From two recent upkeep shortages on link Circe - Montem, it becomes obvious that:
Players don’t keep MU open, or don’t check it regularly
Players don’t check GTWT before every flight
Players might yet seldomly check GTWT when planned flight route is not using gateway as expected, instead they’re more likely to ask “why my ship is not using gateway” in chat.
Game doesn’t trigger a notification to players on upkeep status changes of gateways
Since it’s not practical to ask everyone to develop the habit of checking MU and GTWT before every FTL flight, only solution seems to be creating a notification. But not everyone need every status update about every built gateways in entire universe, I figured we can get some ideas from Traffic Announcements in real life.
Idea is to have a new command GTAGateway Traffic Announcement which is a list for all constructed gateways in universe, as shown as this demonstration below (F12 edited GTW):
GTA would automatically create a notification to all players watching a gateway when its operational status changes (yes F12 again):
Clicking on that notification opens GTA, or GTWT of respective gateway.
In order to prevent players never realising existence of GTA, game could automatically watch a gateway pair for player once their ship have flew through it (include unfortunate situation that their flight through that gateway is failed for whatever reasons)
GTA would be a perfect overview of all constructed gateway’s operational status that can benefit everyone massively: Regular players can see if the shortcut to their CX station is operational, shippers can easily spot disruptions in entire gateway network and adjust accordingly, and governors and contractors can quickly know if their gateways are in good conditions.
And yes I intentionally made the command to be GTA
I would actually posit a different solution that is more transparent to the player - the resources for upkeep are consumed when the flight that is planned to use the gateway is started. If there won’t be enough resources to use the gateway it doesn’t show up as an option in the flight planning screen.
Also, when the upkeep materials drop below a certain level the government of the planet and any assigned upkeep players get in-game notifications about lack of supplies.
Also, I do endose the idea of a “GTA” command as YuLun above proposes. I just think we should plan for gateways to minimize impacts on the player experience and having your ship just stop because someone else didn’t pay something totally messes up with your schedules.
Okay, I pondered this and took a shower, and my views have clarified at bit. Upfront let me say this is not something that is at the level that would make me leave prun - but other than that I think this is very problematic.
The idea that once you set a flight up and send the ship out that the ship might not get to the intended destination at the set time is, for me, a very dangerous precedent to set. For Highlander Shipyards it would mean radically changing our way of business because the only way I can do what I do is with tight shipping schedules, and I can’t watch the game constantly, I have a demanding job, 3 kids and a wife (yes, old man here) - I can check in the morning or evening of weekdays and generally morning of weekends - that is it. If I can’t rely on the shipping to get where it goes my production empire falls apart.
I think a patch for this needs to be created that when a flight control plan is executed it is not interupted by anything in the game. If that means resources are taken out when the plan is set (and lost if the plan is cancelled) I think that is the way to go.
Until that is fixed, if I can’t rely on my ships to get to where they need to go at the appointed time, then gateways are dead to me. For now I will wait to see how this turns out, and just stop using the gateways to avoid issues.
But I think this needs to be addressed quickly and in a way that doesn’t require players to watch gateway upkeep like a hawk to make sure their ships don’t just sit in space and do nothing because somone forgot to fill the fuel tank.
That’s indeed a huge problem for players running a tight flight schedule. I also intentionally avoid my ships arriving at destination when I’m either sleeping or have other things to do.
I think a possible way to address Craftsman’s concern is to add a backup plan procedure that’s automatically executed when a flight runs into exceptions. So on flight planning stages it would allow player to set the ship to “automatically recalculate route and proceed” with a configurable target flight time and/or fuel usage.
