I’m not playing on the live server until the next reset but I am looking closely at all of the new Ignition content on the test server. I figured I’d start a thread up for Ignition feedback!
Shipping and Blueprints:
You can build a ship with no FTL reactor but the FTL tank is still required. The tank is not the most expensive ship item but it would be nice if you could also omit the FTL tank. I realize this may make things more complicated in terms of how the fuel window currently works and it makes sense that it is the way it is to save time.
It may seem odd but in order to allow more ship specialization it would be good to have things that do not seem all that useful. For example a tiny variant of the STL and FTL fuel tanks. The variety of cargo bay options is a great example of something that allows for a lot of specialization.
You can only see a difference between the different STL engines in terms of thrust if you have the Advanced High G seats enabled in most cases. With no seats enabled there’s no difference in the acceleration max no matter which engine is picked. Maybe this is intended but it would feel better if there was some more of a difference on engine choice without the seats or at least more of a spread on the basic seats.
Materials
I love seeing a lot of the unused items like TK and ZR getting multiple uses. There still seem to be a couple of items that are not used. It is hard to see on the test server if they might now be getting used in base construction or planetary projects but as far as I can tell they are unused in all of the new ship items. For example the radiation shielding is not used in any of the anti-radiation plates.
Yes, we noticed that as well. We’ll probably make “–” appear as an option for the FTL tank if you select no FTL reactor.
Right, we will certainly expand this in the future. This is just the very first set of possible options.
It’s not very transparent right now as you have to watch the G factor performance stat at the bottom of the blueprint design window, but more advanced hull plates increase your max. G factor as well. So if you select advanced hull plates for example, you’ll see a big difference between the standard and hyperthrust engines. I’m certain there’s room for improvement though, we made a first few balancing changes on the test server today and I’ll continue looking into things.´
On top of that, the weight of the ship also plays a major role. If you e.g. add large fuel tanks and a large cargo bay to a standard blueprint, your potential acceleration goes down (below the maximum acceleration possible as dictated by your max. G factor), so then an engine with more thrust also has an impact again. There’s lots of interactions across the different parts and overall ship size/weight.
The examples you brought up are meant to be used as building materials on planets with certain environmental conditions. I indeed came across them when working on the Ignition materials, but as specific building materials, they’re pretty much a thing of their own. Though there’s some overlap in the materials used for RSH and the ship radiation shields for example.
Based on my testing, advanced engines and increased thrust just uses more fuel with longer flight times than a standard engine. I assume that you guys are already working on tweaking the flight formulas, but I can’t stress this enough that you will need to very carefully balance these engines so that higher tech/tier engines that are more expensive actually do something other than guzzle fuel for no purpose.
I would personally suggest having advanced engines use (or able to use) a high performance fuel with a different formula as well, just to make the fuel refining side of things more interesting.
I have also noticed that certain flight routes have gotten significantly longer with the new flight formula using the old ships. Although this is not much of a problem for when we reset, introduced into the universe as it exists, this will effectively implode the economy.
As another thing that I noticed, by making a ship lighter (lightweight bulkhead, small cargo bay, etc.) you can significantly increase the speed of a ship and reduce flight times by a lot. This really lowers the value of larger cargo holds if they slow the ship down to the point where you could just make many smaller trips with a smaller ship.
Finally, I’m going to say that building a ship is generally way too expensive. If I had to hazard a guess on how much it would cost to assemble a ship, I would say most likely 10-20 million, possibly up to 50 million if we are adding all the bells and whistles. Perhaps this makes sense in the current context where there are lots of big players with nothing to do or build, and you want to give them a challenge. However, I think you should consider a few other things when balancing the price of a ship:
Keep in context the price of a base. Having a ship cost 20x more than even the most expensive base seems a little bit questionable.
What are the returns on investment for this? If we assume that a ship can bring in 10k profit per day, we are looking at literally years for a ship to pay for itself.
We are in the endgame right now. Roll back the universe to start over again and nobody will have any need (or capital) to build a ship for over a year. This feature will be effectively useless when the reset comes.
What about players that like the shipping aspect of the game and want to start a shipping empire? Players simply cannot afford to build a ship without also building a mega-empire of manufacturing bases to supply the resources required to make a ship.
Here are my suggestions to make ignition and shipping better:
I would strongly suggest that basic ships be made significantly cheaper, through reduction in the resources required. Maybe a mega freighter can be super expensive, but if I want to build ships and start a shipping empire I should be able to do that.
Slower flight times for the basic ships is fine, and I would recommend that in addition to cheaper ships this would make sense. Starter ships should also have a smaller cargo bay to encourage ship building sooner. However I do not recommend slowing down the ships or making these changes in an existing universe as the economy will suffer greatly, players will get pissed off and quit. If you are going to do it, just do the reset at the same time and rip off the bandaid.
Right now the balance between FTL and STL seems off. On the test server STL has gotten much slower and fuel inefficient, but FTL does not seem to have been affected much. Travel within a system should generally be cheaper than FTL travel.
As a general design principle, consider making t0 bases more expensive after the reset so that there is more parity in the cost of a base and the cost of a ship. Right now I’m at a point where I could probably afford to build 5-6 more bases if I wanted to and barely notice the cost, but gathering the materials for even a basic ship seems like an impossible task.
Consider tiering ships like you did with bases. As it stands the radiation shielding, heat shielding and stuff like that don’t seem like they are terribly expensive when taken in context of the total ship cost. It seems fine to make these things expensive if the base ship cost is reduced, but I would recommend making them something like 80% or 90% damage reduction for basic, 100% for advanced. This means environmental hazards can be really expensive or dangerous to traverse in a basic ship, but more expensive ships can be built to “unlock” economical shipping to and from planets or systems with those hazards.
