Michi presents the progress on the
GTWIcommand and the community translations.
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
Whats the point of a big universe and the outer planets if we’re just going to make these megastructures bing bing bing everywhere is now 1 jump away
The jumps are not immediate. It will still take time to go there.
The main benefit will be situations where sectors are physically close to each other but normally take a bunch of hops to travel between.
I assume more tweaking will be done but what we see in the video does look intriguing. The initial level has little utility as most of the possible destinations are 1 hop away but subsequent upgrades do open things up.
The number of daily uses will probably be sufficient though I still have some concern that at busy locations some people will miss out simply due to the time of day they log in. It would make more sense to me if it was set up like planetary warehouses where there are X number of slots available planetwide and depending on the level each player can rent 1,2,3,etc slots.
If the daily limit were based on a rolling 24-hour period rather than calendar day, it should be time zone agnostic. That said, the minimum value I saw of 200 uses per day was way more than I was imagining for a minimum, though I’m not sure whether I see that as a negative or a positive yet.
Usage will be measured using a 24h rolling window.
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So when the count gets down to zero do flights get put in a queue? Is there a counter that says “the next slot will roll over in X min/hr” so you log back in at that time and hope someone else doesn’t get the slot before you?
At current prices the gateway cost around 164 millions just for the resources that we already have, with the new resources i expect it to reach around 180 or more easily, considering that we need to build 2 for it to be functional, we are looking at around 400 millions, thats enough money to upgrade to HQ 45 two times, is this price final or will it receive changes before release?
It is possible that they tweak things before the release but the intention is to make it an expensive endeavor. Also, you may be underestimating how much HQ levels cost. Just going from level 38 to 39 is going to cost me close to 100M. Firefreak can attest to the cost for level 45.
Sorry i meant upgrade from HQ 44 to 45, its around 156 millions
As it sits currently its not worth building really price wise. I’m curious about the mats that are not in game yet and having to things be SST will be annoying.
and upgrading from HQ 49 to 50 is 256 millions, which is still a lot cheaper than the 2 gateways needed
Why would anyone want 50 levels of HQ? Isn’t 2 levels enough? Plus i think that gateways should be able to link to ANY system, but are 1 way only. On top of that, a fuel efficency upgrade would probably also be nice. Even just an inter-planetary gateway to speed up travel between say, OT-442b and OT-442c would be great (if it was cheaper in fuel and inital costs)
Gateways are cool, but I would rather have recurring and muti contacts be a thing.
Would you rather have both over just the contract improvements?
Because i made the contract improvements post!
A bit late to the party, but I have a question about route planning using gateways.
Suppose I fly from system A through B, C, D, E, F all the way to G. Nowadays SFC will just plot that route if I enter G as the destination, I hit “start” and all is cool.
But now suppose there is a gateway from C to F. Will SFC figure it out automatically? I should hope so, because if not, I’m literally never using them simply because a 1-leg trip now turns into up to 3 legs, making it a jump through an extra hoop that I just couldn’t be bothered with.
And if they do, how does this relate to the concept of limited gateway jumps and that rolling window? Suppose at the moment of launch there were still free gateway “jump slots” (and, presumably, SFC told me this route will be gateway-accelerated), but a sudden surge in flights occurs while I’m en route to the gateway? Does my slot get “reserved” somehow?
We plan to enhance the SFC command. There could be options like don't use gateways, use route with least amount of jumps, use cheapest route, etc.
We talked about this several times in our game design meetings, but for now we will not reserve a jump slot for the flights. A flight will terminate at a gateway if there is not enough jump fuel or the 24h our limit has been reached. We plan to show the gateways capacity (and capacity history) in the GTW and SFC command.
We’ll see how it goes. If this becomes a major pain point we can add a slot system later.
The problem I see is that logistics in the game are super cheap, but my real-life time is quite expensive. I’m already doing logistics “suboptimally” due to real life (e.g. flying way faster than necessary only to make the ship arrive at a convenient moment and not while I’m asleep/at work etc). If I’m given a choice between:
- flying a normal FTL route that arrives at 11pm
- flying a gateway-accelerated route that maybe arrives at 3pm (or the same time but for cheaper), but also might terminate halfway and not arrive at all
then even though the latter was an “objectively better” option (because using it routinely would save me some money/time in the long term, statistically), I’m never picking that simply because of the disruption and annoyance this occasional failure will cause.
I’m in top 200 in base count so not a small company anymore, and I spend <20k ICA/d on logistics; this is about 7% of my total expenses. Even if gateways magically removed all of those costs, the saving wouldn’t be worth the QoL degradation.
I agree with MoonSugarTravels. And in addition to the loss of time due to a terminated flight, people might find themselves stuck if the gateway doesn’t get refueled. They’d have to switch to a regular FTL flight and may not have enough fuel for their ship. Also, depending on their destination and the location of the GTW, they might have to backtrack on jump points making their entire flight longer than if they’d done FTL from the start.
Either fuel availability and gateway capacity need to be so high that it simply doesn’t matter or the gateway usage needs to be reserved for the ship when a flight begins. Otherwise, rather than being a possible pain point, people just won’t use the gateways at all.
A compromise might be some gateway statistics included in the SFC screen:
- % GTW Fuel on hand (percentage of fuel available for all potential flights from now until your arrival). For example, if SFC says your ship will arrive at the gateway in 12hrs and within that time there are 60 gateway uses available the SFC would display that X% of those flights could be completed with the available fuel.
- % GTW usage (percentage of average gateway uses vs. available uses). i.e. if the gateway can accomodate 250 flight in a 24hr window and it typically sees 125 flights per day then GTW usage is 50%.
Stats like these would probably need to be displayed somewhere anyway so managers can determine how often to refuel or when an upgrade is needed.
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