumption of basic consumables is too low, but the consumption or maybe the production times of the more advanced consumables are too high.
But maybe it all depends on the UI, if you compare it with Airlinesim, you buy a plane (set up a building) and set up a flight schedule (set up a production schedule), the plane repeats the schedule, which isn’t the case with PU and leads to a lot of manual interaction, the 5 queue slots didn’t help either.
I’ve to do constant calculations, so that my buildings won’t run out of orders, when i’m not online, but maybe i’m doing it wrong, because most of the time i give single orders to assure an evenly stockpiling of goods.
Maybe it’s also a problem of the food processors and farms, because they can do so many things, i’m quite pleased with the Chem Plant for example, not so much with the hydroponics, because i’m stockpiling a lot of SPR, which i can’t process, even with 7 FP’s.
Which leads me further to my opinion, that research could be a long-term goal.
If production will stay this way, it would be insane to manage more than a handful of planets, even if you can set buildings on infinite production, you would still have to ship the goods and do other stuff manually.
To delay a fast expansion, you can connect the ability to establish a colony to some kind of building, like a communication array, with increasing costs, the higher you level that building up, but i think you won’t delay it too much, so what do people aim for, when they reached their 5th planet after some months?
That are my thoughts so far, and as they contain a lot of suggestions, i didn’t drifted too much in OT, as i was expecting it.
Its hard for me to say this but i agree with prosac!!! it is getting very boring and I am at the end of the t3 tree with the exception of the the SCA. I have build and torn down building as i have progressed down the road.
One thing i did was plan out ahead before i dropped production lines down…for smelters i made sure i had enough extractors running a stockpile of ore before i cranked up a production.
With no one building an SCA or a PP3 we are at the end of line and very boring. The market has balanced itself out and prices are falling everyday on stuff. I have stockpiles of t3 stuff just sitting there an no one is gong to use them. I have a electronic plant sitting just about idel because i have a mass of wiring and CLU.
You know this game is in Alpha stage and far from finished?
Let me compare game design with a meal, if you eat plain pasta without sauce, how interesting this will be?
You also know it’s a small team and if you come up with good suggestions, i’m sure they consider it.
They cooked some pasta, now tell them what sauce you want and don’t just say, plain pasta is boring, that’s no surprise.
Thanks @Prosac and @discount for your feedback! Since there is not much content yet, the only real goal is to build a new colony. We understand that when one reached and holds the T3 level that there is not much to do left. There are obviously missing mid- and long-term goal features to keep it interesting.
For the current test it was interesting to see what the markets do when running longer than two weeks and how fast players are able to reach T3 buildings. I’d say we got some answers for these questions. When I am at simulogics HQ next week, we’ll discuss how to progress from here.
Was wondering what the sinks were in the system? Is there decay on structures, ships, etc.? I saw that taxes/fees was an upcoming, so that’s good for a money sink. But, other than constant expansion, what keeps a player needing to keep buying say… MCG, long-term?
Might be listed somewhere and I missed it. Please point me in the right direction.
Thanks!